Customer teams in Singapore face a complex challenge. Organisations recognise the significance of a distinctive customer experience (CX) and adaptability to market shifts in a competitive landscape. They also prioritise enhancing employee experience (EX) and reducing costs. Balancing these priorities requires recalibrating across people, processes, and technologies.
This underscores the pivotal role of data in CX transformation. When CX teams and contact centres prioritise data in all their initiatives, they gain deep insights into customer journeys, facilitating proactive service delivery, enhancing self-service mechanisms, and fostering genuine innovation in customer engagement.
Here are 5 ways organisations in Singapore can achieve these business objectives.
Download ‘5 Ways to Succeed in Singapore’s Competitive Battle to Win Customer Hearts’ as a PDF.
#1 Build a Strategy around Voice & Omnichannel Orchestration
Customers seek flexibility to choose channels that suit their preferences, often switching between them. When channels are well-coordinated, customers enjoy consistent experiences, and CX teams and contact centre agents gain real-time insights into interactions, regardless of the chosen channel. This boosts key metrics like First Call Resolution (FCR) and reduces Average Handle Time (AHT).
This doesn’t diminish the significance of voice. Voice remains crucial, especially for understanding complex inquiries and providing an alternative when customers face persistent challenges on other channels. Regardless of the channel chosen, prioritising omnichannel orchestration is essential.
Ensure seamless orchestration from voice to back and front offices, including social channels, as customers switch between channels.
#2 Unify Customer Data through an Intelligent Data Hub
Accessing real-time, accurate data is essential for effective customer and agent engagement. However, organisations often face challenges with data silos and lack of interconnected data, hindering omnichannel experiences.
A Customer Data Platform (CDP) can eliminate data silos and provide actionable insights.
- Identify behavioural trends by understanding patterns to personalise interactions.
- Spot real-time customer issues across channels.
- Uncover compliance gaps and missed sales opportunities from unstructured data.
- Look at customer journeys to proactively address their needs and exceed expectations.
#3 Transform CX & EX with AI
GenAI and Large Language Models (LLMs) is revolutionising how brands address customer and employee challenges, boosting efficiency, and enhancing service quality.
Despite 62% of Singapore organisations investing in virtual assistants/conversational AI, many have yet to integrate emerging technologies to elevate their CX & EX capabilities.
Agent Assist solutions provide real-time insights before customer interactions, optimising service delivery and saving time. With GenAI, they can automate mundane tasks like call summaries, freeing agents to focus on high-value tasks such as sales collaboration, proactive feedback management, personalised outbound calls, and upskilling.
Going beyond chatbots and Agent Assist solutions, predictive AI algorithms leverage customer data to forecast trends and optimise resource allocation. AI-driven identity validation swiftly confirms customer identities, mitigating fraud risks.
#4 Augment Existing Systems for Success
Despite the rise in digital interactions, many organisations struggle to fully modernise their legacy systems.
For those managing multiple disparate systems yet aiming to lead in CX transformation, a platform that integrates desired capabilities for holistic CX and EX experiences is vital.
A unified platform streamlines application management, ensuring cohesion, unified KPIs, enhanced security, simplified maintenance, and single sign-on for agents. This approach offers consistent experiences across channels and early issue detection, eliminating the need to navigate multiple applications or projects.
Capabilities that a platform should have:
- Programmable APIs to deliver messages across preferred social and messaging channels.
- Modernisation of outdated IVRs with self-service automation.
- Transformation of static mobile apps into engaging experience tools.
- Fraud prevention across channels through immediate phone number verification APIs.
#5 Focus on Proactive CX
In the new CX economy, organisations must meet customers on their terms, proactively engaging them before they initiate interactions. This will require organisations to re-evaluate all aspects of their CX delivery.
- Redefine the Contact Centre. Transform it into an “Intelligent” Data Hub providing unified and connected experiences. Leverage intelligent APIs to proactively manage customer interactions seamlessly across journeys.
- Reimagine the Agent’s Role. Empower agents to be AI-powered brand ambassadors, with access to prior and real-time interactions, instant decision-making abilities, and data-led knowledge bases.
- Redesign the Channel and Brand Experience. Ensure consistent omnichannel experiences through data unification and coherency. Use programmable APIs to personalise conversations and identify customer preferences for real-time or asynchronous messaging. Incorporate innovative technologies such as video to enhance the channel experience.
