Enterprise Integration
1 Mar, 2006
By: Rob Berry,Steve WellerPart I:
Traveling Upstream to Address the Drivers of Customer Contacts
By Rob Berry
It is well-documented that customers would rather do almost anything other than call their consumer service providers such as health insurance, telecommunications and credit card companies. According to a recent Accenture survey, 54 percent of callers compared their customer service experience to driving in city traffic—slow, with alternative routes required to reach their destinations. Worst yet, 50 percent of customers in Accenture’s survey switched service providers in the past 12 months and cited “poor customer service” as their reason for switching. Clearly, to improve loyalty, companies must either dramatically improve their customer service or reduce the number of customers needing service, or both.
To succeed at these challenges, companies will need to focus on operational performance management (OPM), which holds that by focusing their efforts on correcting upstream product and service failures at the source, companies can simultaneously increase customer satisfaction and loyalty while reducing costs.
Eliminating Problems at the Source
It is a customer service tenet that “the best customer call is no call at all.” Few companies, however, are actually leveraging their call data to live by this tenet and solve customer problems at their source. They instead address the symptom (the call), and focus little if any attention on preventing future similar calls. An understanding of the evolution of the contact center helps explain why.
Over the past decade, contact centers have increasingly adopted technologies such as interactive voice response (IVR), voice recording, quality monitoring, agent coaching and advanced switches to improve service delivery within the center. Each of these technologies is meant to improve the efficiency of the contact center or to improve agent performance. As a result, these systems capture interaction data that represents detailed information regarding the call and the agent who handled the call. Call reason codes and recordings are also often captured and can shed insight into what a customer requested or said. Although this data is valuable to improve an agent’s behavior, it lacks actionable, upstream details about what caused the problem in the first place. The lack of actionable data has left contact centers with little choice but to focus on improving agent efficiency and very little ability to manage effectiveness.
Unnecessary Calls Consume Resources
One can categorize calls into three broad categories:
- calls originating from product/service failures
- calls to make a change to an account
- calls in response to a sales or credit inquiry
The first category consists of “unnecessary” calls and is the majority of calls for most companies. While the other two categories are “necessary,” the former should be targeted to be eliminated at their source. For example, a leading wireless provider in North America found that 57 percent of the incoming monthly calls stemmed from product and service failures. Billing problems, hardware issues and activation problems topped the list of call reasons and customer dissatisfaction issues.
As you can see from Figure 1, nearly 60 percent of this company’s monthly calls could have been avoided by eliminating upstream failures. By putting in a system to identify the upstream causes of unnecessary calls, this company could reduce its overall contact center resources or use the savings to focus its agents’ time on higher-value contacts such as up-sales and account service.
In addition to reducing the number of incoming calls, fixing product/service defects also improves customer loyalty by reducing the much larger number of customers experiencing a product or service failure who never call. Research from TARP shows that between 70 percent and 97 percent of customers who experience a product or service failure choose not to call a company. In essence, those customers who actually do call are doing companies a favor, alerting them to an operational problem. By using this information to actually solve the problem, companies not only reduce additional incoming calls, but also reduce customer dissatisfaction and churn. A satisfied customer is less likely to shop around for providers.
The notion that monitoring, measuring and coaching call center agents is enough for the contact center is like deciding to bail water from a leaking boat with a Dixie cup to stop it from sinking. Agent coaching is an important practice, but on its own is really just reacting to the flood of calls and does little to impact the source of incoming call volume. In the boat example, resources would be better spent by identifying why the boat is leaking and repairing the source, thus treating the cause and not the symptom. In contact centers, the cause is upstream product and service failures.
It is important to note that not all customer calls are negative, and we are not recommending abandoning all agent quality management analysis. Some calls give the service provider an opportunity to form a relationship with a customer who might otherwise never see an employee in person. Others might offer an up-sell opportunity with the customer, enabling the agent to offer additional services that will enhance the customer’s experience while generating more revenue for the company. Even a well handled, successful call relating to a service issue can have a very positive impact on customer satisfaction. In general, however, the majority of incoming calls concern product and service issues, and the company would have been far better off to never have received the call in the first place.
