If you’re up for it, let’s do a little thought exercise. Sit way back in your chair and envision the following: What will “the contact center of 2030” be like? Have you ever done a visioning exercise like this? Try it. If we did this in a room full of people we’d undoubtedly hear a wide range of visions–everything from elaborate sci-fi fantasy featuring holographic agents (fun, but not realistic) to “uhhhh, I think five years from now it’ll be pretty much the same” (depressing, and thankfully also unrealistic). Hopefully you’re thinking about something you’d like to see in your own future, and envisioning a 5-year business plan for how to get you there.
What Should A 5-Year Business Plan Include?
We’ve been putting some thought into this question: What should you be doing right now to best position yourself for the years ahead (both as an organization, and as a leader whose career will depend on it!). As a result of what we’ve been learning, we’d like to suggest 5 action items that will form a pathway to creating a 5-year plan for businesses to follow. The best part is…you can be making great progress in future-proofing yourself starting right now, because the things we’ll be suggesting are already now helping organizations like yours drive greater value in 2025.
Path #1: Explore How AI Creates Efficiency Without Risk
Any vision of the future has to begin with the reality that AI is always going to play some role in customer interactions. But the scary part has always been the possibility of bots communicating directly with customers and potentially offering incorrect information (or worse!).
That’s why the smartest companies are now focusing on agent-facing AI tools or AI applications in their 5-year plan for businesses that help leaders manage more effectively. This is what’s called “AI for All.” There’s virtually no risk in using bots that aren’t customer-facing, and the efficiency gains are immediately evident. This one’s a no-brainer.
Path #2: Reduce Unnecessary Phone Calls
Can you imagine getting the same number of phone calls in 2030 that you’re getting today? The way most people use the phone these days (as a messaging channel, not for “phone calls”) makes that unlikely, but that doesn’t mean voice interactions are going away entirely.
There are still 15-20% of customer interactions that are best served with a human voice-to-voice interaction (or face-to-face on video). But these no longer need to be conducted by dialing 10-digits and going through an IVR tree. Converting what would have been phone calls into on-screen interactions is now proving to be much more efficient for organizations, and a way better experience for customers. That’s gotta become part of your forward-looking 5-year business plan.
Path #3: Invest in Your Employee Experience (By Providing World-Class Tools)
Like it or not, most call center jobs require employees to work in a “high effort” environment that all too often leads to low job satisfaction, burnout, and high turnover. But what if that wasn’t the case? In a Unified Interaction Management environment, frontline employees are armed with a host of AI-powered tools that make their job a whole lot easier.
New features like Agent Assist GVA, Cortex Intercept, and Interaction Wrap-Up use AI to augment every interaction, which enables agents to focus on the customer. When your people are empowered to do what they do best–connect with other humans–you’re not only improving CX, you’re improving EX (employee experience). That’s not a “by 2030” thing, it’s a 2025 thing.
Path #4: Adopt a More “Playful” Approach to Managing
Think about all the data and information at your disposal. What if you could have a conversation with that data? What if you could ask your data any question you could think of, and get an instant answer with no limit, and no cost-per-inquiry. What would you ask?
Companies that are now implementing Glia’s Quality AnalystGPT are discovering it enables a sense of playful curiosity that has led to some major breakthrough opportunities. You can even just ask: “List the top 5 areas for improvement among all agents across all interactions” and you’ll get at least something you probably wouldn’t have thought of.
You can ask about top issue types, company-wide CX performance, or individual frontline agent performance. In this case, the old axiom “The only limits are the limits of your imagination” happens to be true! It’s time to start thinking of data as part of an interactive game that enables you to play around with a sense of scientific curiosity. That’s where creativity–and breakthroughs–come from, and what fuels a 5-year business plan.
Path #5: Simplify Your Complex Platform/Systems
As you strategize toward the future, your plan should embody one singular characteristic: simpler. When you consider the number of different platforms you’re operating, the number of screens your frontline employees need to toggle between, the number of vendors you need to manage…this complexity isn’t sustainable, so you’re gonna have to do something.
For all the other benefits of Unified Interaction Management and a ChannelLess® platform, one of the most unexpected is how it simplifies your customer interactions, with all forms of voice, digital, and AI incorporated into a single platform. Fewer systems to operate means faster training and increased simplicity for agents, greater control for managers and executives, and a simpler, lower-effort work environment all around.
Partnering with the Glia team means fewer vendors to juggle and more of a relationship (with people you are always happy to interact with). As you push forward in your planning, you should be planning to make your job simpler, not more complex.
Why Make a 5-Year Plan for Businesses?
Thinking about a 5-year plan can be daunting, since there’s rarely enough time to focus on the distant future when you’re so caught up in managing the here-and-now. But planning for the future is crucial to ensure long-term success, so getting started now will make sure your visions of the call center of the future come to reality. If you take some time to think about 5 years down the road, what you want your organization to look like then, it becomes all the more clear what you should be focusing on right now.
If you create a route based on the 5 pathways we’ve been discovering, you will be doing the best of both–making instant improvements today, that will best position you for success in the years ahead.
Get started on your 5-year plan with a demo of the Glia platform: Get in touch with us today.