Agents are the biggest assets in a contact centre and agent attrition is not a new challenge – 40% of contact centres globally state that high staff turnover is one of the challenges of driving consistent customer experience (CX). The ability to find the right talent has been equally challenging. The pandemic and the hybrid work model have made it harder to manage the onboarding, training, and the other processes required to get the agent up to speed on the job. Despite the challenges contact centres need a strong focus on managing the experience for the agents – they are a company’s front-line staff and the experience they deliver to the customers has an immense impact on the brand.
Workforce Experience Management (WEM) tools have gone beyond just scheduling – they are now able to leverage data and analytics to allow agents more control over their performance and their work preferences. Additionally, Agent Assist and knowledge management solutions give contact centre agents dynamic access to intelligent data. Ecosystm research shows that contact centres across the globe are ramping up their investments in employee experience (EX) technologies (Figure 1). They are focused on simplifying agent workload and offering more flexibility.
How do you elevate the Agent Experience in the Hybrid Work Model?
- Encourage shift bidding. Build flexible scheduling and shift bidding into the company culture. Agents should be encouraged to work on a schedule that works best for them. If you are employing part-timers, retirees or you have agents working from home, you have to factor in their home commitments. Additionally allowing them to bid and openly talk to their managers and colleagues about swapping shifts demonstrates a company culture of open communication and collaboration. So, in essence, this is not a scheduling conversation, but an image-building exercise. You will be able to attract more talent, in an industry where it is hard to retain talent.
- Evaluate your agents’ strengths in voice and self-service channels. Not all agents are good with voice calls and this can sometimes be overlooked by contact centre leaders. Your organisation’s brand image depends on the customer care your employees provide. Voice calls are still important; despite the increase in the adoption of AI and automation, the human touch remains critical. It is important for agents to be as authentic as possible on calls. Assigning the right agent to the right channel, keeping in mind their strengths and weaknesses will help your organisation to maintain the human touch. For example, some agents may be able to multitask well and are better prepared to manage multiple channels simultaneously.
- Your knowledge system is critical. Make sure it is relevant and not outdated! Your agents have limited time on their hands. They often need information urgently, especially when dealing with a difficult customer. An updated knowledge system allows your agents to be consistent in their messages and their delivery. This helps agents to meet the AHT, FCR and other metrics and reduces human errors. Nearly 60% of contact centres globally rate improving knowledge management systems as a CX priority. There is still a lot of data inconsistency and irrelevance which needs to be worked through. An accurate and updated knowledge management system is critical, and it should be ONE source of truth. For compliance reasons, data consistency is critical. Also, the search for the information must be easy and only relevant articles and information should be pushed to live agents. The need to access multiple knowledge systems and CRM tools creates additional stress on agents.
- Give your agents access to call recordings. When your agents have access to the call recordings, they can evaluate how they have performed; and reflect and improve on the outcomes at their own pace. This will also allow them to spot the mistakes they are making, often prompting them to reach out to their manager and/or colleagues for help on how to avoid them. Often managers have access to sentiment analysis applications to spot issues from the tones of the agents and the customers. This can be useful in situations where the agent might have provided the right answers, but the customer is not fully satisfied. Giving equal access to the agents empowers them to find ways of improving the CX they deliver.
- Invest in advanced technologies around forecasting and scheduling. AI and self-adjusting algorithms are important for accurate and real-time forecasts. It is challenging to sometimes predict the volume of voice and non-voice transactions in a day. API-based tools can integrate data from different sources such as web chat, social media, voice, and workforce experience management solutions for an accurate view of the workload, including wait times. The analytics should be able to alert you of potential gaps before the resource shortfall, allowing you to plan your staffing requirements better.
Conclusion
The hybrid work model has its challenges for the contact centre industry. The ability of agents to walk up to their supervisors or raise their hands when they have an issue has been impacted. While it is important to focus on how agents will perform their jobs remotely, it is equally important to evaluate the overall experience including training, scheduling and forecasting workload. AI and automation, WEM and knowledge solutions can help reduce confusion and ease the workload for the agents. An integrated EX platform that uses a single dashboard will be most beneficial for agents to navigate for information. What is important is to have a new approach to managing EX. This will help your organisation immensely in attracting and retaining talent.
