A day in the life: Leaders

So here I am playing the role of a contact center leader, and as such, let me tell you I'm busy. The phone never stops ringing, the chats don't stop coming in. I may have thousands of employees that I'm managing. Just imagine the number of performance reviews that I have to do.

I really have limited time to process messages through the course of the day as they come into my business. Lots of people are trying to sell me stuff or convince me to do something different. Please just recognize that I need straight talk because I don't have the time to think about what you're trying to tell me, just crisply tell me what it is that you think you can do to help.

Then what people need to understand is that my dreams as the contact center leader, the things that I want to achieve, those compete for resources more than most other parts of the business. We always talk about the funnel and the business - the folks at the top of the funnel and on the lower end of the funnel. And you think about IT and the contact center - every change that's going to happen in the business impacts those two groups.

Anything that marketing wants to launch, the call center needs to know about anything that I want to do. The contact center needs to know about changing a finance process, collections activity, billing process, the call center needs to know about that. So, what I want to do often competes with the things that others want to do in the business. So, when folks want me to make a change, or do something different, I need them to help me to help them. I need them to give me what I can take into the business to make the case for why I should be able to do, what I want to do in the contact center.

And finally, as part of that, folks need to know that I need an ROI (return on investment). I need to understand that there's a return on anything that we do, and that return has to be realistic, because pretty much every business case in my business says we're going to take out call volume. And we're going to reduce handle time. And if I took out all of the call volume and reduced all the handle time that everybody told me I was going to get, my call center would be dead empty and nonstop quiet. So, it's a believable, realistic ROI that I'm going to be looking for when I'm talking to you.

So, all of that said, as the contact center leader, I have a pretty big deal. My contact center has thousands of employees using customer service technology. I'm a big employer. I buy lots of everything and as I'm thinking about buying stuff, I could be convinced to maybe start small. I have lots of teams, so I could try things at a specific contact center, or with a specific group. I could possibly try something in a small corner of my business. Prove out that ROI and then go really big.

You need to understand that I also need so many things, like case management and automation, to help drive work to completion without requiring human engagement. The more that we can do to automate or drive a consistent process across channels is going to be really important to me. I need omni-channel support. I need digital channels. I need chat, e-mail, social media, and messaging applications in addition to 'phone. I need to be able to understand why my customers are contacting us so that I could possibly resolve those problems in advance, being preemptive and proactive. I need solutions for both customers and employees to drive satisfaction on both sides.

I need to be web and mobile. I need bots and AI. I need so many things that are going to drive the improvement in my business to really impact that bottom line that we talked about on the cost side.

These are the things that people need to know as it relates to me and my contact center.

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