SATSE: Introduction

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.

About

Rob Innes has worked in contact centres, marketing and technology for 20 years. In that time he has made and taken calls, selected staff, briefed teams, run training programmes, changed processes, implemented computer systems, devised integration methods, prepared analysis and metrics and developed business cases for large contact centre projects. In that time, Rob has worked with clients in Financial Services, Telecommunications, Hospitality, Education, Government, Consumer Goods and Automotive. Rob has helped developed consumer and business to business projects covering acquisition, service, retention and reactivation. In this time, Rob is honest enough to own up to quite a few mistakes, includng a couple of absolute howlers but has learned an enormous amount about what it takes to deliver fantastic service to customers day after day after day. Having worked with Vodafone, Citibank, Ford and HM Government, Rob has built many successful contact centre projects and is keen to pass on his experience.

This book is about sharing tips and techniques, advising on what works and what doesn't, seeing past the obvious to the unexpected sources of value and risk in contact centres, demystifying technology and highlighting practical steps that can be taken to lift an average contact centre to a great contact centre and to lift poor service delivery to fantastic service delivery. Things like:

• Which metrics are most important for improving service levels?


• How to manage change that impacts on staff


• How to retain good staff


• How to recruit staff for specialist roles


• How to give individual customers a personalised service without over-burdening your IT department or tying your advisors in knots


• How to keep the buzz going, day in, day out


• How to reduce the number of hand-offs between teams and increase the number of calls dealt with at first point of contact (first call resolution)

This is above all, a can-do book and is focused on taking what really works, what actually works at the sharp end - the busy contact centre - and making it happen in the most engaging and effective manner. Fundamentally, the contact centre cannot operate in isolation from the business. Consequently, this books looks not just at the ways to improve contact centre operations, but how to best organise the entire business to create the best possible links with the contact centre - embedding the contact centre right at the heart of customer strategy.

On the website there are downloadable forms and checklists, tools and tips mentioned in this book that you can take and straightaway make a difference to your centre.

This book is aimed at both contact centre professionals and business professionals who support a contact centre or who devise the campaigns and projects that run through contact centres. It will also be useful to professionals who are involved in IT, service delivery, customer marketing or sales. It will also be useful to people looking to advance a career in contact centres.

Rob lives in Edinburgh, UK with his wife, daughter and rabbit.

Introduction

Right from the word go I want to lay my cards on the table. I like call centres. Call centres are a force for good in allowing masses of customers to efficiently interact with various parts of the enterprise. The modern call centre, or contact centre, to be more accurate since email and other types of traffic are handled there are here to help and largely they do a great job. There are always options to improve, challenges to be overcome, new regulations to incorporate but to a large extent, call centres have successfully moved millions of transactions from poorly resourced branch offices to large well resourced regional centres. Perhaps waiting in a call queue is less than perfect, but it beats standing in a queue outside a branch in the rain.

Copyright 2007, Robert A Innes