In this episode of Informer, Leigh Hopwood, CEO at CCMA speaks with Dr Nicola Millard, contact centre futurist and principle innovation partner with BT Business.

Nicola has spent her career analysing trends and behaviours to paint realistic pictures of what the future might look like for contact centres, and joins Leigh to discuss some of the findings from the European Customer Contact Alliance’s Future Contact Centre reseatch study, which she was involved in.

In this wide-ranging discussion, Leigh and Nicola discuss:

• Why the term ‘agent’ is now more applicable to artificial intelligence than human contact centre advisors
• Why one of the biggest risks of AI in the contact centre is the annoyance factor for customers
• What some of the pitfalls of agentic AI and machines communicating with machines to deliver customer service outcomes and transactions are likely to be
• Whether we’ll see the end of functional silos, in favour of customer value hubs and a cross-functional teams that drives value across the entire customer lifecycle
• How contact centre roles are changing as a result of evolving technologies
• If increasing volumes of fraud and scam cases impacting consumers will put more emphasis on the importance of having human advisors in the contact centre
• Why humans might be more hard-wired to accept empathy from bots than we first think

To download the Future Contact Centre research study in full, click here.