Executive Summary: ISG Provider Lens™ Contact Center - Customer Experience Services - Australia 2023
18 Sep 2023
by Craig Baty, Phil Harpur, Angie Kho, Jan Erik Aase
The individual quadrant reports are available at:
Customer contact centres increasingly drive business success or failure based on agents’ performance. Organisations ought to possess the right tools and information to provide optimal CX. The trend of contact centres returning to their native countries is extending beyond the pandemic.
The future of work is transitioning towards an Al-driven, hyperpersonalised workplace, enabling organisations and individuals to be productive, creative and purposeful. Key shifts in the market include the rise of frontline workers, the direct impact of metaverse on workplaces, the continued shift to hybrid working, AI and automation integration and a strong focus on sustainability. AI is acting as a catalyst for contact centre cloud conversion, and enterprises are beginning to realise the financial benefits of this transition to the cloud.
Organisations adopt an analytical approach to deliver a deeper level of service as they seek to better understand individual customer needs and preferences and use data from varied sources to deliver a more personalised service. Structured data such as customer feedback streams, customer transaction data and CRM data are the most common data types collected. In contrast, unstructured data, such as social media data, web browsing data, and data generated by connected devices and mobile devices, continues to grow exponentially.
Operators presently recognise that employee relationships with work and work-life balance have changed. Some CX vendors are pioneering new flexible working models.
Since the pandemic, contact centre management and the manner in which agents respond to changing customer behaviours and needs have witnessed significant evolution. This trend is likely to continue over the next few years. The pandemic has propelled companies to adopt new technologies to accommodate evolving working practices. Transitioning to new working environments leads to increased workforce and employee engagement management.
Companies transition towards cloud-based contact centre solutions to safeguard operations and ensure business continuity during crises. By hosting contact centres centrally, Australian companies implement solutions that can better supervise contact centre agents.
More and more Australian organisations are adopting a work-at-home CX delivery model. This model has created win-win solutions for clients, service providers and agents, leading to the work-from-home (WFH) concept becoming an accepted norm.
Clients are transitioning from RPA and recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) for internal efficiencies to customer-facing automation for business continuity planning. They are increasingly focusing on digital as a CX differentiator and are leveraging NLP for human-like experiences.
Contact centres are gradually undertaking a more strategic, central role in organisations. They are becoming more integrated with other company functions, such as marketing. Companies are becoming more skilled at collecting, combining and leveraging customer data through AI and ML techniques. This includes using data in real-time to derive more meaningful insights. New revenue opportunities are created by providing companies with tools to deliver innovative experiences.
Digital solutions are vital to support human contact centre agents as they work remotely from any location. Technologies built to manage AI-based and analytics solutions that work collaboratively to improve EX increasingly support digital solutions. These solutions facilitate improved flexibility with human and digital agents, coupled with investments in automation and analytics solutions, such as automating workflows. Thus, by adopting digital solutions, companies can streamline agent and work management and save time and costs.
Contact centres are more engaged with business intelligence solutions and will further integrate customer interaction analytics software into processes and combine these with ML-driven AI models. This integration will provide contact centre managers access to real-time data insights and predictive behaviours.
Enhancing EX can provide clients with a better overall experience and boost customer loyalty. Contact centre managers can obtain key insights on churn, propensity to buy, fraud and client vulnerability, enabling them to act on agent behaviours before they can negatively impact the organisation.
Enterprises are now seeking newer technologies as CX is gaining more importance. While demands on the buyer side are increasing, the supply side faces newer challenges, such as staffing and retention. Owing to the increased demand for flexible working conditions among employees, providers are attempting to strike a balance with new hybrid working models.
Some specific trends in each of the quadrants covered in this report are listed as follows:
Digital Operations
Contact centres are evolving into smart centres that can obtain customer insights and predict human intent. Workforce optimisation, analytics and other advanced applications are assisting call centres to evolve into CX centres. Two technologies that will rapidly change digital workplace services and contact centre services over the next 18 months are generative AI and intelligent automation.
Several providers are exploring new and innovative ways to collaborate in the blockchain and crypto space in accordance with the ongoing development and growth of these industries within CX.
Service providers leverage their industry experience, research, vertical expertise, nuances and benchmarks to define clients’ transformation roadmap and support technology adoption, enabling tangible business outcomes and ensuring ROIs.
Australian contact centre consultants have significant opportunities to help organisations optimise and develop AI systems. Companies are challenged by the sheer volume and flow of unstructured data within organisations. Call centre service providers can use AI systems to collate, analyse and interpret this unstructured data and provide actionable, real-time feedback. Globally and in Australia, an increasing number of CX providers are now incorporating AI into their CX strategies using customer analysis, insights personalisation to CX, enhanced web search, fulfilment and logistics, and voice powered applications. Other installed features, such as customer-facing chatbots, virtual assistants and RPA in customer service, provide a predictive and personalised experience.
Australian organisations can optimise their CX performance, reduce costs, increase revenue and profit, and deliver high shareholder value by successfully deploying AI. AI enables companies to drive continuous improvement across businesses, including lower operational costs by reducing headcount for repetitive roles.
Hybrid Working Solutions
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the work-life relationship for employees worldwide. Contact centre agents become a crucial touchpoint between businesses and their customers. Organisations investing in work-from-home setups will likely experience improved CX and increased productivity.
One of the primary contributors to a great CX is a great EX — especially for frontline workers that directly interact with and serve customers and make up for 80 percent of the workforce.
It has become a key priority to ensure that the infrastructure used to enable agents to work from anywhere is as secure as in traditional offices. The requirement for a secure infrastructure to support a hybrid workplace is driving organizations to consider outsourcing. An increased focus on CX delivery through digital channels is driving captive contact centres to seek third parties.
Work from home has become an inherent delivery model even for the most highly regulated industries. Hybrid working models are now essential for talent acquisition and retention, which, in turn, have led to the introduction of new delivery models and improved productivity.
Increased flexibility and the ability to work from anywhere, at any time, will likely drive the expansion of the Australian freelance workforce. This working style can also be implemented into the contact centre model.
CX and personalised and customised experiences are becoming important differentiators to achieve success.
Australian organisations have started implementing advanced EX strategy services that support teams and enable more flexible working arrangements. They have realised that this arrangement will help attract the most qualified and experienced new staff.
AI and analytics play an integral role in digital transformation. Advancements in AI and analytics implementation, use cases and adoption benefit customers and agents. Agent experience is equally important as CX. Implementing AI and analytics in this space will help companies drive meaningful and empathetic conversations with end users and significantly impact business outcomes.
Social Media and CX Services
Australian companies with a well-developed CX strategy can benefit from an EX that eliminates organisational silos and results in a compliant and responsible approach for using and managing customer data. Companies benefit from reduced operating costs, increased customer retention and reduced customer churn. They also observe improvements in customer satisfaction, operational efficiency and customer lifetime value.
CX and EX must be more seamless as the world becomes more digital. With robust digital CX strategies and technology platforms, companies can play a crucial role in business success by providing real-time customer support across multiple channels.
There will be a continuation of the transition from human point-of-contact channels towards low-cost, digital, self-service channels, such as smartphone apps, social media, chatbots and instant messaging.
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