Explore fresh, expert perspectives on customer engagement and innovation

We’re delighted to announce that we have been awarded the IT Vendor of the Year Award by the BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT and Computing.

The awards ceremony took place in Central London in November 2022, with the industry out in force to support the awards and celebrate success after another challenging year. The UK IT Industry Awards represent the best and brightest of the IT sector – of all sizes.

Richard Coward, Sales Director at MaxContact said the win “really recognises all the hard work our company’s put in for the last 12 months, how much we’ve grown and the dedication of the team.”

“It’s nice to be celebrated against talented, large organisations. We’re a small organisation compared to others in this category, and it’s really important for smaller organisations to be recognised.”

A special thank you to all of our hard-working employees for your contributions – awards like this highlight the synergy, care and perseverance across internal teams. This award is truly a cumulation of lots of individual efforts – so thank you!

Find out more about MaxContact, here.

‍

As a business process outsourcing (BPO) leader, you know that more and more businesses are turning to outsourcing as part of their growth strategy.

In fact, the global business process outsourcing market, valued at $232.32 billion in 2020, is expected to grow by 8.5% until at least 2028.

BPOs provide client companies with valuable services at reasonable cost, because they use specialisation to create economies of scale. Nowhere is that more true than in the contact centre space.

Unlike client businesses, BPOs can focus entirely on providing great contact centre services, because that is their core business. But to do so, they have to employ systems and processes that allow them to scale, flex and support clients effectively without increasing costs too much.

Here are some of the challenges your BPO contact centre may be facing and how to solve them.

You want to offer your clients the best possible service, but your contact centre software doesn’t flex as you need it to.

As a BPO contact centre, you need to flex with your clients’ needs. Maybe you’re onboarding new clients quickly. Maybe some of your clients have seasonal peaks and troughs in their trade.

A BPO contact centre has to be able to flex up and down easily to meet these changing requirements, or risk providing a substandard service or piling on costs.

With a solution like MaxContact, you can add or remove licences instantly. What’s more, as a secure cloud-based service you can hire the best talent wherever they are in the UK or around the world. By contrast, on-premise solutions tie you to a location. At a time when talent is hard to find, that can be a considerable drawback for an outsourced contact centre.

You want to win new business but your contact centre provider doesn’t support you on tenders or react quickly enough to new instructions.

Winning new clients depends on being fast and nimble. You want to be ahead of the competition. You also want to provide a comprehensive review of the benefits of your service and solution.

Not every contact centre solution provider supports clients on tenders, but MaxContact does. We’ll advise on RFPs and help you hit tight deadlines. We react quickly so you can seize every opportunity. If you need a new campaign setting up in a week, we’re happy to oblige.

Your team is growing and you’re struggling to train staff quickly enough.

BPOs often have to hire large numbers of staff quickly to fulfil contracts. Those staff then need to be trained to a high standard. That’s a continual challenge for outsourced contact centres.

MaxContact is designed for ease of use. It’s an intuitive system that allows agents to seamlessly move through the steps needed to fulfil customer requests logically and simply. It also provides team leaders with the option to provide regular and detailed feedback for continuous improvement purposes. MaxContact also provides free training that quickly gets your teams up to speed.

5 tips for finding the best contact centre solution for your outsourced contact centre

If you’re looking for a contact centre solution for your BPO, always take the following into account:

• Security and compliance

All contact centres have to be secure and compliant. BPO contact centres, often dealing with several clients or campaigns at once, even more so. At the very least, you need tools to ensure that you’re GDPR and Ofcom compliant, the latest security certifications and – if you take payments – a secure payments manager. Make sure cloud based systems are housed in secure, compliant data centres.

• Ease of implementation

You can’t be left without a contact centre solution while you implement a new system. Make sure your chosen software is easy to install, maintain and upgrade, and that your provider will support you at every step. Cloud-based solutions mean the hardware and infrastructure is housed elsewhere, so they’re the quickest and easiest to install and update.

