The 2019 Future of the Contact Centre Conference, where I chaired Hall 2, provided a fascinating and absorbing insight into the changing world of the contact centre and the elements shaping its future. which was perhaps echoed by the sub-title of the conference Contact Centres at the Crossroads.  Many pundits have been predicting the demise of the contact centre for some time. But, as with Mark Twain, I believe that the reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated.

The plenary sessions kicked of with the always entertaining Nicola Millard from BT whose presentation, Chat, tap, talk; trends to transform your digital customer experience, really connected the bots. She showed us that while Chatbots have appeal, and “chat is where it’s at”, there needs to be ‘checks and balances’ from human agents and that phone is still popular and a key part of digital strategy.

This really set the stage for the balance of the day as we traversed the full spectrum of omni-channel and digital capabilities which was respectfully, intelligently and creatively blended with the role that humans play to show why people, customers and colleagues, still come play a major and important role in successful customer interactions.

The Contact Centre and The Customer Journey

Following the break, we left the starting grid in Hall 2 at full throttle with Mercedes Barbuti from Diabolocom, who demonstrated the importance of lowering the Customer Effort Score, hence improving customer retention, by leveraging all data available. Especially by agents really knowing their customers and how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can augment that knowledge to deliver a seamless customer experience. She shared customer examples and showed how with Diabolocom they could analyse flows, identify skills and improve routing for the benefit of both customers and colleagues.

Can we talk?
Next in line was Ido Bornstein-HaCohen from Conversocial who clearly showed that the company name aptly described the juxtaposition and importance of conversation within the world of social media. He evangelized the need for brands to develop meaningful relationships with their customers, at scale. And the disruptive opportunity to build real 1:1 relationship with consumers by tapping into the unique nature of messaging with human agents and self-service through adaptive automation. He left us in no doubt about how to deliver a conversational customer experience for friction-free interactions with consumers.

Happiness still counts

Scarlett Bayes from the Service Desk Institute introduced us to some compelling statistics on feedback and surveys that articulated how important it is to deliver happiness and a great customer experience, even if your customers are internal rather than external with some very telling statistics on the value of the overall metrics of CX over CSAT. She went on to say that while CSAT can provide some insight into the customer experience, but it may not show the full picture. She finished with a flourish by showing that customers are interested in the experience of the service more than Service Level targets being met and that excellent CX can lead to a community of customer advocates and promote customer centricity

The other Gerry Brown from IDC introduced us to some ‘Role models and Villains’ as a way of demonstrating how not to be customer centric, many of whom were the usual suspects. But bookended that smoothly by also introducing companies that did get it right including Metro Bank, Amazon and Salesforce. He divulged his three critical success factors for CX success, Kick start, Orchestrate and Innovate that focused on creating an ‘IT Intelligent Core’ that aligned with a future CX roadmap for digital investments that delivers both competitive differentiation and customer value through CX.

Metro Bank still creating FANS

David Craggs from MetroBank told us of the integrated service proposition offering the best of every channel, and had the audience applauding the fact that they continue to create FANs through their contact centres. He went on to say that while the customer shift towards digital and self- service banking continues to develop at pace; their customers still want them there to help them when needed. He concluded the morning session by saying that supporting these digital users is a major role for the Metro Bank Contact Centre, and analysis of usage patterns and root cause problems is a key driver of ongoing service improvements.

Chatbots, Webchat and Virtual Assistants

Llaura Hughes from Motability got us motoring into the afternoon session with her eloquent and down to earth presentation entitled, Customer Interaction Through Technology. She shared their journey taken to remove the day-to-day monotony within customer interactions by utilising emotional intelligence with the use of an up-to-date knowledge management base and an award-winning employee facing virtual agent. She told us of the changes that had taken place within their virtual assistant and the overall operation to make the process smoother, faster and less cumbersome for both customer and colleagues, and left us with this gem. ‘Confidence doesn’t come when you have all of the answers. But it comes when you’re ready to face all the questions’

Jon Meredith from IFS Customer Engagement continued the theme of bots and people playing nicely together. He noted that agents provide the empathy and listening skills plus the problem solving and creativity around additional services: essential for long term loyalty.  And agreed that as the number of bot and virtual agent deployments grow, so does the frustration and the number of failed deployments. However, he quickly showed us how IFS outline the four cornerstones of a successful implementation and uses real-work examples to illustrate how human agents can seamlessly combine with AI to ensure chatbots can really deliver CX and provide a staged approach to chatbot implementation.

Mark Billingham, from Shop Direct then took us on a journey from a dusty catalogue business to a fully functional, modern on-line retail giant. He showed that it was not only possible, but preferable for many customers that used mostly phone to contact them in the past, to shift relatively painlessly to a variety of digital channels. This resulted in Shop Direct improving their NPS score by 70 points, first contact resolution by 22% and overall contact by 30%.

The Voice of the Customer (VOC) and the Employee (VOE) is heard loud and clear

Chris Angus from 8×8 took us on a journey through the evolution of VOC and VOE in the contact centre and injected a strong dose of reality to the discussion when he said that it is becoming increasingly obvious that business is falling short when it comes to engaging both their customer and employee in the same environment. He identified that while there was a separation between VoE and VoC and combining the two for the VoCE is a trend that is taking over. He concluded that the employee is the true link to customer satisfaction how 8×8 can support business processes that can implemented to enhance both the customer and the employees experience within your organisation.

Richard Atkins, & Trish Roberts from Fidelity International performed a very creditable double act to introduce the three critical success factors within their VOC programme and the positive impact on client experience. These consist of the Health of the programme – having a robust view of the customer journey across different customer segments and countries, ensuring that their customers are able to provide a detailed view of their experience. Then their focus on the Communication and Engagement that is being fostered to celebrate best practice, getting those customer stories and winning the hearts and minds of their customers and colleagues. And lastly, and very importantly, the ‘Close the Loop’ programme, that was relaunched this year and designed to change the minds of their stakeholders through storytelling and the training module they set up to encourage best practice and create a common understanding and goal. This has had a profound effect on colleagues at all levels of the business that has contributed to the benefits in their continuous improvement programme that has been equally beneficial for customers.

