I am an old school contact center person. I am not ashamed of that fact, but the one phrase that I have said over and over is “If I had access to the technology of today back then, I would have been dangerous.” I would like to take a moment to explore why that is. I would love to say that “back in the day,” I had meetings with every other department in my contact center to discuss strategies, upcoming events, and issues that needed to be ironed out, but the fact is, I didn’t. As a contact center team, we stayed in our little bubble and rarely ventured out. Even with the new fancy capabilities of today, such as speech transcription, AI, BI and machine learning, we wouldn’t have done much with the data because we didn’t think far enough ahead to involve the rest of the organization.
My challenge to all of you today is to learn from my missteps. Even if you don’t yet have access to these fantastic technologies, share with the rest of the organization what you know. Even if it is just something around an increase in handle time, that information is useful to sales, marketing, and all the other areas of your business that need to make decisions that impact your customers. Start with the basics and help them learn how this data can affect their bottom line and yours.
Once the rest of the organization realizes the gold mine of data that the contact center can provide, it can only get better from there. Now you can start to include the next-level tech that is revolutionizing how our industry (the call center) is perceived. I can’t tell you how many times in my career I have heard the term “We have a call center?” uttered by other departments. Let’s make that a distant memory. Sell the advantage of a connected enterprise with the contact center as the center spoke and your organization can only benefit!
Dave Hoekstra is a Product Marketing professional with Calabrio (CCNG corporate member) and recently led a CCNG member Town Hall discussion on the modern approach to the enterprise contact center . Dave has a deep call center background, specifically in Workforce Management and hosts the Calabrio podcast “Working Smarter” where he discusses Contact Center industry trends and best practices with his industry guests.