• Ease of use

The easier the software is to operate, the more likely it is that your teams will make full use of all its tools and features and the quicker they’re productive. It also makes it straightforward for agents to swap between clients and campaigns. Ask for a free trial – MaxContact offers one – and ask your team how they get on.

• Scalable and flexible

A BPO’s needs can change quickly, and then change again soon afterwards. Your solution must be able to scale up and down easily, to meet the demands of your clients. BPOs with inflexible solutions risk losing clients if they can’t scale quickly enough.

• Service and communication

A BPO contact centre depends heavily on a nimble software solution and the service that supports it. Ask potential providers how easy it is to raise support tickets, and how long do they typically take to be resolved. Get to know your providers before you make a decision. Are they contact centre experts or just resellers? Do they answer queries quickly and comprehensively?

Expert solution for outsourced contact centres

As a BPO, you rely on your contact centre solution to help you provide a professional and cost-effective service to multiple clients. At MaxContact, we get it. We’re contact centre experts with wide experience of helping BPOs meet challenges and seize opportunities. We offer a powerful, customer engagement platform that adapts to your clients’ needs, and a partnership model of service that makes our team an extension of your own.

For more information about how MaxContact could help your BPO, click here or get in touch.

Industry expert Natalie Calvert helps ambitious leaders powerfully engage customers and employees in a way that impacts the bottom line. Her clients have included organisations of all sizes, including some of the world’s largest brands: O2, Royal Mail, Audi, LEGO, M&S and BT. She is also a board advisor and judge for the Lloyds Bank British Business Excellence Awards.

In this guest post, she plots a smarter route to better customer experiences and explains how contact centres can develop a winning CX…

The contact centre is at the heart of the digital revolution because it is responsible for managing customer interactions through various channels. That means your contact centre has to be at the forefront of a modern human, streamlined and technology-driven customer experience.

In fact, a new role is rapidly developing for contact centre advisors, which involves managing more complex customer needs, dealing with more emotive conversations, and doing so in faster and smarter ways than ever before.

In the omnichannel contact centre – one that combines human and digital contact channels – bringing together customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) is crucial to business success.

What makes a successful contact centre experience?

Most leaders concur with the adage that “happy staff and happy customers go hand in hand”. Yet, in reality, many companies run two tracks and don’t reap the rewards of a holistic strategy. CX and EX are, increasingly, highly dependent on one another and have become totally interconnected.

Despite substantial investments in customer experience initiatives and employee engagement programmes, contact centres still face significant issues related to customer satisfaction, retention, recruitment, absenteeism, and employee turnover. Something must be wrong.

Turning this around and creating sustainable success is contingent on aligning customer and employee experiences.

To do this you need to focus on the three key areas to win with CX:

1. (Re)Define your customer contact centre strategy

The best contact centres are those that have a truly holistic approach to customer service. The first step in developing your customer contact centre strategy is (re)-defining it.

Contact centres were transformed overnight by the pandemic, and many employees now work from home in a variety of hybrid models. It’s time to redefine strategy considering new working methods, using redesigned processes, technologies, team dynamics and advanced skilling requirements.

A customer contact centre strategy which includes a customer contact business plan, target operating model (TOM), and customer experience model (CEM) alongside your CX employee experience (CXEE) plan will guarantee your success, streamline your strategy and produce better results.

Ensuring that each component cleverly integrates customer experience and employee experience alongside the company’s strategy will drive the best possible outcomes for customers and employees.

2. Be your customers’ hero

Customers want to experience the ‘hero effect’ when buying your products or services. Be their hero by delivering an outstanding experience!

Employees that do the right thing, genuinely care, go the extra mile and champion the customer are Customer Heroes. They also have the mindset and skills to turn detractors into promoters, and complainers into advocates. As a result, they build loyalty, increase customer satisfaction and grow business value.

