Negotiating the New Normal

Summary

When lockdowns forced contact centres to empty out overnight, customer experience teams faced an unprecedented operational crisis. Featuring conversations with leaders from Genesys, NTT, and Google Cloud, three-plus-one case studies trace how companies rapidly deployed conversational AI and cloud contact centre technology to keep serving customers through the crisis and turned that disruption into a catalyst for digital transformation.

The case studies span a national government outsourcer managing a surge in citizen calls, a US government agency handling a spike in service requests through virtual assistants, and a retail company forced to enable remote working almost overnight to avoid shutting down operations entirely. Each example examines the technology choices made under pressure and the outcomes that followed, from faster response times to preserved jobs across the business.

Beyond the individual stories, six broader trends are reshaping customer experience and contact centre operations coming out of the pandemic, including the accelerated shift to cloud, the destigmatising of security concerns around remote infrastructure, and the growing legitimacy of virtual agents as a customer-facing interface. Industry leaders close with reflections on how productivity measurement and employee wellness priorities are being permanently redefined.

• Case studies from government and retail sectors on rapid remote deployment
• Six trends reshaping post-pandemic customer experience operations
• Cloud adoption as an enabler of faster, more flexible service delivery