Key Takeaways and Lessons from CCW Nashville 2024

This October, Customer Management Practice hosted our 8th autumn Customer Contact Week in Nashville, Tennessee. This highly curated event brings together professionals from all corners of the customer contact space for a few days of learning, networking, ideating, and connecting. Teams in customer contact rely on so many different personalities and aptitudes to function and grow, and this is always apparent when we gather at in-person events. Coming away from another successful conference with fresh ideas and enthusiasm for customer contact innovation, let’s take a look at some of the recurring themes that arose in our breakout sessions.

Combating attrition and burnout

There’s no avoiding it: attrition is on the minds of contact center leaders everywhere. Where the agent role was once a promising in-road to a stable and fruitful career, both experienced and prospective agents are now losing their spirit. While industry thought leaders attribute this change to a myriad of social, economic, and societal factors, it all leads to the same conclusion. Agent roles are hard to fill, harder to keep filled, and near impossible to remain attractive to employees for the long-term. For contact center leaders struggling to maintain an engaged agent workforce, serious changes will need to be made. Although trust cannot be built overnight, actions taken today to foster a contact center worth staying at will pay off in the long run.

One way to create a competitive advantage and boast a contact center that agents want to work in is by investing in your career pathing resources. Dr. Shikha Desai, VP Operations of Student Resources at UnitedHealthcare, delivered an enlightening session on engaging the Generation Z workforce with applicable lessons for all age groups. The ways of working that many young people prefer represent the future of the workforce. 

We’re moving away from highly structured career goals and 5-10 year plans, with expertise as the end goal, and salary and title as primary drivers for job selection. And we’re moving towards a holistic accumulation of experiences, evaluating companies on their values and purpose, and a growing disillusionment with the idea of company loyalty. Rather than resist the trends in front of us, customer contact leaders can use these trends as evidence of the importance of a Voice of the Employee program. 

Companies with career pathing programs worth emulating are plentiful, but the best approach to this issue is one that incorporates the real-time feedback of current employees. Employee listening to determine what motivates and engages your agents is critical, and what worked three years ago is less likely to be as impactful now. Technology and AI augmenting aspects of work, fear of downsizing, and economic factors making life more difficult, all have the potential to transform agent motivation. 

Another valuable insight on the state of staffing came to us from a session with Shelly Griessel, VP of Customer Support at JetBlue. Shelly shared the trend of automation taking over “easy wins” from agents and the unintended effect of burdening agents with the more complex, negative customer interactions. While many agent-assist and chatbot providers have touted this change as a shift towards more meaningful, intellectually stimulating work for agents, the truth is that there is some correlation between customer sentiment and the complexity of their concern. Consider how many times a day agents heard “thank you” before automation came onto the scene. Now consider how that number may have dropped since the most solvable complaints don’t reach an agent’s ears at all. Contact center leaders know that this difference is not trivial, and can wear on the psyche of agents over time. 

Keeping up with AI

As expected, AI in the contact center was a primary theme for this conference’s sessions. With new technologies emerging seemingly every day, plenty can be said on the tools themselves. However, even the most advanced AI cannot (yet) tell you how to know how and when to augment or replace existing processes with AI. Understanding these tools and their implementations will be an essential aspect of contact center leaders’ roles moving forward.

First and foremost, intentionality should lead the way. Leaders of all kinds echoed the same sentiment: you need to know exactly what problem you’re seeking to solve with AI. Before implementing a new technology, contact center leaders should carefully evaluate what works and what could be improved across your team of agents, pain points for agents, the state of resources and knowledge management systems, and more. More than just due diligence, a rigorous assessment of your current practices will bring to light the weaknesses of your contact center that could actually be remediated–and not just high-level weaknesses that you hope to move the needle on. 

Looking forward, leaders with a strong aptitude for change management will be crucial in the contact center. During the breakout session “The Next Five Years: Emerging Self-Service Trends and Predictions,” CX leaders from finance and insurance companies emphasized the importance of change management as a discipline amidst the accelerating pace of AI and technology. Leaders will need to manage the before, during, and after of a new implementation and anticipate its effects on customer and employee experiences. With many contact center leaders already stretched thin, CXOs should ensure this base is covered by upskilling high-potential team members and get ahead of what is likely to be an onslaught of changes as technology continues to evolve.

Tech stack decisions galore

When it comes to actually evaluating the products that will improve experiences in your contact center, there is an overwhelming amount of content out there. Leaders are expressing a lack of time and resources to effectively compare the options available, and then feel majorly set back when they trial a product that isn’t a good fit. It is likely that this project of “shopping” will only become more arduous as the market of contact center technology crowds further. As we know, time and resources to dedicate to research and demos are extremely limited. Rather than relying on individual CX leaders to take on the task of recommending or even selecting the products that will make up your contact center’s tech stack, consider developing a committee of decision makers to evaluate products through a multi-disciplinary lens. Speakers at CCW Nashville continually expressed the importance of early feedback from legal, compliance, and HR professionals to ensure that the decisions being made reflect the best interest of all business needs. 

At CCW Nashville, CMP Research unveiled a brand new solution to this problem: the CMP Research Prism. By analyzing user feedback and marketplace data across ten investment criteria, CMP Research has quantitatively analyzed a selection of products in the agent assist space, ultimately mapping them across a “prism” of user perspective and marketplace perception. This tool (along with upcoming prisms on other product categories like customer analytics, chatbots, and IVR) is an excellent starting point for CX leaders to understand the many different propensities they should be comparing products across.

If you want to be in the room while CX leaders dispense timely wisdom and be a part of these conversations while they’re taking place, join us at CCW Orlando in January 2025.