Our National Conference focusses on our individual communities of Leadership, Planning, Insight and Quality providing a community focus to develop topics, discuss challenges, share ideas and learn from fellow professionals. The last face-to-face Forum event was in November 2019 in Manchester. The pandemic gave us an opportunity to do something different and experiment with virtual events which have proved extremely popular. With the opportunity to hold face-to-face events now opening up, it gives us another opportunity to experiment. 

The question now is: How do we combine the best of virtual and face-to-face?

The recent merger of Aspect Software and Noble Systems, two leaders in the CX space, to become Alvaria has created a centre of excellence that combines the best and brightest of both companies. Alvaria is a new global force delivering leading-edge customer experience and workforce engagement software as well as cloud services technology solutions to many of the world’s largest enterprise contact centres. 

No one will pay more attention to your development than you. There will be times when great learning is presented to us, however, continued professional growth is a habit and fortunately one that is easy to develop.

I recently saw on the BBC website that additional travel restrictions have been imposed on eight areas in the UK including where many of my family live.

This has been in place since Friday, but nobody knew about it. There was no announcement it was simply posted in a subsection of a governance Covid advice page. But since as far as anybody was aware there had been no change, there was no reason to visit that page.

Homeworking is here to stay say top UK contact centres

Throughout lockdown, business leaders have debated the tricky issue of how best to engage and support their people while working from home.  

You are the key to unlock opportunities, whether this be a personal change, a team development or a business transformation. In celebrating 21 years at The Forum, Phil Anderson looks at the part you can play in influencing the people around you, changing mindsets and overcoming the issues that block or slow down progress in our member organisations.

Are you struggling with bad data in your CRM? Have you tapped into the wealth of information your contact centre interactions data holds?

We all know that the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation and that contact centres have followed suit, with 3 or 4 now using full or partial cloud solutions. Calabrio’s original research, State of the Contact Centre 2021, is based on a survey of 273 contact centre managers in 3 major global markets and in a variety of industries. 

Following on from my last article we are seeing a lot of data being displayed graphically, we can take some great ideas from these but we can also see examples of some of the common pitfalls we need to avoid.

Outbound dialling – viewed by some as a nuisance, and by others as a vital tool in the battle to serve customers in the most effective and efficient way possible. Whether done manually via a list or automatically using the latest in Dialler systems, hundreds of companies employ tens of thousands to make outbound calls for making sales, managing inbound queues, imparting information, or collecting outstanding monies. It is a very important consideration for modern companies.

Which possibly makes it more surprising that so little consideration is actually given to the best way to build capacity plans or plan FTE requirements.

As a result of Covid-19, each aspect of the employee lifecycle has been challenged. This has provided an opportunity to design and rebuild a new and joined up approach, supporting both the long- and short-term strategies. The uncertainty of planning during a pandemic has led to decisions being made with a short-term view in mind; some of these responses may turn out to be poor enduring solutions.

Moving to your Contact Centre to the cloud is easier and more critical than ever!

Have you thought about the awesome power of benchmarking? If not, maybe you should.

Is collecting debt in large volumes on the horizon?  Aspect is a leader in the outbound dialer market with contact capabilities that power automated, compliant campaigns, that help you send the right message at the right time – which helps improve collection activities.  

We have now launched our programme of activity for 2021, combining the very best of virtual and face-to-face to offer you a variety of ways of maximising your membership.

The forced virtual environment of 2020 has given us a huge learning opportunity to understand how we can grow our community, make more events easier to access whilst still ensuring value. 

These can be accessed through your membership, or pay-as-you-go.

Heightened customer expectations are here to stay and are having a huge impact on technology in contact centres. Ed Creasey at Calabrio shares a forward-looking plan for the “new normal”. 

First-ever virtual Calabrio customer conference showcases cloud-based WEM platform designed for the modern, agile contact centre