Contact Centre Canada is an organization that is passionate about promoting and supporting the Canadian Contact Centre industry. Our organization consists of executives and industry veterans who understand the industry and work towards facilitating its overall success.
In the modern-day technological economy, it is impossible for businesses to succeed without having a customer interaction platform in place. This is particularly important for larger corporations which deal with thousands of clients spread across a wide geographical area – sometimes even globally.
What Are Contact Centres?
Before getting deeper into who we are and what we do, it is important to understand what contact centres are. The simplest definition of contact centres is that they are an expanded and improved version of call centres. Call centres allowed a business to receive feedback and communicate its marketing through phone lines. Contact centres include a wider range of communication channels and functions.
Apart from phones, contact centres can include: multiple social media channels, SMS chat lines, email, online chat apps, and VoIP (Voice over IP). This omnichannel approach is what differentiates contact centres from traditional call centres.
Contact centres also serve more functions than just customer service and telemarketing. They usually handle direct sales, market research, reservations, sales support, tech assistance, customer care amongst other functions. In an increasingly competitive global economy, the company offering the best customer experience tends to achieve more success. Contact centres are the best tool that a business can leverage to reach their clients and understand their wants and needs better.
What is our mission?
Our primary mission is to provide support to the Canadian contact centre industry through forming partnerships, raising awareness and finding solutions to challenges facing industry players. Simply put, we have the industry’s best interests at heart, and we want to see it thrive and consistently grow.
On a more specific level, this broad mission can be further divided into six goals.
i. To raise awareness of the Contact Centre Industry in Canada
Contact centres have become an important component of virtually all the industries that make up the Canadian economy. Despite its widespread presence, the general public is generally unaware of its existence and the important function that it accomplishes for the country’s economy. One of our main goals is to shed some much-deserved limelight on the industry. Increased awareness will benefit the industry by increasing demand for the services offered by contact centers by Canadian businesses.
ii.To develop an effective recruitment and retention strategy for the industry
The success of any industry is heavily dependent on its ability to attract and retain the right workers. This is particularly important for industries that rely on person to person interactions such as contact centers. As part of our mandate to facilitate the industry’s success, we are constantly researching and recommending effective strategies that can be applied by the industry to recruit and retain employees more effectively. Retention is particularly important since it has been shown that retaining experienced employees is much cheaper than hiring and training new hires.
iii.To facilitate partnerships with educational institutes and other relevant training facilities
This is a function that is somewhat related to recruitment. It is important for any industry to have access to fresh graduates that have the required skill to be of value within the industry. To ensure a consistent supply of qualified contact center personnel every year, we form partnerships with educational institutes and other training facilities so that they develop new courses and/or fine-tune curriculums in existing programs that will create an ideal workforce for the industry.
iv.To produce and share industry beneficial information
We are living in a knowledge-based economy, and for any industry to succeed, it needs to constantly update how it does business. It is, therefore, important for our organization to constantly research the industry and the larger Canadian economy to identify how contact centers can improve. This includes carrying out market research, academic studies and internal assessment fact-finding missions.
v.To form partnerships with other stakeholders such as government agencies and industry associations
We believe that it is important for the industry to have partnerships in place with the government agencies and other public bodies whose purview includes the contact centre industry. This is to ensure that the industry has a say in determining the regulatory environment within which it exists.
vi.To ensure that the Canadian contact centre industry is at the forefront of emerging technologies
The contact centre industry is wholly dependent on technology. This is why the industry experienced a boom once the internet became mainstream and widely available. Unlike call centers that only used telephones and were extremely labour-intensive, the world of contact centers is more hi-tech. Technologies like IVR (Interactive Voice Response) allow an automated service to receive calls and redirect them to the relevant departments without any human involvement.
Similarly, contact centres need to be able to support the numerous communication channels used by a company’s clients and stakeholders. To achieve this, we are constantly on the lookout for major technological shifts in the communications industry and facilitate the fast adoption of new technologies and communication channels by the Canadian contact centre industry.
What are our core values?
To enable us to achieve our goal and facilitate the contact center industry’s continued success, our organization is guided by three core values.
i.Teamwork and collaboration
This works in two ways. First, we believe that our industry’s success is heavily dependent on the partnerships that we form with key stakeholders in the public and private industries. Secondly, as an organization representing a large industry, our ability to meet our growth targets depends on all the industry players working together for the industry’s benefit.
ii.Continuous learning and improvement
We believe that stagnation is the biggest enemy of success. We are constantly striving to learn more and improve the industry to achieve long-term success.
iii.Customer Commitment
We want to instil the importance of customer commitment to all our industry partners. It is only through achieving customer satisfaction that the industry will get the demand levels it needs to keep growing.