SATSE: Part 1: Conversations with Customers
If salespeople are the eyes of an organisation, the contact centre is certainly the ears. It's often the first place to appreciate a change in consumer sentiment, perhaps due to competitor promotions or difficulties in your service provision. Advisors in the contact centre talk to a large proportion of customers each day and are very well placed to learn what is working and what isn't. Similarly, since lots of customers are calling, it's a great opportunity to reinforce the brand values of the organisation, through the efforts of your advisors.
Chapter 1: Making Contact Centres Listen to Customers
Listening to customers is one of the key roles of contact centres. But is the organisation listening? Too often information available to advisors in contact centre stays in the contact centre. This could be about delivery problems, availability problems, pricing challenges, competitor activity, in fact all aspects of your customer engagement from your branches to your website will generate calls which are opportunities to learn. Often the organisation has analytics capability to capture this knowledge and distribute around the business and from them, increasingly sensible decisions can be taken about products and services, pricing and promotion, delivery and servicing and remarketing and recommendation. However, this happens haphazzardly and this book is about how to improve the use of valuable information gained through contact centres.
- 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
With interactive web activity, self-service IVRs, supplier extranets and the like, it's easy to imagine that the demand for contact centre staff is falling. Actually the opposite is the case. Employment in the sector continues to grow and the first thing you notice in a contact centre is not the technology, it's the people. They are a fantastic resource that create the amazing buzz of contact centres. Managing large amounts of people, especially large amounts of young people can be challenging. This writer has experienced amazing behaviour, at one extreme an empowered advisor leaving the contact centre, drawing personal money from an ATM, driving to an airport and giving the money to a distressed customer who had called regarding a lost ATM card, before getting onto a flight. At the other extreme, advisors selling drugs to each other in company time, using the company intranet. From the good to the bad, people are everywhere in contact centres and the successful management of this resource means the difference between great performance (and great service) and indifferent performance (and poor service).
Implant Managers
The other day I saw a great ad on the side of a telephone box. Katie Price, aka Jordan, is advertising new children's books. Before I go any further, I want to say hats off to her for doing something worthy and this is not a "kick the bimbo" joke, however, the agency responsible for the ad have photographed her from the waist up (that's an important point in this story - get a picture into your mind) holding two books above her head. The text in the ad (copy to anyone in the marketing industry) reads: "Katie Price's New Ponies". I mean, really. The "ponies" are the books, however, given her track record with implants and the shot used in the ad, it's not a huge jump to take a second meaning from the ad.
Implant Managers in contact centres does not involve any surgery. Thankfully. Implant managers are representatives of the brand that the contact centre is handling calls for, where the calls are taken by an outsourcer - a specialist organisation that runs contact centres on behalf of one or more brands. Often, brands place managers into the contact centres of their outsource partners to provide in situ advice, guidance, escalation and direction. This is especially true of complex projects, high profile projects or projects undergoing a large degree of change. The implant manager might be there full time or part time, for a bedding-in period, during new product launches or full time. Some projects may demand a team of representatives to work onsite with the outsourcer for an extended period of time.
Over time, implant managers start to become part of the team but the start of the relationship can be uneasy. Outsourcers tend to have two views on implant managers. Firstly, that they are the spawn of the devil and are there to spy on the operation, interfere with matters nothing to do with them and generally bend contact centre managers out of shape. Another, perhaps more healthy, view is that implant managers are a sign of committment form the client and that their presence is a fantastic opertunity to learn more about the client (if you're smart about it, political stuff not just product and process stuff). The implant manager is there to help improve outcomes, for customers, the project, and the outsourcer. Having worked with large, demanding clients in a previous life, I have had the pleasure of working with two particularly fine implant managers and one complete nutter. To be fair, I've worked in contact centres with a couple of certifiable people, one hard case from a client in ten years of working with implant managers is not bad. Later in the book I will talk about one of the certifiable staff we employed and how a mad and dangerous person slipped through a very strict selection process. But for now, back to implant managers. It is important for the contact centre manager to realise that implant managers have to be managed and that whilst openness is fine, there need to be some rules about access and dealing with staff. If an implant manager starts to comment on individual staff member suitability, watch out. Trouble brewing.