Customer heroes are highly engaged and happy, and so are their customers.

Having employees who are engaged provides companies with 89% greater customer satisfaction and 50% higher customer loyalty than companies with disengaged employees (source: Korn Ferry/Hay Group).

Ask yourself how you and your fellow leaders can develop your employees into Customer Heroes.

• • Do you have a customer-focused mission and vision that guides your entire organisation?
• • Is your customer-focused mission being fulfilled by giving employees a voice and allowing them to make decisions?
• • Do you have customer service champions and brand ambassadors in each department who drive the customer mission?
• • Do you understand what your customers want from you to be their hero, and how you can deliver it?
• • Do you understand the mindset and skills that are required from your CX frontline and their leaders?
• • Always remember that customer centric organisations are 20%+ more profitable (source Forbes).
• • Overall, know that developing your employees into Customer Heroes will result in more satisfied customers and employees.

3. CX employee community

Build a strong CX employee community by fostering collaboration, communication, and customer centricity among employees. This will drive customer-focused outcomes and make your organisation more effective – and your staff happier.

Nearly three quarters of employees say that better communication would increase their productivity at work. Team huddles are one of the most effective ways to build winning CX teams by allowing groups to collaborate on ideas, disseminate information, and focus on customer centricity. The key here is ensuring leaders have the skills and tools in place for inspiring and effective hybrid team huddles.

Creating a CX employee community with the customer at its heart will not only improve customer experience but also transform employee experience.

In summary, the experience economy and the digital era are changing our lives in ways never seen. Contact centres are facing significant challenges to deliver exceptional experiences, tailored to meet the expectations of the digital age. It is time to meet those expectations head on. Become your customers’ hero, redefine your customer contact centre strategy and grow your CX employee community. CX+EX connects everything. Don’t forget that when you align the stars, the magic begins…

Transform your CX and EX with MaxContact’s customer engagement software, giving customers and employees an unrivalled digital, in-person and omnichannel contact experience. Contact us to find out more.

Customer complaints are an expected part of the job when it comes to contact centres. But if you want to reduce complaints and improve the customer experience, you have to be proactive in your approach.

We sat down with CX+EX Coach & Expert, Natalie Calvert, and MaxContact

Product Owner, Sean McIver, to get their takes on how to reduce complaints and set up winning systems to improve the customer experience.

To hear Sean and Natalie’s top strategies, tune in to the full webinar or keep reading.

Why you need to know your customer journey

The very first thing businesses should do when handling complaints is to prioritise the customer experience. By putting the customer front and centre of everything, you’re naturally going to understand their frustrations and where the bottlenecks in your business are.

The common challenge Sean highlights is that while many businesses talk about the importance of customer experience, many don’t know what that journey looks like. That’s why companies should proactively test out their customer journeys, whether that’s signing up for a new service or making a complaint.

When was the last time you tried to call in or communicate via email as a customer would? By taking some time out to do this, you can understand what the customer experiences and find the snags in the process.

What businesses can do to reduce complaints

Rising customer complaints are becoming much more commonplace. Customers are more vocal and have higher expectations today.

So what can we do about rising complaints?

Natalie says first, you need to create a strategic review of your company. Strategic reviews can help you gain a good picture of what’s going on in your business. You can see what’s causing the issues by looking at your processes, volumes, customer types, and key triggers. This will help you understand what’s really going on so you can get the whole thing moving towards a resolution.

You can also look at the training quality of your staff. Most staff are trained not in how to deal with complaints, but how to follow the standards that the company wants to deliver – which are two very different things.

Another thing you can do is calculate the cost versus the value of a complaint. What does it cost you to deal with complaints, and what is the value you get back when you do or don’t deal with a complaint?

It’s also important to look at this from both a customer experience (CX) and an employee experience (EX) angle as well. Dealing with angry customers all day can take a toll, so it’s important that frontline staff get the support they need. By ignoring the EX side of things, you could have issues with high staff turnover and absences.

