The Power of $ervices: Maximizing the Benefits of Your Technology Investments
1 Jul, 2007
By: Nathan StearnsWith today’s complex environment, most contact centers make a tremendous investment in the operation, from the physical location to the agents on the phones to the technology that manages queues, workflow and scheduling. That investment is certainly justified time and time again – particularly when considering the contact center’s importance to the enterprise at-large. After all, the contact center is the face of the company and its first line of defense for customer loyalty.
While trying to manage the complexity of the contact center and gain recognition within the enterprise at-large, however, maintaining cost controls is still equally important.
Unfortunately, the need to save money on technology projects is often done by skimping on services and consulting expertise in favor of internal resources or a “learn-as we go plan.” Not only does this prevent the organization from gaining maximum value from its technology investments, it places unrealistic expectations on managers, coaches and strategists.
For starters, internal resources probably already have their hands full just meeting the center’s day-to-day operational goals and ensuring the organization operates to the company''s expectations. Aside from the numerous demands on their time, internal experts may lack the depth of experience necessary to think outside the box and see new ways to exploit the technology to address problems or new initiatives defined after the systems first go live. For example, a recognized internal authority on the practical points of workforce management does not necessarily understand the full range of potential represented by the organization''s workforce management (WFM) solution. That untapped potential can go unnoticed and wasted.
A number of companies became disenchanted with outside services during the expensive run-up to Y2K and some of the high-flying enterprise software projects that coincided with the first few years of the e-commerce boom. But there should be no shame or stigma associated with the use of expert consultants and proficient service providers.
Internal experts are second-to-none at knowing the needs of the business. But a skilled service provider offers a powerful combination of in-depth software knowledge and the keen ability to see the bigger picture. Together, the two can develop innovative solutions to achieve maximum benefit from technology investments.
Limitations of Do-it-Yourself
Internal teams face a number of challenges and restrictions. A major contact center transformation project involving new processes and technologies can place a tremendous burden on the organization’s leaders. They face pressure not only to ensure that the contact center continues to deliver quality service during the transition, but to communicate the new strategies clearly and effectively to agents and, to the extent they are affected, customers as well. These responsibilities can extend into project planning, change management, training design and deployment.
Due to the scope of these tasks, oftentimes contact centers will scale back their vision of transformation projects or delay certain components. Without dedicated expertise available to support the new system design and changeover, it can become simply too much for the internal team to oversee a complete reinvention of the contact center process.
As a result, objectives are pared back to just the easiest aspects of functionality, addressing quick-win, low-hanging fruit payoffs. Although quick, demonstrable wins are important elements of the ROI for any business investment, the fallout from an undermanned project can linger.
A project isn''t guaranteed to be successful with an expert service provider. But when the organization goes it alone, corners are almost invariably cut.
Once basic functionality is in place, the day-to-day managers and support staff are left to their own devices to determine the full potential of the new procedures and technologies deployed in the contact center. Without a comprehensive basis to understand the full spectrum of possibilities, they will typically fall far short of fully exploiting that potential. Later, when the sheen of the quick wins fade, at worst the company could end up viewing the entire exercise as a wasted effort which fell short of long-term potential because the vision did not come together.
The tragedy of such a conclusion is that it is only partially correct. True, contact center projects can under-perform and fall short of expectations if not guided and supported with the right degree of resources. But often these disappointments come when, in fact, nearly all of the right components were in place. The company could have flexible agents, visionary executives and an eager staff of managers, coaches and operational specialists ready to take the new design to its fullest potential. However, they may simply have lacked the time and resources necessary to make the project blossom. The right services can do that.
The Power of Services: Business Insight
Nobody knows the inner workings of a business like those charged with ensuring that it runs smoothly on a daily basis. Qualified outside opinions from skilled service providers can augment that focused excellence with cross-disciplinary wisdom that comes from numerous client engagements and exposure to a variety of successful strategies.
Those insights can build a greater understanding of how mandated KPIs and management objectives for a given departmental initiative can best mesh with the objectives of contact center leaders and the capabilities of frontline agents. More important, that trained insight can play a vital role in devising strategies for executing on those results — strategies which also take into account customer satisfaction and perception of the business.
The learned expertise of a trusted services partner can also aid in looking beyond received internal wisdom to conduct more effective root-cause analysis. It is too easy to conclude that past causes lead to current effects.
By bringing the range of experience necessary to understand changing customer demands and expectations as they have already appeared in other markets, service providers can explore the issues behind operational shifts (such as consistently elevated hold times) to reach not only a conclusion as to the cause, but propose clear solutions as well. Customer preferences may have shifted, the efficiency of self-help channels may be dwindling or there could be an agent skill gap. The right services partner can tell the difference.
