Blended agents are happy agents

A very interesting nugget was presented by Belinda Haden at the Verint Consulting Outbound Forum event last week. According to the recent Contact Babel report, the use of inbound and outbound blending can have a positive impact on staff attrition. Only 29% of contact centres using blending report a problem compared to 56% of operations where blending is not used.

This fits with a lot of what we’ve believed about the future of outbound for a while now – that more warm calling, more service-oriented calling and less cold-calling is going to change the dynamics of the outbound centre and also make it much more likely that inbound and outbound activity is going to be conducted by the same personnel. The historical personality differences which have characterised outbound (predominantly sales) and inbound (predominantly service) thus become less distinct, making outbound a much more key, much more central part of the contact centre mix. It will be interesting to see if this will herald a more integrated approach regarding location, in-house operations vs outsourcing or even a growth in customer-focussed outbound.

Either way blending – something close to my heart for years – is clearly an important part of the contact centre future. It'll be interesting to watch it grow - and also see how it develops in relation not just to inbound/ outb ound blending but also multi-channel too.