Truly customer-centric organizations are driven by strong leaders who desire positive change. They have a clear vision for a better future, even if there are potential unknowns along the way.

The overall theme for 2021 is: It’s all about the response to COVID and its impacts.

COVID ‘shined a light’ on the importance of the contact center, and it now features far more prominently as the ‘face’ of the organization.

As centers tackle their challenges and pursue their priorities, I believe we will see a strong focus on the agent experience, and the result should be better customer experience, as well.

Companies that did not measure the impact of the VoC were much more likely not to have improvements in satisfaction year-over-year, and several actually reported significant declines.

As centers pursue bots, RPA, and a variety of AI-enabled capabilities, it is imperative that we consider the people and process changes that go hand-in-hand with these powerful tools.

We have some noticeable movement this year. It reflects our dynamic industry in what the vendors are offering, how the labor market is changing, and how centers are maturing.

Integrating disparate applications into a coherent contact center technology architecture remains the number one challenge.

Perhaps now we’re moving into an era where the technology can help achieve “genetic engineering” to change some of those fundamental challenges, or provide better ways to tackle them.

More than half of the supervisors out there in our contact centers have been provided a trace amount or no leadership training. If any data point screamed “Fix Me!!” in this survey, this is it.

It’s time to take these tools, and the related processes and roles, to the next level; the market has us poised to do just that.

Customer-centric leaders know the customer experience brings a brand vision to life. They work hard to unite the organization to a shared vision of the ideal experience. They also ensure everyone...

Highly engaged customers are more likely to exhibit brand-focused behaviors that go beyond business as usual.

Attrition was again the No. 1 challenge. It’s an age-old problem that plays a major role in saturated markets with ample opportunities to go elsewhere, whether for a little pay bump, less...