leading thoughts / sep 2012 Are You Headed Toward a Perfect Storm? Empowered customers and rapidly expanding access channels are on a collision course with contact centers that are unprepared to meet new demands. By Marilyn Saulnier, Interactive Intelligence Pipeline Articles www.contactcenterpipeline.com
Marilyn Saulnier Interactive Intelligence Many organizations are headed toward a perfect storm. Empowered customers with increasing demands, expanding access channels and diverse preferences for communication are all converging upon contact centers that are unprepared to meet the demands of a new era. The good news is that companies are investing in upgrading technology and infrastructure. The bad news is corporate leaders are not addressing the growing gap between emerging technologies and the contact center s capacity to meet the challenges in supporting complex new communication channels. More sophisticated technology and tools do not automatically equate to a good customer experience. Rather, it can simply mean that a company has more sophisticated ways to disservice customers and damage the brand image. Being Easy to Do Business with in a Complex Environment Someday technology may have enough artificial intelligence that humans are no longer essential to the actual managing of the contact center. But that day is not today. Today, we must have effective processes, sound methodologies and incorporate best practices to achieve desired results from technology. I recently got into a healthy discussion with colleagues I ve known and respected in the contact center industry for many years. We were discussing how the advances in technology are having a significant impact on contact centers, and how they must adjust to the changing customer access channel preferences. Those of us who have been around for a while remember when adding email as an access channel rocked our world. We had figured out how to precisely manage inbound calls we could forecast accurately and staff efficiently down to each half-hour interval, and we were consistently meeting our service level goals. And then, a curve ball email. How many emails will we get? Why will customers email us vs. calling? What will it do to the inbound call volume? What skillsets are required? Will we have to hire and train differently? What should our response time be, and how do we measure it? Fast forward to the present and, if you haven t already, you soon will be challenged with adding new access channels to the mix: Webchat SMS text Social media C/S mobile apps Video All very cool technology, and all part of our changing ways of communicating. Customers typically want to do business with us through some combination of these channels, not just one exclusively. And, repeat, AND, they expect you to provide a seamless customer experience through whichever channel(s) they choose. The bottom line is, you must be easy to do business with across all access channels if you expect to earn their loyalty. If your customers continually wait endlessly in queue, deal with poorly trained agents who are unable to resolve their issue(s), receive no response or poor response from emails, etc., they will take their business elsewhere. In fact, these days you re lucky if that s all they do. You could also find yourself the focus of a very entertaining (and brand-damaging) YouTube video, and/or find that a frustrated customer has launched a website called ihate<yourcompanyname>.com. 2
Contact center unprepared for demands of new era Expanding customer access channels Demanding, empowered customers Reevaluate Contact Center Performance Objectives We re noticing alarming trends in contact centers that clearly illustrate the need for many operations to hit the reset button and reevaluate their performance and objectives. The following are a few examples from my You re Doing What?!? file of practices that will likely result in serious customer backlash: Misuse of ACD Features ACD features designed for the exceptions (unforeseen spikes in call volume) become the normal customer experience: Calls routinely routed to untrained/unskilled agents just to get the call answered and meet service level little or no attention paid to the poor quality of the interaction, percentage of calls transferred or the experience of the customer. Offering a callback when wait times are high. The customer hangs up but maintains their place in queue and receives a call back when it is their turn. Customers really want you to answer when they call you. Offering scheduled callbacks after X seconds in queue. Contact center provides timeframes when scheduled callbacks can occur. Again, customers would really prefer you to just answer when they call you. No forecasting and planning of the workload How do you know how to staff if you don t know your workload? Poorly designed and implemented Quality Program The quality program is poorly designed and isn t implemented because there are always too many calls in queue to take people off the phones. Supervisors are on the phones most of the time, so they don t have time to monitor or coach anyway. 3