Five tips for implant managers
- Be humble - you have power, don't be obvious about, everyone just thinks your a git or desparately insecure if you wield power
- Request information sufficient to ensure the SLA is on track but no more. The outsourcer has resourced the campaign to the requirements of the SLA and no more. IF you want more, review the SLA and allow the outsourcer to propose new resources. Some flexibility on both sides is, of course, helpful and expected in a postive working relationship, but don't take advantage of any flexibility shown
- Be a champion for the project - manage issues, communicate success, demonstrate capability. The outsourcer will jump through hoops for you if you help their PR, consistent with delivery on the SLA
- Meet the staff. The only way to really understand a contact centre, the only way, is to listen to calls, observe transactions, talk to advisors. Doubt anyone who visits, doesn't listen to calls and then offers opinion. Consistent with driving the SLA, if you observe any glitches in service from the wider organisation that impacts on your project, communicate this back to the organisation and find out if it is slated for development, etc. Feedback on stuff like this is likely to improve your relationship with the advisors. Get to know them but don't tell them how to do their job, refer concerns to the programme manager or training manager, and avoid being personal. Refer to transaction handling rather than people wherever possible
- When socialising with staff from the outsourcer, try to be the first to put their hand in their pocket. Don't accept hospitality beyond reasonable business activities. Remain professional and honest. And never, ever, ever get involved, er, romantically with a member of staff from the outsourcer. There is zero discretion in a large contact centre and EVERYONE will know by 9.05 the next day.
Five tips for working with implant managers
- Be open - this is your best opportunity to understand what's really going on and to shape the client's view of your business
- Don't hide things about the operation of your client's business - if it comes out later and you didn't disclose it, the shit will most definately hit the fan
- Disclose sensible. Don't blurt out "WE LOST SOME DATA". Make sure you understand the dimensions of the error - did it definately take place? what is the impact? is it customer visible? and make sure you know what rectification will take place and what you can learn to avoid it happening again?
- Follow-up - don't leave any issues outstanding, get them aired, onto a schedule and traffic them as you would any other items on your to do list. Make sure any committments made and followed through, and that they are notes as dealt with. Arrange regular meetings, daily catch-up, weekly planning, monthly review, etc. and avoid dealing for every run of the mill incident contempraneously otherwise you will bend yourself and your managers out of shape
- Create some ground rules for day to day engagement - systems access, bringing other staff to site, talking to advisors (talking is fine, telling is not)
Recruit from Within
The first time that I promoted someone within the business to a senior position, I hadn't thought that it was a big deal. We have an opening, this person is capable and keen, let's do it. My boss at the time, a strange little man what we reffered to as NWTTP, was of the opinion that we should bring someone in from outside but time was an issue so we went with the internal choice. It turned out to be a great move, which NWTTP acknowledged. What happened, the really cool thing that happened was the effect on other staff of seeing "good career prospects" in action. Easy to say at interview but harder to do. In contact centres, there is always going to be a degree of staff attrition (and this is not a negative, unless you have 10% of staff leaving each month) and later in this chapter I'll talk more about retention and attrition. By demonstrating that forward career progress is possible, general staff attitudes got a bump up. Progressively, we moved to skill-up more and more advisors and when team leader, coach, trainer, super-agent positions came up, we actively encouraged progress. In another firm, we had a data entry temp who became one of our lead developers over a period of about seven years. I can tell you that this creates HUGE loyalty and buy-in. ISSUES TO DISCUSS: Since attrition is real, promotion oppotunities regularly come up. Dealing with changing team formats is never easy. Giving people new skills can take time. Moving from a colleague to supervisor can be a strange transition.
