In this series we will look at some useful tips for contact centre management, as seen by our work in the Australian contact centre industry. They are not presented in any particular order.

This article is the fifth of nine articles in the series.

Sell Success

Do other areas of your business know what you do and how well you do it? Really? They know you help customers or sell stuff over the phone, but do they realise how much you sell, or how many customers you help that would otherwise be calling them? I bet they don’t.

If you have a company newsletter – use it. If you don’t, create your own newsletter to tell people about what you do. Not in detail – it won’t be read. Just a few key metrics, examples:

• Did you know that the contact centre made xxx sales totalling $yyy,yyy.yy this month?
• Did you know we helped zzz customers with an average NPS/Customer Satisfaction score of aa?
• Of the bbb calls we received this month, only cc% required escalation to another department for resolution – thus removing a significant amount of work from these departments.

The home page of the company intranet is also a great place to advertise the successes of the contact centre. You can also publish complimentary emails from customers to reinforce the positive customer satisfaction scores.

It is important that contact centres demonstrate their value to all parts of the business – thus generating interest and respect for the valuable work they do.

For more information please email spels@ccaction.com.au or call +61 3 8648 6577.

All previous articles are available on our web site – www.ccaction.com.au

Next article – Celebrate Success

In this series we will look at some useful tips for contact centre management, as seen by our work in the Australian contact centre industry. They are not presented in any particular order.

This article is the fourth of nine articles in the series.

Focus on the Right Metrics

Almost anything in a contact centre can be measured. In fact, metrics in a contact centre can become a cottage industry of their own. All those tables of numbers, statistics, pretty colourful graphs, monthly board reports that run into tens of pages and lots of detail, wallboards with all sorts of displays for all to see. It is all worthwhile, right? I mean – all these numbers show how hard we are working and what great service we are providing, right?

Wrong.

Many people outside the contact centre do not understand contact centre metrics. In fact many contact centre managers don’t understand all the metrics available to them. Or, they understand the metric but not the reason – or how to effect change. For example, there is a wide variance in average talk time between (apparently similar) staff members, but why does this happen? The complex metrics are useful for contact centre manager to identify issues and make changes and improvements that affect the higher level measures that senior staff are usually interested in.

Before you send any more reports out, talk to the recipient of the reports and find out exactly what they want, then provide that and only that. Senior management and boards generally want simplicity and are only interested in 2 or 3 key metrics – value of sales for the month, costs for the month, Net Promoter Score or customer satisfaction score, staff forecasts, and that is about all. All other metrics contribute to these, but are for the contact centre manager to use to achieve these goals. They are too specialised for senior management who usually don’t want reasons, just the impact to the business.

Review and simplify your reporting, cull any reports that aren’t required and save your time and money.

For more information please email spels@ccaction.com.au or call +61 3 8648 6577.

All previous articles are available on our web site – www.ccaction.com.au

Next article – Sell Success will be available mid-January 2016 as we are taking a short break. Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year to all our readers.

In this series we will look at some useful tips for contact centre management, as seen by our work in the Australian contact centre industry. They are not presented in any particular order.

This article is the third of nine articles in the series.

Recruit the Right People

In an effort to keep costs down, contact centres often recruit reactively – they wait for staff to leave before recruiting new staff, by which time it is urgent to get staff on board because customer service is suffering. All too often the focus is quantity, not quality – just get the ‘cheeks on seats’.

This approach usually adds to the attrition problem – the wrong people are put in the wrong job and finish up leaving after a relatively short time. Rushed, or inadequate training will also worsen the problem.

Another approach is to forecast attrition and recruit staff before a vacancy actually exists. This is more expensive in real dollar terms because you are often over-staffed, however it saves the hidden costs that are not always considered. Some examples of hidden costs are:

• The impact to customer service from the time the original staff member resigns to the time they actually leave – they are at work but are effectively “checked out” and not performing to optimum.
• The impact to customer service after the original staff member leaves but before the new staff member is ready to service customers – this includes the recruitment and training period. Remember – you will be down one full staff member during this period.
• The impact to customer service from the time the new staff member starts servicing customers until they are fully productive – they will be constantly learning and becoming more productive during this period.
• The damage to company reputation resulting from these reduced levels of customer service.

