Top 10 Ways To Improve Contact Centre Performance And Enable Proactive Customer Care

Top 10 Ways To Improve Contact Centre Performance And Enable Proactive Customer Care

Contact Centres can become victims of their own success. Good customer service and the ability to quickly and effectively answer customer enquiries leads to ever increasing call volumes and an ever increasing diversity in the type of enquiries received. This can quickly become a vicious circle increased call volumes affects the contact centre s ability to quickly respond to customers. The increasingly diverse range of enquires results in longer call durations and many enquiries not being resolved during the first interaction. This also puts a strain on limited resources which then contributes to the pressure of being able to quickly respond to customer enquiries. We all long for stability, but in the world of the contact centre, continual change is not only a good thing, but it is crucial in order to continually improve productivity, reducing wait times, abandoned calls, call durations and driving up first call resolutions. Whether you are a large, long established contact centre, or a small department-based, informal contact centre, we believe there are a number of areas you need to focus on in order to improve and optimise performance and to enable proactive customer interactions here are just ten. 1. SEAMLESS CHANNEL CHOICE Unfortunately, customers do not either use email, the web, SMS or the telephone to interact with us; they are likely to use a combination. (ie. A call that is chased up with an email, a web session that is followed-up by a call.) Many contact centres make the mistake of segmenting their channels, having one function dealing with email, one function dealing with web chat or enquiries, etc. The result of this is a fragmented and inefficient customer experience. Customers want to embrace multi-channel/multi-media more than we often think they do and to the contact centre this should not be an overwhelming challenge we aim to divide and conquer, but an opportunity we leverage to reduce cost per transaction, expand customer choice and improve the customer experience. Don t silo your contact centre by media ensure you have a single service that can operate across any media. Don t deploy point solutions to address each media as this will in itself cause fragmentation, and also be wary of single vendor solutions that have been created through acquisition; many of these integrate far better in PowerPoint than they do operationally. To provide seamless channel choice to customers and gain the productivity benefits from this, you need a single contact centre platform that natively supports true multi-media interaction a call that can be followed-up by an email with a click, an email referring to a call that can be linked and dealt with holistically, and a consistent quality service that is delivered to the customer every time regardless of media. 2. BEST AGENT EVERY TIME Just think of the impact if every time a customer called they were routed to the expert in the subject matter of their enquiry. This would generate a reduction in both call duration and repeat calls as the expert is far more likely to answer the customer enquiry quickly and effectively and there would most definitely be an improvement in customer satisfaction. Skill-based routing is not new; in many contact centre platforms you are able to define which agents have which skills and as such associate specific campaigns/queues to those agents. Where this falls down is in two areas; firstly in many systems it is only possible to indicate if an agent has a skill or not and as such there is no distinction between the agent who is fresh out of training and the agent with 10+ years of experience. Secondly, when you have to manage agent skills over multiple systems to cater for different media it becomes complex to maintain accurate and consistent skill mapping. Contact centres should not underestimate the importance and the significant benefits that can be gained from having effective skill-based routing in place. However, we believe that three factors are key in driving the impact of skill-based routing on the performance of the contact centre: (i) Grading of Skills a single flag indicating whether the agent has a skill or not does not help in attempting to route to the best agent; it needs to be a graduating scale to be effective. (ii) Media Competence the agent s skill in each of the different media types needs to be taken into consideration; a subject matter expert with poor or no email skills may not be the best agent to use. (iii) Ease of Use if the way you define and manage agent skills is complex, then supervisors will not only be reluctant, but will not have the time to keep this maintained and skill-based routing that utilises out-of-date information is not effective.

