Your Contact Center is Your Competitive Advantage

Video transcript:

I’m Brian Spencer, the General Manager for Mitel’s contact center business, and I’d like to share with you our vision for the contact center as it evolves into the “customer experience center.”

Today’s consumers – they’re different. They’re not waiting until they get home to pick up the telephone and call into an organization to handle personal business. They’re working in real time. They want instant access to services – how they want it, when they want it. They’re typically going to start on a mobile device using a mobile app or a mobile website, some sort of digital tool. And, often, they’ll complete an end-to-end engagement and access the services they need autonomously, completely on their own.

Think about how you may engage with mobile banking. I know when I engage with mobile banking, I handle everything through the mobile app or the web app. In fact, I can’t remember the last time that I interacted face to face with a teller at the bank. That’s how consumers want to access goods and services, and that’s going to permeate businesses of all shapes and sizes moving forward – even yours.

So, my vision of the future is taking myriad contact centers and converging them into a center of excellence – a customer experience center – that is focused relentlessly on driving positive customer outcomes to create customer retention, loyalty, and long-term, lifetime customer value. How is that going to happen? Think about the customer journey. Your customers will engage through the mobile or digital tool of their choice. They’ll be on a mobile app and they’ll hit a point where they need to interact with a human. Today, there’s nothing more frustrating than getting 80 percent through accessing a service, having to stop, place a telephone call and start all over.

In the future, they’ll be accessing that service, they’ll hit the point where they need to interact with a human and, right through that mobile app, natively, they’ll be able to start a communication channel – maybe text-based, maybe voice-based, maybe video-based or using some media we’re not even thinking about today. But, in any case, it will come into that center of excellence, hit the right person at the right time – someone who’s relentlessly focused on pleasing them, who knows exactly what they’ve been through already and is able to pick up that conversation, creating a seamless transition from the digital tool to live assistance. They’ll be able to handle that sophisticated or more complicated requirement that couldn’t be handled through routine automation.

All of the data from that interaction will be captured, and business analytics will be used to allow management to constantly adapt the tools and the customer experience center processes and technologies to optimize the interfaces that customers want to use, increasing the level of service available through automation and also increasing the sophistication that the workers have in their ability to satisfy more complex tasks when engaged. They will be able to use that information to create a sustainable competitive advantage for your business, because you will be pleasing your customer better than your competitor down the road.

That’s our vision for contact centers transforming into customer experience centers in the future. I hope you share that vision and come along for the ride with Mitel and Towner Communications.