Customers' expectations of the service they should be receiving from contact centres have matured. They no longer simply want answers to routine questions. They want a two-way conversation about a range of progressively more complex transactions, financial and emotional, in which they want to engage in with the organisation.
The way organisations invest in contact centres will have to change.
Evan Jones is director of operations at Merchants.
This is forcing organisations to think progressively about customer satisfaction, rather than simply about cost reduction.
Dimension Data's 2011 Benchmarking Report shows a significant number of the 546 contact centres in 66 countries that were surveyed rank customer lifetime value management as the number one issue. This trend brings with it strategic change, not only for the contact centre, but also for the organisation at large.
Making decisions
To start with, a focus on customer satisfaction means an emphasis on people and how they impact one another. The contact centre agent, therefore, comes up front and centre, with organisations realising they will have to convert their contact centre agents into service specialists, with accountability for the relationship between the customer and the organisation.
This has several knock-on effects.
The first is that the contact centre will have to be much more closely integrated with the organisation, which in most cases, it currently represents at arm's length. This calls for a massive culture shift for both organisations.
The second is that having accountable contact centre service specialists means opening up career paths within the rest of the organisation for service specialists incubated in the contact centre - because companies can't expect people who are not only prepared to take responsibility for customer relationships, but also have the skill and talent to do so, to be content to remain 'agents' for the rest of their lives.
The contact centre industry is one of the most wasteful of human resources. Most organisations lose one-third of their agents every year. It's ironic that an industry that is so focused on cost reduction should be squandering money by not retaining skills it has paid to develop, particularly considering the payback periods associated with tenure!
The third is that the way organisations invest in contact centres will have to change. At the moment, investment in technology and in people is heavily focused on enabling cost reduction. For many organisations, this means keeping spend on agent training to the bare minimum needed to equip them to meet existing contact centre metrics - all of which are geared to improve efficiency rather than customer satisfaction.
There has been a belief that picking up a call quickly and resolving the query in that first call, both of which are aimed at cost reduction, will also result in customer satisfaction. In fact, customers are less interested in how quickly the call is answered than in the information and understanding of their issues provided. Until now, the two approaches have seemed contradictory.
The lesson being learned now is that agents who are service specialists can deal with complex issues and reduce costs at the same time. And, as the cherry on top, actually drive revenue.
Service specialists providing superb service will generate revenue by creating high levels of customer loyalty, thereby bringing repeat and referral business to the organisation. This can be demonstrated in measures such as the Net Promoter Score, and more recently, the Customer Effort Score.
Service specialists providing superb service are also likely to boost first-call resolution levels and be more efficient at most tasks, precisely because being better empowered, they will have more insight into how their actions affect the functioning of the rest of the organisation.
Empowering agents, therefore, gives organisations the best of both worlds - leaner operations and better performance through an improved service culture.
Strategy shift
So... how is this nirvana reached?
The first step is to engender multi-skilling, by bringing together various products and services that will co-ordinate and consolidate organisational effort in serving customers. These include more astute use of organisation-wide management information systems to equip agents to better serve customers, and to enable more ownership and accountability by agents when it comes to hand-offs.
They would also include HR strategies such as career path mapping, employee well-being programmes, and pay-to-stay incentives.
In addition, contact centres are not easy environments in which to work. The physical structure and layout of contact centres need to change to make them more pleasant work spaces, because the physical design of a service-led culture is as important as the design of the HR strategy aimed at inculcating that culture.
At the same time, organisations need to create more, and very probably, new senior roles to which agents can aspire as part of their career progression. These roles would initially be within the contact centre. Ideally, however, they would extend into the larger organisation, so someone starting as a service specialist could theoretically progress to being a head of an organisational division.
Overall, the focus has to be on getting a return on the investment of converting agents into service specialists, and then on retaining their capabilities, either in the contact centre or the organisation at large. A clear focus on an appropriate culture to drive service will also yield high results for any operator.
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