Verint has announced the intention to acquire Conversocial, a US-based social media management system provider for USD 50 million to integrate social messaging capabilities across Verint’s cloud platform. The deal is expected to be closed in Verint’s third quarter subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory clearances.
Verint has been expanding their digital engagement capabilities through acquisitions. In June, Verint expanded their Workforce Management (WFM) offerings to include AI-driven insights for better hiring decisions through the acquisition of HireIQ. To extend Verint’s omnichannel cloud Voice of the Customer (VoC) portfolio, Verint acquired Foresee. Verint is also building IVA capabilities and recently launched a low code version of their IVA solution to make it easier for brands to build the solution without the need for technical knowledge.
The Need to Enhance Digital Engagement
Using self-service and messaging as the first point of connection to engage with a brand is growing rapidly. It accelerated during the pandemic, and it is common now for individuals to engage with their financial institution, airlines, retail and others through social media. Now that customers are demanding it, brands are lifting their game and engaging with customers on the platform of their choices. This acquisition will allow Verint to deepen their digital engagement with customers across Marketing, Contact Centres and digital functions – it follows the pulse of today’s customers.
Digital discussions are accelerating and having a platform that can orchestrate as well as understand all the data from each digital and social messaging channel is important. Verint is taking the data discussion seriously and earlier this year they launched Engagement Data Management Solution (EDM). The ‘’data’’ piece is huge and cuts across functions – from back-office communications to gathering data across all channels and touchpoints. However, where this is going wrong for some enterprises is that all the data they collect sits in multiple repositories; in some instances the data has not been analysed for years! Managing the multiple social experiences, including data management and insights from these multiple sources, will be key to delivering proactive customer experience.
The data discussion is particularly significant for a vendor such as Verint – they are well known for their speech analytics and compliance management capabilities. These are all critical to managing multiple channels of conversation. They help agents to be accurate, efficient, and compliant; allow organisations to use asynchronous channels and social messaging and digital channels; immediately rectified errors through monitoring the data on the channels and so on. More importantly, they allow organisations to pick up points from conversations that can be passed on to Marketing to gauge the effectiveness of the messaging and campaigns. Organisations can ‘’identify and fix” problems by truly listening to customers.
Why Conversocial
If we look at the Conversocial customer stories, we realise how relevant their offerings are to industry requirements. They offer brands the ability to engage through an automated channel and chatbots. Whirlpool appears to have benefited by integrating channels to deliver better customer care as well as communicating with field engineers through WhatsApp. Another customer, Freshly – a meals delivery company – saw a spike in incoming queries at the start of the pandemic. They were able to use automation to ease of the load and say that 50% of the conversations were handled in-channel through automation without the need for human agent intervention. They were also able to use Facebook Messenger as a preferred contact channel and decreased their cost-per-contact.
This acquisition demonstrates how Verint is taking the digital and the data discussion seriously. CX Vendors that do not move fast in building end-to-end digital capabilities will find it hard to compete in a highly competitive CX market.
Uniphore, a provider of Conversational Automation solutions, has announced their intention to acquire Jacada, an Israel-based autonomous customer experience solution provider. Jacada’s low-code/no-code platform will help Uniphore solve complex contact centre challenges using AI and automation. Jacada’s strengths include a low-code optimised interface and AI-enabled contact centre capabilities leading to automation across agent and customer engagements, enhanced knowledge-based guidance for agents and end-to-end analytics and insights.
Jacada has been in the market for around three decades and over time they have built various unified desktop and process optimisation products including RPA for customer service and support.
The acquisition follows Uniphore’s USD 140 million Series D funding round led by Sorenson Capital Partners in March 2021. Earlier this year, Uniphore acquired Emotion Research Lab to add AI and machine learning video capabilities that identify the emotion and engagement levels over video-based communications.
Growing Importance of Agent Assist Solutions
With agents facing pressure in offering customers satisfactory outcomes and at the same time having to manage the high volume of inbound transactions, Agent Assist solutions are high on the agenda for organisations. Remote working has made things even more complex where agents are cut off from their supervisors and not able to walk up to them to seek guidance. These “immediate challenges” have not yet been addressed in every contact centre even a year after the crisis. This presents a good opportunity for Uniphore to own the front and back-office integration piece. The back-office integration segment has become increasingly important as there is a need to fulfill customer requests by ensuring the conversation thread with back-office systems is followed through and communicated back to the agent. This need was heightened during the pandemic due to delays in product arrivals, in shipments, and other delays and miscommunication.