Make absolutely no mistake – contact centre work is not easy; despite public opinion it is certainly not ’entry level’. Contact centre staff have to know more about the organisation, its people, products and services than anyone else in the organisation – which is why so many contact centre staff are “poached” into other areas of the business. In addition to this, they need to have the right attitude and approach – they have to get excited about helping people. People ring contact centres because they have a problem – I have never heard anyone ring a contact centre to wish the agent a nice day! Doctors have the same issue – people only go to the doctor when they are sick, but doctors are excited about helping people. It is critical that contact centre staff are genuinely excited about helping people and meeting customers’ needs.

Many contact centres do undertake aptitude tests and psychometric tests of new employees, as well as putting all new staff through “assessment centres” as part of the recruitment process. I also recommend using appropriate testing to define a desirable personality profile based on the traits of your best staff, and testing new staff against these traits to ensure they have the right personality and attitudes (not aptitude) for contact centre work.

Spend more time in the recruitment process, select the right staff, use aptitude testing together with personality profiling and your staff turnover will drop significantly – and so will your costs.

For more information please email spels@ccaction.com.au or call +61 3 8648 6577.

All previous articles are available on our web site – www.ccaction.com.au

Next article – Focus On The Right Metrics.

In this series we will look at some useful tips for contact centre management, as seen by our work in the Australian contact centre industry. They are not presented in any particular order.

This article is the second of nine articles in the series.

Provide Appropriate Training

Training is often focused on induction training – staff are recruited, put into a classroom and/or on the phones with a ‘buddy’ and crammed with as much product and service knowledge as possible. The new staff member is unable to remember everything they have been taught, and are not confident when they are put onto the phones. This results in stress and can contribute to poor staff morale and high turnover.

A better approach is to only teach new staff what they need to know to get on the phones quickly, and allow them to reinforce their learning while they gain experience. Where possible, this should be a single product, a single function or simple tasks – and use the capabilities of the technology to only feed them calls they can handle. As their confidence grows, teach additional products and skills and include those calls in their capabilities. This aids confidence with a corresponding improvement in morale and customer service.

Training doesn’t stop after induction – it is ongoing forever. As new technology (including new phones and CRMs), new products, new services or new processes are introduced or updated, thorough training should be provided to all staff to ensure they are appropriately equipped and confident to handle customer queries.

Staged training as advocated in this article should be complimented by:

• A quality assurance and evaluation program
• A reward and recognition program
• Multiple levels of staff skill to allow recognition and promotion of staff as they achieve a higher skill level
• Frequent feedback and coaching.

Customers expect staff to already know the answers to their questions, not to have to look them up or go and ask someone. It is highly stressful for staff to have a customer on the phone and not know the answer to the question they are being asked.

For more information please email spels@ccaction.com.au or call +61 3 8648 6577.

All previous articles are available on our web site – www.ccaction.com.au \

Next article – Recruit The Right People.

Tips for Successful Contact Centre Management

In this series we will look at some useful tips for contact centre management, as seen by our work in the Australian contact centre industry. They are not presented in any particular order.

This article is the first of nine articles in the series.

Empower Staff

Staff are intelligent – they have to be to work in a contact centre. They come to work each day with the intention of doing a good job and providing a high level of service to their customers. However, in many centres whenever a decision is required they have to refer to a team leader or supervisor for approval – particularly when there is actual money involved. Interestingly this can be as little as a $5 refund to the customer and the cost of obtaining the approval would far outweigh the refund itself.

There are two, equally important issues here – the customer service impact and the staff impact.

The customer service impact is obvious – particularly to the customer. By insisting staff obtain approval, even for small transactions, you are delaying the resolution. Whether you have the customer on hold while you refer to a senior person, or you have to call the customer back later, it is still an unnecessary (for small amounts) inconvenience to the customer. Further, the additional time taken will also add to the queues as staff that could be answering calls are off obtaining approvals.

The staff impact is not so obvious. By insisting staff obtain approval for what seems to be the most menial things, managers are effectively giving staff the impression that they are not trusted. This can have an adverse impact on staff morale and can actually contribute to staff turnover.