Dealing with Change
Keep on Rocking in the Free World – Neil Young
The contact centre is generally a place of change – new products to talk about, new campaigns, new offers, etc etc. These “slipstream” events roll into the day to day operations plan without worry. The changes that cause difficulty are things like legislative/regulatory changes, major systems changes, team structure changes, major role changes (adding a sales element into a service based team, for example). All change types deserve special attention as each has its own dynamic.
At a really fundamental level, people resist change. Not because we are against the elements contained within one particular change programme, but because we are not good at handling uncertainty and ambiguity. Despite seeking diversity and creativity in working roles (in addition to money, obviously), we get used to working within boundaries. The boundary creates a safe environment within which we can learn the role, develop relationships with those around us and relax into our job. It’s one less thing to worry about. Developments which affect these boundaries, this state of harmony that we have achieved, tend to generate an emotional respose. That’s the root of the problem. Our disaffection with change is not because we don’t like the layout of a new computer screen, or we don’t like the features of a new product (though our objection to change may manifest itself as “feature disappointment”). Change causes an illogical, emotional response. Few are the workers who shout “Yipee, my role is changing again, how exciting!”
Five signs that emotional responses are likely
- The project committee have not visited the contact centre
- Terms of Reference have been written with little or no input by anyone in the contact centre
- There is a history of tough (i.e. failed) change programmes
- There is more than one project sponsor
- There are more than three objectives for the change, or that the objectives do not relate to contact centre outcomes - i.e. the benefits lie elsewhere but the pain resides in the contact centre
Because it is usually imposed (rather than evolved from the team), it is usually controlled (an external manager/team has been recruited) and information about drivers for the change and impacts of the change have already been decided, change is something that we set ourselves up to cope with rather than jump on board with.
Change is usually presented to us rather than something that we participate in from the start. This is different to how many other things in our lives work. Don’t like your house, start decorating. House too small, move house. Fed up with being unfit, join a gym. Any of these situations can turn out to be stressful, but it’s a different kind of stress. This is stress that we are initiating and we are active participants in the whole of the process. Organisational change is not like that. Organisational change is often something that has been decided elsewhere and is being imposed on us. The boundaries of our role, our work environment are under threat. That’s why we kick-off defensively when confronted by it. The change may turn out to be positive and enhance our working environment. It may create new learning opportunities or new skills to be acquired that will lead to a better paying role. But all of that is a dim, distant flicker of a light, like next summer’s holidays when you go back to school in September. Right now, when the change is announced it’s a potential threat and we treat it as such.
So objections to change are generally emotionally based but often articulated in semi-positive manner – “the customers may not take to it”, “it’s quite complicated to communicate on the phone”, “I don’t understand the new system, can we get more training”. All of these are most commonly disguised fears coming to the surface. Sensibly people don’t run around screaming “they’re changing the systems again, run for your lives” and so they embed their fears into comments on features of the change. Rather than diving for cover when their boundaries come under threat, staff are more savvy and know, pretty much, any fool who screams “THIS IS SHIT” is not likely to make forward progress come bonus time. So the fears, the uncertainty come out in a different way. And that usually is negativity attached to one or more features of the change programme. This can be quite sophisticated and often take on at least a veneer or credibility about protecting the organisation and seeking only to ensure that the change programme is successful (“whilst vital, it is important that it’s done right”). Examples of this can be using very complex exceptionals to see how the new process copes and if the change architect has not thought of that particular exception, suggest deeper flaws in the programme or another classic is linking – this is where a dependency is created betweeen the current approach and other departments / divisions / processes / suppliers etc and indicating how difficult this change may be on these players if the change goes ahead. In a technical environment, change can be especially hard as there is the extra test of Keeping the Show on the Road – kind of like changing a tyre whilst you’re driving down the motorway – keeping the current plates spinning is a reason to delay / weaken / circumvent change programmes. Finally, there is the dear old customer. What will this really do for them. If the case is not proven, expect trouble at mill.