The big challenge also lies in making Agent Assist help the agent perform better and not make their lives more stressful! The design element of Agent Assist is critical. The solution must fit well into the other systems and applications such as CRM, Knowledge Management, and Speech Analytics. You don’t want another solution being pushed on to the agents when they are under pressure to meet customer demands during a 15-minute call.
Conversational Automation and Agent Assist must be evaluated carefully as you are integrating the solution into multiple environments with the clear objective of ensuring that agents only get the right information, in a manner that makes sense for them and at appropriate intervals.
The Growing Importance of Low-code No-code (LCNC)
As contact centres focus on business agility and pivoting fast to cope with sudden market shifts, organisations will benefit from moving programming closer to the contact centre – requiring very little assistance from IT teams.
Having a LCNC platform will now allow Uniphore to build front and back-office experiences in a multi-vendor environment. The need to use intelligent APIs to build workflows is high on the agenda and it helps eradicate the costly efforts and time spent on developers to further extract and build new capabilities at speed.
Jacada has been pushing their value proposition on RPA and Conversational Automation for some time now and this blends well with where Uniphore is going with AI and Automation in the contact centre space. The acquisition will also give Uniphore access to other contact centre technologies that will help them to compete better with a wider range of solutions. With the challenges in managing the agent experience, we can also expect the Workforce Experience Management (WEM) segment to play an important role and intersect with Agent Assist to manage and elevate the agent experience.
Cisco has recently announced their intention to acquire Socio Labs, a US-based event technology platform – the latest in a series of acquisitions. Cisco’s Webex Events provides meeting, webinar and webcast capabilities, including polling, Q&A, chat and real-time translation. This acquisition will allow Webex Events to cater to large-scale, hybrid events and conferences. Solution capabilities will include live streaming, sponsorship, networking, and advanced analytics – including for pre-event and post-event activities.
Collaboration Platforms are Here to Stay
2020 was the year video conferencing and collaboration finally became mainstream. With the exponential rise of remote and hybrid working, the investments in collaboration technologies has increased – and Ecosystm research shows that the trend is continuing well into 2021.
The other aspect that has been impacted by the pandemic is the Events business. With social distancing regulations, Events and Marketing teams are being challenged in their outreach and go-to-market initiatives. Even when countries allow in-person events, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get people to attend events. With most organisations allowing remote working many attendees are away from the CBD/ commercial areas and are reluctant to commute to attend events. This has seen the rise of a hybrid event model that caters to both in-person and virtual attendees.
While some countries are beginning to bring back in-person events, they will remain largely virtual. Event organisers will have to cater for those who are happy to attend in-person and those who want to access the event virtually. Providing a better experience for hybrid events, will require richer features using video and collaboration platforms to allow live streaming, chat, feedback, analytics – to gauge audience engagement – polling and other interesting ways to retain audience attention. Additionally, it will be important for these platforms to facilitate sponsorship, registrations and even ticketing capabilities directly from within the platform. These new dimensions to step up engagements for both virtual and in-person events have become necessary for the world we are living in.
Cisco Strengthening Collaboration Capabilities
Cisco is enhancing the virtual/hybrid meeting and events experience they provide and this has been evident from their recent acquisitions. They clearly see the need to enhance audience participation and engagement from pure static video and collaboration environments. Socio Labs’ business accelerated during the pandemic and they built a platform that offers a deeper engagement with the audience. Their customers include Google, Microsoft, PepsiCo and Hyundai.
Last year Cisco acquired BabbleLabs, a noise removal technology provider and the product has been integrated into their Webex platform, to improve the audio experience. Earlier this month Cisco also completed their acquisition of Slido. This means that Webex users can now leverage Slido’s capability of gathering real-time audience feedback, rather than just asking questions via text or chat. The solution can also enhance the learning experience during team training sessions and offers built-in analytics to gauge audience participation and where the gaps are. These acquisitions are an indication that Cisco is serious about their market presence in the video and collaboration space – and is keen on making a mark in the Events market.
