One of the great things about the Customer Contact industry is that there are a good number of conferences and award ceremonies to help share best practice, learn from subject matter experts and celebrate the achievements made and last week, it was the CCMA (Call Centre Management Association), first UK National Contact Centre Conference. The event was a sell out and held at The Millbank Tower in London.
Due to our ongoing commitment and partnership with the CCMA, not only were some of #TeamDJ in attendance at the event but we were also very pleased to offer some of our community, who are not yet CCMA members, some additional event spaces as well and we received some very nice thank you messages from those of you who took up this great offer.
The team at the CCMA put together an extremely high calibre of speakers, with a wide variety of subjects covered, which generated a good deal of questions and debate, here were some of our key takeaways;
- Ben Page from Ipsos Mori, opened the event and said that ‘customer service is now the main criteria to judge a company (it used to be the quality of products and services)’
- Dr Nicola Millard, BT Futurologist shared some thoughts on the customer experience and the challenges faced in serving customers with ever growing channels and changing preferences including; ’best to keep your IVR under 3 options to keep it easy and effortless for customers’
- Jonathan Gale, CEO of New Voice Media when talking about personalised service suggested that ‘57% of consumers will recommend a business if they offer a good customer experience and that 65% of the time, organisations should be able to identify exactly who is calling them and therefore be able to personalise their IVR to create a better service.’
- Mats Rennstam, Managing Director from Bright ‘although online channels are increasing is it not yet more important than phone and email contact.’
- Clare Carroll from BT said ‘Getting trust is first step to creating Profit Centre status for call centres.’
Marcio Rodrigues, Customer Propositions Director, Vizolution posted on Twitter: 
Carolyn Blunt, also in attendance, tweeted ‘The way staff speak to customers and their knowledge is proven to be more impactful on CSAT and NPS than speed of answer’. #ukccconf
Ann-Marie Stagg, Director of the CCMA commented: “We were astonished by the response to our conference; we had double the number of attendees that we anticipated and some fantastic feedback after the event. The CCMA have a great network of active supporters and our thanks go to all of them.”
We are very much looking forward to next year and thank you to the CCMA team for a great day.
If you would like to know more about the Call Centre Management Association and their future events please go to: www.ccma.org.uk