Service Design in the Contact Centre

James Sandberg from Customer Devoted acknowledged that many business struggles to implement successful automation programs and his powerful presentation entitled Empowering contact centres with automation and action orientated dashboards, provided many valuable tips. James showed how contact centres can optimise NPS with the use of automation and how data driven dashboards can deliver actionable insights about what needs to be improved within the customer service experience. These included Customer process mapping, Tooling strategies, Conversation design and the clincher, Action orientated dashboards. The end result being dashboards that go beyond vanity metrics, better collaboration across channels that can surprise customers with unexpected rewards and value.

The days presentation was brought to a fitting end by Ian Webber-Rostron from the N Brown Group with his aptly named presentation The Changing Role of Contact Centres Within Our Organisations. He asked the probing questions; What role does our contact centre really play in the turbulent and changing world of online retail? And how far should we really go to delight our customers with their contact centre experiences? He answered these questions by demonstrating that by restating and redefining their purpose, really listening to customers and colleagues, reliving the customer’s journey and focusing on relationships, they developed a new and sustainable customer strategy which resulted in their Engage award for ‘Best use of Innovation in Customer Engagement.’

We couldn’t have asked for a better closing presentation as he enthusiastically defined and celebrated the continuing value of the contact centre and that by continual and consistent innovation it is in rude health and will live to a ripe old age.

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Automation AI and Robotics command daily headlines given the pace of innovation. It therefore makes for good conferences as this one indeed proved to be. I was chair and this is a flavour of what was explored on the day.

The inimitable Brian Manusama from Gartner started proceedings with a disturbing quote. “The country that leads artificial intelligence will rule the world.”. This is Putin’s view of its strategic value. I think he is right which incidentally is why our own national success matters so much.

Brian had wise words for enterprise decision makers.

1. Be patient. AI needs the right expertise and workflow discipline.
2. Focus on augmenting employee value such as improving the quality of decision making.
3. Figure out the business problem before choosing the technology. In other words, have purpose before shopping.

He finished with one final pearl – The business value of AI will be proportional to how thoroughly you reinvent your business.

A great scene setting contribution.

In terms of putting those principles into practice there were some very clear examples to learn from. Mike Migliore, Head of Customer Value at News UK was one.

It’s no secret that selling news is tough and newspapers need deep reinvention to offer more value than online news aggregators. Mike showed how subscriber loyalty is a function of engagement and habit. This is driven by highly personalised subscriptions. The question becomes how can this be affordably scaled?

Enter James – an anthropomorphised machine learning driven engine. James orchestrates the right content, right time, right format and right frequency for each individual subscriber and of course being an ML algorithm, gets smarter over time. The net result is increased engagement which translates in increased lifetime value.

Clever stuff.

The results showed James was especially effective in the first few habit-forming weeks of a new subscriber. Dramatically reducing their rate of churn.

Fast forward to the next example. Verco is a leading energy management and sustainability business advising organisations how to transition to a zero-carbon economy. Tim Kay. Commercial director presented how they were starting to use AI for in the context of that mission.

As you might imagine energy management generates tons of data. However, turning that into realised benefit is tough. Especially when searching for those opportunities is human driven and therefore tends to be inconsistent in terms of skills and focus across different organisations. As Brian’s Gartner research showed, improved decision making is the top use case for AI. It’s ability to unearth patterns within complex datasets is precisely what Verco aims to achieve for its clients.

The project is still in early days. Tim and his team are using 2019 to pilot the capability of spotting patterns and opportunities. Anyone interested in being part of that beta testing programme should contact Tim.  

After lunch we kicked off with another market overview. Leslie Willcock’s views the world of automation through the lens of LSE as a curator and author of how organisations are evolving their use of automation. In line with growing market maturity, we are moving from ‘easier’ – structured data (robotic process automation) to ‘harder’ unstructured data and basic decision making (cognitive automation).

My own observation is that RPA has been popular. A quick show of hands from the audience confirmed that its use is widespread. The benefits are readily quantifiable in terms of classic cost reduction metrics: less time and faster responsiveness. There is a lot of low hanging fruit in the form of simple administrative tasks that can be automated. This makes RPA faster to rollout out than assembling a team of data scientists and engineers which more complex AI initiatives classically demand.

However, once we enter the more complex world of cognitive automation, the ROI becomes tougher as the quality of data becomes a key issue.

We were then offered a wonderful example of why AI is going to be a force for creative disruption in every sector. As one of the audience remarked at the end of Stuart Stock’s presentation, ‘I had no idea rubbish collection was so interesting!”

Stuart Stock is CIO of Veolia. He loves data and uses it to great effect. He has assembled a very bright team of 40 data scientists to make rubbish collection smart. Within customer service he has implemented automation, chatbots, predictive analytics. He seems to have handled journey mapping and omni-channel which others still struggle with. The fact that customer churn has halved in the last two years is evidence of the team’s impact.

However, it was adding sensors to bins that really sparked the audience’s interest. This allows a whole new approach to the scheduling of bin collection. Instead of pre-determined collections, new schedules are dynamically generated based on bin capacity SLAs. This fundamentally changes the business model of waste collection echoing the point Brian made at the start of the day.

We saw a glimpse of what smart cities are all about. I can’t wait to see what Stuart’s team get up to once they get their hands on 5G technology.