Have a look at your operation, understand what the most common issues are and come up with some appropriate boundaries for staff that empowers them to make decisions and take responsibility for their own customers. Actual monetary refunds are one obvious area, but altering standard processes, or rushing approvals or similar could also be included in agent’s delegation authority.

There are three key benefits to this:

• It improves customer service
• It empowers staff, makes them feel valued and improves staff morale
• It reduces workload from team leaders and supervisors, allowing them to focus on tasks where they can really add value.

For more information please email spels@ccaction.com.au or call +61 3 8648 6577.

All previous articles are available on our web site – www.ccaction.com.au

Next article – Provide Appropriate Training.

In this series we discuss the process of acquiring new technology for your contact centre, and provide some suggestions to ensure a successful project.

This article is the fifth in the series.

Implementation

A successful implementation happens when the supplier works closely with the client company as a partnership, not as a vendor/purchaser. The client company also needs to be committed to the project at the highest level, and must have the right resources allocated. This includes a project manager who understands telephony and knows how to deal with the large carriers. The project team should also include someone capable of understanding the business needs and translating them into technical specifications, as well as taking technical capability and understanding its benefit to the company in business terms.

The implementation of a new customer contact system for a contact centre is an opportunity to make significant change to customer service levels. Many companies choose to replicate their current configuration directly in the new system to reduce risk – which is a perfectly valid approach. There is less training required, less testing required and implementation is usually quicker as there is less analysis and design required.

Problem is – once the implementation is complete, very few companies go back and make the changes required to fully leverage the capabilities that the new system provides, which results in a missed opportunity.

The implementation of a customer contact system should not stop at go-live. There needs to be a follow-up phase where the current operation and customer service offering is reviewed with a view to leveraging the capabilities of the new technology. Without this you are in danger of buying a sports car to only do the grocery shopping.

Customer requirements are constantly changing with different service channels and different expectations. Not so long ago, callers hated IVRs & wanted to speak directly to a person – now research shows that callers are much more tolerant of IVRs but expect to get their query resolved at first point of contact.

Technology is also changing, with vendors building in more and more functionality with every upgrade. Technology no longer caters only for voice, it caters for email, chat, social media and a variety of other channels too. Customers expect to be able to transfer from one channel to another at any time and have the entire history of the interaction transfer with them so they don’t need to repeat themselves.

With the constant change in customer expectation and technical capability, the gap between customer, service provided and technology will widen over time – and often over a very short time. There is a need to constantly review all aspects of the contact centre and make changes to ensure that this gap remains small and customers are provided with the service they expect. Reviews of this nature are best undertaken by an external organisation that specialises in this field (such as Contact Centre Action), and has visibility of the industry as a whole.

For more information please email spels@ccaction.com.au or call +61 3 8648 6577

This has been the last article in this series. All previous articles are available on our web site – www.ccaction.com.au.

The next series is entitled Common Mistakes Made By Contact Centre Managers

 

In this series we discuss the process of acquiring new technology for your contact centre, and provide some suggestions to ensure a successful project.

This article is the fourth in the series.

Selecting a Solution and Vendor

It is often not realised that selecting a solution and selecting a vendor are quite different. Consider buying a new car – the process is often to select the preferred vehicle first, then select the dealer based on a combination of the dealer’s personality, price, showroom appearance, locality or a variety of other reasons.

A similar solution exists when choosing new contact centre technology. There are numerous solutions that are likely to meet your needs to different degrees, and there are usually different dealers that can sell each of the solutions – sometimes a dealer can sell multiple solutions.

When you issue a tender to the market, a variety of things can happen:

• A vendor may select the solution they think will best suit you, or the solution that provides them with the most margin to present to you.
• You may get multiple vendors presenting the same solution.
• You may not be presented some solutions that are very suitable to your needs.
• You may be presented a solution that you like, by a vendor that you don’t like.
• You have to base your decision on what is presented to you – you have little visibility of how that vendor or solution has performed in the past.

All of this adds up to a very confusing situation, particularly as this kind of technology is usually quite expensive.

Wouldn’t it be great to have access to someone who has insight into the past performance of different dealers, and the degree of backing and support provided by the vendors? This would also reduce the risk associated with a significant project such as the replacement of a phone system.

