Book Index

Service at the Sharp End: Making Contact Centres Work

Or, how to survive in a world of change with too little budget, too many staff, too much complex technology, tight deadlines and revised briefs.

Book Index

Part 1: Conversations with Customers

• Chapter 1: Making Contact Centres Listen to Customers




• One Erlang or Two? Sizing the call part of the contact centre


• Honey, I srunk the contact centre! Shrinkage and Occupancy


• Sizing the contact centre - email, mail, other traffic


• Queues and routing technology


• Contact Strategy development





• Chapter 2: People. People Everywhere




• Motivation and Development


• A Sense of Team


• Matching Staff to Projects


• Recruiting for secure positions


• Super Agents! Subject Matter Experts and escalation


• Maintaining Motivation over the Long Term


• Dealing with Change


• Promoting from Within


• Introducing Management from External Source


• Implant Managers


• What can you tell from a recruitment ad for advisors?





• Chapter 3: Delivering on Promises




• Compliance


• Quality Assurance


• Back Office linkage


• Regular Data Feeds


• Reporting to the Business

Part 2: Customer Experience Management

• Chapter 4: Serving for Success




• Complaint handling


• Stultifying standards-based approach - if it says 72 hours, we're bloody well going to take 72 hours - that's NOT service


• Customer Selection - why it's right to deliver different service levels to different customers


• Staff rewards


• Self service augmentation and promotion to customers





• Chapter 5: Content Personalisation




• Personalisation as a source of differentiation


• Commercial rationalisation


• Using one channel's results to feed another channel's activity


• What to personalise?





• Chapter 6: Segmentation and Targeting


• Chapter 7: Is There a Relationship at the Heart of CRM?




• The Idea Behind CRM


• What Relationships mean to Customers


• Customers never see themselves in a relationship with a bank


• Customers might see themselves in a relationship with Harley Davidson, but few other brands qualify - test #1 How many customers have Capital One tattooed on their shoulder?


• Sensibly using CRM to make the operation effective and commercially viable


• Sensibly using CRM to delivery a customer experience that encourages more of the outcomes you want


• Understand exactly who you are set up to deliver a great service to

Part 3: Keeping the Show on the Road

• Chapter 8: Technology




• KTSR


• Legacy Integration


• CTI, IVR, ACD, Call Recording


• Root Cause Analysis - Verint


• PBE or Hosting





• Chapter 9: Project Management




• BDUF / Agile


• MOSCOW


• Involving the right people in the project


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• Chapter 10: Living with Risk




• Identifying Risk


• Project, Operation, Commercial Risk


• Recognising Risk and dealing with it


• Business Continuity





• Chapter 11: Running a Contact Centre in 137 Easy Steps




• Scheduling


• Recruitment, Induction, Training, Development & Retention



They say you can never be too thin or too rich. Is Keira Knightley too thin and not rich enough? Who cares, in contact centres, you can never spend too much time developing staff. I know this article looked like it was heading for celebrity-mag territory, which might have been fun (if vacuous), but hey, this is a book about contact centres and some of this content is going to sound dull compared to Paris Hilton selecting a new brand of shoe. The title on the cover should have alerted you to the likely direction. So, staffing a contact centre. Let's she what worthy stuff we can find.




It really is true, you can never spend enough time developing staff. There are several reasons for this. Firstly cross-training. This allows a wider team of people to gain skills to complete a wider range of transactions. Why's that a good thing? Well, for one it gives more resilience so that if customers call with specific questions there is a better chance of finding advisors who can answer correctly. It's also good because the more advisors who are trained across multiple skills, the easier it is to meet service levels as you don't need to worry about ring-fencing resources in case calls come in about a specialist, in times of staff shortage or peak load, you will achieve higher usage rates (and hence more efficiency) as the level of cross-training increases.




Secondly, with today's products and services being increasingly content-led - take mobile phones, 10 years ago there were fewer devices and they could do less. Now there are hundreds of devices, most with cameras, able to view TV, receive email, browse the web. The complexity is increasing and training provides advisors with more current information, enhanced skill and confidence fielding more questions. It's great for confidence becuase it reduces the number of times an advisor needs to check a fact, refer to a colleague, escalate to a supervisor or hand-off to a subject matter expert or another team. These are all drags on efficiency and affect advisor confidence which dirctly translates into service performance.




Thirdly, advisor satisfaction. Holding roadshows, seminars, training, coaching, etc. adds variety and substance to a role and gives confidence that an individual is developing their skills to improve their future job prospects, and to aid them in doing their job better. This creates good outcomes: lower absence, lower shrinkage and longer tenure. Retention of good advisors is so important - the effort and cost it takes to find, recruit, induct and train a new person to the level of a leaver is very expensive. Calculate the full cost in your centre and you will quickly see that advisor retention activities have an incredibly high return on investment. Losing advisors in the three/four month period is particularly expensive as that's the point when they really start to become useful having spent the first 100 days or so learning the job. If they then leave, you've thrown away several thousand pounds - go do the addition yourself. This is often a hidden cost in contact centres.




Fourthly, for service development. Advisors who are used to learning new topics and used to new content, are better at accepting ... new topics and new content, so when you roll out new projects, guess what, teams that regularly get briefings on changes deal with change much easier. A public sector environment where a job changes little in three years is a hard place to introduce change compared to a fast moving centre, all other things being equal. Change is always difficult but if staff resist all changes, then it's really tough. And resistence to change builds up barriers and resentment and creates negative energy in teams. This translates directly into to negative outcomes - longer wrap-up times, higher absence levels, longer wait times for customers, etc. So the more appropriate training, the more engaged the advisors, the easier service management becomes.




For all of these reasons, training is hugely important to improving outcomes. It can be more impactful than a small increase in staff rewards.



easier it is to crosstrain, content refreshing accellerating, retention, service development

• Team structure


• Briefing in Projects


• Service Levels - Measurement Performance and hitting targets


• Coaching and Performance Management


• Knowledge sharing and escalation to SMEs


• Maintaining knowledge bases and feeding back to training sessions


• What challenges do "no paper, no pens" environments create

Part 4: Putting it All Together

• Chapter 12: The Keys to the Kingdom: Personalisation, Excellence and Innovation




• Sources of service differentiation: personalisation, excellence and innovation





• Chapter 13: Integrated Marketing Communications




• Campaign management across channels


• Creating a sense of flow across channels


• Database Management





• Chapter 14: Advanced Customer Management




• Anticipating Needs


• Progressive Disclosure of Information - JIT data





• Chapter 15: Outsourcing, insourcing, resourcing, offshoring. What?


• Chapter 16: Contact Centre Support Organisations




• DMA, CCA, IDM, The DMA

Part 5: Future Directions

• Chapter 17: Service Technology Options




• Moving to IP


• Video Contact Centre


• Business Intelligence


• Software as a service / hosted applications





• Chapter 18: Modeling & Customisation




• Managing data across channels


• Profiling schemes, MOSAIC, etc


• Heat Maps


• RCV, CLTV, Scarcity Allocation Models


• Managing massive customisation





• Chapter 19: New Distribution Models




• Asset Digitisation


• Centralising or Dispersal of Assets?


• UGC/Web2.0/Social Networking - What does it mean for Contact Centres?


• RSS feeds and podcasts & blogs - What happens when advisors self-publish?

Copyright 2007, Robert A Innes