Amy Mitchell from Leathwaite took the stage to talk to us about recruiting AI talent. She has tons of experience and well worth tapping into if that’s where you are in your own journey. She offered what I would describe as strategic common sense. Don’t invest in roles until you understand the business problem (another Brian Manusama point). Set people up to succeed in terms of workflow and support or they will under perform and eventually leave.

I’ve just read a great article on the important differences in skill sets between data scientists and data engineers. Both are needed in typical AI deployments and they are poor at duplicating each other’s skill set. The point is to make sure that real expertise is brought to the discussion and decision making around the required team and the support needed to make it a successful investment. As such, Amy concluded with the following observation – Adopting AI is primarily a people problem.

ThoughtRiver provide contract pre-screening. It’s a classic use case for augmenting humans. Trawling through legal contracts for the few clauses that require attention is slow, expensive and prone to error when undertaken by people. ThoughtRiver takes the pain away and expedites contract approval at lower cost. No brainer really.

‘Digital first’, ‘cost reduction’ and ‘winning through data’. These are any retailer’s mantras in today’s world. Phil Jones used them to scene set what M&S is doing around intelligent automation. Phil approach was detailed, educational, well planned and by the looks of it well executed. An agile approach providing the momentum. Like most large organisations, M&S employees waste time doing tasks that automation would do better.

Here are Phil’s hard won insights.

• Get the right ownership.
• Find the right problem to fix – it took a few iterations for M&S to hit gold.
• Improve the process before automating it.
• Focus on the data – quality, governance etc
• Think long term – scalability

That’s it. The day was full and insightful. Delegates walked away with a pocketful of practical insights to guide their own efforts. Things are definitely happening. Let’s hope UK plc keeps forging ahead in their AI deployments.

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In this new monthly Engage Business Media blog we cut through the clutter to pick out some of the key content focusing on themes and trends in the Customer and Employee Engagement sector. From national days to celebrate the workplace success, to upcoming events that should be in all your diaries, here are some of the highlights.

Kicking off the first month of spring was National Employee Appreciation Day on March 1^st. With some companies treating their employees to a round at the local pub or a feast for the office, we actually discovered that Employee Appreciation tends to be noticed more during in the Autumn period. Research also suggested the reasons for employees being recognised more so at this time was to do with the proximity of the end of the year, making it easier to take a step back, assess what’s been achieved and recognise accordingly.

Continuing with the Employee theme, the 4^th to 8^th March symbolised the start of National Apprenticeship Week – here we recognised those individuals between 18 to 20 hoping to get a kickstart in their careers. Yet the response to interest in apprenticeships has dropped significantly, even with the recognition of them being on the rise. Studies show that apprenticeship take-up is down by a quarter in 2019, with larger firms regarding the apprenticeship levy as little more than an extra tax on their wage bill, while many smaller companies are reluctant to have their apprentices go to college one day a week. Research found that two in three of business owners haven’t even heard of the apprenticeship levy – with over a quarter (27%) of UK managers didn’t see the benefit from offering apprenticeships, and a further 17% didn’t see the point of them at all.

A day which is embraced by all globally is International Women’s Day, which this year was celebrated on Friday 8^th March. Leading up to the prestigious day, the news coincided with some strong female-led stories within the workplace, including Virgin Atlantic lifting their female cabin crew make up ban and Morrisons facing women’s equal pay action. The articles go to show women are no longer being limited to what they can do in their positions and what they have responsibility for in the workplace, which is a huge step in the right direction towards the gender equality goal.

Finally, a nod to our most recent. The Engage Focus Groups returned for 2019 on 22^nd March and offered a platform for individuals to get involved in detailed discussions and find solutions to some of the most pressing issues and challenges facing the industry. If you are working in customer and employee engagement, the Focus Groups are the perfect event to meet like-minded professionals, voice your thoughts and share your experiences across a wide range of topics in a structured professional environment. Missed the March event? Don’t worry, we will be holding our second Focus Groups of the year in September.

For those interested in our must attend future events, we have our Automation AI and Robotics Forum coming up on April 4^th and our flagship Employee Engagement Summit on the 10^th May, both of these industry-leading events offer a great insight to the future of work. The Automation, AI and Robotics Forum will be discussing how you can bring people and technology together to drive digital transformation, and the Employee Engagement Summit will delve into the business benefits that accrue when organisations forge a link between engagement of their employees and their customers. The good news is there is still time to register your place for the events.

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by Elizabeth Akass, Editor, Engage Business Media

Mental Health Awareness Week is an increasingly notable week in the year, running from 13^th to 19^th May in 2019. Started by the Mental Health Foundation in 2001, it is a pinnacle annual week for businesses, schools, and communities to normalise opening dialogues and reducing stigma around the subject of mental health.

The Mental Health Foundation has been running for over 70 years, researching mental health in several areas of life to influence key legislative policy decisions on mental health for the benefit of the general public.

Each annual Mental Health Awareness Week has a theme, and in past years topics such stress, relationships, loneliness, sleep, alcohol and friendship have all been covered; this year, the theme being campaigned is body image. The Mental Health Foundation reported that: ‘one in five adults (20%) felt shame, just over one third (34%) felt down or low, and 19% felt disgusted because of their body image in the last year.’

They continue: ‘last year we found that 30% of all adults have felt so stressed by body image and appearance that they felt overwhelmed or unable to cope.’ This is even to the extent that ‘one in eight (13%) adults’ have ‘experienced suicidal thoughts or feelings because of concerns about their body image’. This widespread negative impact on individuals’ self-esteem can affect all areas of life, and ‘a recent survey showed that 20% of people had gone to work while experiencing suicidal thoughts or feelings’.

