The next level

Contact centres used to be an insignificant component of an organisation, a must-have and a necessary evil rather than a valuable touch-point with customers. But times have changed and many contact centres have become the primary communication medium within an organisation.

Every contact with a customer is a chance to leverage a relationship. It's an opportunity to impress them, to educate them, up-sell or cross-sell, to leave a lasting impression, or to degrade a company's brand. Every contact either builds a customer's loyalty or erodes it.

While organisations realise how key the contact centre has become, they still place their primary focus on cutting costs. This became more evident as the economy slowed down, with little thought given to the well-known adage: “It costs five times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one.”

The combined pressure to exceed customer expectations, increase revenue generation, and cut costs is causing contact centres to buckle under the weight of conflicting mandates, internal and external pressures, and seemingly unrealistic goals.

But contact centres can find a way to meet these goals. It's about balancing the efficiencies of processes with the attitude of people and the intelligence of technology. It's about defining a vision and then co-ordinating the processes that fulfil that vision, the people who drive that vision, and the technologies that support the vision to exceed the ever-changing, ever-evolving expectations of customers in the marketplace.

A contact centre is complex to run. I'll take an overarching look at just some of these components, and I'll delve into more depth in future Industry Insights.

As new generations enter the market, their method, mode, and preference of communication channels are also changing. Contact centres are evolving to cater for an ever-growing choice of communication channels, but with this choice comes the added complexity of efficiently managing these channels and the processes that support them.

Voice calls, e-mail, USSD, SMS, Internet chat, Twitter and Facebook have all become expected modes of communication. Supporting them is one issue, but co-ordinating them to create the ultimate customer experience is impossible in today's market.

These cross-channel communications have a significant impact on customer service expectations for consumers across all age groups, not just for those who are younger and more tech-savvy. A company that provides multiple contact channels raises expectations that the service it provides will be better - a more customer-friendly company.

The convergence of these channels creates complexity in the way the workforce is managed and scheduled. Agent training and skills assessments grow in complexity, as they have to communicate with an expanding variety of generations via an expanding range of mediums, often with a complex and dynamic product portfolio.

Every contact with a customer is a chance to leverage a relationship.

Francis Bakos is manager of business solutions at Bytes Intelleca.

Workforce planning becomes three-dimensional as companies manage contractual obligations with agent preferences and a seemingly unpredictable flow of traffic.

Few contact centres have discovered how to handle a sudden spike in call or e-mail volumes that lasts an hour or two, so how will they manage multiple channels that could spike at any given moment?

Then there's the issue of being able to report on and analyse all these interactions. Most contact centres have one of two problems: either they don't have enough data to work with - because their channels are unmanaged or the technologies they are using to manage that channel do not provide sufficient statistics; or they have such a variety of statistics from so many different sources that it's impossible to correlate and analyse the data into meaningful business intelligence.

Unless companies can achieve multi-channel reporting with multiple metrics using differentiated views, advanced analytics on customer behaviour and agent productivity becomes impossible.

Many contact centres do not know how to move forward because the morale and willingness of the agents paralyse them. While management in some contact centres accepts that agents will always have low morale and that it's the nature of the job, others are finding innovative ways to get into the minds of their agents, understanding their motivators, and then working to motivate them and ensure they are happy.

One customer even has a virtual agent interaction system that agents can speak to when they feel down, or have a problem. It's not only helping agents to feel more fulfilled: it's showing management where the real issues lie in their contact centre and helping to streamline processes and gain efficiencies.

Making sure to hire the right agent in the first place is still an essential building block, and recruitment teams are becoming increasingly innovative in their screening processes and career path design to retain their best agents.

Finally, there's the part that management in most contact centres miss. Yet it is an area that in some companies is responsible for 90% of their customer complaints. That area is back-office fulfilment.

Just dealing with the initial contact and getting it right isn't good enough if the fulfilment of the request did not meet expectations. For this reason, even back-office staff are becoming part of the contact centre with the same performance management and SLA criteria being applied to their work requests as is applied to customer interaction requests. With this development comes an alignment across the organisation of KRAs, metrics, and the alignment of a vision for ultimate customer experience.

There is no single answer to creating the ultimate customer experience. It's not just about a piece of technology or a single process. It's about a holistic view. Integrated technology, integrated people management, and integrated processes, all moving toward a unified strategy. There are many different ways to achieve this, but sooner or later every contact centre will have to go on this journey or get left behind.