Link the Contact Center
By linking the siloed information existing in the enterprise, contact centers can evaluate relationships in data that have never been connected in the past. Analyzing this data and creating industry-specific metrics enables companies to solve the problem of call avoidance and to answer the following questions:
- Which customers call the most often?
- Which event takes place before customers typically call?
- What is customer satisfaction at each stage of the customer lifecycle?
The following case study illustrates the insufficiency of contact center data to identify the cause of a customer call in enough detail to be actionable. Consider this situation from a leading telecommunications provider who noted a recent rise in customers calling to request a billing adjustment. The contact center data tagged the call as a “billing adjustment” call. Aside from agent, AHT and hold time information, there was no product, account, or billing context available in the CRM system to point to the cause of the call.
After linking in product, account history and billing history data, it became clear that a particular switch from Plan A to Plan B was driving a large percent of these calls and that an existing customer discount was being incorrectly withheld. This company made the change and avoided an estimated 50,000 errors, 5,000 calls and many dissatisfied customers.
Best Practices
Leveraging upstream back office and contact center data to eliminate unnecessary call volume is now possible and is being used at an increasing number of companies, with the emergence of operational performance management. In essence, OPM solutions sort through and analyze massive volumes of data from front office, back office and customer satisfaction systems. They then intelligently map the drivers of unnecessary contacts in the contact center to the back office operational failures that lead the customer to need to make a contact. By identifying and solving problems at their source, OPM solutions prevent significant volumes of potential future calls and reduce the number of “silently dissatisfied” customers, those who either suffer quietly from the failures or choose another provider.
Best practices for transitioning contact centers from focusing only on efficiency and quality metrics to also focusing on driving out call volume from upstream product and service defects are now emerging. The catalyst of this process, however, is for companies to first switch the focus away from the call metrics and look to the call drivers.
Below are five best practices that will enable organizations to travel upstream to l address the drivers of customer contacts.
- See each customer call as an opportunity
Every contact that comes into the contact center is a favor to the provider, as they are made by customers who care enough to alert you of an operational or service failure. Whether that issue relates to the product, service, the back office processing systems or the contact center itself, these are failures that have significant impact on providers, either in direct costs to handle or with customer churn. Through these calls, you can not only improve your customer service, but use the data from the calls to better understand your service operations. - Create a “Continuous Quality” team
Eliminating the service failures driving calls is a continuous process. As products and services evolve, sales and marketing programs change, and new systems, policies and procedures are used, the drivers of calls to your contact center will also change. By assembling a “Continuous Quality” team comprising members from marketing, operations and customer service, you create a group with insight into the entire enterprise. With this group in place, you can quickly anticipate and solve the problems resulting from various program alterations, while prioritizing those that have the largest impact. - Proactively identify and take action on common service failures
Experience shows that the customers most likely to call the contact center have recently started a new service, changed products or services, or have received an atypical bill or statement. By utilizing available operational data and identifying when these events are likely to occur within your organization, you can determine where to take proactive action. This action could be sending a reminder email, altering agent scripts or updating Web site copy to help get customers through this change without the frustration and confusion that leads to an unnecessary call. - Put in place an OPM system
An OPM solution is the most effective way to link your contact center data to upstream data to understand and eliminate the drivers of calls and dissatisfaction. As operations vary dramatically from industry to industry, it is crucial to select a solution that contains packaged applications built for your particular industry, as well as a professional services organization with relevant expertise. It should provide pre-built metrics, key performance indicators, reports and dashboards for several categories of business users in your organization. If you select an on-demand solution, your Continuous Quality team can start using this system to achieve their call reduction targets in as little as 90 days. - Monitor call reduction impact
To ensure ongoing success of this continuous quality initiative, it is important to track and quantify not only the eliminated calls, but also the expected positive impact on customer satisfaction. Your OPM system should provide the ability to monitor the impact of projects undertaken to improve quality, as well as ensure the return on investment goals are being achieved or exceeded for management reporting. This gives your Continuous Quality team an effective measurement of how programs and initiatives are working so they can adjust accordingly, in real-time.