This is a widespread problem, made increasingly worse by the unrealistic beauty standards in the media, including social media. This has become particularly prominent in recent years with the increased normalisation in controversial photo-editing apps such as Facetune. To help combat this, a wave of body and life positive activists such as Jameela Jamil (@jameelajamilofficial and @i_weigh) and Megan Jayne Crabbe (@bodyposipanda) created hugely successful Instagram accounts to promote being kind and accepting of oneself, and encouraged their followers to value themselves beyond their physical appearance. With almost four million followers between these three accounts alone, they have begun to break through societal norms and have opened dialogues and safe spaces online for people to talk about their mental health and acceptance of their bodies.

However, it is also vital that workplaces are environments where employees will not have their mental health negatively affected or be at risk of burnout. Taking proactive steps to increase mental wellbeing in the workplace not only benefits the employee’s health and wellbeing, but benefits the employer too. According to the Mental Health Foundation: ‘addressing wellbeing at work increases productivity by as much as 12%’. This has a significant effect on higher profits and lower staff turnover rates, and as a result many companies are now taking active steps to improve the health and wellbeing of their employees for a happier, healthier, more productive staff.

According to the annual survey conducted by mental health charity Mind, 62% of people surveyed said that they are consulted on what they feel would promote staff wellbeing at work, and 62% felt that positive changes had been implemented as a result of feedback. This shows progress in humanising the workplace and making each individual employee feel valued and that their voice, and by extension their mental wellbeing, matters.

They continue: ‘mental health problems are all too common in the workplace and it is the leading cause of sickness absence. A staggering 70 million workdays are lost each year due to mental health problems in the UK, costing employers approximately £2.4 billion per year’.

They state: ‘there is strong evidence that workplaces with high levels of mental wellbeing are more productive’, as staff feel more energised and motivated in their roles, and are less likely to take sick leave for stress and exhaustion. They report that the estimated cost to the economy in the UK alone from our current mental health crisis is ‘over £100 billion each year’.

Evidently, we still have a long way to go in improving the mental wellbeing and body image of the general public, and more workplaces need to progress towards making their staff feel valued in regards to their mental wellbeing. If you would like more information on increasing employee wellness and improving internal relationships within your company, our Internal Communications Conference happening in September, and our new Employee Wellness Conference launching in March 2020, could both provide useful insight into this area, and a platform for sharing innovative ideas with a wealth of brands and organisations.

The post Why Mental Health Awareness Week Matters appeared first on Engage Customer.

By Elizabeth Akass, Editor, Engage Business Media

We are delighted to announce our brilliant line-up of speakers for our Customer Engagement Transformation Conference in London on 11^th July. Representatives from iconic brands and organisations will be taking the stage, such as: Netflix, Google, The Telegraph, Booking.com, Virgin Holidays, Virgin Atlantic Airways, Direct Line Group, and the Radisson Hotel Group. Other brilliant companies being represented include: Beyond Philosophy, Henley Business School, Customer Lifeguard, Hanover Communications, The Inner Circle, National Grid, Changing Health, Southeastern Railway, Nectar Sleep, Catch London, Sands, and Maitland/AMO.

Successful customer engagement is critical for businesses to survive and thrive in 2019, and the number of companies shifting their focus towards this area is ever-increasing. Recent statistics published show that 72% of businesses now say that improving customer experience is their top priority, and with the accompanying statistics brought to light, it is easy to see why.

Research shows that customer engagement is driven by price, quality, and convenience, and customer loyalty is driven by likeability and trust. Almost half of customers (45%) are even willing to pay more for a better customer service experience.

It is also reported that 70% of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated, with 91% of customers feeling unwilling to do business with a company again after a bad customer service experience, and 95% of consumers stating that they talk about their negative customer service experiences with others. As a result, it is easy to see how mistakes in this area can have a severe knock-on effect on profits. In 2017, it was reported that customers switching to competitors for better customer service cost US businesses $1.6 trillion.

Technology also plays a significant role in this, transforming the way in which customers interact with businesses. Customer service interactions on Twitter alone have increased by 250% over the past two years, and the entire customer service experience is increasingly moving online, particularly on mobile devices (78% overall, and 90% for millennials). It is also reported that companies with the strongest omni-channel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, compared to 33% for companies with weak omni-channel strategies. Therefore, it is essential that businesses adapt to keep up with this changing and progressively technological area.

To help your company navigate and adapt to the ever-transforming world of customer engagement, our speakers have some fantastic case studies for you to look forward to. Some examples are:

Netflix’s Head of Customer Service, Dekyi Boorsma, will be sharing how Netflix provides excellent customer experience across multiple sites and in multiple languages, enabling them to drive continuous optimisation and strategy to foster a nimble and effective service organisation which delights customers and is ready to sustain a course of rapid growth and change.

Wally Brill, Head of Conversation Design Advocacy and Education at Google, will be discussing how advancements in technology is progressing customer service and engagement, including Metabots, Chatbots, Intelligent Assistants and Personality.

Ian Naylor, Head of Customer Operations Excellence at Booking.com, will be sharing his expertise in digital customer journey re-engineering and the creation of customer insight capability to eliminate failure, increase customer loyalty, and significantly reduce cost. Ian is also a judge for our International Engage Awards, our industry awards programme which is the only awards programme to celebrate excellence within both customer and employee engagement.

Katrina King, Director of Customer Value and Expertise at Direct Line Group (DLG), will be sharing her insight on developing DLG’s ability to use data to aim to meet the needs of a diverse customer base and ensure the best possible experience for customers. Her current focus is on embedding DLG’s customer experience pillars as an ‘internal currency’ to ensure that everyone across the organisation has customer top of mind and all focus on continuing DLG’s customer experience transformation.

This is just a snippet of what you can expect from this year’s Customer Engagement Transformation Conference, creating a platform for knowledge and innovative ideas to be shared between industry leaders across multiple sectors. To book your place, visit: www.CustomerEngagementTransformation.com.

We look forward to seeing you there!