3. OUTBOUND PRODUCTIVITY If you are making outbound calls in any part of your contact centre, then this is most definitely an area where you could achieve significant productivity gains from automation. Manual dialling and even basic click-to-call automation is highly inefficient, with time required to setup the call, time spent listening to unanswered ringtones and inherent dialling errors. Productivity gains from automating outbound calling can be as much as 400% and even very basic automation can achieve double digit performance improvements. Bad press, confusing and contradictory claims, and expensive and complex solutions have led to some organisations avoiding all but basic outbound automation, however given the significant productivity gains, this could be throwing the baby out with the bath water. It is not the principles of automated outbound dialling that are at fault but the manner in which they are normally implemented. It is essential that contact centres find a solution and approach that works for them and their customers. What will make this possible for organisations is flexibility, integration and ease of administration. Traditional hardware diallers have taken an all or nothing approach, driving all activity through predictive dialling. We do not believe this is the right approach as one size seldom fits all. Different campaigns to different audiences requires different types of dialling and contact centres need a dialling solution that supports multiple modes of automation per campaign, team or even agent at the same time. To make the best use of this flexibility requires an outbound solution that is not only simple and intuitive to use, but also looks, feels and acts like an integral part of your overall contact centre platform. 4. BEST PRACTICE/BEST PROCESS There is always a right way and a not so right way of doing anything and when it comes to dealing with customer enquiries in the contact centre this is particularly true. The difference between the right way and the not so right way can be just a few seconds added to the call duration and an OK, not exceptional customer experience. However, it can also be a few minutes on the call duration, result in a repeat call, and contribute to customer churn. The efficiency of the contact centre is directly driven by how optimal the call flow is (the process), and with all processes there are always cases of inefficiencies, bottlenecks and even breakages. The highly effective contact centre takes the best practice of their best agent and replicates this across all of their agents. Placing structure on every interaction and guiding the agent through the most optimum process will deliver improved productivity. In a similar way, guiding and prompting agents to use best practice will make each call more effective, increasing sales and/or improving customer satisfaction. Intelligent scripts delivered through the agent desktop is the most effective way of guiding agents through an optimum process for each call type and prompting them with best practices to better serve the customer. Key to making this work is flexibility and once again, integration. The intelligent scripts do not replace your existing systems and as such need to seamlessly integrate into both the data and functionality that is required. The ability to rapidly develop scripts and then to adapt and refine these easily is a must in order for them to deliver the maximum benefit. 5. SINGLE VIEW OF THE CUSTOMER How many times do you hear the apology from the contact centre agent that systems are running slow? In a lot of instances it is not a case that the system is running slow, but the fact that the agent has to navigate many systems and many screens in order to get to the information they need or find the fields in to which they have to input data. Every time that an agent has to change screen, wait for the system to respond, or have to rekey data into multiple systems/screens adds to the duration of the call and wastes both the agent s and the customer s time. It is essential that agents have the right tools to be effective. When interacting with customers, they need to be focused on the customer and not how they navigate the multitude of systems and screens on their desktop. They need to enter and access data in a manner that supports their conversation with the customer which is very seldom the way that traditional back-office systems are structured.

Putting in place a unified agent desktop that is focused on how the contact centre agent works will have a significant impact on the agent s performance and the customer experience. By providing a single view of the customer and having the unified agent desktop be responsible for pulling and posting information into your other systems not only reduces the number of systems and screens required to be accessed, it also eliminates rekeying and reduces mistakes. 6. AGENT MONITORING Agent monitoring is often thought of as call recording focused on capturing calls into and out of the contact centre and making these available for future playback either for agent quality monitoring or for compliance purposes. Agent monitoring should be much more than this. First the contact centre is no longer focused solely on calls; there are many interactions that take place that do not have a voice to record, yet are still customer interactions that need to be captured. Secondly, it should not just be about capturing interactions for future playback; it should also provide the ability to monitor and assist agents in real-time. It should be possible to monitor how an agent is interacting with a potential customer over a web chat session, in a similar manner to live monitoring a call. If the agent is struggling, in the same way as a supervisor can whisper or intrude on a call, they should be able to do the equivalent over the other media. Agent monitoring provides the fundamental ability for supervisors and contact centre managers to manage and where necessary, coach agents. It should be a baseline capability of your contact centre platform and enable you to capture all interactions regardless of media including screen capture. It should allow you to record in the traditional way for both quality and performance management, but should also enable you to monitor and intrude in real-time. And for organisations with remote or home-based agents, then agent monitoring should go even further and leverage webcam technology to provide a real-time video feed of agents to their supervisors, ensuring they are operating in the right environment. 7. OPERATIONAL INSIGHT There is a well-established saying that you cannot manage what you do not measure and this is never so true than in the contact centre environment. Understanding the detail of your contact centre operation is essential in knowing how to drive productivity, improve agent performance and deliver on your promises to customers. It is no longer sufficient to drive your contact centre solely on call-related statistics. Whereas call volumes, average call duration and wait times are still important contact centre managers need far greater insight into who is contacting them, which media they are using, what is the mix or flow across the different media, why customers are calling and how well their operation is meeting customer expectation. As with providing customers with seamless channel choice and providing agents with a single view of the customer, the same is required in terms of operation insight. Fragmented reporting by channel can be very dangerous. For example, a report on web usage can appear encouraging in terms of migrating avoidable calls out of the contact centre onto the web, however, if call volumes are still growing, then this may indicate that once customers have been to the website and failed to get the information they wanted, they call the contact centre. To manage a proactive, multi-media contact centre, managers require a holistic view that not only includes all channels, but can track and report on an end-to-end customer interaction. Equally as important as this is flexibility. It is very easy to get caught in information overload where you have so many reports, saying so much it is difficult to see the wood for the trees. Contact centre managers and supervisors need the ability to monitor and report on what is important to them and to quickly and intuitively create user-definable reports and views that are relevant to them. What is also key is the ability to drill down on such insight, either by drilling down on specific examples and playing back the recorded interaction, or making a quick change to a script to collect an additional piece of information on why a particular trend is occurring. It is vital that organisations recognise that it is not possible on day one to define all of the information that they need to report on; the contact centre is a dynamic environment and managers need flexibility in the insight that can be gained.

