FAB has always been built from on operational managers perspective
how do we help Contact Centre leaders tackle some of the problems they face off to daily.
Having worked in contact centres for a long time I’ve seen most of the problems we set out to help others with.
Some nearly ended me and were much harder to fix then others and some just need a helicopter view to help you see the wood from the trees.
There are generally six Key areas we see in contact centres where ops managers need help.
Poor customer outcomes – either complaints are too high or QA isn’t right or the operation is struggling or maybe all three
Manual and multiple systems – operators using up to 12 different systems and juggling manual Workarounds driving inefficiency and agent burnout
Disengaged team – Culture eating your strategy for breakfast, with inexperienced leaders and disparate workforce makes it hard to engage the team leading to high attrition, disengagement and a perpetual recruitment cycle.
Performance pressure – having to hit targets and KPI’s without the right resource or a revolving door on attrition makes it hard to build experience levels and get better means sales, retention and CSAT suffer.
Clunky CX – customer journeys built from the inside out rather then from the customers perspective, technology not helping hand too much focus on customer KPI’s rather then fixing the journey.
Inefficiency – Losing resource through poor operational oversight, lack of reporting and lack of experienced leadership driving performance improvements, high sickness, high absence and loss of control
So how we can turn these outcomes upside down and SING about customer and employee experience.
We use the SING acronym to kick start our thinking, but what does SING actually mean?
It’s the “how” do you deliver a consistent customer experience? I always talk about the customer experience equation which is:-
Great Operational Excellence + Great Employee Experience = Great Customer experience
But we need to define what Operational excellence is and then measure how well we are living up to it and importantly what we do with areas where we aren’t hitting the standard.
We also need to be clear what a great employee experience is and the acid test is always do our people attest to that!
By optimising the performance of your people, processes and Technolgy that contribute towards customer experience we can make CX “SING”
STAND OUT – Create differentiation through amazing service – knocking the socks off people with service difference, understanding what amazing service looks and feels like. We then need to map that out, train our people and then inspect what we expect by measuring, observing, tracking and seeking feedback from customers AND colleagues.
INNOVATIVE – Doing the basics brilliantly but using Technolgy to enable not hinder customer experience. We start with how technology is currently used, how many platforms, how do they talk to each other, how do they hinder your agents ability to do a great job?
NEED BASED – Appeal to each persons needs and personalise the journey along the way. So understanding your customers is important here, when did you last invite customers on to give you honest feedback, we aren’t talking about complaints but customer think tanks from your actual customer base!
GUIDED – Signposted and supported along the journey with information that easily accessible, accurate and not misleading. Walk the journey from your customers shoes, we can get boxed in within our own way of working do thinking outside in can really help get inside your customers brain standard to reinvent the journey to make it easier and simpler.
One of the most important aspects of delivering great Customer experience is people, they are the frontline to your brand, you can have bad process’ and antiquated technology but good people can navigate around them and help your customers feel better about it and actually paste over some cracks.
We need to be able to balance the equation and by auditing all the key areas in the contact centre, using interviews, data analysis, customer journey mapping and maturity assessments you can get some a qualitative and quantitative results and then prioritise what’s going to have the biggest impact.
delivering awesome customer experiences helps us shift customer perceptions of contact centres
#fabsolutions #contactcentres #SING
