#211 Goodbye 2024 - Hello 2025

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to another episode of Get Out of Wrap. Episode 211. What a year, what a year. Believe it or not, tomorrow, New Year's Day for 2025, I would have been self-employed for two years. I'm still here. It has been a very tough year, for sure. But a year where I've probably learned more than I've ever learned before.

[00:00:28] And I'm hoping that 2025 will be the year I can put that into practice. The things that I've learned, sometimes very, very painful lessons. But as always, I'm very, very lucky to be supported by a lot of people. Maybe you that are listening, you've helped me at some point this year. Even with just an encouraging word because being a solo business owner in our industry is tough.

[00:00:57] So anyone else that's out there doing it, you know who you are. More power to you. But I just thought it would be a good chance to reflect on some of the things from this year. If we take this podcast, for example, as I said, we're 211 episodes started in May 2019. Still going.

[00:01:19] I think our content has evolved. You know, we've got we've had so many different industries. It's a horrible term, but it's the best one. Thought leaders that have come on offering practical advice.

[00:01:32] Everyone always gives engaging personal stories. And I'm hoping that it's kept you guys informed, entertained and inspired.

[00:01:42] The podcast has grown significantly through. You are one of thousands. Now we're listened to in over 100 countries, which still blows my mind.

[00:01:54] 70% is still in the UK, 10% in the US, which is great. And then the other 99 countries, you know, it's it's their small percentages.

[00:02:12] Thank you very much. Please do get in touch. I'd love to know why. Why did you listen to this?

[00:02:19] We've introduced loads of new concepts and talked about all of the key things in the industry.

[00:02:25] You can't go anywhere these days without hearing about AI.

[00:02:28] But we've talked about the practical implications of that and the extent to which is it really as prevalent as as people think.

[00:02:36] Probably not. Maybe your contact center still very much has a Frankenstack set up where you've got cobbled together bits of technology.

[00:02:46] And perhaps you're still using Excel a lot. You're not alone.

[00:02:52] You know, the latest stats show that 50% of people, 50% of contact centers are still recording their QA results, for example, in Excel.

[00:03:04] So it's very easy, isn't it? Where all you read is about groundbreaking technology, which is great.

[00:03:12] But you might feel like you're being left behind. You're not alone. You are not alone.

[00:03:17] And if it's still working for you, then, you know, happy days.

[00:03:21] I think in our industry, we're very creative. We always make do.

[00:03:25] And that's not going to change.

[00:03:28] I think from my point of view, the podcast, you know, there's been more interactions, more feedback, more episode discussions.

[00:03:36] And when you hear about real world applications of some of the things that the guests have come on to share,

[00:03:43] that that's what makes it worth it for me.

[00:03:45] I would love to keep evolving the podcast in 2025.

[00:03:51] And that will mean maybe shorter episodes, maybe more, you know, updates where I just record in the moment.

[00:04:00] If something catches my interest, I'd like to get some sort of regular guests on now and again,

[00:04:05] so you don't just get to hear from me.

[00:04:09] Because it's never actually been about me.

[00:04:12] All I wanted to do was share the stories from great people that I was meeting when I was employed.

[00:04:17] And that's really been the theme all the way through.

[00:04:22] On the Get Out A Wrap LinkedIn page, I'll be sharing some more behind-the-scenes stuff,

[00:04:28] you know, how I set up and what's important in the podcast.

[00:04:31] And as always, if you ever want to come on to talk about any subject, you know, it's not just contact centres.

[00:04:41] It's the people in them and the stories and experiences they have and their passions.

[00:04:46] And maybe you'd like to come on.

[00:04:49] All you've got to do is drop me a note on LinkedIn or email me.

[00:04:52] And that's martin at getoutarap.com.

[00:04:55] And we will get it arranged.

[00:04:59] Please be patient.

[00:05:00] Like I said, it is just me.

[00:05:02] And we've got a fair few lined up.

[00:05:05] But let's get you on the list.

[00:05:08] Of course, Get Out A Wrap, this podcast spawned Get Out A Wrap TV.