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By Rachel Summers, Director of Operational Excellence and Business Transformation, Shared Services Connected Ltd

Allow us to introduce ourselves! We are a relatively young shared service centre and we are a joint venture between the Cabinet Office and Sopra Steria. We provide back office service for a number of large government departments.

The size and scale of what we do has grown at an incredible rate and our people underpinning this are our biggest asset.

One of our core objectives is to ensure that our people regard SSCL as a great place to work, and a place where they feel they can achieve their full potential. Our values are few but strong, our most important value being to create an organisation that recognises the worth of individuality and provides people with the opportunity to reach their full potential.

We are very proud of our skilled people in SSCL who have a proven record of delivering large-scale transformation worked alongside the TUPE’d population, and who have the business and customer understanding of the clients and their priorities. This approach – utilising the best skilled and knowledge resource – enabled a unique proposition and delivery of the strategy. Our people are our most valuable assets; we understand and recognise that having an engaged workforce is the key to our success.

We were aware of our challenges and that the scale and complexity of the transformation undertaken in SSCL since its concept in November 2013 has been remarkable and unprecedented. We had to apply for this award, to not apply would have been a great disservice to our people and our clients; we wanted to honour their hard work and efforts collectively. The achievement and scale of our accomplishments made it a simple decision: we had to apply!

We have completely transformed our ways of working – moving from teams in 17 different locations working on the clients’ legacy technology and using many different processes, to operating on a Single Operating Platform for all our clients, streamlining of the processes in four Centres of Excellence. We have transitioned over 500 FTE of work by increasing productivity, multi-skilling the teams, changing working patterns and thinking differently. We recognised that business change and innovation requires people-led change, as engaged and motivated people are our most important asset.

The scale of change our people have embraced and achieved whilst delivering against SLAs and KPIs means that this award would be testament to the people in SSCL. The transformation program has saved the UK taxpayer over £100m to date and further savings will be delivered over the life of the contract.

Applying for the award and the entry process was straightforward, all the information we needed in order to apply was available online. A group of us sat down together and put forward our award entry ready. That in itself was a great opportunity for us to reflect on what we had achieved and to see how far we had come in a relatively short space of time. We were very proud to put ourselves forward and crossed our fingers in the hopes the judges would find our credentials worthy of this award.

When it came to the awards ceremony, we were all very excited and slightly nervous, but it was such a good enjoyable night out. A team of us attended from SSCL and it was a great opportunity for us to see and meet the other teams from different organisations. We enjoyed watching the other awards being presented too and the presentations were slick and efficient; a thoroughly enjoyable evening.

It was such an amazing feeling that cannot be described or appreciated fully with words, to win was testimony to all our hard work and efforts. It felt like a seal of approval that gave us confidence in our progression and development as a company and as an employer. It has been a very positive experience with the best possible results for our success. In terms of our customers and clients internally, it’s good for them to see how we are improving ourselves as an organisation.

2018 was a fantastic year for us, we bagged five awards, including the ‘Best Business Transformation Strategy Award’ at the International Engage Awards! We wanted everyone to feel part of the success and the opportunity to celebrate as one big team, one big family. We all celebrated together, and we wanted to share that feeling far and wide.

To help us celebrate, we had a fun day ‘photo booth’ across all our sites and encouraged everyone to take part and get involved. We have attached a couple of photos that were taken on the day, as you can see a lot of happy faces. The enthusiasm that was displayed that day and the way people got involved was nearly as good as winning the award! The excitement and rush of being awarded a winner for engagement was celebrated throughout. We saw people coming together to celebrate our success and congratulating one other at the same time as people getting to know one another too. The engagement continues onward and puts us in good stride for our future ventures…

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By Elizabeth Akass, Editor, Engage Business Media

The annual International Engage Awards celebrates the successes of our community of industry-leaders across a variety of sectors. The 2019 event marks the fourth year of the awards, and will host a record number of 20 categories, covering all aspects of customer and employee engagement, including the new coveted Lifetime Achievement Award. This event presents entrants with the chance to gain esteemed recognition for their achievements, and end the night as award-winning companies.

This will be the first year the event will be called the International Engage Awards, acknowledging the increasingly global spread of organisations submitting entries to the November event: the only customer and employee engagement awards programme.

This follows the 2018 Engage Awards which was a huge success, breaking records across the board, including in the number of submitted entries, the number of companies entering, the number of attendees, and more. There were 19 total winners in 2018, including Elon Woodman-Worrell from The Times and Sunday Times winning Employee Engagement Professional of the Year, Federica Silvi from Reward Gateway winning Customer Engagement Professional of the Year, Marks & Spencer International winning Best use of Voice of the Customer, Argos winning Best use of Social Media, Direct Line winning Best use of Voice of the Employee, Northumbrian Water Group winning Best use of Innovation in Employee Engagement and Best use of Technology in Employee Engagement, and many more. The utilities sector also proved particularly successful across several categories.

Federica Silvi told us: ‘I’m feeling proud, and very excited’; Northumbrian Water Group said the experience was: ‘Amazing. We’re ecstatic, this is just absolutely fantastic recognition for all of the hard work from everyone at our company’. Direct Line said: ‘It’s fantastic. We’re a company of 11,000 people with brilliant ideas, and this is absolutely proof of the worth of that’, and Marks & Spencer stated: ‘It’s a great honour to win an award for the amount of work that we’ve put in over the past four years’.

Categories relating to innovation and technology proved the most popular to enter in 2018, aligning with the overarching themes of all our events. For 2019, there will be nine new categories, which consist of: Best Employee Centric Strategy, Best Internal Communications Strategy, Best Digital Engagement Strategy, Best Engagement Team, Best use of Automation, Best Customer and Employee Engagement Programme, Best Omnichannel Customer Experience, Best use of Customer Insight, and the Lifetime Contribution Award. We are delighted to reward outstanding industry achievements in these areas for the first time.