Uniphore, a Conversational Service Automation (CSA) provider in the contact centre space announced two new services – U-Trust portfolio and U-Assist Assurance solution to support call centre agents and operations. The U-Trust portfolio includes U-Trust Agent to authenticate agents using unique voiceprints and U-Trust Environment to protect sensitive data. The other offering, U-Assist Assurance integrates RPA along with conversations AI and machine learning to track and deliver commitments made by agents in real-time during the call, to align with customer expectations and manages fulfilment post calls.
Security and Automation Driving Investments in Contact Centres
With agents working from both their home and the office, security is a bigger issue today than ever before. In 2021, contact centres will be under pressure to ensure all security requirements are met. For example: agents taking screenshots and photos of confidential information; family members having access to customer conversations and data; how agents access customer data. These are pertinent concerns that must be addressed and mechanisms around securing customer data will be of utmost priority. Any form of misuse of customer’s private information can have negative implications on the brand of a company.
With security efforts high on the agenda for contact centres, Uniphore is addressing critical issues faced by contact centres. The U-Trust portfolio aims to leverage biometrics for voice authentication and ensure safety in customer data handling. Uniphore is clearly listening to the market and have identified “problematic areas” that must be addressed. Ramping up security efforts especially with the work from anywhere model will be high on the agenda for every contact centre.
What is sometimes not talked about often enough in contact centres, is the integration to the back office. There are often follow ups required after the customer interaction – for example when a product needs to be ordered or serviced, the back office has an integral part to play in delivering customer experience. As contact centres realise that back office integration is critical there will be greater Investments in workplace collaboration, robotic process automation (RPA) and other automation technologies.
Uniphore is carving out a name in Conversational Service Automation. They are investing heavily in building an end-to-end automation solution for contact centres across Conversational AI, RPA and security capabilities. Cost pressures are rising and the need to automate will be greater than ever in 2021.
Uniphore focused on Growing AI/Automation Capabilities through Acquisitions & Partnerships
The last 12 months have been impressive for the company in terms of partnerships and acquisitions. For example, last October they partnered with NTT Data and will license NTT’s RPA technology for contact centres. The company issued a press release saying based on internal projections and the opportunities currently underway, this partnership could generate more than USD 50 million in revenue over the next five years. They also announced a partnership with Sitel. Through the partnership, Sitel will deploy Uniphore’s solution to its customer base. These are global partnerships that will help Uniphore scale its presence with outsourcers and in-house contact centres and help them with their customer experience transformation efforts.
Last month saw Uniphore collaborating with Idiap Research Institute, and joined World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Innovators Community. Uniphore and Idiap will work on the development of speech recognition algorithms, spoken language and signals for detection of emotions and semantic and pragmatic applications to generate insights and enhance customer experience. As a member of WEF, Uniphore will focus on co-designing and developing policy frameworks, standards for protecting children, creating an AI regulator for the 21st century and addressing concerns of facial recognition technology.
They also acquired Spanish video and emotion AI start-up Emotion Research Lab. Through this acquisition, Uniphore is looking to create advanced AI-based voice and video products for innovations in conversations service automation services and to expand its footprints in the European market. Moreover, combining voice and video AI with automation and machine learning will open up new use cases, including customer experience, sales, marketing, HR and other critical areas of business.
The comprehensive portfolio solution aims to strengthen overall contact centre interactions between customers and agents, optimise the connection through RPA and improve the contact centre security aspects through agent verification and data security.
2021 will see contact centres, dealing with new ways of working by employing various AI and Automation capabilities. See how you can empower your teams and agents to deliver exceptional customer experience in 2021. We outline the contact centre trends for 2021 in our Ecosystm Predicts: The Top 5 Contact Centre Trends for 2021 report.
Five9, a cloud-based contact centre solutions provider announced the acquisition of intelligent virtual agent (IVA) platform provider, Inference Solutions for about USD 172 million. Five9 and Inference Solutions have been partnering for the last couple of years, with Five9 being a reseller for Inference Solutions’ IVA platform. The acquisition is expected to provide a boost to Five9’s AI portfolio, automate contact centre agent activities and provide AI-based omnichannel self-service solutions.