[00:05:12] So that's been pretty much every Tuesday morning on LinkedIn.

[00:05:18] LinkedIn Live.

[00:05:20] It's very much live.

[00:05:22] And you can tell.

[00:05:23] I've really enjoyed that.

[00:05:25] It's been a highlight of the week.

[00:05:27] 89 episodes we've done.

[00:05:29] And, you know, for something that happens during the working day at 10 o'clock most Tuesdays to get 50-odd people coming in and chatting and engaging.

[00:05:40] We've grown a real community there.

[00:05:44] But it's a welcoming one.

[00:05:45] So if you've never joined one of the shows, everyone's going to welcome you.

[00:05:51] And also, it's a great way to expand your network of people within the industry.

[00:05:56] But we've covered loads and loads of topics.

[00:05:59] And throughout the year, I've had partners who've enabled me to do that.

[00:06:03] A special shout-out to Better Outsourcing and The Forum, who I'll be working with going into 2025, who've been so, so helpful.

[00:06:14] But equally, there's been some other partners who, whilst I might not be working with them on Get Out A Wrap TV, have been really, really helpful this year.

[00:06:25] And that's One Calm, DDC, Outsourcing and EvaluAgent.

[00:06:30] So thank you guys.

[00:06:32] We've worked together and done some really, really interesting stuff.

[00:06:36] That show, so if it happens on a Tuesday at 10 to 11, it normally is about an hour.

[00:06:44] Because then Hugo starts disrupting me for his walk.

[00:06:48] Second walk, that is.

[00:06:49] By the end of the Tuesday, that video's been watched over 250 times.

[00:06:55] By the end of the week, it's well over 500 views.

[00:07:00] And I think that just goes to show the appetite for us talking about our industry and showing up as normal people.

[00:07:10] Rather than people stood on stage talking about things you can't understand.

[00:07:17] It's also been nice to see new podcasts and new people on making use of LinkedIn Live.

[00:07:25] I'm all for collaborative competition.

[00:07:29] When I first started this, this podcast was the very first UK-based podcast about contact centres.

[00:07:37] Now there's loads, and that's great.

[00:07:38] And I always thought, I can remember looking for UK podcasts about contact centres.

[00:07:45] Couldn't find one, so set this up.

[00:07:47] But whilst I was looking, there were loads and loads of podcasts about recruitment.

[00:07:52] And I thought, if recruitment, and I'm not dismissing the recruitment industry at all,

[00:07:59] but just as a comparison, if the recruitment industry had that many podcasts, why haven't we?

[00:08:04] So it's genuinely great to see all of these new podcasts coming out.

[00:08:11] And many I've helped just by sharing some of the mistakes I've made, some of the ones you've heard probably.

[00:08:17] If it, the more the merrier is what I would say.

[00:08:21] I think one of the other things this year that I've really enjoyed doing, which was a first for me,

[00:08:27] I've never done anything like this before, was we did some extensive research with Calabrio.

[00:08:33] So Rachel Arnold, who I worked with, and I worked with Rachel, must have been every day for well over a month.

[00:08:41] And then latterly, Ed Creasy, who is just awesome, who brought a level of insight to the research that I never could.

[00:08:51] He's awesome.

[00:08:52] But we went out to 520 agents, 12 plus contact centres across Europe, predominantly the UK,

[00:09:04] and asked them to complete a survey.

[00:09:08] I think it was 30 plus questions, but it covered every aspect of their work in life.

[00:09:16] And that was a real buzz to see all of those results come in.

[00:09:20] You can access the full research from Calabrio, or you can contact me and I'm happy.

[00:09:27] I'll be happy to share it.

[00:09:30] And that was something I'm very proud of this year, that we did a piece of work like that,

[00:09:35] that has got so many implications.

[00:09:38] You know, it's got so much actionable insight.

[00:09:43] Get a copy, have a look at it, maybe compare it with your own team.

[00:09:49] I said agents, that's this voice of the agent research.

[00:09:53] That's a term I think we need to update.