What if they also had an understanding of the different solutions in the market, and could recommend a short list of suppliers and solutions to reduce the time required to evaluate the different offerings.

Using an external, independent advisor (such as Contact Centre Action) significantly increases the likelihood that you will select the right solution from the right vendor, and that solution will be installed with minimal problems in the shortest possible time. While not always obvious in the beginning this can save you many thousands of dollars over the course of the project.

Remember that, similar to a car purchase, the purchase of a phone system commences a relationship with a vendor that is likely to last five years or more. It is important to get that decision right in the first place.

For more information please email spels@ccaction.com.au or call +61 3 8648 6577.

www.ccaction.com.au

In this series we discuss the process of acquiring new technology for your contact centre, and provide some suggestions to ensure a successful project.

This article is the third in the series.

Types of Solution Available

Along with choosing a solution and a vendor that will meet your needs, choosing the appropriate technical architecture is also critical.

You need to assess various considerations, including:

• Would you prefer the solution to be financed by capital or operational expense?
• Do you require flexibility in the size of the solution – do you experience significant peaks and troughs?
• What is the architecture of your existing IT solutions?
• What are the capabilities of your current IT staff?
• What are your business continuity or disaster recovery requirements?
• Are your requirements likely to change in the short to medium term?
• Are you anticipating significant growth?
• How many sites do you have?

The answers to these questions will go some of the way to determining which solution architecture will best suit your needs. There are three main architectures available (plus various combinations of all three).

The first is the traditional Customer Premise-based Equipment (CPE). In this case you buy the solution you require (capital expense) and install the physical hardware and software on your premises. You are entirely responsible for the provision of the physical environment, security, arranging maintenance and upgrades as well as the day-to-day operation and management. The size is relatively fixed and limited by the licences you purchase. If you require redundancy you need to provision a second system for business continuity and disaster recovery.

The second is a hosted solution. Very similar to the CPE solution, but in a facilities-managed data centre. The difference here is that the data centre provider is responsible for the physical environment. The cost can also be an operational expense, but is still largely a fixed cost.

The third alternative is a cloud-based solution. This solution is also physically located away from the customer premises, but whereas the hosted solution is installed in a single data centre, the cloud-based solution is often located in multiple data centres and the load is shared across the centres. This provides an additional level of redundancy because if one data centre fails the load should be distributed across the remaining data centres. It is also very easy to scale up and down because the hardware and software resources are shared amongst all customers – there is no concept of licensing individual users or ports. It is purely operational expense and you only pay for what you use – on a per-call, per agent, per agent/hour, per IVR second or similar basis. While you gain additional elasticity to handle peaks, and the system is always maintained at the latest version, you do lose some control over when upgrades and changes are made as the timing has to suit all users of the system.

A managed service (sometimes referred to as a private cloud) is more a management option than a technical option. While there are a number of different definitions, the most common is fully premise-based equipment (same as the first option above) that is owned and managed by the technology vendor and charged on a monthly operational expense basis.

Some companies also deploy hybrid solutions to reduce the size of the links from premise to the data centre. In this case the components that handle the voice paths (and the carrier trunks) are located on the client premises, but the application servers (the “brains” of the system) are located in a remote data centre.

The best design for you will depend on many factors, so ensure the vendor’s solution architects work with your IT team to design the most appropriate solution.

For more information please email spels@ccaction.com.au or call +61 3 8648 6577.

www.ccaction.com.au

In this series we discuss the process of acquiring new technology for your contact centre, and provide some suggestions to ensure a successful project.

This article is the second in the series.

Going to Market – The Tender or Proposal Process

There are effectively two different processes to use when going to market for a new technology solution. The first is a Request for Tender (RFT) and the second is a Request for Proposal (RFP). An RFT can be used by anyone, but is mostly used by Government departments and large corporations. An RFP is more frequently used by smaller organisations.

So what is the difference?

An RFT is more formal with very prescriptive processes and extensive compliance requirements relating to the response. An RFP is less formal and allows more collaboration between prospective vendors and the purchaser in evaluating the different solutions.

