If the past year proved anything, it’s that necessity isn’t just the mother of invention; it’s also rocket fuel for evolution. 2021 force-fed a distributed workforce model on the contact center industry and accelerated our industry’s digital transformation. Perhaps, as an industry, we were already moving toward where we find ourselves now, but 2021 pressed us to get there at relative light-speed.
Is it a stretch to say our starting line in 2022 is a few years ahead of where it would normally be? I don’t know, but there’s no arguing that the pandemic and its associated impacts on behavior, culture and business altered some fundamentals, and that change-as-usual, meaning change undertaken at its customary pace, became a potential liability for contact centers.
As we wade deeper into this new year, now is a good time to look at a few notable developments in the contact center software world in 2021.
The changing workplace
Trends toward distributed workforces and virtual meetings really began accelerating with the onset of Covid in mid-to-late 2020. For their part, contact center leaders generally took one of two paths in those early months:
· They scrambled to get their agents re-situated at home (if they weren’t already actively planning for a hybrid workforce or if the contact center didn’t have cloud technology)
· They wavered, reluctant to commit quickly to making wholesale, permanent changes to their workplace model in the hopes that the world would return to normal, particularly with the promise and eventual availability of vaccines.
Pre-Covid ‘normalcy’ has eluded us all, unfortunately. It’s somewhat surprising then that, as recently as December 2021, an informal survey of attendees at Customer Contact Week (CCW) in Las Vegas revealed that many companies still have not made a final decision about the nature of their workplace moving forward.
Employment-market pressures are pushing those companies to a decision point. A considerable amount of evidence on the efficacy of virtual workplaces is in, and it proves that contact centers can indeed thrive with remote employees and that employees want at least a remote workplace option. A company’s willingness to offer that option directly impacts its ability to attract and retain talent.
A November 2021 CCW Market Study shows that remote work is indeed here to stay. Only 12% of surveyed contact centers believe that they will ever revert to a traditional, on-site contact center model. Apple, for example, has indefinitely delayed its return date for in-person work, and they’ve provided employees with an $1100 work from home bonus to “help… with your home workspace” that “can be used as you see fit”.
Bottom line, in this pandemic-driven job economy, workers are in the driver’s seat. They have the confidence to quit their jobs knowing that they will find new and better ones — either directly transitioning to those jobs or taking a brief break between jobs. Contact center leaders are struggling to find solutions.
The emergence of CCaaS
The contact center technology market’s ongoing evolution is driven by the same dynamic impacting the larger business technology sector: customers expect digital access to goods and services. That trend manifests in the contact center with CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service), a deployment model that increases the portability of contact center software capabilities and contact center services, extending them beyond the limits of the physical contact center.
CCaaS is gaining traction for several reasons:
· Brands today engage in increasingly complicated customer interactions through multiple channels — sometimes face-to-face in a brick-and-mortar location, sometimes online and sometimes in the contact center. CCaaS supports efforts to communicate with customers in a single, unified voice.
· Contact center managers are expected to do more with less, so they constantly seek ways to reduce direct and operational costs and increase efficiency. As a result, many are moving to a cloud or hybrid environment.
· The benefits are universal — reduced complexity, lower total cost of ownership, increased scalability and enhanced flexibility.
A big year for mergers/acquisitions/strategic partnerships among software providers
Both dynamics — the rise of distributed workforces and the need for digital transformation — drove change in the solution provider ecosystem. Many WFO and CCaaS companies merged/acquired/partnered for reasons beyond growth. Instead, they sought to forge integrations with complementary solutions, break down data silos and equip development teams with SDK tools and APIs. The ultimate goal is to provide contact center customers with access to a broader set of capabilities and cloud options and deliver a more unified experience — rolling out these changes faster than before.
Solution providers are becoming more intentional about improving experiences across multiple customer touchpoints, focusing on leveraging data, deploying supporting technologies, and empowering contact center employees to drive these interactions. In the WFO industry, that means pushing AI, IVA (Interactive virtual agents), and RPA (Robotic process automation). The challenge for contact center organizations moving forward lies in streamlining their data and making the financial and cultural commitments necessary to build, manage and leverage a tech stack suited to those tools.
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The good news is if you’re reading this, you survived a year that demanded we all — contact center organizations and contact center software providers alike — get more comfortable operating in a volatile business environment within shorter time horizons. In that sense, disruption is a good thing. As an industry, 2021 conditioned us to be more agile, ask better questions, reorient our focus in pursuit of the answers and innovate faster. That can only bode well as we face whatever comes our way in 2022.