[00:09:56] It's, I think it's associated, it kind of demeans the role a little bit,

[00:10:01] but for the purposes of not having a more readily available phrase, let's just use agent.

[00:10:08] There were some headline stats in there.

[00:10:10] The one that will stick with me for a while will be the most positive headline

[00:10:16] that gives us a lot of hope, I think, going forward.

[00:10:19] And that was 64% of the agents that we surveyed said they were proud to work in the industry.

[00:10:27] And I think about when I started on the phones, I would tell people, so I was working as an outsourcer,

[00:10:34] and a lot of our clients were financial services.

[00:10:37] I would name, I would say I work in financial services.

[00:10:40] I would not say I worked in a call or contact centre.

[00:10:44] So to hear that people are proud, you know, the vast majority are proud to say they work in the industry is brilliant.

[00:10:53] What that means, of course, is that we have to make sure that these people that are proud,

[00:10:59] happy stay in the industry because they are our future leaders.

[00:11:03] And then there were a couple of other things in the research that just were pointers to what we might need to do a bit better.

[00:11:12] So too many of those people we surveyed didn't have career progression plans

[00:11:19] and didn't know what was available to them in terms of having a great career.

[00:11:25] You know, I think one of the things that's always stood out in our industry is if you go into any contact centre,

[00:11:32] bricks and mortar or hybrid or whatever, and look around the support functions and management positions,

[00:11:40] a high percentage of those would have started on the phones.

[00:11:43] And those are the things that we need to be talking about to people even before they've joined the contact centre.

[00:11:51] We should be showing them what's possible.

[00:11:53] They might just want to stay as an agent.

[00:11:55] That's absolutely fine.

[00:11:56] But I think most will orientate towards something that they're interested in, comfortable with,

[00:12:04] and whether that's finance, scheduling, HR, training, operational management.

[00:12:11] They've got so many different options.

[00:12:13] We need to start talking to them regularly and early about that.

[00:12:19] I think the other thing that I came across was there's a wide variety of cadences around meeting up with your line manager

[00:12:30] to talk about your performance.

[00:12:32] Performance management doesn't need, it shouldn't be something that's fearful or negative.

[00:12:38] It should just be normal.

[00:12:39] You know, if you come and do a quarterly one-to-one,

[00:12:43] and that's the first time someone's talked about their performance,

[00:12:46] no wonder it's going to be fearful.

[00:12:48] But if you're talking about the aspects of their work that are important most days,

[00:12:54] then that time when you do come together, whether it's monthly or quarterly,

[00:12:59] to have a review, you can use that time really effectively to talk about careers,

[00:13:04] to talk about things that are a bit deeper than let's talk about your average handle time

[00:13:09] or whatever it may be.

[00:13:11] So there was a wide variety of regularity with which people met up with line managers.

[00:13:18] One of the other key standouts was the lack of social events.

[00:13:24] So perhaps that is related to the nature of where we are right now with hybrid workforce.

[00:13:31] Of course, it is more of a challenge, but there was a big percentage of those that we surveyed

[00:13:38] who didn't have regular social events, couldn't remember the last time they had one.

[00:13:44] And I think those are the things that create connections over and above,

[00:13:50] this is just my job.

[00:13:51] This is a people-based industry.

[00:13:55] Shared experiences are massive for creating that esprit de corps, that team spirit.

[00:14:03] Where you will see that play out is in attrition and absence.

[00:14:07] The more teams are connected, the less absence, the less attrition.

[00:14:11] So we should be doing it for those reasons, but we should anyway.

[00:14:15] It's a great bit of research.

[00:14:17] We'll be doing it again and variations of that throughout 2025.

[00:14:22] So look out for that.

[00:14:25] Of course, the other half of my business is the team leader community,

[00:14:32] which I started in February 2023.

[00:14:35] So February 2025, it'll be up and running two years.

[00:14:42] I'd actually been trialing different platforms with a few guinea pigs prior to that.

[00:14:46] But February 2023 was when it launched with 10 people in the community.

