UK Forefront Executive Council discusses “New Horizons in Customer Service”

Forefront brings together forward-thinking industry leaders to share best practices and thought leadership on how intelligent automation is revolutionising organisations and helping improve agent and customer experiences whilst increasing efficiencies.

Council Chairman Paul Milloy welcomed participants and introduced keynote speaker Martin Hill-Wilson—a customer engagement expert and digital business strategist. Martin led a discussion on how omni-channel expansion (chatbots, Web, social media, video, DM, etc.) is providing customers with new paths to engage with brands.

A wider range of channel choices—combined with accelerated digital adoption prompted by the pandemic—is driving changes in customer behaviour. Increasingly open to self-service, customers are leveraging new channel options to find answers to their problems proactively rather than depending entirely on phone-based customer service agents. The key here is making sure the customer intent is understood, enabling the right channel solution for that intent, leaving agents to support customers with the more complex or emotive enquiries.

The growing role of artificial intelligence (AI) and data is transforming CX focus from an historical to a more predictive, real-time approach. As organisations move into the post-pandemic period, contact centres will increasingly follow a hybrid work model (some remote, some in the office, some alternating between the two) which will require greater support and flexibility to deliver consistent experiences for both agents and customers. This development is having a considerable impact on resource planning both in channel demand forecasting and workforce flexibility & optimization. Automation is already playing a major role in helping leading businesses meet these challenges right now, with others set to follow their lead.

Matt Rumins, Head of Customer Success Management, introduced Mark Brown of Virgin Media. Mr. Brown Mark spoke about how automation is helping Virgin Media scale its capabilities, noting that Virgin contact centre agents view Intradiem as a “game-changer”.

After the conference, the participants networked and held further discussions on their challenges, successes and plans. As well as continuing to discuss the keynote areas above, topics ranged from the optimium balance of self service and assisted service from a sales effectiveness perspective to the extent that enterprise data is now being joined up and analysed, providing actionable insight to help agents support customers better, all enabled by more organisations migrating to the cloud and embracing the capabilities of Intelligent Automation.