An RFT is used where it is necessary for a company to be able to demonstrate its processes were fair and objective, and did not unfairly advantage or disadvantage any one supplier. Because it is more prescriptive there is less opportunity for the purchaser to ask additional questions or seek clarification of responses, and less opportunity for the vendor to provide additional information that may assist in their response.

An RFP allows less formal interaction between vendor and purchaser, which facilitates the exchange of information and allows purchasers to explore functionality that might be most relevant to them. It often results in a better, more appropriate solution for the purchaser but can make claims of favouritism harder to defend.

Another key consideration is deciding which vendors to send the RFT or RFP to. Some companies have a policy of always using an open tender – this often means the existence of an RFT/RFP is advertised in the newspaper and the documents are available to anyone to lodge a response. This will often result in a large number of responses that require evaluation, including the same solution from multiple vendors or resellers. However, it is a better alternative if you are not sure which vendors are in the market or which solutions are available.

Some companies use a Request for Information (RFI) step to do a very high level cull of prospective vendors, then follow up with an RFP or RFT. There is little benefit in doing this because the requirements are specified at a high level with little granularity (otherwise it would be an RFT or RFP – not an RFI). This effectively means that most vendors will be able to meet those high level requirements, resulting in very few vendors being eliminated at this stage (remember – the differences between solutions is often in the detail). The other differential is price – and an RFI really doesn’t give vendors enough information to provide even a budgetary estimate on price. Because of this there is a real danger of a strong vendor being eliminated at this point because they have been honest (or provided a worst-case scenario) in relation to price. Another vendor may have provided a very low price just to get to the next stage.

The other alternative is to put out a ‘closed’ tender – only send the tender to a small number of vendors to respond to. This requires an understanding of the vendors and solutions in the market but usually results in a lot less work to evaluate the responses.

Consider engaging professional assistance that is independent and had no commercial links to any technology vendor. Engage someone who has a view of the solutions and vendors in the market, and can advise which are likely to be able to meet your requirements.

For more information please email spels@ccaction.com.au or call +61 3 8648 6577.

www.ccaction.com.au

In this series we discuss the process of acquiring new technology for your contact centre, and provide some suggestions to ensure a successful project.

This article is the first in the series.

 

Business Requirements.

The first step in acquiring new technology is to thoroughly understand the requirements of the contact centre. As obvious as it may sound, it is quite difficult to get right as often the current processes and procedures are viewed as the business requirements, whereas they may have been designed to overcome shortcomings with current technology. This involves objectively assessing ideal work practices, as well as additional functionality that has become available in the market. When you are close to the processes it is very easy to fall into the trap of believing the current process is the best process and the new technology has to enhance this. In reality, it is a good opportunity for a ‘spring clean’ – getting rid of old, redundant processes and implementing a better way of doing things.

It is actually surprising how many contact centre executives don’t actually understand their own processes – or appreciate there are often better processes available. It is here that an independent opinion can assist – someone who has seen ‘best practice’ in other companies and can assist to implement changes that best suit your business.

Business requirements don’t just apply to today’s environment – you need to cast your eyes forward and consider how the company may change, as well as how the competitive environment may change. We have all seen the explosion of social media, but how many companies are using it well, and how many have technology to treat social media as another customer service channel? What is going to be the next ‘big thing’ in the contact centre or customer service environment.

Contact centre technology typically lasts longer than five years when properly maintained and upgraded. Getting the initial decision wrong means either more cost to replace the technology early or substandard customer service and lower profits because of the functionality limitations of your technology.

Business requirements also includes technology requirements, and this is where you require the input of your IT department. What is your Standard Operating Environment? What is the strategic direction of your IT department? Is there a preference for on-premise, hosted or cloud? What will the new system have to integrate with? The new contact centre technology has to compliment and enhance the existing IT environment.

Lastly, involve your customers. What do they think of your service & how should it be improved? Your opinion of your service is unlikely to match your customer’s opinion, and in the end it is the customer that counts! If you conduct customer satisfaction surveys, include findings from this in your requirements. If not, find out what other contact centres are doing and what customers expect in other industries.

Technology is expensive and it pays to get the requirements right from the beginning. Whichever technology you choose has to support your customer’s present and future needs as well as your present and future business needs.

 

For more information please email spels@ccaction.com.au or call +61 3 8648 6577.

www.ccaction.com.au