This is not a complaint. Really.
Whenever I see a reputable firm publish a document with a title like, “Top Five Contact Center Trends for 2013,” you know that they have my attention.
This Nemertes Research issue paper cites these key trends:
- Mobile
- Big data & speech analytics
- Social media
- Self-service
- Rich-media browsers
[Never mind for now that they ignored the transformative and liberating impact that cloud contact centers bring to on-premise solutions. I promised that I wasn’t going to complain in this post.]
But what I find amusing is the almost comically sober way the analyst writes the report. In an era where we are trained to put the conclusions and recommendations up front (because no one reads to the end anymore), the important stuff is on the last page. I paraphrase here:
The customer contact center is going through a rapid transformation. Managers should:
- Develop a roadmap
- Extend to monitor social media
- Provide a seamless cross-media experience
Those who deliver a unified customer experience…will improve sales, retain customers, and reduce costs.
First, I would put that on the first page.
And second, I would word it more like this: If you don’t expand your mission and migrate to newer systems, you will lose business, lose customers, and be a cost burden to your organization.
To be blunt, everything they say is true, but they don’t state the obvious: the status quo is not a safe place to stand.