This reads like a faintly disguised PEGA advert. Nothing personal here intended (Simon and others) please, articles by Verint are far worse. The real issue is there's nothing actionable here for contact centre leaders. The article also does an excellent job of severely contradicting itself:

If 81% of businesses claim that “people issues” are the biggest challenge to delivering a great CX, then why is there such a tangibility bias towards investing in tech?

Moreover, "...only 13% of customers found resolution wholly within self-service... " Yet the article suggests you should not be afraid to invest in chatbot tech... For self service?

Finally, the "agent of the future" has purportedly been on the cards since a 1999 article by Bain. I don't see any stats suggesting calls are more complex. Take any water company. Customers call in about raw sewage, leaking water or billing problems.

Now, all these teams have seperate silos for the three skills, but the ops leaders I know want to multiskill their teams to help WFM, capacity planning and manage peak demands. The "guiding intelligence" capabilities of PEGA would help here. Show me the stats that say AHT and C-Sat are not affected by multi-skilling the team. That would be useful. Hint... C-Sat went down 18% when this was trialled in one FTSE firm. (Not with any intelligent automation or real time prompts). Not a PEGA solution either for avoidance of doubt. But that's the baseline. I'd like to know what are PEGA's numbers?

Hopefully these comments are taken in the spirit it's intended. To provoke discussion about real issues and not celebrate archaic views like delighting customers.

It's a good well-written piece Chris. I feel something that's masked here is the distinction between rules, guidelines, boundaries and policies.

To avoid confusion, rules should be treated as Black and White. FCA, Security, GDPR etc. I think Bryan's view could be misconstrued by some as these type of rules are not meant to be broken. But guidelines should be pushed for sure.

AHT should be seen by all as a guideline, but I've witnessed top performing BPO Agents (when measured by C-Sat) put on a PiP - a performance improvement plan, when taking 10% longer on calls. As you can imagine, these top performers didn't hang around for long.

I'd also suggest that giving autonomy and a small budget for 'wow moments' can backfire. I've seen this a few times. As the unhappy customer often expects more than a £15 credit or, in utility field work, they didn't just want a new strip of turf laying; they then wanted the full lawn replacing! I think wow moments too are archaic and the whole purpose of giving autonomy, or a creating a permission culture, is to give the agent the space and resources to fully resolve the customer issue.