The need to drive greater automation in the contact centre is high on the agenda, and this acquisition demonstrates how important AI and automation is to contact centre modernisation. The old-fashioned ways of long wait times, being passed on through different menus on the IVR and being asked to repeat yourself through the older speech recognition engines is starting to not only frustrate customers but will become obsolete. Based on Ecosystm’s research, close to 60% of contact centres globally stated that investing in machine learning and AI is a top customer experience priority in the next 12 months.
Inference has come a long way since its inception at Telstra Labs
Inference Solutions (founded in 2005) was spun out of Telstra Labs. It has since expanded to the US and developed a suite of solutions in the IVA segment. They have a good partnership strategy with the leading telecom providers globally as well as the UC/contact centre vendors. Inference Solutions uses resellers such as service providers, UC, and contact centre software providers – and these include AT&T, Cisco (Broadsoft), Momentum Telecom, Nextiva, 8×8 and many others. The Inference Studio solution will see a new release in the next few months where the solution will come pre-built with the ability for the contact centre team to pre-load the contact centre conversations. These can be conversations that have been going on for 6 months or longer. The Studio solution will then be able to analyse and understand the underlying intent of the conversation, match the intent so that it can be used to auto train the bots accurately. That process of matching the intent and training is expensive and if you can automate some elements of that, it will bring the cost of the deployment down. Its solution integrates into NLP engines from Google, AWS, and IBM. In Australia they continue to work on patents in close partnerships with Melbourne University and RMIT. Throughout its journey, Inference has built a good base of customers in the US, UK, and Australia.
Five9 to accelerate on its vision of AI and Cloud
Contact centre modernisation is high on the agenda for many organisations and this will lead them to build AI and automation at the core of their customer strategies. The discussion spans across the CEO, Digital and Innovation, and the Contact Centre teams.
Five9 had acquired Whendu, an iPaaS platform provider empowering businesses and developers with no-code, visual application workflow tool, optimised for contact centres in November 2019, and Virtual Observer, an innovative provider of cloud-based workforce optimisation, also known as Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) in February of this year.
The pandemic has resulted in increased engagement of contact centres with customers. Companies are gradually looking for ways to automate tasks, deliver better communication, speech and text recognition, decipher languages, and implement solutions mimicking humans. As a solution to these challenges, IVAs are being viewed as efficient and effective digital workers for a modern contact centre. IVAs represent increased throughput, more accurate results, and better-informed agents.
Successful use cases have shown that conversational AI can reduce calls and repetitive queries by 70-90%. IVRs with monolithic, complicated menus will start becoming unpopular and force contact centres to embark on a modernisation and automation strategy. If we evaluate the shift in priorities after COVID-19, we see that organisations are ramping up their self-service capabilities and their adopt of AI and machine learning (Figure 1).
The acquisition will give Five9 a foothold in the Asia Pacific region with an initial focus on the Australia market. The Australia market is by far the most advanced cloud contact centre market in the Asia Pacific. Five9 gains a team of staff that will help them fuel the contact centre modernisation discussion across the Asia Pacific. As the region has a complex market, the need to work with local carriers and partners will be critical for further expansion. Five9 has made an important acquisition in building in IVA capability into its CCaaS solution.
Click below to access insights from the Ecosystm Contact Centre Study on visibility into organisations’ priorities when running a Contact Centre (both in-house and outsourced models) and the technologies implemented and being evaluated
Probe Group, a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) solutions provider and Stellar – a customer experience (CX) management organisation announced a merger to create Australia’s largest and most diverse CX provider group. The partnership will combine the experience and expertise of both companies and will employ 12,600 people to provide outsourcing of business process services for customers across six countries. Probe Group is backed by Quadrant Private Equity and Five V Capital.
Probe Group has been expanding its business presence since being acquired by Five V Capital in early 2018. At the time, Probe acquired Salmat’s Contact business, a broad-based CX operation which helped Probe expand their presence in Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines. Looking out for further opportunities, in December last year Probe Group acquired Australia-based and Philippines-focused Beepo and quickly followed this with an acquisition in January this year of the Philippines outsourcing agency MicroSourcing, a counterpart to Beepo which greatly expanded Probe’s Philippines offering. These acquisitions helped Probe extend their service offering from CX into Shared Services and Knowledge Services.
