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GOOD PRACTICE GUIDELINES FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT OF CONTACT CENTRES

SECTION 7: PROCESS

Process - the engine of any successful contact centre - is often the most overlooked element of set-up. Experience shows that failing contact centres do not follow quality processes, relying on an impromptu approach to solution management. This has a negative effect on staff morale and sets the centre into a negative spiral from which it becomes increasingly difficult to emerge. By insisting on a first-class process, the wise contact centre manager avoids many later problems and establishes the basis for constant enhancement of the service offered to customers.

Process mapping

Successful set-up and development of contact centres relies on the effectiveness of business processing. Critical to the planning and ongoing management of the centre is the need for comprehensive process mapping. This involves gathering and organising facts about your processes, representing them in a way that enables you to identify actual or ideal paths and reveal problems and potential solutions.

Process mapping should be 'as it actually is', not what procedural manuals say or what people think it is. It should be conducted 'outside in' (in other words from the customer's perspective) in order to identify problem areas and opportunities specifically related to the customer experience. Improving processes will include:

• eliminating entire processes or unnecessary portions of processes;
• combining tasks;
• changing the sequence in which tasks are accomplished; and
• changing the ways in which tasks are carried out.

Measurement

A contact centre's ability to generate data often far exceeds its ability to use it.

An over-emphasis on productivity and automatic call distributor ACD measures is not enough to reflect how the centre adds value to the organisation. There is a need to focus more on outcome, rather than just activity.

The focus must be on tracking, analysing and interpreting the data gathered in order to make informed decisions. The measures should encompass department, team and individual activity. They should be relevant and achieve a balance between value and cost. They should focus on the customer, the people and the business and should translate to meaningful KPIs like:

• Quality of the customer interaction for example:
  • Customer satisfaction and feedback
  • Conversation monitoring and evaluation
  • Mystery shopping, etc.
• Staff development and progress for example:
  • Development and training
  • Performance
  • Attrition, sickness, etc.
• Efficiency of delivery for example:
  • Service levels
  • Agent productivity
  • Line utilisation
  • Schedule adherence, etc.
• Financial viability for example:
  • Cost per call
  • Overhead and direct costs
  • Cost to service customers

Interpretation of the measured indicators should take account of how the different measures relate to each other, as together they can paint a fairly complete picture of contact centre performance, whereas isolated metrics can be misleading.

Managers should be trained to interpret and analyse KPIs. Merely focusing on them will not inherently improve them. Improvement comes from optimising the factors that cause them to be as they are. For example, by monitoring 'cost per call' as a KPI, you identify the variables that drive it up or down and their impact. A climbing cost per call can be a good sign, depending on the variables driving it up. For instance, process improvements may result in fewer calls than would otherwise be necessary (for example eliminating the need for customer call-backs).

The CCA has developed a Standards Framework as an operating guide through which expectations of efficiency and customer service can be fulfilled. It is a collection of simple statements, designed for the industry by the industry, against which you can judge if your focus on customers and staff is maintained during development or major change. The Framework seeks to identify areas in which activity should be focused, but within that focus allows complete freedom of commercial decision-making.

It is not just the hard facts (call volumes, service levels, etc.) that should be measured. These technical measures do not reflect the customer's experience, nor do they give an indication whether the conversation properly represents the 'brand'. Traditionally, even 'mystery shopper' analysis has focused on harder measures, assessing whether the agent followed the script and asked the right questions. For instance, a call may be completed by an agent in the time allocated and the outcome may be the correct one, but there is no indication of the customer's take-out from the call. Were they happy at being rushed through the call? Did they have further questions or want more detail than was provided?

In this brand-conscious age, the contact centre has often failed to support a company's professed brand image. One reason for a failure to focus on quality of conversation is that, historically, it has not been possible to assess something as intangible as conversational quality. However, the increased focus on branding within contact centres, plus the reflection of the brand in customer communications, has given rise to a new set of measurements capable of assessing customer take-out from a call. Measuring conversations will soon be as integral a part of contact centre management as any of the current metrics.

Forecasting and scheduling

There is a need to understand the drivers of customer demand for example:

• customer lifecycle;
• marketing and communication activity; and
• seasonal trends.

For inbound scheduling of staff, you should as far as possible match resource with demand. This requires an understanding of queuing theory and Erlangs (units of telecommunications traffic measurement used to describe total traffic volume in one hour). Many Erlang calculators can be downloaded free from the internet. In order to calculate your staffing requirements using an Erlang formula, you will need, as a minimum: number of calls forecasted, average duration of these calls, average delay you feel is acceptable for incoming callers to experience.

Workforce management systems ( see section 6) can convert forecasts into staff requirements by using such service standards as the grade of service and average waiting times.

Process improvement

Ensuring that there is a focus on continuous process improvement to deliver excellent and efficient customer service is a challenge for the best contact centre managers. Here are some guidelines:

• Understand customer demand and apply techniques of root cause analysis to help eliminate recurring problems by:
  • analysing customer demand events for their root causes;
  • accurate forecasting of volumes;
  • evaluating each event for elimination benefit;
  • understanding all of the factors involved in reaching a solution;
  • selecting the problems for action; and
  • executing a process improvement action plan.
• Utilise customer feedback to enhance the offerings and services provided by the centre to:
  • increase sales of products or services, thus enhancing the revenue generated by the centre from those customers; and
  • promote advocacy amongst the centre's customers, thus encouraging new customers to purchase the client's products, either directly or through other channels.
• Evaluate conversation quality: This is an increasingly important tool in a centre manager's portfolio. It can work as a defensive mechanism, enabling you to understand negative issues and manage them while they are still small, or as a proactive mechanism, promoting opportunities for increased customer satisfaction and, therefore, revenue generation.
• Employ benchmarking: This helps you to develop a better understanding of your industry and identify 'best in class' practices. The Scottish Executive and CCA have developed a benchmarking service. For more info, contact C21g@scotland.gsi.gov.uk
• Adopt recognised industry standards such as those developed by the CCA: Details of the CCA standard can be found at www.cca.org.uk
• Promote industry awareness: Keep up to date on industry developments in process practice and technical development. The contact centre industry and its suppliers are growing significantly in number and continually bringing new practices and technologies to the marketplace.

Knowledge management

A major issue in contact centres is timely access by agents to information to assist them in servicing the customer. This, especially in the early days of a centre, adds significant time to the length of a call and frustration to the customer.

In addition, one of the biggest threats to any contact centre is the attrition rate of staff within the industry. Quite often, knowledge is widely and unequally distributed within the minds of the agents. As staff members leave, a certain amount of knowledge goes with them.

A knowledge-base solution significantly reduces the threats posed by both these situations and ultimately enhances the customer's experience. The ideal knowledge base stores resolutions that can be accessed and easily understood by the agent, using a minimum of effort. It is able to build dynamically and to import answers to new problems, questions and issues that arise.

Effective knowledge management is the backbone of any customer sales or service centre. It helps advisers to deliver 'first call resolution' and increase customer satisfaction.

Your knowledge management strategy should reflect how it creates customer value, how that value supports an efficient model and how staff deliver value effectively. It should support multiple channels of user access, for example a comprehensive knowledge base can be placed on a self-service website, thus significantly decreasing the costs of customer service.

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