It is important to stress that in a contact centre, people are not being obstructive just because they don’t like you. You must understand that psychology of what’s going on and understand the difference between change that we initiate ourselves and change which we have little or no control over that impacts upon us. The contract between employer and contact centre staff may state “and other duties that your manager may require from time to time” but this means nothing for those affected by change.
Negative comments or actions from contact centre staff are designed to delay and obstruct the installation, to give more time, to cling to the status quo for longer. They have not seen a compelling picture of a better future and consequently their emotional response is taking over. It should be clear that if this is happening in your organisation, you’ve got a problem. The root to solve this problem is two-fold. Firstly to address the feature objections and manage concerns through workshops, demonstrations, consultation sessions, though, let’s be honest, that horse has long since bolted past a wide open stable door. And that leads to the second thing you can do: learn from this episode and embed consultation into the very first phases of future projects.
Presenting details of a change programme is what some managers think is “communication”, having heard that the secret of change management is good communication. These people are, of course, wrong, the secret of change management is “no change”. If you must have change then separate change into mandatory and development. Mandatory is stuff like, reduce costs or we go out of business, or dealing with a legislative change that requires immediate action. Development change is process improvement, evolving positioning, offers, technology, services to provide some additional novelty, functionality, efficiency or other benefit that can be delivered to customers, donors, voters or whoever your organisation’s community is.
Five tips for Initiating Change in the Contact Centre
- Be humble
- Listen to calls with the team, rather than from recordings, remotely
- Get advisors and team leaders involved early
- If the benefit is for another business area, say, shipping or business decision making, articulate the change in contact centre terms and not in shipping terms - rather than "improving address quality for shipping manifests", use "how do we lift our data quality levels"
- Don't impose, consult
What is “No-Change” Change?
I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy - but that could change, Dan Quayle
No-change is the state of continual evolution. Of developing an environment where product changes, intranet content, customer types, system upgrades, role changes can all be slip-streamed into the teams in a positive, ongoing way without creating an emotional response. If consultation is a constant and a means of the organisation truly listening to what customers are saying (and contact centre advisors really do have something big to contribute there), then it is less likely to be an event, something out of the normal, but rather just part of the fabric of the contact centre.
To the JFDI consultant, consultation is an inconvenient stage that delays and discolours their otherwise perfect picture of the how the project rolls out. However, consultation (and lots of it) is actually a fantastic solution to project delays and can really sharpen the detail of the plan. Result of consultation: improved project outcomes.
How do you design consultation in? Well, the first thing is not to make change an event. Try to embed change into the regular operations plan for the contact centre. Rotating people between teams, cross training, varying shifts, exposing people to new systems to learn, etc. Try not to talk of a “change” at all. Some changes are mandatory – e.g. legislative changes that impact your industry or impact all organisations, for example, changes to data protection legislation. In that case, everyone has to get on with it, but usually with legislation you get plenty of advance notice. Get the teams involved in designing solutions – no group of advisors when consulted regularly ever suggest process steps or systems changes that make their life harder. They go for shortcuts, straight lines, no hand-offs, more autonomy – usually things associated with improved outcomes for customers. And if bonuses are tied to improved outcomes for customers, it’s a fair bet that advisors will pretty quickly figure out how to speed up processes. There has to be processing speed balanced with compliance (but how about that being another dimension of the bonus calculation). Bonuses are all about rewarding the real outcomes you want, not the simple outcomes that are easy to measure – time on systems, calls handled, etc.
Advisors therefore can be a great resource for figuring out solutions to obstacles. However, when you start the consultation process, you can open the flood-gates. Then you end up with seven hundred suggested system changes that will take three years to make and generate negligible value. You have to balance consultation with contributing to outcomes. Advisors can be involved in this if they have all of the dimensions of a problem, but often they don’t. But if they know that there are four things that need to change, there are 50 days of systems development resource, what is the best use of those days to improve, say, product uptake rates and reduce the number of calls that cannot be answered at the first point of presentation. If bonuses are oriented towards these factors, consideration of solutions will tend toward the practical and the effective rather than the interesting but uneconomic.
