Emma Stapleton, Head of Customer Support at MECCA, joins us to give a little taste of her upcoming session – talking about why delivering great customer and employee experience in contact centres needs an all-of-business approach.

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

Emma: Because you’re going to walk away with actionable insights that you take back into your business to break down silos between contact centre and other departments.

Ed: What are the biggest silos do you think?

Emma: I think it depends on the business, but I certainly think there is often a barrier between teams who communicate with customers indirectly and teams who communicate with them directly. It just depends on the context of your business – what’s right for one business might not be right for another.

Ed: Do you think there are communally-objective things that everybody can pull in the same direction on that will work?

Emma: Without a doubt. I think the kinds of things that we’re gonna talk about are going to be really actionable and that’s why we’re gonna focus things on things like your own reputation within the business, and that how that impacts how you influence the business, the reputation of the department, the role of your ego in that conversation, is it important to be right, or is it important to get the right things done? We’re gonna talk about how the business views the contact centre and how we can influence how the business views the contact centre.

So we’re not talking about things where we’re gonna walk away and need to spend a $500K investment to get something done. These are really actionable things that anybody can do. It is within anybody’s control to impact how they work with other teams within their business. They just need to know the places where to concentrate their energy.

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

Emma: I’ve said it before but this was my favourite event last year and I think that’s because so often the events, in Australia in particular if they’re contact centre focus, they tend to be very sales pitchy and that was one of the things I loved – it didn’t feel like I was being sold things.

It felt like I walked away with things that I can use, which is what motivates me to create the same kind of content now that I’m attending. But I think it’s the only event that I’ve seen that really is just specifically for the contact centre. And I think those are really powerful conversations when you get in a room with people from other contact centres, because it doesn’t matter whether you’ve got 500 seats or five seats, there are things that we can learn from each other. And in fact, that’s sometimes more powerful than being in the other rooms that we get invited into, like CX and digital and retail like that, where we’re already having to kind of stake the claim of why the contact centre is important. We all know contact centre is important for this event. And so that breaks down this barrier to having these really great conversations about how we teach everyone else that it’s important as well.

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

Emma: AI…

Remote Working… I’m gonna call that one. I think I don’t think we’re going to stop talking about that anytime soon. It continues to sort of flare up in the media which drives a conversation. Cost of living pressures put a lot of pressure on that because team members start to look at things like “Okay, well can I save money by not needing to commute to an office?” So I think that’s gonna remain topical.

And then I don’t I have a third one that I think is a buzzword for 2024 but I think there’s one that I would really like to be a buzzword and that is ‘experiences.’ So, how do contact centres get to stop focusing on interactions and start providing experiences. And how do we get to value create rather than just be seen as a cost of doing business? Because we have value, we can bring value. We all know that, whether or not we’re measuring it. How clear that is to our businesses is a whole other story.

Ed: What’s your hot take on AI?

Emma: What’s my hot take on the AI? I think it’s really exciting. I think it is really scary. And I think that we’re wasting a lot of time talking about the theoretical of what we might want to be able to do when really we should all be spending our time cleaning up our backyards in terms of data because it doesn’t matter what the technology can do if you haven’t got your data in the right place.

Ed: On the data piece, should that responsibility lie with the contact centre?

Emma: It has to be a shared organisational responsibility. It can’t sit at the contact centre because when you think about AI, what we’re really at risk of is that you’ve got a business with multiple departments making multiple plays into AI spaces and wasting resources and money because they’re going after the same things. Are you uniting the same data in different locations for different purposes?

And then we’re at risk of the thing that is quite scary, which is that we want this AI to sound like our businesses. Our businesses have brands. They have tones of voice. We want this AI to speak like us. What does that look like when that ownership of the data that informs that that informs the conversation is really siloed across the business? So it has to be a united conversation but it also has to be a united conversation because every single person in the business collects data. So it can’t be sat in one place. It has to be a shared responsibility. And then you bring in the ethics, the privacy, and all of that.

What are the biggest challenges and biggest opportunities for contact centres in 2024?

Emma:I think the biggest challenge post COVID continues to be too many top priorities. I think a lot of people got forced into digital transformations and all these sorts of journeys a little bit faster than expected through the COVID experience. And now we’re in a world where there’s so much new technology. It’s moving at such pace that there are so many things that you could go after, and people sort of spreading their eggs across many baskets rather than picking a couple of baskets where they really wanna differentiate and do well. So I think that’s a that’s a challenge that we’re facing.

Coming back to AI, I think that’s a huge opportunity. I think a lot of the challenges that we’re facing can also be solved by AI and it’s just about making sure that we’re putting ourselves in the right place. We’re gathering that data. We’re having the conversations about the ethics. We’re getting our organizations in the right places to be ready to make those plays. And in some organisations, doing some tests, doing some proof of contact, steps, learning what we can about this new technology and how we might wanna use it, and how customers might wanna use it because at the end of the day doesn’t really matter what you implement if the customer doesn’t wanna play with it.

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

Emma: My history in customer service – I’ve always been in retail customer service and I think that in all of the retailers I’ve been in they’ve been bricks and mortar businesses before they were digital businesses. That is sort of the classic retail customer service experience you have to teach the business about the contact center. They understand retail, but you’ve gotta teach them about the contact center.

I also think that there is a lot that I hear from my colleagues, who are in insurance and telcos and banking and all of these kinds of things as well, that even though the contact center in some of those instances is the only front line to the business, it’s still not necessarily understood. And I think people think that the job that contact centers do is really easy, and it’s not. But What we have to remember is our role leading contact centers is to educate the business on why we’re important. We can’t expect people to know things if we’re not coming to them and giving them the information.

So I’m passionate about giving people the tools to do that.

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 spots remain!