[00:14:54] We now have 450 members across Europe, again, predominantly the UK.

[00:15:01] It's an online community.

[00:15:04] It's separate to LinkedIn.

[00:15:07] There's the team leader community page on LinkedIn.

[00:15:09] That isn't the community.

[00:15:10] It's a desktop-based community, but it also has an app.

[00:15:16] And about 50% of the active users are on the app.

[00:15:22] And it absolutely rocks.

[00:15:24] I love it.

[00:15:25] I'm in every single day.

[00:15:27] Those 450 members, whilst the majority are team leaders,

[00:15:32] we have senior leaders in there, people from support functions.

[00:15:37] It's a nice mix who want to come together and talk about that first vital step in leadership,

[00:15:44] one where you're often thrown in at the deep end.

[00:15:48] You know, the community has grown into an even more robust network of team leaders

[00:15:54] who are sharing challenges, ideas, and successes in a supportive, fun, relaxed environment.

[00:16:01] You know, I think we are on our way to the team leader community becoming a symbol of excellence and connection.

[00:16:08] It's all about community.

[00:16:10] There's been so many different initiatives that have directly improved team leader confidence,

[00:16:16] their skills, their development, their satisfaction in work.

[00:16:20] And there's a real bridge there between strategy and action.

[00:16:24] It's very, very small.

[00:16:27] It's like micro learning, micro coaching in a fun way.

[00:16:32] And we've had some amazing success stories.

[00:16:36] Senior leaders sharing their testimonials has been great.

[00:16:39] But I think even better than that, we've had people who someone came onto the community and said,

[00:16:46] I've got an interview coming up and one of the things they've asked me to do is a 30, 60, 90 day plan.

[00:16:54] And I don't know what that is.

[00:16:56] Within minutes, other members of the community had shared not only templates,

[00:17:02] but templates with example wording with offers of give me a call and we can help

[00:17:07] or do you want to chat to me on the community and I can help.

[00:17:10] And the person who posted that they didn't know what a 30, 60, 90 day plan was,

[00:17:18] then came back on a couple of weeks later to say she'd got the role.

[00:17:22] And we, you know, we all celebrated that, that together.

[00:17:25] So that is awesome.

[00:17:27] If you want to join or you have people within your contact center that want to join,

[00:17:33] it's purposefully low cost because whilst the aim has always been that senior leaders pay for their team leaders to be in it,

[00:17:43] that isn't always the case.

[00:17:46] And there are individuals who still wanted to be members.

[00:17:50] So it's priced at a level that is affordable both to agents and team leaders.

[00:17:56] So again, if this is something you are interested in, it's super, super easy to get involved.

[00:18:02] Just email me martin at get out of rap.com and we will get, we'll get you in.

[00:18:07] You know, I've got big plans for the community.

[00:18:10] We do live streams all the time.

[00:18:12] Think about it's like get out of rap TV, but every other day.

[00:18:17] We are looking to do some in-person events as well in 2025.

[00:18:21] There's gamification competitions.

[00:18:24] There's always giveaways, quizzes, training courses, everything you can think of.

[00:18:29] It's not designed to replace or be your learning and development program for your team leaders.

[00:18:40] It's to complement it.

[00:18:41] It's a place where they can go maybe in their lunch break, maybe on their commute in the evening.

[00:18:47] I was chatting to someone the other day who said it's their third most used app on their phone.

[00:18:54] And that was, that was amazing.

[00:18:56] And that was only from like 20 minutes a day, just looking in the community.

[00:18:59] As I say, I'm, I'm in it all the time.

[00:19:02] I'm up to, I'm adding content across all of the different spaces within the community every single day.

[00:19:09] We're never going to run out of things to talk about or, or share.

[00:19:13] And the community is something that I'm really focused on building in, in 2025.

[00:19:19] And I guess linked to that whilst I launched it inside a very hot dinosaur suit at the expo.

[00:19:27] The key thing I've done in 2024 is the launch of TLX team leader experience.

[00:19:33] My, my, my view is it is through the team leader experience that you can positively influence CX and EX.

