Becoming Strategic by Broadening Senior Management’s Understanding of Your Center
1 May, 2007
By: Mark SelcowForget the word “strategic,” start thinking “value.” Why? Because transforming the way senior management views your contact center operation involves both an internal make-over and external education, its important to quantify and communicate the value your contact center operation brings to the organization. Once your operation’s “value” is clearly communicated, its “strategic” role becomes apparent.
There are several key steps that can help you communicate the contact center operation’s value to senior management:
• Support the corporate brand through customer experience
• Tie organizational initiatives with contact center activity
• Link customer operations through a common set of performance measures across several functions.
Support the Corporate Brand
As everyone in a contact center knows, agents are typically the most important link between the company and its customers. Unfortunately, senior management’s perspective is often different. To transform senior management’s view of the contact center from a transactional organization to a valuable asset, the operation’s activities must be mapped directly to an enterprise’s key business drivers – customer experience, customer loyalty, customer acquisition and customer retention. To support the corporate brand by mapping the contact center operation’s activities to an enterprise’s key business drivers you should:
• Build the right data foundation, including customer experience and loyalty data
• Change the metrics on which you report and run the contact center operation.
Build the Right Data Foundation---
The first step to supporting the corporate brand is ensuring your operation has a single, accurate view into performance. Building the right data foundation requires:
• Integrating data from across the entire operation, allowing you to develop correlations between key metrics and activities by consolidating efficiency, effectiveness, customer satisfaction and revenue information into a single location
• Picking the right technology, permitting frequent changes to metrics, reports and dashboards by business users – this allows your metrics to always be business relevant.
Change the Metrics on Which You Report and Run the Operation---
It is important to remember that other parts of the organization do not measure (or care about) wrap and idle time. To increase the value of the contact center to senior management, you need to speak through a set of metrics everyone understands and tracks, such as customer churn, saves, satisfaction and revenue. This requires a fundamental shift in the contact center itself.
By gathering hard-to-get data, cleansing it, determining dependent variables and statistically correlating the base data with dependent variables, you will uncover some new, uncommon and unseen metrics that have a major impact on performance. You will need to examine these new metrics alongside all the metrics you currently use. Each metric, new and old, should be mapped directly to a key strategic objective of the enterprise. If a metric does not map to an objective – throw it out!
The metrics that remain will allow you to improve your own operation by managing to numbers that truly impact performance – not just data that is easy to access. The set of final metrics will also allow you to more clearly communicate the true value of the contact center to senior management through facts and data they understand.
Tie Organizational Initiatives with Contact Center Activity
It’s still common to see new marketing campaigns being rolled out without anyone in contact center operations being notified, let alone being included, to provide operational considerations. The increased call volume from the campaign results in reduced service levels and consequently, the marketing efforts fail to meet their potential. To prevent occurrences like this, organizational initiatives must be linked with contact center activity. This requires better cross-functional communication, which ultimately results in better performance. There are two important steps that can help:
• Share customer feedback with counterparts
• Rigorously quantify the impact of every campaign.
Share Customer Feedback---
With thousands of direct interactions occurring every day, the contact center is the best source for customer feedback to senior management, Sales, Marketing and Channel Operations. By identifying, tracking and regularly sharing customer feedback, you will be providing other departments with critical information they may not have had access to previously --- increasing the value and role of the contact center.
Once you have established regular interactions with your counterparts to review customer feedback, be sure to help develop solutions to common customer issues while also offering your support in the planning stage of future campaigns. The more you are involved upfront, the smoother the campaign will run and ultimately the more value the campaign will have to the organization.
Quantify the Impact of Every Campaign---
Rigorously correlate any changes in call volume or call type directly to specific campaigns. If a change in the format of a bill results in increased call volume, document the impact, quantify the financial result (both up and down) and report it. If a new marketing campaign reduces customer complaints, also document and report the financial result. By providing valuable campaign statistics along with direct customer feedback, you will be able to effectively bridge the gap with other functions and establish the operation as a valuable partner to senior management, Sales, Marketing and Channel Operations.
Link Customer Operations
Contact centers should never work independently. Even though a majority of customer interactions occur through a contact center, other customer operations have a major impact on customer experience, customer acquisition and customer loyalty. To drive operational excellence across the entire customer operation, it is important to link the contact center with field service, channel (retail and partner) and back-office operations through:
• Integrated data
• Common metrics and goals.
Integrated Data---
The first step to linking customer operations together is integrating data across all the departments. Creating a holistic view across the contact center, channel, field service and back-office is the only way to truly define and track key metrics such as customer retention, churn and satisfaction. A “single version of the truth” across each department will also allow you and senior management to accurately identify critical process improvement opportunities. For example, by combining contact center information with field service data, management can determine if a certain technician’s customers are more likely to call the contact center than the average --- identifying a training opportunity. By combining contact center information with retail data, management can determine customer churn by channel partner and outlet --- helping identify the most valuable retailers.
Common Metrics and Goals---
The second step to linking customer operations is developing a set of common measurements and goals. With a common data foundation across the contact center, field service, channel and back-office operations in place, a set of shared metrics, goals and processes can be established. These metrics should include customer churn, satisfaction and loyalty along with a set of common goals. By linking each operation through common metrics and goals, each function will naturally coordinate with the others leading to increased operational excellence across and within the functions - increasing customer experience, loyalty and retention.
What it All Means
Becoming strategic by broadening the understanding of your center is about demonstrating value and presenting data and facts that map to corporate objectives. By building the right data foundation and managing to a new set of metrics that drive business impact, you will be able to clearly communicate the value of your operation. Working cross-functionally, more effectively and helping to tie the contact center directly with other customer operations (including field service, channel and back-office), you will elevate the role and value of the operation itself ---allowing your center to become more of a strategic asset within the organization and to senior management.