Who should run change? Well again the trick here is not to make change an event. Don’t have something that people say, oh no, here we go with another team of consultants asking dumb questions, listening the four calls then thinking they know the job. Better to embed a change dimension to staff roles, such as trainers, supervisors, managers. Some specialist help may be required, but consultants dropped in from above are about as welcome as a fart in a space suit, as Billy Connelly observed. Taking the change event off the table and making team structures and activities focus on changing process elements, such as updating training materials, documenting and distributing short-cuts, improvements, etc. can lead to an environment that is comfortable with change (or as comfortable as people that are emotional can be). There are so many solutions for self-publishing now – team based solutions such as wikis can be a fantastic resource if they are seeded and regularly used and updated.
Embeding change practice does not mean change for change sake, but if there is new content around the service/product offer then get that shared on a regular basis. This is easier for contact centres that operate in content rich environments, e.g. publishing, telecommunications, tourism, healthcare, etc. but if you are imaginative, you can always find content even in static environments such as utilities (developments in renewables, examples of sustainability, new initiatives for power transmission, even updated TV advertising or TV content that reflects concerns/developments in that industry. Having daily briefings is a great opportunity to share ideas and getting the team focused on change, as a background concept, an ever-present factor in modern business.
If you need to do big change, get some project management expertise. However, don’t fall into the trap of many organisations – getting project managers to do the work of managers. This writer recently experienced a very large technology function in a global banking organisation where project managers (nearing 1000 at the last count) were being asked to manage better use of existing software tools. Not looking for which software tools the organisation could invest in to best address a need, they had all the tools but were not using them a) consistently and b) to their potential. This is absolutely not a project management issue. This is a management issue.
Motivation - The M Word
I saw a trade advert by a contact centre outsourcer showing two attractive young people in a hot, distant land looking all relaxed, tanned and happy. The perfect picture of a summer holiday. The advert was designed to position the outsourcer as an informed supplier, taking time to understand their client requirements by sending their staff to directly experience the product that the contact centre is supporting (in this case a holiday company). The idea is great – the better staff know the product or service, the more they can relate to how actual customers will feel. Honda similarly insist that contact centre staff experience their new vehicles so that they can engage more positively and knowledgeably with customers.
Getting to test drive a new car is likely to greatly overcome any boredom with day to day operations. However, having advisors test drive cars each and every day is unlikely to generate positive outcomes for customers. It’s easy to create involving one-offs. Roadshows, product launches, special training blitzes, etc. But what do you do the day after? Well, the answer to that is complex and does not mean that the roadshow is a bad idea. Motivation in contact centres is not a value that can keep on rising (but it can certainly keep falling). The way to view it, is about maintaining motivation at a level which generates positive customer outcomes at a sensisble economic level. In that light, 100% customer satisfaction, zero leavers and 100% attendance are not the goals. 100% customer satisfaction is impossible to achieve (and that way lies madness), some attrition can be a good thing (see next section) and a small amount of absence will be easily catered for by the daily resource plan. If money is not restricted then every call can be answered within 15 seconds, and advisors handsomely remunerated so that every conversation is a complete pleasure, like a chat with a new friend with no limits on their resourcefulness, alacrity and downright happiness. However, money is a scarce resource, and in times of scarcity, rationing is present. That means, accepting that 90% of calls answered in 20 seconds is good enough and losing 1% of calls is acceptable. The rationale for this statement is a cold hard look at the economics of answering that last 1% of calls – it requires a huge increase on staffing, disproportionate to the benefit that answering the calls brings. No organisation sets out to lose any calls, however, if you want your advisors operating at more than 40% efficiency, then you will compromise somewhere. Economics will dictate to what extent to ration “telephone handling resource”. You want advisors to be busy (but not frantic) most of the time. What does that mean in practical terms? Well, something like 35 to 50 minutes of talk time per hour. Any more than that and you will break your advisors (and probably employment laws) less than 35 minutes and they will get bored.
