John Connolly and Kristy Ingall from Newcastle Permanent Building Society join us to give a little taste of their upcoming session – including the significant increase in call and online channels alongside growing latency in physical branch transactions.

An elevator pitch for your session: Why should people come and see you at the Contact Centre Symposium in 2024?

John: One of the key things that we are all challenged with is to do more with less or to do more with the same. And some of our experiences have been about maximizing our efficiencies, through technology process improvement through supporting our people. And at the same time we’ve been saving money by doing it and enhancing the experiences of both our customers and our people. And if people are interested in that, I think they should come at talk to us.

Why do you think it’s important to have an event like the Contact Centre Symposium?

Kristy: We’re all navigating the same issues. We’re all navigating people, technology, agent experience, and customer experience. How do you deliver value when you have those challenges? And, as John referred to earlier, cost as well. So, for me, it’s really important that you hear in best practice, you’re hearing industry-best speakers and being able to learn and gain knowledge from other’s experiences.

What are your top three words describe the contact centre industry in 2024?

Kristy: It’s auto automation, simplification, and innovation – which essentially is as you referred to ‘process improvement technology’. All of those things we’re all grappling, every contact centre is grappling with those those initiatives right now. And AI as well.

John: And I’d even add a fifth seeing as now we’re not sticking to the criteria, but I think collaboration is a huge thing in regard to these events. And it certainly was a big part of our experiences and some of the things that we’ll be sharing with people on the day.

Why do you think that navigating this ‘people versus tech’ challenge is such a challenge for people?

Kristy: I think the cost of doing business is always a challenge. We’re resource poor, I guess you could say, so using technology to innovate helps enable us to essentially be able to deliver better service through technology and not impact our agent experience or our employee value proposition.

John: And I think the more that we wanna achieve through our business for our customers, a lot of the times our frontline agents jobs become more complex and that’s not what we want. We want our agents to be able to focus on the customer experience and the conversations that they’re not navigating some complex process or some intricate piece of technology. So including that in the piece is crucial to the success of any initiative.

What’s the biggest challenge for contact centres in 2024?

Kristy: In one sentence I’m gonna say the introduction of AI. We have boards that are interested in this but there’s also a nervousness around it. So it’s finding that happy medium. It’s navigating those challenges whilst embracing the new and innovative ways of working. I think also, as far as AI is concerned, it has to be synergistic with the people experience and the customer experience. Technology needs to enhance not replace, to the point of making our people’s jobs more simple but also to create better customer outcomes and better customer paths. AI definitely has a huge opportunity for us all in 2024.

What’s the biggest challenge for contact centres in 2024?

Kristy: In one sentence I’m gonna say the introduction of AI. We have boards that are interested in this but there’s also a nervousness around it. So it’s finding that happy medium. It’s navigating those challenges whilst embracing the new and innovative ways of working.

John: I think also, as far as AI is concerned, it has to be synergistic with the people experience and the customer experience. Technology needs to enhance not replace, to the point of making our people’s jobs more simple but also to create better customer outcomes and better customer paths. AI definitely has a huge opportunity for us all in 2024.

What do you think is the biggest risk with AI?

Kristy: I think there’s an element of how much do you let go? How much do you allow machine learning to do the job of what a human does right now, ensure that customer experience and ensure you manage that risk. We all know about the cases in Canada and things like that. How do how do we allow ourselves to let go a little and maintain that trust as well?

John: I think there’s a risk in over overcooking it, having really high expectations of what AI can do rather than looking at what you want it to do and making sure that customers have an appetite for it as far as creating channels or enhancing customer channels through AI.

Why are you so passionate about the subject that you’re speaking on?

John: Because we put a lot of work into it. I didn’t have a grey hair on my head before we started doing this. However…

Kristy: For me, I think it is all about that delegate dance of innovation but maintaining a key focus on our people. We want to make our people’s roles easier. We want to make their experiences and we want them to come to work and feel comfortable and enjoy what they do but also continue to throw change at them and hope that they can manage that effectively.

John: We’re a customer-owned business. Everything we do everything we pay for, it’s our customer’s money. We’ve got a responsibility to make sure that we do everything that’s in the interests of our customers and our business. And Christie’s mind around the agents, that’s crucial to that overall success.

What you guys do in Newcastle Castle Permanent Building Society – what do you think is the most unique part of your own case study that’s gonna be the golden nugget that people are going to get walking away after this session that they wouldn’t get with anybody else?

John: The case study that we’re talking about – everyone’s got a COVID story. And then ours is kind of related to that. I think despite the pressures of COVID, we engaged in in this initiative in a way that we took our people on the journey with us. We didn’t, despite the pressures of increasing customer demand and lessening branch inquiries, we made sure that we engaged in this initiative in a way that had longevity and we’re still getting enormous success through these initiatives that we created four or five years ago. We’re still getting enormous benefits from it and, to Christie’s point, we’ve now merged with one of the other largest customer advocacy in Newcastle Greater Bank. The learnings that we’ve got through there and the transferability of what we’ve learned is going to create great success for us in the future.

The Contact Centre Symposium 2024 is bringing over 120 of the smartest minds in contact centres to the beautiful Hunter Valley from 21-22 May 2024. Only a few spot remain!