Political Contact gets Personal

Happy New Year and all that. I think it’s going to be tough one for everybody, but in this bi-centenary of Darwin’s birth it’s worth remembering that difficult times are what cause innovation, adaptation and change that can have long term consequences for the better. Granted, that’s not much comfort when your livelihood is at stake, but there is always opportunity for some in every circumstance. It’s clear in times of economic trouble looking after existing customers is absolutely key for any business – and that’s what we’re in business to do.

Looking at the predictions for the year, there’s already a buzz about a General Election. The political whys? and maybes are for another time (probably over a pint..) but contact with voters, campaigning and marketing will play a key role.

In the US elections last year, social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo played a huge role not just in the general election but in the primaries. The Labour Party have just launched a community site, LabourList.org to compete with ConservativeHome and LibDemVoice, and there is news of a “virtual phone bank” – effectively web-based access to home supporters of Labour’s canvassing databases to allow party supporters to make calls from home.

Nick Clegg, of course, already made the headlines with his automated calls, subsequently declared illegal by the Information Commissioner, and the Tories have been trying to get an upper hand in new media and web campaigning since the launch of WebCameron, the rather cheesily named Cameron video blog.

In the end the economy, the polls and his state of nerve will determine when Gordon Brown does eventually go to the country, but it will be fascinating to see how the political parties rise to the challenge of marketing to and contacting their potential voters.

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.