These will join the already established categories from previous years. This includes: Best use of Training, Best Business Transformation Strategy, Best Engagement in Utilities and Telcos, Best use of Innovation in Customer Engagement, Best use of Innovation in Employee Engagement, Best use of Voice of the Customer, Best use of Voice of the Employee, Best use of Technology in Employee Engagement, Best use of Technology in Customer Engagement, Best Outsourcing Partnership, and Best Engagement in Customer Retail.

We are thrilled to announce our calibre of judges for 2019, many of whom have judged for us in previous years; the new judges joining us for the first time this year have also been identified as leaders and experts in their fields. There are a huge range of companies represented by the judges, from Stuart Eames at Waitrose, to Anna Wilcox at Bupa, Stephen Robertson at The Big Issue Foundation, Ramkumar Chandrasekaran from Tata Consultancy Services, Heather Mustafa from Nationwide Building Society, and more, with 21 judges overall. Their input and expertise during the judging process will be invaluable, and thereafter we will be honoured to award this year’s winners in November.

There are numerous benefits to entering the International Engage Awards. There is the chance to become an award-winning company which will boost your brand’s status and marketability, associating your business and brand with industry-leading business excellence, aligning yourself with industry-wide recognition and association to these prestigious awards, and building and developing long-term relationships and networking with leading industry figures. In addition, supporting, celebrating, and recognising your workforce, being a part of the industry benchmarking and recognition programme, extensive exposure to the Engage CX Marketing, Engage Customer and Engage Employee communities, and long-term branding and association with fellow award winners. Finally, internally at your organisation, entering could build a team culture among staff, and enhance employee engagement, motivation, and boost morale.

The International Engagement Awards take place on 11th November 2019. Entries close on 15th July.

To find out more, visit www.EngageAwards.co.uk.

The post The International Engage Awards: The Global Maker of Award-winning Brands appeared first on Engage Customer.

By Paul Carse, CTO, FirstHomeCoach

Big Tech creates a climate of distrust

In an era of Big Tech harvesting people’s data for their own gain, consumer suspicion around how companies such as Google, Amazon and Facebook are using their personal information continues to grow.

Recent research conducted by Dentsu Aegis Network and Oxford Economic found that globally:

Eight in 10 people would stop doing business with an organisation that misused their data.

– 44% of people have taken steps to reduce the amount of data they share online.

– 58% of people don’t believe enough is being done to ensure digital technology benefits everyone in society.

– This news is perhaps not surprising. Yet we still see too many technology businesses taking data they don’t need from their customers.

Most companies invariably need to ask their customers for key data in order to be able to provide them with a service. However, many of them squeeze in other questions to acquire customer data to serve their own ends, such as building their own analytics or to sell information to advertisers.

Ruthless transparency to garner customer loyalty

Rather than looking to harvest data, companies must be ruthlessly transparent – thereby driving consumer trust, rewarding the business and ultimately building brand loyalty.

In our case, with FirstHomeCoach, our mission is to make it cheaper, easier and less stressful to get on the property ladder, by guiding people through the complex process of buying a home.

In order to help these prospective buyers, we need to ask them to share personal information – gsuch as their salary, credit score and savings. We must, therefore, show users that the data we collect is only being used to tangibly benefit them. Part of our goal is to recommend services that fit people’s needs, not share or sell their personal data to others. We call this building digital trust.

How to build digital trust?

As the new research demonstrates, technology firms need to engage with this question more and more if they want to win and retain customers. Tech organisations can help establish digital trust in three key ways:

1) Explaining to people why they are asking them for the data they ask for.

Companies need to ask people for their personal information to be able to help them. But they must challenge themselves to be completely transparent and only ask for data if they have a use for it. Any request for data must be verified with an open explanation as to exactly why it is required.

In our case, we only ask people for their date of birth because some savings products – such as Lifetime ISAs – have an age limit on them. We ask for their salary so that we can input that information into our calculators to tell them how much they can borrow, or how long it will take them to save the deposit size they need. In each instance of data harvesting, there is a tangible benefit to the customer and this is transparently explained.

2) Creating a transparent business model that doesn’t sell user data or advertise to generate revenue.

Many businesses are not open about the fact that they monetise their products through commissions. There is nothing wrong with monetising products through commissions or introductions to products and services per se, and indeed it forms the basis of the business model for many small ventures. But the key is ensuring these companies are absolutely transparent with their customers around how that company is making its money.

Companies must explain how they make money from introductions, and also explain why they have chosen those specific products and services, and how they are relevant to their customers.

By doing so, companies can begin to challenge the status quo of the murky world of affiliate commissions with its profound lack of transparency around revenue generation.

3) Using micro-education to bring people along on their journey and give them the right information, at the right time, in the right way

People like to educate themselves about complex subjects in different ways. Some choose to read detailed articles, but this approach doesn’t work for everyone.

In order to give customers a personalised experience, they will need to ask them relevant questions – and this can be used as an opportunity to provide them with brief explanations about the service being provided. In our case, for example, we can provide information along the way about the particular stage of the home buying process they are in exactly when they need it.

What does the future look like?

As consumers, we expect companies to be open about how they make money and use our data, however, most businesses are still reluctant to follow this approach fearing for their bottom line.

We believe that being open and transparent with our customers is the right thing to do, and we’re confident that this will lead them to reward us with their loyalty.

The post Building digital trust appeared first on Engage Customer.

By Jamie Thorpe, Deputy Managing Director of CX, Kantar

Brands will thrive if they can deliver a great customer experience. Getting it right means being rigorous and delivering on the marketing promise.

A great customer experience is something to be treasured. After all, we have them all too fleetingly with so many of the organisations we deal with in our daily lives.