The Power of Services: Technical Know-How
Cultivating internal experts is one of the most important things an organization serious about contact center excellence can do. However, out of consideration for their job priorities, these experts tend to be masters of specific, operational technologies.
A quality monitoring expert may be a whiz at listening to contacts, calibrating observations and providing feedback, all of which delivers a great deal of value to the organization from the quality monitoring task. But such a person is unlikely to have significant insight into how his or her efforts can directly improve the workforce management function within the contact center. And while such internal experts may be able to articulate how advanced system functionality could benefit their departments, they are often lacking in the technical experience to make such plans reality.
Experienced consultants can build out new and innovative capabilities in each contact center department, often by using the solutions already bought and paid for by the contact center. Look for partners who have proven experience in expanding contact center platforms across operational disciplines to create valuable insight for the company.
The Power of Services: Integration
Skilled service providers should also bring exposure from several other deployments to the table, which can help a client organization look beyond its immediate concerns and create insights and strategies outside the company''s usual orthodoxy. These solutions often build from the ability to combine technologies in a way that may not be readily apparent to internal experts.
For instance, an experienced contact center services group can produce new competitive insight by creating linkages between quality monitoring and other operational systems. Quality monitoring is typically thought of as a performance assurance tool, to observe and rate individual agent performance and to give upper management the ability to rate coaching and management efforts. Even in organizations sophisticated enough to combine a speech analytics tool with monitored recordings, these are generally used to capture and report on certain behavioral triggers of the agent or customer — such as ensuring that the agent does not use certain discouraged phrases or to investigate reports of abusive behavior.
A skilled services organization can put monitoring and speech analytics to even greater use. Feeding detailed speech analytics results into forecasting can help workforce managers observe call trends not just at the queue category level, but from ideas and concepts expressed in the natural flow of dialog between the agent and the customer. These insights provide insight that a simple queue statistics cannot capture.
Such analytical data need not even remain inside the conceptual four walls of the contact center. Other areas of the enterprise need insight from the contact center interactions. But how many internal experts will be able to afford the time to build an integration with marketing to share instant product feedback, collected directly from customer conversations? How many will have time to build a technological link with the product design group to share real-time customer assessments of product performance and preferences for future designs? These possibilities could be wasted without assistance from a third party that can be charged with the responsibility of building cross-functional requirements.
The Power of Services: Customization
As business and customer demands evolve, the technology and procedures employed in supporting and understanding those customers must evolve as well.
For example, experienced service providers can augment and adjust existing capabilities to fortify the business against threats such as fraud. A complete, end-to-end anti-fraud solution might include speech analytics monitoring for deceptive phrases or known bad credit card numbers, combined with agent scripts that ask the right kinds of verification questions, along with soft-skills training to better identify dubious callers.
Customization can also play a key role in managing unplanned intraday interruptions or queue spikes. With the right know-how backing the organization, speech analytics and IVR logic can be deployed to recognize not only the presence but the cause of a contact spike and enable new logic to be quickly deployed, presenting new self-help options or a pre-recorded message likely to address the needs of the caller until the rush subsides.
The Power of Services: Training
Just as nobody knows the business as well as its people, nobody knows agents as well as the supervisors and coaches who work with them every day. An expert service provider, however, can provide everyone in the organization with an expanded understanding of the tools and techniques necessary to run a successful contact center. They have the insight to know how best to use the solution and can take the time to work with internal experts to foster better understanding that will be felt on every customer call.
Custom training need not be an extended classroom affair. Consider an acute crisis where a billing error affects tens of thousands of customers, all of which may call for help and clarification. A skilled services and training specialist can work with the contact center to devise a just-in-time training program to help agents proactively identify customers likely to be calling with respect to the error. This can minimize customer frustration as well as combat long hold times and handle times, as customers get their questions answered both completely and promptly.
Custom training programs can also address agents who may attempt to circumvent the system to avoid the call queues.
By combining real-time adherence measurements from a workforce management solution with screen and speech analytics, as well as insight from working with a broad range of operations, a program can be devised to communicate the correct priorities. The program can also help outline the sequence for post-call work and ongoing adherence and provide supervisors with the tools and understanding necessary to spot chronic abusers.
Conclusion
A competent, cooperative services provider can take contact center projects out of the realm of "good-enough" rote button pushing and diminishing returns to show how the organization can capitalize on investments in people, process and technology. Not through trial-and-error, but by using proven techniques and deep understanding of not only the needs of the modern contact center, but the core technologies that power it. In the end, no one can tell the men and women charged with keeping the contact center effective and accessible how best to do their jobs. The role of the service provider is to make it possible to do that job right.