This is a brilliant move as Stellar is one of the most successful contact centre outsourcing providers in Australia. With successive growth for 22 years and having a strong footprint in both the public and private sectors, the acquisition will give Probe Group entry into some large accounts. Additionally, Probe will gain a large pool of well-trained agents in Australia and other locations across the globe.
The merger comes at an interesting time when we are seeing several organisations re-evaluate their outsourcing strategy. There is also an active interest in enhancing CX through AI/automation. Both the Probe Group and Stellar understand the Australian market and consumer sentiments and the merger is expected to drive better customer outcomes in the Australia market.
Prior to COVID-19, Probe Group employed 8,500 agents. With this acquisition, they will have 12,600 agents and an expected turnover of USD 420 million. That is not only impressive but will help Probe offer a variety of services including both onshore and offshore, to take on their rivals.
Rise of Onshore Activity will see New Shifts in CX Delivery Models
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about several changes to the outsourcing sector. The disruption caused by services in many key offshore markets led to organisations re-evaluating their contact centre outsourcing strategy and some have started moving contact centre jobs back to Australia. Westpac is the latest organisation to announce that they are moving 1,000 jobs back to Australia. They have stated that while they expect productivity benefits over time, there is clearly a cost to adding 1,000 roles – likely an uplift of around $45 million per annum in its costs by the end of 2021.
The cost element is bound to creep in over time and contact centres will ask outsourcing providers to help drive costs down. Options would include moving some services offshore, while the critical remain onshore. Striking that balance to manage costs will be important and so will be the ability to offer various options for customers. Additionally, we can expect to see an increased demand for self-service technologies. Many organisations are in the midst of re-evaluating the use of AI and automation technologies not only as a way to drive great CX but as a way to also reduce costs (Figure 1).
Contact centres are starting to realise that to modernise their contact centre, the ability to lead with machine learning and AI technologies are critical. It will drive the deployment of natural language understanding (NLU) and conversational AI, sentiment analysis, transcription capabilities – and ultimately provide intelligence about the call even prior to the call being fielded. However, it is worth noting that whilst automation is on the rise, the role of the agent is not going away anytime soon and will grow in importance. We will see the rise of the “super-agent’’ and the agent’s role will evolve over time and AI/automation will generate rich insights to help aid the agent and the contact centre team to better predict customer behaviour and patterns.
The Next Generation of Outsourcing Providers must Drive Innovation for their Customers
Companies today are not outsourcing just to save labour costs. While cost remains an important angle, it will not often be the main driver for outsourcing in the future. The next generation of outsourcing providers will have to build rich solution capabilities, customer journey maps and help customers understand how to align all channels. This involves working with many different technology providers to build the right capabilities for their client organisations. Organisations are keen to modernise their contact centre operations to achieve excellence in CX. Outsourcing providers must have the capability to deliver that innovation.
Ecosystm research finds that 63% of organisations that outsource their contact centre functions are challenged with finding the right partner that can drive innovations (Figure 2).
Contact centre outsourcing providers have a role to play in some of the following areas:
- The ability to adapt to change and take on risks together with the client
- Ensuring that all forms of security and governance measures are in place. This includes considering factors such as data security, data handling, and security features enabled across devices, applications, and the network. This is especially true for Government and Financial services contracts. Additionally, with some organisations preferring the work from a home model, there are security issues that must be addressed for the scenario.
- Helping the move from a traditional contact centre to a contact centre that delivers the highest levels of CX for its customers. Applying technologies such as AI and machine learning, NLU, biometrics, speech analytics, customer journey analytics and robotic process automation (RPA) will be key to modernisation.
- Being able to build a business continuity plan (BCP) for their customers in the event of another crisis.
Ecosystm Comment
Probe Group started off as a business specialising in outsourcing services in the credit and collections segment. Their customers in 2016 ranged from organisations across Financial Services, Utilities, and Federal and State Government. At that time, Probe employed about 300 people and their turnover was about USD 25 million. They did not rest on their laurels and realised that organic growth combined with strategic acquisitions would give them a foothold across various geographies and add new capabilities to their portfolio. With the rise in onshore activity, they will now be in a strong position to offer their customers various services and models of engagement to help drive CX excellence. The acquisition of Stellar will help Probe Group propel to greater heights and we see a new CX outsourcing giant being born.