Modelling your complaints procedures on other companies

Customer service and handling complaints can vastly differ from company to company. But spend some time thinking of the companies that give great customer experiences and resolve complaints quickly and efficiently. Does your complaints procedure follow suit? Or does it look more like a company that doesn’t return phone calls or has an inconsistent service?

Natalie gives two examples of companies that manage their complaints efficiently – Amazon and Apple. They deliver a consistent, organised experience on a mass scale. While you may not be able to replicate Amazon’s customer service resources, you can take ideas from them and adapt them for your own strategy.

Why staff are at the heart of the customer experience

At the heart of your complaints strategy is the staff who deliver the communication and resolutions to customers.

Natalie says that over 60% of complaints are around staff attitude and behaviour. So, it’s not just about building a clear customer journey and process. It’s also about how the staff themselves deliver that experience.

We need staff to be fully trained in not just the process, but also how to deliver what the customer wants and expects.

Natalie says that contact centre staff need to learn and understand three things:

1. When customers get the trust and transparency they need, the staff member becomes the customer’s hero. Think about how you can become a customer hero.

2. We should aim for a win-win scenario – so that the resolution is good for both the customer and the organisation.

3. We have to be trusted advisors. How can staff build their knowledge, resilience, and skills to become that trusted advisor?

How to get to the root cause of complaints

To understand the root cause, you need to look at those early feedback loops – something that Sean believes is often missed.

The frontline members of staff who talk to customers on a daily basis are a resource that can be utilised. They know which issues are cropping up the most and how they directly affect customers. By utilising this resource, you can find root causes for issues and resolve them before they turn into more complaints.

Another plus side for this is that it ensures frontline staff don’t have to deal with the same issues over and over again because this can make them become robotic. Once you become robotic in your customer interactions, it’s harder to display empathy and truly engage with customers, which affects their experience overall.

If you wait until the later stages when those issues have built up over time, it can be too late. You’re then fire-fighting problems instead of preventing them, which costs time, money and effort.

So it’s important to have a system that helps your team raise early red flags.

Natalie believes this all starts with having a complaints culture in the boardroom. By being proactive and positive about complaints, the entire team can work together to find solutions.

You can do this in three ways:

1. Design the conversation by deep diving into what practices work best and replicating them.

2. Empower your staff to make decisions and resolve complaints without passing them on to other departments.

3. Create good stakeholder management (both internal and external) to keep everyone informed and involved.

Six strategies for reducing complaints and improving the customer experience

1. Staff training

Once you have proper staff training, you can eradicate a lot of complaints that come through. There are lots of different types of complaints that require different competency levels to handle. Make sure your staff get the right training and are empowered to tackle those different types of complaints.

2. Active listening

Active listening is about using empathy to get to the root of the problem and show the customer that you truly understand. If you actively listen, you can engage with the reasons behind the complaint and be empathetic and transparent about any shortfalls or mistakes in the process.

3. Complaints culture in leadership

By building a complaints culture, you ensure that complaints aren’t just a number. You can be proactive and look at root causes, staff training, and active listening to boost your understanding of the problems and provide better resolutions for the customer.

4. Proactivity

Don’t assume customers know the next steps in the process. Tell them and clearly outline what will come next after they make a complaint. This can completely transform the customer’s experience, especially when you follow up later to check if the complaint has been resolved.

AI technology can support this process by handling your customer’s frequently asked questions without impacting your agent’s availability. Find out how our AI-powered chatbot for contact centres can support you.

5. Continuous improvement

Like most things in customer service, building a strategy for complaints is not a one-and-done thing. You should continually look to improve your methodology by looking at data, feedback, quality control, and strategic reviews to reduce complaints.

6. Accessibility

Avoiding complaints from customers just leaves issues unresolved. So ensure that it’s easy and quick for customers to make complaints because you’re much more likely to resolve that issue quickly and effectively.

