Our Business Development Director Marcel Stroop spoke recently at the GSA’s Festival of Sourcing, taking part alongside Paula Kennedy from Concentrix and Roger Beadle from Limitless in a virtual roundtable discussion about the future of ‘open talent’ CX. Here are some of the highlights from the conversation.
The consensus seems to be that we’re looking at an evolved ecosystem, where companies use a blended model that shifts between traditional call centers as well as gig CX and its use of open talent. There are demographic shifts already underway. The panel talked about how 50% of the US workforce are estimated to be freelance by 2027, and the same shift is happening in the UK and Europe.
The speakers agreed that bricks and mortar will still be with us in ten years’ time, but that that CX option will exist alongside plenty more options, like gig CX or remote work. Those choices will also extend to the agents, who will be considering contact centers alongside much more flexible ways to work.
The panel talked about how COVID-19 has only accelerated the changes we’re seeing to the work landscape, and how the scale of the global changes that have happened have moved the world of work on by five years in just 12 months.
2020 saw many employers get past the issues they had had up until now with remote working and security, and that’s bound to have implications for the geography of where people work in the future as much as how they work, with more businesses setting up away from cities.
The increasing abundance and complexity of technology in each of our daily lives means we need a different landscape of support, one that can help us navigate the numerous devices and apps we use to run our lives.
The panel spoke about how the open talent model can help to break the cycle of low wages that have traditionally been associated with call center roles, by stripping out a lot of the costs associated with brick and mortar companies, instead being able to pay a new generation of domain expert CX agents (what we at 5CA call our ‘fans of brands’) much better.
The panel talked about how access to open talent can be wrongly painted as a negative for employees, mentioning the recent court case featuring Uber. All the evidence shows that it creates more opportunities for workers to work when, where and how they choose to work.
Companies have been outsourcing jobs for years, after all. They make a strategic choice when deciding where they want their CX to be based. The point was also made that flexibility to choose when and where to work can only be a good thing, particularly in beginning to address the disproportionate amount of job losses the pandemic has brought for women in 2020. It also opens up more opportunities for people who can’t necessarily commit to office jobs and the required commutes.
Aside from having the capacity that means it’s much easier to scale up CX support at speed, it’s the faster speed-to-competence that makes such a difference, because so many gig and remote workers are already domain experts in the product or service they’re being hired for, like our fans of brands.
If you want to talk about how your business will source its CX support in the future, get in touch with us.