8. CONTINUAL ALIGNMENT & REFINEMENT Insight is pointless unless an organisation is able to quickly adapt to the trends and changes that have been identified. As stated in the opening page of this document, within contact centres, change is actually a good thing; ensuring flexibility and continuous improvement is essential. However, a high proportion of contact centres work at sub-optimum performance because they are restricted/restrained by the systems they have in place; lack of flexibility in the way interactions can be routed or agents blended, limitations in the type of automated dialling that can be used and lack of integration of systems making some things just impossible. It is also not just a case of whether the systems you have in place allow for you to make fundamental changes in the way they work, but it is how easy it is to make such changes. If it is difficult to adjust agent skills, change call priorities, adjust scripts and modify reports, then this flexibility is pointless as it will be seldom used. The best advice that can be given is never to stand still. The needs of your customers, skills of your agents and market conditions continually change; to maintain your performance you need to continually adapt your systems and processes to ensure alignment. Every time you identify a potential issue with a process or see a best practice that needs to become standard, then it is possible to improve performance by aligning your systems. Having a single, intuitive administration and supervisory interface into your contact centre platform is key in operating and responding to the dynamic world which is proactive customer care. 9. SCALABILITY Scalability is not just about the number of agents in your contact centre, although this is very important, it is also about the functionality. Your contact centre at the moment may not be focused on interacting with customers via social media, however, when the time comes that this is important, you do not want to have to swap-out all of your systems and change all of your processes to accommodate. Being able to have a single contact centre platform that enables you to phase which functionality you use and pay for over time provides essential scalability and enables you to align systems to need and cost to performance. The same is true in terms of number of agents; you need the reassurance that you are not going to grow out of your contact centre platform and if anything, you are going to achieve greater economies of scale as you grow. When selecting a contact centre platform it is essential you make sure that it has the scalability that you require both in terms of users and functionality. It is impossible to completely future-proof your system but you need to take a two, three and five year view of where your contact centre is going and ensure that your chosen platform can grow with you. It is also worth looking at flexibility in terms of deployment; a multi-tenanted system can often prove more effective if you are looking to gain economies of a single platform that can serve many companies and/or departments autonomously. A hosted or virtualised solution can also provide great benefits in being able to serve multiple geographically- dispersed contact centres either independently or as a virtualised service. 10. LOW TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP All of the above recommendations fail to be feasible if the costs of deploying or managing the technology outweigh the benefits that can be delivered. The more you spend on your technology platform the less you are able to spend on staff and training, and as such it is a careful balancing exercise that needs to be right. The best piece of advice is to fully understand all of the costs associated with your contact centre platform not only during initial implementation, but on-going. For example, ask yourself the following questions: how long with the implementation cycle be? What are both the internal and external costs of this? Will there be any additional costs to fill any gaps? What is the cost of ongoing management? What can be changed in the contact centre? What help is required from your IT department and what external help is required? A common mistake is for a contact centres to only understand some of the costs and not the total cost of ownership. Key factors that you should be looking to achieve in order to reduce the TCO of your contact centre infrastructure are reducing hardware both in terms of number of servers and carbon footprint, rapid deployment cycles reducing both external and internal costs, on-going simplicity of management and burden on IT, and the ability to tailor and configure within department.

SUMMARY As we continue to operate in uncertain economic times, contact centres are under continuous pressure to control or even cut costs while facing increasing demands from their customers both in terms of volume and the diversity of enquires they are expected to deal with. In essence, today s contact centre is expected to do more with less - take more calls, develop multi-channel communication and deliver proactive customer contact - all with less resources and shrinking budgets. The obvious approach is to halt investment with a freeze on all capital expenditure. Unfortunately, while enabling organisations to retain their cash, this does not help address the need to control or reduce operating expenditure and worse still, it forces contact centres to stand still while everything around them including customers are progressing. It is therefore essential that contact centres respond to pressures by looking for innovative ways to increase performance and deliver a more cost-effective service. Focusing on the areas highlighted in this white paper have proven to be effective, enabling more to be achieved with the same number of agents, reducing the cost of each interaction and turning reactive customer engagement into profitable, proactive interaction. ABOUT VOCALCOM For almost two decades, Vocalcom has been helping clients to maximise proactive customer contact through their innovative contact centre application suite. Founded in 1995, Vocalcom is a privately owned global company that has consistently grown by 20% each year. We are 100% focused on contact centres. We have created a highly competent team that combines contact centre operational management experience with a unique understanding of how to leverage technology to improve performance. Our award-winning and market-leading contact centre application is developed in both Europe and North America, helping us to create a truly world-class solution that is focused on and reflected by local requirements. Our goal is the constant improvement of our contact centre application suite that enables organisations to transform the way they interact with their customers our ability to do this is proven by the fact that Vocalcom is being used by over 600,000 agents within 4,500 organisations across 40+ countries. Vocalcom UK Limited 40 Occam Road Guildford Surrey GU2 7YG