The gains for brands that get CX right are huge. Indeed, much of the success of so-called disruptive brands has been built on the fact that they are fully focused on consumers and their modern needs.

Studies by Forrester and Watermark show that CX leaders outperform the market by some 79.9%, while Bain & Co have demonstrated that a 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by up to 75%.

As I outlined at CX Marketing Summit last week, such headline numbers are encouraging companies of all sizes to work harder to get closer to consumers. But too many are failing to approach the challenge in the right way.

The bottom line is that the true enemy of business success is not the frequently blamed disruptor brands or digital progress, it’s mediocrity. Average brands will struggle to compete but the truly excellent will thrive.

In 2019 being excellent means delivering a fantastic experience, every time. As customer expectations rise (and true loyalty wains), the winners are those that crack the CX code. The world that people like me grew up in, limited choice and bafflingly high levels of loyalty, no longer exists.

Today, an alternative brand or service provider is just a quick swipe away and consumers are aware of their own power. They are fickle and promiscuous.

Brands invest heavily in marketing a promise and the experience that consumers get when they come to the brand needs to at least match or ideally exceed what they have been conditioned to expect.

Marketing remains critical to get people through the door but it’s the experience that matters when it comes to recommendation and repeat purchase.

Brands need to understand the difference between those who buy because of the brand and those who buy because of the quality of experience. Recent research into one big spending brand found that the CX equity was now higher than their brand equity, a remarkable achievement given that the marketing spend was so much higher than CX investment. One to watch for sure.

Evidence of value

The good news for brands is that this is an area well worth investing in: 86% of consumers said they would pay for a better service, according to recent research by Kantar Insights (some as much as 20% more). The same research has also found that 75% of millennials said they would rather spend on experiences than ‘material things’. Our recent work for a global travel client demonstrated that a 1% improvement in NPS was worth more than £23m of incremental revenue per annum.

But if the value of CX has been widely accepted, then putting the right programme into action to deliver it is proving more complex.

The first step for any programme is identifying where you are and where you’ve come from. Our experience shows there are four stages of CX maturity. Journeying along that pathway can take time but knowing where you are – Establish, Realise, Develop or Maintain/Optimise – helps you plan your direction.

The next stage is to develop a multifaceted and holistic approach to CX across the key areas of design, platform, service, analytics and activation. Great understanding of each of these areas is essential to maximise the benefit.

With analytics, for example, you need to ensure that the process of continual improvement is driven by the right measures. Too many advertisers are hung up on NPS. While this measure tells the brand what proportion of people would recommend, it doesn’t interrogate the gap between what people say they will do and what they actually do. The natural follow up is: “have you ever actually recommended?” Business success is predicated on what people do not what they say!

This is just one example of the complexity of modern CX and how the brands that are winning are taking into account the entire ecosystem.

CX is continually evolving. That may be daunting for those who are just starting out on the CX journey, but the future winners are those who deliver excellence across customer, brand and employee experience.

The post Customer Experience Pays appeared first on Engage Customer.

By Gerry Brown, Chief Customer Rescue Officer, The Customer Lifeguard

Do try this at home. Pick two or three of your favourite and most used smartphone or device apps, such as those provided by airlines, banks, hotels or retail organisations. The best examples will be where you need to create or login to an account, and/or authenticate via a user name and password. Then if you are able to find an icon for ‘help’ or ‘contact us’, see what happens. In almost all cases when I do this, I get a list of phone numbers, often premium rate 084x numbers, or an email form that asks me for my name, email address and other information that should be available via the data that I’ve already entered, or is on file. Rarely if ever is there an option to be directly connected, and identified, to a customer service person via phone or web-chat. Consequently, despite my ‘status’ I’m just another faceless, nameless number in the queue waiting anonymously for ‘How can I help?’, when it could be ‘Hello Mr. Brown’.

Did you get the memo?

I do this on a regular basis in the vain hope that the companies, that I patronise on a regular basis, some of whom are actually quite good, will have got the memo about how everyone that’s anyone in the customer experience (CX) world is providing their customers with a joined up, personal, consistent, seamless Omni-channel experience. In case you think it’s not on many people’s minds, I googled ‘Seamless Experience’, which is simply defined as, customers seek an expert reply, in real-time, and through the channel of their choice. I got 2.3 million hits many entitled ‘How to Deliver a Seamless Customer Experience Across Digital Channels’. Which suggested more than a passing interest.

You can also carry out a similar experiment via your desktop PC. Start by logging in to internet banking, your on-line retailer or book a flight with the ‘World’s Favourite Airline’, (alright I made that last one up, nobody believes that anymore!). Then once logged in and authenticated, contact them to see if they can synchronize your online instance with the phone call or web-chat session. No, I didn’t think so.

There are some companies whose digital path seems more perfectly formed, even if providing that joined up experience isn’t quite there. Companies such as Vodafone, Groupama, Amazon and some of the other usual digitally mature suspects, have some interesting and CX friendly app capabilities that pretty much do what they say on the tin. So it’s not as if the technology doesn’t exist. And when you see the ‘shiny new toys’ demos from the technology companies, this type of joined up journey and connectivity will often feature large in their presentations.

For many businesses digital capabilities seems to be developed in isolation, in a dark room and without input from customers or front line colleagues. And for them, having a sexy app, whizzy web-site or a chat bot called Gladys is the height of digital sophistication. But if the business can’t quickly and easily reach into a digital filing cabinet to access key information about me and my contact history that can provide context, relevance and personalisation, then they’re as much use as a handbrake on a canoe. But, as I’m ever the optimist, it’s still a start and we just need to get the right people from across the business together in the same (preferably not dark) room.

