Companies are increasingly focused on customer retention. So customer experience management is imperative in the daily operation of most organisations. And with the adoption of customer experience management principles comes a focus on every aspect of the contact centre.
On answer rates and queue times, on brand awareness and representation, on quality procedures and applications, on customer segmentation and personalisation - the contact centre is being optimised, improved, and shaped into a sleek machine to make customers happy.
Yet the contact centre is the tip of an iceberg. The value chain extends beyond the contact centre. It extends into the back-office, administration teams, and the rest of the enterprise.
True customer experience custodians need to look beyond the contact centre - the entire value chain - and optimise across the value chain to ensure customers a good experience. That presents new challenges.
Departmental alignment
The first challenge is to ensure departments work together to achieve a seamless customer experience.
Francis Bakos is executive: presales and business solutions at Bytes Connect.
The first challenge is to ensure departments work together to achieve a seamless customer experience. Historically, many back-office processing departments are separated by function. In most cases, the back-office processing teams are separated from the customer-facing contact centre and - unless the organisation is integrated - most teams look only at their own department.
Each manager focuses on their own processes and SLAs. They implement fixes that other departments may have caused; they throw up their hands to customer problems and cast blame elsewhere.
These departments are not interested in working together, their values and service levels are often in conflict, and even their cultures differ. Their competitive natures drive them to work against each other.
Disparate systems
The next challenge is the number of systems. Often different departments work on different tasks requiring different systems. That means there is no “single version of the truth”.
Many companies lack a workflow system that controls what work needs to get done when, rather preferring to use e-mails, or even printed paper delivered to each department.
When a workflow system does exist, it is often inefficient - unable to automatically prioritise work, work with exceptions, or to track an entire workflow process. The workflow is often so inefficient that it is bypassed by e-mails and telephone escalations as these competitive departments struggle to meet their SLAs.
The final complication in this customer experience across the value chain is a result of the inefficient processes, systems, and lack of departmental alignment.
When paper and e-mail are used, when workflow systems are bypassed by telephone escalations, or when workflow systems are absent, then it becomes an impossible manual task to understand, track and report on service levels in the back-office, and if it can't be measured, how can it be improved?
One solution
The problem needs to be attacked from multiple angles, starting with an unbiased analysis of the end-to-end life cycle of a work item. Often managers of various teams get so caught up in their daily operations, troubles and goals that they lack the time, motivation or inclination to look across the entire value chain.
Take a step back. Find someone who has no allegiance to one department or another. Give that person the goal to optimise the entire value chain, and then let them analyse the back-office life cycle. Look at SLAs across the various departments, and then redesign processes to optimise the time taken to complete a customer query.
Implementation looms - dependent on systems. A single workflow system would go a long way toward optimisation, but often those workflow systems alone are not enough, lacking the abilities to dynamically optimise work items, to enable auto-escalations, to auto-distribute to skills-based agents, to track average handle times, and provide reports.
All of these are historically contact centre features, but now they are just as important in the back-office. Queues, average handle times, service levels, agent performance, agent skills, multi-skilling and blending are synonymous with back-office processing, and to keep up with the competition, they should be as important in the back-office.
So it is essential that any solution (or combination of solutions) chosen for the back-office, allows the same transparency, reporting and tracking available in the front-office call centre. That same system should also allow for a single, holistic overview of the entire value chain, and also enable blending, prioritisation and automatic distribution.
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