Business Agility Was The Most Common Discussion At CCW 2024 In Berlin

We posted some photos recently from our team when they were at the CCW conference in Berlin. CCW is one of the most important customer service focused trade conferences in Europe. The event has been running for 26 years now and attracts around 7,400 visitors from 41 countries. This year, over 215 companies were showcasing their customer experience (CX) products at the event.

Our team was speaking at the event and showcasing our services. We talked to people from across the industry and enjoyed hearing about the trends and opportunities described by many of the visitors.

Naturally there were many different discussions taking place, but if we narrow it down to the three most often discussed topics by visitors we met at CCW 2024 then they would be:

• Customer Experience Scalability: companies want to be able to scale up their business operations in an agile way - flexing in new markets and with new products and often they want to be able to test a market, rather than make a multi-year commitment. This has traditionally been difficult with physical contact centers because they need investment and commitment. They need employees and they need a volume of work that matches the size of the operation. Traditional customer service operations focused on a contact center is very difficult to operate in an agile way because it requires both upfront investment, ongoing expense, and a large number of people. It’s a difficult way to run an agile operation.

• Cross-border Expansion: this is much more of an issue in Europe, compared to the US where companies can expand over wide area using the same laws and language. In Europe, as companies expand they need to dramatically increase the number of languages offered to customers - because the sales and customer service process all needs to be in the local language of the customer. The yoummday platform already offers over 40 languages so this is one area where our clients have found it extremely helpful.

• AI: Artificial Intelligence has been top of mind in many industries since OpenAI launched ChatGPT at the end of 2022 and demonstrated that AI-powered chat could be natural and helpful. The immediate question was how to replicate this in the customer service chat environment. What has generally happened in the CX environment is that companies have started using AI internally to improve productivity - for example by giving all customer service agents access to a helpful digital assistant that can advise during calls.

The yoummday solution answers all these issues and we enjoyed sharing information with conference visitors who wanted to build more agile customer service solutions. With yoummday it is possible to build an entire customer service operation in a new country, using a new language, and without any capital investment - you don’t need to open a new business or physical office in that location.

As mentioned, we already operate in over 40 languages, but our model is immediately ready for expansion - we can add any new language to the service as clients require it.

It was interesting to find that the most common discussion in Berlin was around flexibility and business agility. This is probably linked to the uncertain economy around the world at present - there is no single common economic problem, but there is a general lack of confidence which makes executives wary of new investment.

Yoummday really does facilitate a way to test out new markets and services without the need for large capital expenditure so we feel that our service is directly answering one of the most common issues talked about at CCW this year.