1.Simplify
With so many different and often conflicting demands on the contact centre it strikes me that there is often a bias towards complexity in contact centre organisations. Take time out now and then, to group your problems around common themes, or root causes. Ask yourself how can we address a significant part of the problem without new investment?

2.Punches in Bunches
It may seem like an odd metaphor but in boxing you knock the opponent down with a combination of punches, not one “big one”. A lot of executives are looking for one big punch in terms of great customer experience, but actually you have to get all the little experiences in place to even put you in a position to make the final one last. Taking a customer journey perspective on your customer interactions and making sure that all the small steps are optimised means that when you go the extra mile to make a difference, then to now only makes a momentary impact, but also moves the customer satisfaction score. Stop, reflect: are there combinations of actions that, together, could move the customer satisfaction score?

3. Mobile Experience
Customers are not going to wait until they get home or back to the office to “solve that problem”. They pull out there smart phones and they browse. Have you really sat back and reflected on what the next twelve months will bring in terms of mobile interaction? What kinds of decisions do you need to commit to; which can you defer until the future becomes clearer? What scenario’s might emerge and how would you be placed to address them?

4. Cloud Adoption
Technologies don’t usually fail because they don’t work; mostly they fail because people don’t adopt them. You probably don’t have a “technology issue”; you probably do have an “adoption issue”. Why not create a centre of excellence for evaluating, trialling and adopting new cloud based services? It really should not be something you leave to your advisers and outsourcing partners in “isolation”. By developing the in-house capabilities in this area you also become a magnet for innovation.

5. Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better
Samuel Beckett gave the world this line many years ago in one of his final works. The mantra has at its core the belief that to be better, to do something worthwhile, means failing, learning from that, and saying that next time you will have an even better fail. How can you fail better? One is by developing a culture of experiment and then by running these experiments under better and better empirical conditions. Do you have a plan on how you are going to learn to fail better?

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