Call centre expo

Today I made my first visit in a few years to the main UK customer service show, Call Centre Expo. As with all of these things, it’s a mix of technology firms, consultants, and a few other randoms, (this year including John Lewis, amongst others. Very tenuous…)

Anyway, with my day job involved in online custome care I was hoping to find a slew of new ideas, creative thinking, products and services that would really help contact centres (and service organisations in general) to become more online-centric, taking on board all the new opportunities afforded by the Twitters and so on of this world, getting us to progress on from traditional contact strategies.

How wrong I was. If this show demonstrates the best products that the UK has to offer in helping firms deal with their customers then we’re in real trouble. It could have been 1999 not 2009 – there were dialers, headsets, CRM systems, tips on how to drive customer loyalty, knowledge bases and some quite basic email handling systems. But – with very few exceptions – innovation didn’t get a look in. Social media for example is, it seems, a different planet, and where I thought I’d see both firms I knew (the CoTweets and Radian 6′s of the world), and a bunch of sleek, agile new upstarts, there was simply nothing. Well, with the sole exception of the impressive Salesforce.com who put on a well informed, if rather basic, intro to ‘service in the cloud’.

So, there’s either no desire amongst the UK’s service businesses to innovate, or the next generation of service technology supplier are looking for their leads somewhere else – maybe trade shows have had their day?! Either way, though, customer service directors need to be casting their nets wider than ever before in order to respond to the massive shifts in customer behaviour away from traditional call centres…

PS – I did come away with 6 pens. And a stress ball. Plus ca change…