5 Steps to Transform your Contact Centre
It’s a scary thought that we are moving into year 2 of the pandemic. Most organisations have been through the initial crisis phase, shutting down offices where required and enabling work from home mode.
Customer service leaders have been operating under pandemic conditions for long enough to see the critical problems in the contact centre that need to be fixed. We are all starting to see the end of the tunnel for social restrictions and considering how to respond to a post-pandemic set of market dynamics.
Senior leaders are now turning to more tactical fixes and strategic activities to enable their organisations to adjust to changes in the way that they need to interact with their customers and differentiate themselves. A recent survey highlighted that there are 3 important trends that business leaders must take note of:
- Customers are more demanding and expect better service
- Multi-channel communication is growing
- Customer usage of many communication channels is accelerating
An article on nojitter.com summarised the challenge facing business leaders:
“Consumer behaviour has always been ahead of, and thus the driving force for, business technology innovation. But while sales and marketing have had significant investments in R&D, the contact centre has fallen far behind. That’s because while we all talk a lot about customer-centricity, we then go right on ahead prioritizing the needs of our agents, departments, and businesses. If we are going to be customer-centric, we must actually (finally) put the needs of our customers first.”
Customer feedback is the loudest source of guidance for an organisation.
You can get this directly from your customers through customer satisfaction surveys and measuring customer effort scores. Customers will find every means to provide you feedback. It’s key that you listen to them, it’s not just a metric to be measured.
Customer feedback highlights problem areas — the volume of the feedback in a specific area will help you to prioritise where to look first.
There are 2 ways that you can respond to customer feedback:
- Tactical (defensive or reactive response) is a response to known issues: addressing common complaints from customers, internal deficit of tools, lack of resource or broken or complex processes.
- Strategic (offensive or proactive response) is characterised by a response that supports a larger business goal and often has a measurable value associated with it.
A common mistake in organisations suffering under a load of negative customer feedback is to focus on searching for a technical solution that can be implemented quickly — a defensive response. Terms that you hear frequently are “look for the low hanging fruit”, “tactical fixes”, “we need to implement “X” tool to fix the problem” — it is a search for a silver bullet. The focus is on the solution first.
The problem with this approach is that you can find yourself stuck in a cycle of putting out symptom fires instead of focusing on addressing the root cause and changes that will enable you to differentiate in the market.
Gartner in recent research outlined the top priorities for service leaders in 2021.
What stands out is that the top 4 priorities are all strategic initiatives. They are focus either on the customer or the enabling platforms that enable the delivery of changes to the customer experience.
How to approach the transformation challenge
Consider this matrix:
Quadrant 1 is for activities that is easier to execute but has limited customer impact. An example of this would be the addition of a new feature or channel in a contact centre. Quadrant 1 is the zone of temptation. Working in this quadrant delivers a marginal benefit to the customer at best and ties up resources that may be better utilised elsewhere.
Quadrant 2 activities tend to have a limited customer impact but need a higher level of organisational effort. These tend to be internally focused — changes in process, or a company re-org that may impact the contact centre and the way it operates. If you map an activity into this quadrant it is not a tactical fix, it requires careful consideration.
Quadrant 3 activities have the potential to benefit your customer's experience and are easy to put in place — this is your tactical quadrant. Any activity in this quadrant must have a defined problem, a clear understanding of the customer benefit and how you measure success. Iteration can drive impact and speed.
Quadrant 4 activities change your customer’s experience significantly and your ability to differentiate but require effort from across your organisation to deliver. Dressing up an activity that should be in Quadrant 2 as a Quadrant 4 activity because of urgency should be a red flag to senior leaders.
The most significant blocker to transforming your contact centre and your customer's experience is the ability of the business to absorb the change required. The priority is to ensure that allocated resources get the right outcome in a way that the organisation is capable of embracing.
If you are embarking on a contact centre transformation, understanding the “what” and “why” you are making a change is critical to maximising the potential for success. This understanding enables you to map proposed actions into the impact/execute matrix and then evaluate the different options, benefits, risks etc.
A quick internet search will return a depth of opinion on digital transformation and how to approach it. I tend to favour a simple but comprehensive approach that is:
- focused on the customer,
- enables you to engage with all stakeholders in the business and
- enables you to “solve the problem” for the customer, the business and the contact centre agents.
The approach to a transformation project that you use will influence the outcome. Some approaches are better suited than others to complex, evolving challenges. During the pandemic, projects tend to be endeavours of a somewhat uncertain nature, due to the ongoing potential for disruption and resulting change in the business environment.
Most organisations are familiar with and comfortable with a waterfall project management approach. It’s the comfort zone. It’s linear, sequential with a predictive big plan up front, followed by gated progress to the end. It’s a clean, clear and predictable form of project management. But it requires stability and predictability. — something that you can argue does not exist today.
Recent experience has shown us that it’s harder to predict changes in customer behaviour, which changes are temporary and which ones will stick. Choices based only on customer feedback “symptoms” or untested business assumptions, can set you on a path that could result in a “miss”. And it could be costly.
Where there is uncertainty, iteration offers a better approach.
Adapting the stages and approach of design thinking in the context of a contact centre transformation can offer significant benefits and the potential for a higher success rate. If you put a product manager hat on, the goal is:
- to deliver a solution to a defined problem,
- for a defined target customer,
- at the right time that
- delights customers
Let’s take those 4 goals and add in a design thinking approach and process. What you get is a 5-step process that offers the best opportunity to realise an outcome that delivers what customers want.
The 5 Steps to transform your contact centre:
#1 Confront your today — define the problem
#2 Create your target — how could it be?
#3 How do we get there? — build your plan
#4 Make it happen — what works, learn and adjust.
#5 Implement (migrate) & launch
This approach has clear benefits:
- You avoid the technology silver bullet syndrome, deploying technology without understanding the “what” and “why” and the implications.
- Time spent upfront will help you avoid being locked into a reactive/tactical cycle of short term “emergency” changes.
- It allows you to learn and adjust quickly, something that is far more difficult when using a waterfall project management approach.
- This approach will enable you to select technology based on addressing the customer need and your customer experience strategy, not trying to bend customer preferences to your latest technology “flavour of the month”.
- It simplifies your technology procurement — your technology partner gets a clear definition of your requirements, objectives and strategic roadmap.
- It allows your technology partner to add far more value, way beyond the old “buy and deploy” sourcing model. Cloud contact centres have changed the technology partner model for organisations. How you chose your partner and what you expect from them, needs to adjust as well.
How to use this process is a discussion for another day. In the meantime, if you would like to discuss this in more detail, drop an email to hello@knoldhill.com and I will get in touch.
