“Change is the only constant in life.”
—Heraclitus
The above age-old adage came to mind as I reflected on the past 30-plus years in the contact center industry. As telephone centers (yes, that was the original name) started up in the mid 80’s, terms like multi-channel, digital enhancement, customer experience management, and artificial intelligence (AI) were not a part of the vocabulary.
Fast forward to today, and not only have these terms changed how we do business in the contact center, but our industry continues to evolve into a service that cares for customers’ needs and drives efficiency in business results.
Possibly one of the biggest changes we have seen in our industry is the customers’ increasing expectations of service from our frontline representatives.
As innovative companies started to raise the bar on service - by introducing online, self-serve, 24/7, CRM initiatives, and technologies like chat - we saw consumers raise their expectations for the rest of their service providers.
We’ve needed to prepare our people to meet and even exceed those expectations by focusing on their abilities to communicate and problem solve: their soft skills.
The coaching and training around those skills has evolved as well. But the core delivery hasn’t changed.
Possibly one of the biggest changes...is the customers’ increasing expectations of service from our frontline representatives.
Visualize managers doing side-by-sides, role-playing, and show-coaching: the happy people we see in recruiting brochures. Helping people improve transcends time and it’s all in that “soft” realm. But let’s dive into what has impacted and improved the coaching and training disciplines.
New Landscape, New Concepts
Next I considered what percentage of those coaching interactions due to remote work, have shifted to webinars, online modules, and assessments. I also thought about what the training content looks like.
Back in 1990, we hadn’t conceived of - much less trained on - so many of today’s concepts. These include emotional intelligence, omnichannel interactions, digital platform literacy, customer journey mapping, cultural competency, and diversity, enhanced soft skills like active listening and empathy, and topics like resilience and stress management.
Furthermore, areas of specialization like compliance, cybersecurity, and consumer privacy were non-existent. When you think about the countless hours of training course development for these new topics alone, you can envision just how much change we have put our employees through over the last few decades.
Managing Uncomfortable Employees
Coaching and training beyond new hire training is often focused on product or service changes, or the implementation of new or enhanced systems.
A Harvard Business Review study found that 50-75% of change efforts fail, and that failure stems from many employees feeling anxious or skeptical about organizational changes. The resistance, anxiety, and skepticism statistics likely neared 100% during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Employees have historically resisted new technology due to fear of the unknown. If their previous approaches and scripts brought them success, they may be reluctant to change.
This underscores the critical role of training. The less the employees understand the changes, and the impacts to job and customer experience, the more discomfort they are likely to experience.
Managing Customer Change
Unfortunately, employees aren’t alone in being concerned about change. Customers experience similar anxiety or skepticism when presented with changes in service delivery or product features.
This is why companies have become so focused on change management in recent years. Customer communication needs to come early and often when anything is changing.
Those communications begin with your employees. Stakeholder involvement at every level has become critical.
Companies realized that project management became challenging due to the lengthy duration required to implement the changes. By the time a project neared completion, circumstances had evolved and in some cases became obsolete.
That’s when Agile Project Management came on the scene. With it, project deployments became two month, then later one month, and eventually two or even one week “sprints” that would lock down the new technology or process before circumstances could change.
The benefits of Agile are being able to react to customer feedback and improve processes quickly: which translates into speed to market for any new processes or systems. That all sounds great until the training departments realized that they must train everyone.
Historically, training departments had implementation timelines that were eight weeks or longer. They too had to completely re-tool their departments around the Agile framework. Employees have ended up with weekly training and become very up-to-date on changes their customers are being exposed to.
The Importance of Empathy
Recently, empathy has been characterized as one of the most important attributes for managers: if not the most important one. Early in our careers no one talked about the stressors employees faced, or the need for employees to be resilient. We just talked through our frustrations around the water bubbler or coffee station and then moved on!
But the focus on empathy in business, particularly within customer service and contact centers, didn’t come into existence until the early 2000s. This is when companies started to see customer experience (CX) as a differentiator and when they looked at best practices, they found empathy to be the key ingredient in both understanding and addressing customers’ needs.
The benefits of Agile are being able to react to customer feedback and improve processes quickly...
Then came the pandemic. Training on empathy went next-level to recognize shifting consumer sentiments, locations, and needs. At the same time, companies and their front-line employees needed to react to the rapid adoption of channels that didn’t require an in-person element.
Thank goodness the Agile change management and training teams were ready for this speed of change. Furthermore, we were no longer just focused on coaching and training employees on how to deal with their customers. We were coaching employees on how to deal with the disruption in their own lives. And managers and coaches were also learning how to handle the changing tides.
The New Normal of Service
The pandemic also brought the demise of the service industry. As employees made the hard decision to stay home during it when they were facing their own health issues and that of their families (and home schooling for their kids), we found certain industries like pharmacies, groceries, and restaurants challenged with staffing.
All the service industries with contact centers had to figure out how to have large percentages of their staff completely remote.
At first, consumers had some level of understanding for the service workers who were clearly dealing with a new normal at work: babies crying in the background, dogs barking, and the like.
However, as time went on consumers lost their empathy and their patience and in other cases developed stress, anxiety, and even mental illness, which unfortunately translated to representatives dealing with these people on the phone.
Furthermore, everyone was sitting at home communicating on social media and happy to share both good and bad service experiences with everyone and their mother: literally. Contact centers bore the brunt of these shifts in consumer sentiment and behavior.
...our industry has not only re-invented itself to manage change, but we have actually embraced change...
Luckily, with the advent of AI, both text and chat were two new channels that consumers rapidly adopted during the pandemic.
Employees still needed to be trained and coached on how to help their consumers navigate the new channels, but ultimately many of the easier questions no longer had to come through a live person. And that freed up capacity for more complicated and sometimes more difficult calls.
Recognizing that the resulting calls may need more empathy and help to resolve during the first call, leaders adjusted metrics to not penalize longer call times. Instead they focused on first call resolution and sentiment analysis.
So, in a nutshell, coaching and training have changed a lot over this period of time. As we’ve learned here, literally everything has changed. And back to my original point, perhaps the only constant throughout these 30-plus years was change itself.
Luckily, as we have learned, our industry has not only re-invented itself to manage change, but we have actually embraced change and made it an important part of the fabric of our business.