Poor processes often mean that the method of making the complaint becomes another problem for the customer. And this just results in more wasted time and frustration for everyone. Check your own process for making complaints and tweak it to make it as simple as possible.

Complaints might not be anyone’s favourite thing to spend time on, but they are an ongoing part of contact centre work. By being proactive, strategizing, and really taking the time to understand customers and support staff, it’s a win-win for everyone involved. For more on this, be sure to watch the full webinar session.

‍

Ben Booth, CEO of MaxContact has been named as a One To Watch in The LDC Top 50 Most Ambitious Business Leaders programme for 2022.

The programme, which is supported by The Times and now in its fifth year, celebrates those entrepreneurs that are growing the UK’s most successful and fast-growing medium-sized firms.

A record number of nominations – more than 750 – were received this year, proving that ambition is alive and well despite the challenges faced by increasing economic uncertainty.

The Ones to Watch are the business leaders destined for great things. Those who are making waves in their sectors, having a positive impact on their customers and employees, and who are the driving force behind tomorrow’s most successful medium-sized firms.

Ben Booth said: “It’s an honour to have been selected as One to Watch in The LDC Top Most Ambitious Business Leaders programme for 2022. The success of the business is not only down to myself, but the whole team at MaxContact, so I’d like to thank them for achieving this recognition too.”

John Garner, Managing Partner, LDC, added: “The volume and quality of submissions this year surpassed all of our expectations. We’ve been struck by the way business leaders have overcome challenges and adversity to run fast-growing and successful companies, proving that difficult circumstances can become the biggest driver of ambition.  This year’s Ones to Watch embody just that and they have really grabbed the judges’ attention with their success stories. Congratulations to all those featured – we look forward to seeing where they go next!”

You can find out more information on this year’s Top 50 Most Ambitious Business Leaders programme here: https://bit.ly/3e2c3gk

About LDC

LDC is the private equity arm of Lloyds Banking Group. Since 1981, LDC has invested more than £5.5bn in medium-sized firms across the UK; backing the ambitions of more than 650 ambitious management teams.

About MaxContact

MaxContact is customer engagement software that goes above and beyond to build smarter customer experiences. Our platform is packed with powerful features, accessible for businesses large and small, and ensures businesses can operate compliantly. We work with our customers to create seamless customer interactions, so they can reach the right people, on the right channel, at the right time, every time.

‍

MaxContact is pleased to announce its partnership with the UK operations of Hinduja Global Solutions (HGS) Ltd (listed in BSE & NSE). This partnership is one element of a new ecosystem for HGS UK to differentiate and create memorable customer experiences across admired brands throughout the UK and Europe.

HGS selected MaxContact to assist in continuing to strengthen their contact centre offerings. HGS recognises that employee engagement is a key contributor to memorable customer experiences (CX) and they felt MaxContact has differentiated itself as a UK technology provider across customer and employee engagement.

Providing an easy-to-use platform for agents means HGS will be able to support customers better and be more engaged, delivering a reliable service, operational excellence, and value-for-money.

“We’re thrilled to establish an ongoing partnership with HGS UK, a company that is renowned for delivering high quality CX operations for its clients. Our flexible approach to building and developing a market-leading engagement software platform means we can adapt to the needs of HGS and its clients,” explains Ben Booth, CEO of MaxContact.

Michael Hanratty, Director of IT of HGS UK notes, “The migration to MaxContact as one of our key Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) vendors allows HGS to scale quicker and offer a wealth of benefits and features to our clients using a proven robust infrastructure and support model.

The MaxContact team have been a pleasure to work with. The HGS UK team has leveraged their deep and specialised expertise throughout the initial migration and on many occasions since.”

The HGS UK and MaxContact partnership is designed to help HGS’ current and prospective clients exceed customer expectations and fast-track their digital transformations.