What’s Necessary
In this increasingly competitive consumer-focused market, delivering superior customer service is no longer an added value, but rather a necessity, as competitors use every trick in the book to lure consumers away from their current providers. Using baseline metrics such as call length and number of calls handled per day provides some superficial statistics regarding customer dissatisfaction, but does not get to the root of the problem. In order to succeed, contact centers must first redirect their focus past the call metrics themselves. Performance management strategies need to evolve to integrate the operational data in the back office with the front office systems, providing a holistic view of the contact center. Each customer call holds a wealth of information that, if used properly, can shed insight into operations as well as failure prevention. Operational performance management enables companies to extract, analyze and act on the data within the contact center to pinpoint the upstream drivers of contacts and then simultaneously reduce operational costs while improving customer service.
Creating a team that can constantly monitor performance management programs ensures that these initiatives are not implemented and forgotten, but rather constantly adjusted to meet the needs of the constantly changing market. Eliminating these problems can not only reduce call volume, but also satisfy those customers that either silently suffer or churn to a wily competitor when failures occur.
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Part II:
Quality in the Contact Center: Delivering a High-Quality, Branded Customer Experience
By Steve Weller
Today’s 24/7 marketplace has grown increasingly commoditized, characterized by an array of competitive offerings with remarkably similar features and benefits. With increasing frequency, the key competitive differentiator for these offerings is brand¯the feelings and attributes that the market instantaneously associates with a company and its products.
Contrary to what too many companies believe, brand is not a logo or a tagline; those are only symbolic representations. Brand is market perception¯a visceral reaction to the mere mention of a company name. And for those companies that think only the most successful, global players have a brand, consider this: as soon as you do business in a marketplace¯ any marketplace¯like it or not, your brand is under development.
Building the Brand: Aligning the Enterprise with Market Needs
Looking closer, it is clear that brand is, in large part, a reflection of how well the market feels a company meets its needs. Note that this perception is often based largely on intangible and not always logical considerations. For example, studies show that consumers who have experienced a good interaction with a company to resolve a problem tend to have a more positive perception of the company than those who have experienced no product problems at all. A company’s performance in providing outstanding products and services may not be enough to sustain a strong and positive brand, especially if those offerings are not aligned with market needs. On the other hand, a company that successfully conveys to the marketplace its thorough understanding of customer expectations and an ability to quickly and pleasingly address them is likely to generate the positive perceptions that underlie a winning brand.
As the primary arena for customer interactions, the contact center is in a unique position to generate positive (and negative) market perceptions. But, the contact center is more than a brand steward; it is also the repository of valuable business intelligence about market needs and how well departments throughout a company address them. Ultimately, aligning all of these customer touch points with the marketplace may be the most critical factor for developing a successful and profitable brand.
Calibrating Performance to Market Perception
Contact center performance management has traditionally focused on a concept of quality built on common sense standards: lower average handle time, first-call resolution, short holds, a minimal number of transfers, and so on. These performance factors are unquestionably important. This approach, however, focuses solely on the mechanics of customer interactions, without sufficient attention to why customers are calling or how well their goals are being met. This misalignment can severely damage a company’s brand because it perpetuates the perception that the company is out of step with the marketplace.
Therefore, the first step in building and then reinforcing a high-quality brand is to recalibrate quality to customer perception…to assess performance not only according to efficiency, by also according to customer satisfaction.
Many companies find that post-call surveys provide valuable insights in this regard. Unfortunately, survey scores reviewed out of context provide limited value because they indicate only the customer feels without revealing why. To deliver significant brand intelligence, each customer survey score should be associated automatically with the relevant customer interaction recording. Doing this allows supervisors and managers to (1) rapidly identify and review the interactions that most significantly impact customer satisfaction, (2) hear firsthand how customer perceptions evolve, and (3) zero in on the performance techniques and business processes that are most contributory to positive and negative perceptions. To leverage this intelligence further, real-time coaching functionality should also be available for transforming these representative recordings into examples that can be pushed to agent desktops, as needed, to address specific performance problems.
