Letter from the CEO
Getting Your Contact Center in Top Gear
Ensuring a Smooth Road to Customer Success with
Omnichannel Customer Journeys The Rocky Path of
TCPA Regulations ... An
Insider's Perspective
In 2013, when Frost & Sullivan first borrowed the term omnichannel from the I recently had the pleasure of
James K Noble, Jr
speaking at the PACE Washington
Summit, an important industry
event that focuses on the latest issues surrounding
regulatory compliance, consumer protection, and
risk management. Many of you know that I have
been involved the industry for a long time, but you
may not realize that my experience began in 1979
as a member of Time Life's call center management
training program, followed by several years running
call centers for The Hearst Corporation, and then
operating my own service bureau. We developed
the first Noble predictive dialer to help improve our
own center efficiencies and performance, which
in turn led to the founding of Noble Systems in 1989
to promote the sale and support of our innovative
technology. We continued to operate the bureau
until selling the business in 1999.
retail industry to describe the components of what should be a seamless
customer journey, it didn’t understand how popular the term would become.
It is now everywhere, incorporated in product names and marketing materials,
sales pitches and the press. It became a buzzword even by companies whose
products didn’t fulfill the intent of the original definition.
The wholesale embracing of the term omnichannel by an entire industry is a
good sign, paving the way for solution providers and customers alike to think past
siloed customer interactions
and
transactions,
and
instead focus on what really
counts—the CX. This leads
to a further look to define
the bridge between a single
customer interaction with
a
business
and
multiple
interactions across time as
customer journeys, and to
view the impact of those
journeys on overall CX.
The omnichannel concept
started to get people out of
their siloed thinking, which
had closely followed the
maturation of the call center into the contact center. In the early days of ACD,
outbound dialers and IVR, businesses were just consumed with how to add on
these adjunct systems and applications, There was not an overarching plan on
how to tie information together.
Call centers rapidly became more complex as a fast-growing set of “customer
interaction channels” was added that morphed the call center into the contact
center of today; first with email and the web, and then with a continual stream
of new arrivals from chat to social media. Now it is typical for there to be nine or
more channels through which customers can access a business. The rise of the
always-on, mobile-addicted millennial consumer helped push the industry even
faster. Their love and adoption of technology compelled businesses to add new
channels and to face the disjointed and jarring experiences customers often
have in their customer service journeys when channels are not truly integrated.
While it has taken us more than a decade to truly embrace multichannel and
move into omnichannel delivery, the pace of consumer change is rapidly
pushing us further. Millennials and younger are changing the way they obtain
and use goods and services, work and play.
...continued on page 4
What does all of this mean to you? Well, it means
that I've been in the industry for a while now ... and
I've seen and felt the business impacts of the TCPA
regulations from their start in 1991. Over the years,
the FCC and FTC have taken the original laws and
mutated them in ways far beyond the original
scope, and in a manner that is detrimental not only
to those who make their livings by the telephone (or
other forms of customer contact), but also to the
public which the regulators say they aim to protect.
The current auto-dialer definition, deluge of lawsuits
that are clogging court dockets, "Robocall Task
Force", and the proposed "blacklist" of numbers
for widespread call blocking – while created to try
to combat ill-intentioned people from making
illegal calls to scam consumers – are ultimately not
effective in solving the problem. One system, called
"Shaken and Stir", offers a very workable approach
to identifying the originating source of illegal calls,
so that the perpetrators can be found and stopped,
rather than handcuffing an entire industry of
legitimate business operators. If you aren't currently
involved with PACE, I encourage you to learn more
about the work they are doing to advocate for
contact centers.
Noble Systems has the honor of working with some
exemplary companies who reflect the best of the
industry, shining through the cloud of regulation.
Each year, we recognize these users with our
SNUG Innovations Awards. This year’s EMEA region
winners were announced in June at the SNUG 2017
conference in Manchester, UK. Congratulations to
these companies:
• Vitality Health – Best Practices, CC Operations
• Welsh Ambulance Service – Best Practices, WFM
• permanent tsb – Technology Innovator