Most certainly run roadshows, introduce new products to the team, get their opinions, give them samples but don’t expect a long run pickup in motivation levels (however you measure that, and a proxy is best – customer satisfaction levels, first call handling %age, etc. as “motivation” itself is impossible to measure). It’s like running sales promotions for a grocery brand’s market share. The promotion gives the product a bump in its category but after the promotion, the brand returns to it’s long run market share level. Same with advisors, regardless of how much effort goes into “Pizza Madness Friday”, don’t expect the gain to last much past the following Tuesday once advisors have had two full shifts of dealing with awkward customers. That’s life. The idea is to keep things going. To keep the show on the road. To give enough variety, often enough (but not too often – economics! And you must be able to establish that people are there to do a job and that specials are just that, special. Not part of the day to day). Mixing up motivation events is best:
- Mixing scheduled and unscheduled stuff
- Mixing directly work related and team fun related
- Mixing money (and proxies – gift vouchers, for example) and non-money rewards (time off works VERY well)
- Mixing media – video, tactile (if the product supports that), presentations, find out by doing, etc.
Motivation is not something that people can rate themselves on a one to ten scale. Motivation is a state of mind and you either are or are not. Trying to measure motivation is like trying to read tea leaves. Motivation is easy to recognise. Staff that are motivated behave in ways that are common between all motivated staff - they have an inner smile and this presents itself as positive behaviour like ethusiasm, encouragement to others, flexibility, eager for learning, innovation and high productivity. Clearly these are positive attributes to have in a customer service environment and anything that helps to give people a sense of motivation is to be encouraged. Good pay might do it. A great environment might be do it. There are many aspects but one of the most important is being part of a team.
A Sense of Team
Of all the hackneyed sports team manager expressions - "a game of two halves", "at the end of the day" and "losing two early goals was not in the plan", the one that is useful here is "I wouldn't want to single out any one individual, it was a team performance". Quite. Teams made up of superstars perform well only if the superstars perform as a team. Poorly organised stars come second to well coached and disciplined average players who cooperate as a team. In the contact centre, teams are a vital structure. Both in terms of structure for communication and organisation and more importantly as a unit that staff can associate with and feel a sense of belonging. Carson McCullers book "The Member of the Wedding" talks of a need to belong. Important for a 12-year old, it's vital for advisors. Contact centre performance depends on teams working well. Good team dynamics can create very positive outcomes: reduced absence, longer tenure, higher customer service ratings, whereas poor team dynamics are linked to poor service levels, poor attendance and higher attrition. It cannot be emphasised enough how important creating and mainting a sense of team is to individual and group performance.
Maintaining Motivation over the Long Term
If we accept that everyday cannot be a special surprise day, how do you keep motivation going along (not increasing, but not falling either). This is down to the following factors:
- Team and a shared sense of purpose
- Work diversity and autonomy
- Rewards
- Stability and Advancement
With one out of these four working, motivation is unlikely to be high, but with three out of four working, motivation is likely to be high. Remember, motivation is not something that can be directly measured. It's not like taking someone's temperature, you have to look at proxies - outcomes that are affected but the level of motivation in the centre, for example, absence, service levels, etc. The better the organisation performs on these four factors, the better the motivation is likely to be. For example, staff may work in a great team and feel secure in their role but if the role is stultifyingly dull and the rewards are poor, don't be surprised if motivation is not as high as you would wish. I've lost count of the number of times my ex-colleague Nick Price said to clients who had complained about staff attrition: "When you recruit for your call centre you are looking for interesting, intelligent people who are good at getting on with customers, get a sense of achievement from helping people and then you put them in a tightly controlled environment and ask them to repeat the same task ten times an hour, seven days a week. What did you expect would happen?" This is the dilemma of recruiting for contact centres - if you find sparky people who are good to talk to on the phone, they probably don't want to operate in a restrictive environment. The trick is to bring the four quadrants together and normalise wide variations between, say, rewards and autonomy. Giving people the ability to take some control of their environment, giving them variety, ensuring that there is little or no insecurity over their position, giving scope for developing their career, being able to earn a fair return for their efforts and letting them work within a fun team that promotes individual efforts, shares team success (and failure) and has a strong sense of purpose. That's what it takes. Oh, and if it's a shitty office to work in, you have make an effort to really clean up and make everything work. Environmental factors don't improve motivation but they sure can hurt it. If you have all of this you are on the road to a fantastic contact centre.
