While many contact centres had the technical ability to work from home, only a small number encouraged staff to work from home on a semi-regular basis, and very few had permanent work-from-home staff.

There were still a large number of contact centres that did not have the technology that allowed work-from-home, which required a flurry of upgrade activity in the early stages of the pandemic.

Once staff were working from home the focus turned to how best to manage a remote workforce. This included supporting, training and motivating staff in a new working environment, adopting new technology (including the widespread use of video conferences) and so on.

Now management are wondering what the future looks like – are staff going to work in an office, at home or a mixture of both? What is the best way to achieve this? Is it going to be the same for everyone or will staff have a level of personal choice?

We would be interested in your thoughts.

What were the main challenges you experienced during the pandemic?

Has it been difficult to retain staff?

How is your contact centre likely to operate in the future – in the office, remotely or a hybrid?

For assistance or more information please give us a call on 1300 789 456 or check our web site.

The last two years have been rather reactive for the contact centre industry due to the pandemic.

With the focus on working from home and maintaining customer service, a lot of improvements and strategic planning have been deferred as higher priority tasks were attended to.

As the pandemic settles into the “new normal” contact centre managers are starting to think more strategically.

• If you replaced or upgraded technology, is the solution right for you? Is there functionality available that you are not using? Have you adapted your work practices to leverage the capabilities of the new technology?
• There is a lot of talk in the media about staff changing roles post-pandemic. How will you be able to retain staff?
• In some ways customers became more tolerant during the pandemic as we all experienced a situation that we had never been in before. Again, as we adapt to the “new normal” customer expectations are likely to rise again.
• Everyone is talking about artificial intelligence. There are lots of applications for AI from self-service to agent assistance but is it right for you and your customers?
• What are your customers actually thinking and saying? How are they behaving. Understanding customer sentiment and behaviour through analytics allows you to tailor your offerings to optimise the customer experience.
• Is your contact centre operating as efficiently as possible? Are there any capabilities available in your current technology that would allow you to increase efficiency and reduce cost?
• Have you moved all your technology to the cloud or are there still some components that need to be moved?
• Staff are working from home but are they working well? What is their environment like? Do they have the equipment they need? Is your data secure? Do they have access to all the information they require? How do you ensure your staff still feel like members of a team?
• Do your business continuity plan and disaster recovery plan accurately reflect the changes made during the pandemic or do they need updating? When was the last time they were tested?

Do you have a strategy for the next 5 years?

What is the most important change you will be making this year?

If you need any assistance to develop a strategic plan, or to assess your current operation, please give us a call on 1300 789 456 or check our web site – www.ccaction.com.au.

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 eighth of nine articles in the series.

Communicate Effectively

This point relates to communication within the contact centre, as well as communication across the wider business.

Communication within a contact centre is difficult to get right. It shouldn’t be too much or key messages are going to get ‘lost’ in the noise. It also shouldn’t be too little – staff need to know what is going on and how it affects them.

The format of the communication is important too. Often, team leads send out emails with information, product updates, promotions, break times, birthdays and all sorts of other subjects. Staff either ignore them, or read them at a suitable time (which might be too late). People also learn (and receiving information is learning) in different ways – some learn best by reading, some learn best by seeing, some learn best by hearing and some learn best by doing. Tailor your message to your staff – it may even be appropriate to use multiple formats for the same message.

Another complaint of some contact centre staff is that they never know what is going on in the rest of the business – they just come to work, do their job and go home and aren’t fully engaged in the success of the business or (worse still) don’t understand how their job benefits the business as a whole.

This point is related to Article 7 in this series – Work With The Business (available at www.ccaction.com.au). It is essential that contact centre staff see themselves as integral to the entire business. It is just as important that the rest of the business views them in the same way – after all it is highly likely that the contact centre is the biggest and most important interface between the business and the customer – therefore the success of the whole business is heavily dependent on the performance of the contact centre.

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 – All Hands On Deck.

In this series we will look at some of the common mistakes made by contact centre managers, as seen by our work in the Australian contact centre industry. They are not presented in any particular order.

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

Work With The Business

Contact centres often operate in isolation, with little or no interaction with other departments in the business – even if their performance has a direct impact on the other department.

Contact centre staff should meet regularly with all other parts of the greater business that are impacted by the performance of the contact centre – after all, those other parts of the business are customers of the contact centre too.

In order to be truly effective a contact centre manager must know what other departments expect of them, and must also show other areas how their work impacts the contact centre. For example, if Accounts send out inaccurate invoices, or Marketing put an ambiguous statement on the web site, contact centre volumes will increase, which has a real and measurable cost to the business. By demonstrating that cost (or even re-charging it internally), it will encourage the other departments to consider the impact of their actions in the future.

This frequently occurs when a customer calls the contact centre to request something (maybe a new service or a fault repair), but the contact centre can’t resolve the issue immediately and has to pass the issue to another department. If the other department doesn’t resolve the issue quickly the customer will call the contact centre back thus increasing workload. In extreme cases they will become frustrated with the contact centre and its staff, which can adversely impact staff morale – even though the contact centre can’t do anything to resolve the problem.

While regular meetings are the most common way of interacting with other parts of the business, there are other strategies that can be employed, including:

• Encouraging management from other departments to visit the contact centre and see how it works – even listen to some calls.
• Creating a staff exchange program so call centre staff and staff from other areas that interface with the contact centre can “swap jobs” to experience each other’s challenges and successes.

Providing customer service is not the responsibility of a single department, even though a single department maybe the interface to the customer. Customer service is the responsibility of everyone in the organisation, and everyone needs to work together to provide that service.

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 – Communicate Effectively.

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 sixth of nine articles in the series.

Celebrate Success

This is different to selling success – it is internal to the contact centre.

Contact centre work is difficult and often thankless – but you can change that! If staff exceed realistic targets, get good customer feedback or similar, celebrate their success – reward them and actively promote their achievements.

This can be through a formal reward and recognition program, or it can be simply ‘catching someone doing something right’. Ideally, it should be both.

Don’t ignore it – recognise it, then others will put in a greater effort to be recognised and customer service goes up.

Every contact centre should have a reward and recognition program. It has to be fair, defined and documented so the right staff are recognised. If staff believe the wrong staff are being recognised it will have a negative effect. However, it needn’t be expensive – the short-term rewards can be very small and very inexpensive, because it is the recognition that counts. Longer term (quarterly, half-yearly or annual) need to be a bit more substantial but they still don’t have to be expensive in terms of your overall budget. The benefit to customer service will more than offset the cost.

A reward and recognition program has to be balanced. If you include only productivity, or only quality, you will drive the wrong behaviours. The key attributes of a reward and recognition program are:

• Objective
• Fair
• Balanced
• Measurable
• Open
• Viewed as desirable by staff.

Without these attributes it is unlikely to be successful.

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 – Work With The Business

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.