It's an exciting time for customer service operations. There are new artificial intelligence and automation technologies that help you deliver differentiated service and control costs. Many contact centers are rolling out conversational AI, robotic process automation, predictive models for next-best action recommendations, bots to offload repetitive agent actions, new knowledge bases, and generative AI for service replies and case summaries. But with all these new technology initiatives come the struggle to adopt these technologies and to adjust to new ways of working.
Change management is often a dirty word. It's human to resist change unless you are convinced it's necessary and will not threaten your job. But getting change management right is foundational to every project that introduces new technology to the contact center. It addresses the human element of embracing change and motivating agents and supervisors to accept new ways of working and improving results.
Change management is not a technology-led initiative; it's a business initiative. It's driven by a team of employees who work side by side with the IT project team. This team is responsible to scope out the change and put in place a communications, training, onboarding, and continuous improvement plan to make the change stick.
Managers and supervisors must drive the change and be involved at every step. They must communicate why they're imposing change on agents and what it means for every person affected. Because of the time and resources required, leadership must buy into the comprehensive change management plan and treat it as an insurance policy that ensures technology investments will deliver the promised outcomes.>
Consider the following best practices for change management:
- Establish a vision and executive sponsorship. The CEO often makes the initial announcement of a major change and lays out the components at a high level. Both the overarching benefits (e.g., greater profits) and the individual benefits (e.g., faster, less error-prone claims processes) matter. More effective sponsorship leads to better results. If senior leaders don't value the project, no one else will.
- Incorporate change planning even before technology selection starts. New initiatives will generally run most smoothly if all types of users—agents, supervisors, managers, admins—are part of the overall process. Technology leaders sometimes avoid or minimize business input during the early selection stages to keep it efficient, but this can often backfire. Design thinking and participation in demos can help people feel more bought in; they can also identify real issues before making the wrong choices.
- Enable feedback and engagement throughout the deployment. The best rollouts incorporate critical user feedback and build champions at every stage. This ranges from designing the workflows and screens to the analytics dashboards. Get your staff involved from the start to get them on board and to learn and develop the system.
- Remember that change never ends in the world of continuous innovation. Unlike older systems that could go months or years between major changes, the new world of customer service technology is full of much more frequent change, with quarterly automatic releases being common. You'll need to keep an eye on vendor roadmaps, both to avoid wasting time creating or buying something that is due to arrive shortly as well as to stay ahead of new features. If the next release will have generative AI to create knowledge articles, expose your knowledge team early. Some vendors offer beta or pilot programs ahead of big releases, which can be useful to get a head start on tackling resistance to change.
Kate Leggett is a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research.