Critical Issues
Navigate the future of customer engagement with confidence.
2020 Critical Issues
Each year, Council members in North America and Europe vote on the most important issues facing the customer service industry in their region of the globe. The annual Critical Issues become the key areas of focus for member discussion and Council events throughout the year.
Automation
CX Measurement (Europe only)
Effortless Agent Experience
Operational Efficiency and Effectiveness
Practical application of automation: what you can do today to move the needle.
Helping you answer the question, “Am I still measuring the right things in the right way?”
Getting the agent experience right is your first step in delivering a true effortless experience for your customers.
Plan for the “must have” people, process, and technology needed to meet the expectations placed on you by management.
Areas of Focus:
- Leveraging insights from machine learning to improve contact center processes and the chatbot experience.
- Leveraging automation enabled customer interaction.
- Tackling data challenges presented by internal legacy infrastructure, along with third party vendors. (Europe only)
- Augmenting the contact center and the back office.
Areas of Focus:
- Identifying the priorities of your customer.
- Uncovering actionable insight from customer contact center metrics.
- Leveraging metrics to uncover actionable insights for the organization.
- Translating contact center metrics and insights into a narrative that resonates across the organisation and drives strategic action.
Areas of Focus:
- Insight on identifying the disconnects between the service contact centers provide, and the service customers expect.
- Identifying opportunities to leverage robotic process automation to relieve employees from low touch, low value process.
Areas of Focus:
- Leveraging automation opportunities in the contact center to empower agents to focus on the customer.
- Standardizing and empowering thinking about process improvement opportunities by all employees across the enterprise.
Predictive, Proactive and Personal Care (North America only)
Self-Serve
Transformational Talent
Driving an effortless experience by meeting the unexpressed needs of your customer, and allocating resources for greater impact.
Mapping the self-serve customer journey experience is a success factor for understanding and enhancing those interactions, and delivering ROI.
Navigating the changing dynamics of the contact center workforce, paired with technological advances, is key to the future.
Areas of Focus:
- Proactively ensure a consistent experience across all customer touchpoints and channels.
- Leveraging the data you already have to anticipate and provide a more complete understanding of your customers’ needs and expectations.
- Collaborating to drive efficiency and process improvements outside your business area.
Areas of Focus:
- Balancing live agents and AI in the customer interaction.
- Implementing the integration of chatbots into your self-serve strategy.
- Facilitating generational channel preferences.
Areas of Focus:
- Recruiting, engaging, and retaining a tech-savvy and skilled workforce for the future.
- Right-skilling your channels for your future workforce.
- Identifying and applying appropriate metrics to recognize agent effectiveness in complex customer interactions.
- Changing mindsets and re-skilling your workforce for the future.
- Addressing transformative workforce trends (Gig economy, remote worker, generational expectations).