Super Agents! Subject Matter Experts and escalation
Subject Matter Experts are not the geeky kids that get kicked around at break by the cool kids. They are people how have a degree of specialisation in a complex environment. Typically, 80% of queries that present in a service environment are represented by 20% of the different query types. In some environments, e.g. financial services, travel, technical support, the 20% can have a very long tail with some very complex queries that are unusual and in a large contact centre a typical advisor will not encounter these queries sufficiently frequently to be competent at answering them. This is where Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) come in. They take the complex situations, either through escalation from a colleague or directly from an IVR/ACD queue or perhaps from a dialled number uniquely identified for particular queries. The organisation of SMEs can be very formal - 1st, 2nd and 3rd line support is a particularly formal method of maximising the return on expert knowledge in a support environment. Here, the 1st line support advisors are there to handle the simpler (but no less worthy) queries that come in and act as a filter / information gathering point for 2nd line support. The 2nd line support team would typically be smaller than 1st line and may be geographically remote, perhaps run out of a separate organisation (1st line outsourced, 2nd and 3rd done in-house). In less formal environments, SMEs may be a team resource or may be a floor resource with several advisors being an SME on different topics. The advisor management system has a list of skills matched to logged-in and available advisors which makes it easy to facilitate the escalation.
A lessons learned database, either as a wiki, intranet, knowledge base, ops manual, whatever, is a fundamental resource for SMEs and to operationalise knoweldge to streamling and push more and more queries out to more and more advisors (many reasons for this - more expertise across the floor means more chance of a customer call finding someone able to answer the call and also for the advisors it means more diversity in the role and as an organisation, it is learning and these learnings can be structured into training for new starts so that performance has a good chance of improving over time).
- Matching Staff to Projects
- Recruiting for secure positions
- Attrition can be a good thing
- Introducing Management from External Source
- What can you tell from a recruitment ad for advisors?
Chapter 3: Delivering on Promises
Remember Johnny Rotten? John Joseph Lydon, lead singer of the Sex Pistols, and later Public Image Limited. Of course you remember Johnny Rotten. One thing you may not know, Mr Lydon closed the last ever Sex Pistols concert, in San Francisco with the phrase, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" Quite sublime. What a great phrase, and links neatly to the reaction many people must have when service goes bad. Thankfully, contact centres are generally pretty reliable and service failure does not actually occur that often. Sometimes outcomes as defined by the contact centre manager may be different to that defined by customers. For example, if a customer asks a bank for a larger overdraft but credit rules cause the request to be knocked back, that can't be the fault of the contact centre. Don't shoot the messenger. But the customer wants to do just that. This is an asymmetric view of the same data and is probably irreconcilable.
Contact centres are very much part of the connected enterprise and integration with other divisions is essential to effective service delivery. Often promises made in the contact centre are delivered elsewhere. Advisors need to have confidence that a promise made is a promise delivered. How do you make this happen? What are the short and long term problems if this connection fails?
- Compliance
- Quality Assurance
- Back Office linkage
- Regular Data Feeds
- Reporting to the Business
Copyright 2007, Robert A Innes
