The world is innovating, and the customer contact industry is keeping pace. We spoke with CEO Jasper Meerding about innovation within the customer contact industry, his vision for the future, and our focus on personal development within the ContactCare Academy, where innovative learning is a priority.

Machine Learning

There are numerous innovations happening in the field of customer contact at the moment, consider, for example, the automatic chatbots that keep your company active 24/7.
But what does the (real) future have in store for us? Jasper Meerding predicts that Machine Learning will play a significant role in the customer contact industry. Machine Learning will be utilised as an assistant to customer contact employees, by listening in and providing suggestions on what the employee might say during the conversation. Jasper also predicts that systems will be capable of detecting the emotional state of the recipient. This way, customer contact employees can work with even greater empathy, making it easier to lift someone out of a particular emotional state.

Blended Learning

As a customer contact employee, you must possess a good set of skills to make a customer conversation a success. In the future, Machine Learning can be a useful tool, but we are not there yet. That’s why you need to practice these skills. You learn to conduct a good phone call by doing it often, and you learn general customer knowledge by absorbing a lot of information. For that reason, ContactCare works with the Academy using a form of blended learning.

Blended Learning programmes sped up with the arrival of COVID-19 in early 2020. Previously, ContactCare delivered all training in the office; now, new staff members learn a lot through our own online learning platform and come together in the office for skills training. This has many benefits, according to Jasper. “This way, we can offer more tailored programmes according to Kolb. Where one person prefers to learn through reading, another gains more from video content.” But it’s not just the ability to apply various learning styles through e-learning that brings advantages. By storing knowledge in one central, digital system, it prevents fragmentation. It allows us to offer this training not only to our employees but also to add extra value for employees of our clients. The training can be accessed anywhere in the world via the internet. Together with our clients, we work towards a ‘single source of truth’. A personal trainer is, of course, not a robot. Each week, the story might differ slightly from the previous week. Online training is fixed and 100% fact-checked by our clients. This makes it easier to ensure the truth and to provide customers with consistent information.

Personal Contact

With everything being automated and knowledge stored everywhere, an agent's skills are becoming increasingly crucial. For example, a customer can find information online themselves. The real added value lies in the personal contact that only a customer contact employee can provide. Offering a listening ear. That’s what it’s all about, and this will only increase in a world where automation becomes the standard.