What’s this queue for?
As with those seeking an audience with various oracles to discover ‘The Meaning of Life’, there appears to be similar queues forming to learn more about the meaning of digital transformation (DT) and customer experience (CX). But who exactly is lining up? And are they in the right queue? The received wisdom appears to be that for DT they will be IT people in the technology company queue. For CX, they will be various marketing and customer service types going to CX conferences and webinars. Or possibly even listening to, or reading, the rants and blogs of CX practitioners!

Whichever it is, I think that they’re both in the wrong places and they certainly shouldn’t be there alone. While many of us in various scenarios are urged to ‘get out more’ I’d suggest the opposite is true for DT and CX evangelists and seekers of truth. Staying home, or in the office, and meeting and sharing ideas with like-minded colleagues from across the business will be far more gratifying, cost effective and ultimately lead to DT and CX success. Don’t just take my word for it. IDC’s recent Digital Transformation report suggests that 70% of DT initiatives will ultimately fail because of insufficient collaboration, integration, sourcing or project management.

Sharing the caring and joint parenting

With many people seeking guidance and redemption on both topics, there are a number of high level and not necessarily new ideas and lessons to be shared. I’ve certainly spotlighted these in previous blogs and that I’m pleased to see that have been validated by companies successfully aligning the DT and CX initiatives.

There is clearly strong consensus and no C-level doubts about the validity and importance of a digital and CX agenda. However, it’s less clear how to establish the priorities and to agree on where to start. Marketing, sales, customer service, e-commerce and others will all state the case for ‘me first.’ These conflicting ambitions and opinions can put the brakes on any digital transformation project before its left the station, as organisational turf wars break out and digital hype goes into overdrive.

To successfully traverse this potential mine field and keep their constituents happy, organisations must adopt a digital experience framework and integration mind-set and capability closely aligned to the CX strategy. That starts with the customers in mind.

This includes removing internal silos that can hold back customer experience efforts, which has been a key initiative for Maryam Banikarim, Global CMO of Hyatt Hotels. In a recent Market Week interview she said: “We work in a much more integrated fashion than we used to before. Once you focus on the customer versus yourself there is no other way to operate. When you’re purely focused on who you’re serving, it forces all the other pieces to come together.”

Organisational Engagement is more than a marriage of convenience

There is a lot of positive noise about the importance and alignment of customer and employee engagement, and with good reason. These are key planks in building a successful customer experience stage and putting on a great performance. But there is another piece of the foundation that is becoming increasingly more valuable in supporting the overall strategy and in particular aligning DT and CX: that is Organisational Engagement. To successfully engage employees, provide customers with an outstanding experience and create a high-performance culture, businesses need to be fully aligned and develop organisational engagement that is more than just lip service or a hastily contrived tactical shotgun marriage between departments.

One of the key areas that this type of engagement will address is the idea that ‘everything’, or every touch point, must be digitally enabled. Clearly at the start I mentioned a couple of specific use cases and for me, as a customer, those are important capabilities that would make my experience a far better one. While it’s natural to think that by making every channel available to every customer every time is a guarantee of success, it may not be true. It may be a realistic long term objective, but an unnecessary and expensive choice initially. But by truly understanding customer needs and colleague pain points, we can determine the best places to offer digital capabilities now, and where they can wait until more evidence of the value is demonstrated. But whatever we decide to do we still have to enable it.

Technology’s the answer, now what was the question?

Even as the prodigals begin to catch up after their reunification and start to build a strong familial relationship, there’s still another uncomfortable truth that needs to be addressed. “Can we talk about Technology?” Because even if there is consensus on the “why” and the “where”, it’s the “how” and the “when”, and the perceived cost of digital technology, and the time to deploy, that threatens to break up the party. In many cases companies are finding that the integration with myriad back-end legacy systems is a pain point that can deprive them of the business value of digital services. Often the digital journey begins with a desire to smoothly and quickly integrate solution platforms such as CRM, ERP or contact centre and other mission critical business systems. Complex multi-solution integration slows time-to-market, burns investment budgets, and often leaves cross-company teams frustrated with the outcomes.

We live in a world where agility, flexibility and “fail fast” are becoming synonymous with project progress and success, but may also join the increasingly long list of most hated jargon. However, regardless of our semantic feelings, they do reflect a methodology and an approach that is available from a number of vendors who understand that ‘time isn’t always on your side’. These can address short term trials and pilots as well as long term DT deployments, without lengthy and costly ‘rip and replace’ programs. I touched on this in more detail in an earlier blog, ‘Digital Transformation Hype or Hope’, but here are the key points.

Many of the most critical and successful digital deployments tend to rely heavily on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and/or digital experience platforms (DXPs). These can deliver the robust and flexible integration that can connect content, data, and systems to unify marketing, commerce, and service processes over multiple touchpoints. They often have a much smaller footprint and a cloud presence that means implementing a Proof of Concept (POC) can be accomplished in days rather than months or years. As a subscription model, companies can also manage their investment carefully, and users can be brought on as required with flexibility in both data and capability, and with a minimum of IT involvement.

Even if one of these is not the ultimate solution, it enables an organisation to trial concepts in ‘what if’ scenarios that can mirror customer behaviour and colleague actions and determine acceptance of the proposed changes or any obstacles to their introduction. If an organisation needs to go to tender, they can go with a much clearer idea of requirements, and knowledge of the ‘art of the possible’ that can significantly reduce procurement time frames and costs. The end result is that these solutions can make life easier, quicker and satisfying for customers, smoother and less time consuming for colleagues and more cost effective for the business.

Doing this in a truly collaborative environment will help to develop the guiding principles and uncover a clear connection between the digital framework and the broader customer engagement and CX imperatives that drive them. It will also provide the organisation with a road map that has been plotted on strong multi-departmental and customer experience principles that all the family has played a role in creating and should keep them together and communicating positively, to create a bright and inclusive digital future.

The post Digital Transformation and Customer Experience: Separated at birth, reunited by a common purpose appeared first on Engage Customer.