[00:19:43] Everyone will say the team leaders are the most important people in the contact center, but we don't ever look at the score or their experience.

[00:19:56] And how, if we positively influence that, they are then better able to influence their agents and therefore customers.

[00:20:05] And, you know, I shared the component parts and how you can influence, uh, TLX.

[00:20:12] And in 2025, I'll be launching a model that will show you how you can, how you can use it, how you can score it, and how I can assist in getting you to a point where you have a world-class team leader population.

[00:20:31] And you will definitely see the results in any customer satisfaction metrics you have, or any employee satisfaction metrics you, you have.

[00:20:41] So it was well worth sweating inside a dinosaur suit at the expo.

[00:20:46] And I've already had people asking me what I'm going to do next year.

[00:20:50] To be honest, I have no, no idea.

[00:20:52] So when it comes to thinking about our industry, I think 2025 is going to be transformative.

[00:21:00] I think we're going to get a handle on the application of AI.

[00:21:06] I'm not going to repeat a lot of what these predictions are.

[00:21:10] I think we all know them.

[00:21:11] They're getting a bit boring now because you want to actually see them in action.

[00:21:16] I'm more interested in how we are using something as exciting as AI to make it easier both for our customers to talk to us and to have their issues resolved, services completed, products delivered, talked about, whatever.

[00:21:33] But equally, that we're using AI to make our customer-facing team members' lives easier.

[00:21:41] That is everyone in the contact center should benefit.

[00:21:46] Because one of those common lines that people say is AI will take all of the transactional elements away from agents and they'll be left with the more complex, emotive issues with customers.

[00:21:59] I can tell you most agents are not looking forward to that.

[00:22:03] If nothing else changes but the transactional contacts are replaced with complex ones, that doesn't sound good.

[00:22:10] That just sounds more taxing, more cognitive load.

[00:22:14] It only works if in this extra time that we are doing more, that we're really thinking about the breaks that we give people, how we're developing them emotionally and preparing them for these challenges and rewarding and recognizing the fact that we're going to ask them to do more.

[00:22:36] I don't know whether it's a good thing.

[00:22:37] I don't know whether it will be stark as is being predicted.

[00:22:42] One thing I do know is despite all of the vast strides in technology, we're still seeing customers frustrated that it's taking too long to talk to us.

[00:22:53] And then when they do, they get bounced around all over the place.

[00:22:56] These challenges have been with us for a long, long time.

[00:23:01] I think we, let's hope in 2025, we actually take a look at the customer journey completely.

[00:23:07] That it isn't siloed, that it is seamless.

[00:23:10] And that number one, we know, don't we, if we can reduce the wait times and deal with people straight away, that's going to have the biggest impact on how people perceive our industry.

[00:23:22] And that will be reflected in customer satisfaction scores.

[00:23:26] I'm very hopeful that we will start seeing a change in that in 2025.

[00:23:33] I think a lot of the developments in technology around kind of multilingual services is going to be fascinating to see that it's going to, again, the onshore offshore debate will change as a result of that.

[00:23:47] I think we've got to be very careful about what we're doing when it comes to that.

[00:23:53] You know, the contact centre industry is predicted to be worth well over £3.2 billion in the UK in 2025.

[00:24:02] Over and above the sort of financial element, I think about all the great things that contact centres do for their local communities.

[00:24:12] Not just through employment, but for everything that is attached to a contact centre.

[00:24:18] Charity work, volunteering, making a positive difference in their communities, all the social elements that come from working within a contact centre.

[00:24:27] That's why we did it, right?

[00:24:30] So, yes, what a year.

[00:24:33] What a year.

[00:24:35] Been close to the edge a few times.

[00:24:38] And those are lessons that I will not forget.

[00:24:41] You have been a support for me through your engagement, even if you've never engaged with me, but you listen to the podcast.

[00:24:49] I can't thank you enough.

[00:24:52] I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful new year and that 2025 is successful for all of us.

[00:25:01] And I will see you for episode 212 shortly.