In the contact centre industry, understanding what is happening at the point of customer and advisor interaction is key to achieving operational efficiency and an enhanced customer experience.

Conventional processes seek to uncover this insight by manually listening to a small sample of calls, to highlight performance issues, noncompliance and ‘dead’ call time, so that advisors can be retrained or redeployed as appropriate.

We are in interesting times when one of the few clear differentiators between companies, products and services is the extent to which customers enjoy interacting with them.

This is great news if you’re good – and can remain good – at delivering a great customer experience. But what if you’re not, or aspire to be better?

In economic theory, perfect knowledge equals perfect decision-making.

If we lived in this perfect world, customer acquisition would be a straightforward task for any organisation. All that you’d need to do would be to match a compelling offer with a receptive prospect, engage and stimulate them before you moved to process the new customer...

In June we wrote about the Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) scandal's impact on the banking industry and some of the necessary measures needed to ensure businesses across all sectors are protected against the charge of mis-selling.

As the fall out from this episode continues we can see a similar level of scrutiny being applied by the regulator to other sectors where they feel consumers are not being treated fairly....

Using Social Media to drive sales is not just about having an online presence on Facebook or Twitter, but instead, using new platforms and technologies to change the traditional purchasing process and subsequent customer relationship.

More often than not, traditional ways of engaging with customers are being superseded by social strategies which allow customers to listen and respond to individuals on a one-to-one basis, using tools that can gather real time data and allowing brands to act in ways and at speeds that were never before possible. So, is ‘going digital’ the key to driving sales?

You probably don’t need me to tell you that your world (and that of your customer) is becoming more complex. Today your advisors face a barrage of increasingly sophisticated requests from customers who are looking for answers to more complicated products.

But it’s not just your products and services that are more sophisticated. So too are the ways in which you can, and are now expected to, interact with your customers.

We explore the challenges facing today’s contact centres, and what you can do to harness a new multichannel relationship with your customers.