Integrating post-call survey data with customer interaction recordings helps organizations realize greater value from their customer survey systems. More importantly, this integration generates more pertinent and actionable intelligence for building positive market perceptions and a successful brand.
Brand Strength: Making the Most of Your Most Valuable Customers
All customers are valuable, but they are not necessarily equally valuable. A focus on high-value customer segments can yield impressive results with regard to prevailing market perceptions: these customers not only have the most impact on your top line, but may also be the most powerful “viral influencers” in disseminating word of your brand. Unfortunately, manual identification of high-value customer interactions is overwhelmingly subjective and prohibitively time consuming.
However, desktop screen analytics can automatically tag key data from customer relationship management (CRM), order processing, billing, and other business systems to the corresponding customer interaction recordings, so that interactions involving higher-value customers and transactions can be rapidly and accurately identified. These interaction recordings should then be distributed to contact center supervisors, managers, and customer retention specialists, so that they can evaluate not only how efficiently these important calls are handled, but how well agents (and the company) address the needs of the most valuable customers.
Finally, customer perception is shaped not only by contact center agents, but by departments throughout the enterprise, from order processing and billing to sales and advertising. These VIP customer interaction recordings hold important information about how high-value customers perceive back-office processes and performance. Providing visibility to pertinent interaction recordings to departments and stakeholders companywide gives them valuable insights for improving products, services, and the processes that shape profitability, as well as brand.
Data Mining and Brand Development
The aggregation of contact center data for the purpose of supplying metrics on key performance indicators is certainly critical to successful contact center operation. However, the performance that is instrumental to a strong brand is not necessarily measurable by conventional means.
Traditional performance efficiency metrics can be readily calculated by a wide variety of reporting packages available today. But, since a strong brand comes from the market perception that a company meets customer needs in a timely and pleasing way, it becomes critical to measure not only what the contact center and company are doing, but what the marketplace expects and how best to meet those expectations. This is where sophisticated data and speech analytics can help.
Data mining reveals cause/effect relationships in contact center performance without requiring that users know in advance which relationships to examine. For example, data mining can pinpoint the days or times of day when account cancellations are most frequent and unearth specific causal factors, such as interactions handled by an outsourcing concern or lengthy delays before technical support calls are picked up. Companies can use this intelligence to provide greater training to outsourcers and increase technical support staff during peak hours. By addressing sources of customer dissatisfaction, companies are likely to improve the market perception that translates into brand awareness (as well as improve customer retention).
Data mining applied to high-value transactions (segmented via the desktop screen analytics mentioned earlier) might reveal that these calls have a significantly longer handle time than other calls. Does this mean that these callers require additional time to make up their minds, or does it mean that agents are not sufficiently trained to close these transactions in a timely way? By listening to calls brought up by data mining analytics, decision makers can take appropriate action to better serve these high-value customers and build a stronger brand.
Speech Analytics for Identifying and Acting on Expectations
Speech analytics can provide insights into why customers are calling and leverage these customer interactions to further the goals of the enterprise. For the purpose of positive brand development, these goals might include emerging market needs, customer satisfaction, and competitive deficiencies or strengths, all of which contribute to market perceptions.
Speech analytics might show that a significant percentage of customers who call to cancel orders cite a recent competitive promotion offering similar products at a lower price. Here, too, the company can take rapid action to show how well it meets customer needs, either by offering a similar package or by providing greater value in its current offerings.
Or speech analytics might reveal that high-value customers frequently request service features not currently available in the company’s service packages. This insight represents a valuable opportunity to please the company’s most influential customers and build positive perception.
Actionable Intelligence: The Foundation for a Strong and Profitable Brand
In essence, brand is market perception. It reflects the market’s feelings about a company and its offerings. Actionable intelligence derived from customer interactions reveals market expectations and how best to meet them. This knowledge positions the enterprise to align performance objectives with the needs of the marketplace in order to build positive market perception. And this realignment empowers the contact center to build and sustain a strong, differentiated, and profitable brand.