This week, Vodafone New Zealand launched a contact centre solution known as Vodafone Connect that runs on AWS cloud infrastructure. The solution is designed for contact centres and customer service providers to reduce their operating cost and deliver an improved customer experience (CX).
The move comes as many businesses and governments are witnessing a spike in inbound contact centre volumes since the outbreak of the pandemic. The telecom company aims to help the contact centre industry through its on-demand contact centre suite of solutions that can be scaled up or down according to the organisations’ requirements. It can be combined with existing CRM platforms in a single dashboard for better access to data and resolution support.
Vodafone Connect is built on the AWS Connect cloud contact centre solution and uses data analytics and machine learning tools to automate customer interactions across multiple channels – email, messaging and social media – to support the contact centre agents with real-time information.
COVID-19 has accelerated the move to the cloud
The recent pandemic has seen many organisations make a leap almost overnight to cloud contact centre technologies. Many organisations that previously had concerns around data privacy, and securing customer data – and were thus hesitant about deploying cloud contact centre solutions – have moved to the cloud model. The cloud model helped get agents that were forced to work from home up and running in a short duration. The immediate urgency was primarily due to a massive spike in voice calls and non-voice activity such as emails. During the COVID-19 crisis, many organisations used Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections to their legacy on-premises phone system to enable the remote agents. However, there have been challenges reported by many organisations with that approach such as increases to IT budget, difficulty in scaling easily, and the requirement for more IT support that could have been avoided.
Ecosystm research finds that only 30% of organisations have fully migrated their cloud contact centre solutions on the cloud. 
This indicates a market opportunity for vendors in the cloud contact centre space. The COVID-19 pandemic has definitely triggered a strong move towards the cloud model. It has become imperative for vendors and solutions providers to strengthen their cloud capabilities.
Driving an Omni-Channel Experience has become increasingly difficult
Ecosystm research also finds that organisations find siloed organisational data as one of the biggest challenges in driving consistent customer experience.
This has been further exacerbated by the high volume of interactions that organisations have been having with their customers, and the need to accommodate work-from-home policies for their customer care agents. At the same time, nearly 60% of organisations want to drive an omni-channel experience to improve CX. This provides a huge opportunity for contact centre vendors and partners to offer consulting services to help organisations bridge the gaps in achieving an omni-channel experience. For many organisations there has been a greater push to integrate CRM, the voice of the customer/surveys, customer journey analytics to the contact centre technologies and this is not an easy task as it involves different stakeholders with different sets of KPIs. Having a single platform that can manage this omni-channel experience will be a huge benefit for many organisations.
New Players in the Competitive Landscape
AWS is a relatively new player in the contact centre market, but it is starting to disrupt the existing players, with a global installed base. However, it is worth noting that Avaya, Cisco and Genesys have a higher installed base and they continue to win new deals. The move to the cloud is witnessing more service providers, telecom providers and other contact centre partners push more cloud-based solutions in the market. Apart from AWS, other important players include NICEinContact, 8×8, Talkdesk, Twillio, Five9, and UJet. The competitive battleground is heating up and there are a lot of options for customers to choose from. It will all come down to working with a vendor that can help them achieve their desired CX outcomes.
There are other important elements in CX that are growing in importance and these include conversational AI, voice biometrics, knowledge management systems, machine learning and CX management solutions. Contact centre solution providers are having discussions around these areas with tech buyers. This will mean that we can expect deeper partnerships and acquisitions in the short to medium term. Security has also emerged as an important issue to be resolved, especially with agents working from home. This is from a compliance perspective and pertaining to how agents are viewing and handling customer data. These new trends indicate that customers will need to work with different vendors to solve the variety of issues they are facing.
The Vodafone Connect solution on AWS Connect is one of the many examples of how more partners of contact centre solutions are gearing up for the rapid move to the cloud. Globally, Vodafone also sells contact centre solutions from Cisco and Genesys. The next 3 years will see a great movement in the market and this will include vendors from North America that will set up operations to push their offerings across Europe and the Asia Pacific.
Click below to access insights from the Ecosystm Contact Centre Study on visibility into organisations’ priorities when running a Contact Centre (both in-house and outsourced models) and the technologies implemented and being evaluated