Some days the robot future feels closer than others. At the annual Google developer jamboree in California last week, the tech giant wowed the audience with the language skills of its virtual assistant software, now so fluent it can make calls without the recipient realising the voice does not belong to a human.

It’s a long way from Silicon Valley to Swansea, where less than a fortnight ago nearly 800 call centre workers were blindsided by Virgin Media’s surprise decision to pull out of Wales’s second-largest city in 2019. While Virgin did not blame the march of technology for the decision to close its Swansea base, the move is symptomatic of dramatic changes sweeping the UK customer services industry.

The majority of customer-service workers are concentrated in a few hundred large operations around the country, each employing 250 staff or more. So when they close job losses are significant: Virgin’s Swansea site had 792 staff while the closure of Tesco’s Cardiff call centre in February eliminated 1,100 jobs.

Anne-Marie Stagg, chief executive of the Call Centre Management Association, said machine-learning was the latest stick being used to beat a resilient industry.

“It’s is the current bogeyman,” said Stagg. “Every couple of years there’s a bogeyman that’s going to take jobs,but we are not seeing it. Call volumes are declining but those that come through are more complex and take longer to resolve. If there is an area finding it tough it’s retail, as the industry has been impacted by online shopping.”

Read the full article in The Observer …

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The Contact Centre Renaissance: Why Human Connection Matters More Than Ever

For me, the contact centre is the most valuable function in a business. There are two main reasons why this is the case. The first is that the contact centre, as the hub of all customer interactions, is also at the centre of all the insights a business gathers. The second, more prosaic reason, is that customers still want to forge human connections with the brands they do business with. To make this vision a reality, however, we need to reverse the recent alarming slump in customers’ perception of customer service quality. Let’s take a look at how.

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Empowering Contact Centre Leadership at Every Level

The traditional top-down leadership model that has applied in contact centres since forever, is no longer fit for purpose. Because today’s contact centre is driven by the need for an agile, responsive service delivery, the thinking goes that leadership must exist at every level of the organisation – as close as possible to where decisions need to be made.

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Watch the online seminar which continues the conversation into the power of the strategic value of the contact centre.

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Watch the online seminar which continues the conversation into the power of the strategic value of the contact centre.

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