Expanding Customer Access Channels Contact centers are getting increasingly complex as communication preferences increase in number and sophistication. Many contact centers are steeped in the old ways of managing and must restructure to meet customer expectations and support corporate objectives. Leadership must recognize widening gaps in service delivery and address them as a priority. Contact centers need to build a strategy for supporting new ways customers are communicating: Phone Email Webchat SMS text Social media C/S mobile apps Video Fax Postal mail Meeting SL Goals Takes Priority over Service Quality Customer-impacting processes are put in place to ensure that service levels are achieved: Untrained, unskilled agents are routinely part of the skill group to ensure appropriate staffing Calls are disconnected while in queue when service level thresholds are exceeded Calls are blocked from entering the queue Service level is manipulated by manually removing a call from queue and placing it back in queue All of these practices fail to acknowledge two fundamental truths: 1. Customers expect you to be available when it is convenient for THEM to contact you. Not when it s convenient for YOU to contact them. That s the deal you make with customers. 2. If you are consistently too busy to handle inbound traffic, then you re too busy to make callbacks. It s common in this scenario for a single inbound call to morph into multiple calls, emails, chats, social media, etc. Everyone s busy these days. When you call customers back, they are probably on another call, in a meeting, dropping the kids at school, cutting the grass, etc. The most efficient thing you can do is handle the call when it arrives. Remember, you serve at the pleasure of your customers. If you are not easy to do business with, you will risk losing your customers. In this age of empowered, Internet- and social media-savvy customers, the world will hear about your customers experience. Guaranteed. It s that simple. Meet your customers expectations or be prepared for major damage control. It s much easier to do it right the first time. 4
It Starts with You: 10 Actions for Contact Center Leaders I ve met many people throughout my career who were very demanding as customers. They expected stellar service and would settle for nothing less. When they walked into their offices each day, they became the provider instead of the customer yet, they felt no responsibility to provide the very service that they themselves demanded. To ensure that your contact center doesn t fall into this rut, consider the following 10 practices for effective contact center leadership: 1. Look in the mirror. Are you committed to do the right thing for your customer? 2. Review your mission. Is it still relevant? Do you continually identify the gaps and take action to close them? Is the contact center aligned to the mission? 3. Review the contact center s plans. Does the contact center develop long-term (oneto two-year) plans? Are they based on collaboration with senior managements future plans? Sales and Marketing? IT strategic plans? What new customer access channels will you support? Do you conduct what if planning? 4. Do you have effective measures of success in place? KPIs? Are the metrics driving the right behaviors vs. something from my You re Doing What?!? file? 5. Do you hire and train the right number of agents to handle call types? Eighty percent to 90% of the time, calls should go to an agent who is skilled to handle the transaction to completion without transferring or putting the customer on hold. Customers hate being transferred and being put on hold. 6. Do you have a culture of FCR (first-contact resolution)? Do you have effective processes, policies, procedures, empowered agents and efficient systems that support the contact center s ability to resolve the customer s issue on the first contact? 7. Do you scrutinize every activity, task and decision against the mission? If it does not support the mission, it s out. Done. No further discussion. 8. Is there accountability at all levels? Do your reports have integrity and are they actionable? Does everyone clearly understand their roles, responsibilities and measures of success? Do you hold employees accountable for performance? Do have a track record of not tolerating poor performers? Do you effectively performance manage your people and move them out if performance does not reach acceptable levels? 5
9. Does your organization capitalize on the contact center value? Do you share customer and business intelligence across the organization? 10. Have you spent a day immersing yourself in the contact center? Do you make it a practice to spend at least one to three hours per month in the contact center listening to customer calls, observing efficiency of agent desktop tools, and conducting agent focus groups? You will be amazed what you will learn about your company and your customers. If you haven t answered yes to all these questions, then you have a to-do list! As you work through your list keep in mind two things: 1) Always keep the customer s perspective top of mind; and 2) a poor-performing contact center is putting your business is risk. Marilyn Saulnier is Principal Consultant, Contact Center Solutions Consulting, at Interactive Intelligence. marilyn.saulnier@inin.com (317) 493-4028 6
About Contact Center Pipeline Contact Center Pipeline is a monthly instructional journal focused on driving business success through effective contact center direction and decisions. Each issue contains informative articles, case studies, best practices, research and coverage of trends that impact the customer experience. Our writers and contributors are well-known industry experts with a unique understanding of how to optimize resources and maximize the value the organization provides to its customers. To learn more, visit: www.contactcenterpipeline.com Online Resource This issue is available online at: Sep 2012, Contact Center Pipeline http://www.contactcenterpipeline.com/ccpviewindex.aspx?pubtype=2 Pipeline Publishing Group, Inc. PO Box 3467, Annapolis, MD 21403 (443) 909-6951 info@contactcenterpipeline.com 7