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The Evolution of the Contact Center Roaring Into 2020 & Beyond
By Chris Recio, Director of Contact Center & Advanced Applications
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Another year has passed and as we dive head first into 2020, one thing is certain: The Contact Center is at the epicenter of a never-ending cycle of change all centered around Customer Experience and Customer Loyalty, that trend will continue in dramatic ways long beyond 2020.
The Contact Center operation of yesterday has morphed into a machine that demands our attention and challenges our capacity to keep pace with the onslaught of technology being released on a regular basis.
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Customer Experience And The Contact Center
As technology continues to provide advancements in communication and automation, managing a Contact Center remains a demanding responsibility. Keeping pace with the persistence of technology has become a chore unto itself and many contact center operations are becoming lost among the masses.
Adding to that, the ripple effects of Customer Satisfaction dictate that we make a paradigm shift from solely thinking of our Contact Center Operation as a customer support process for interacting with customers, but rather, we need to extend our thoughts to a much larger process and formulate a Customer Contact Strategy redefining our purview of the Contact Center as a broader operation outside the four walls of the traditional ACD.
This is not new information. This has been on the forefront of the contact center landscape for several years, yet I meet clients and client vendors alike on a regular basis that lag far behind technology, and consequently flounder to meet the basic needs of their customers, and their customers’ customers.
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The Future Is Now With Contact Center Technology
The latest trends of recent years in contact center technology include: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Bots of every kind, the Internet of Things (IoT), Speech Recognition, Text-to-Speech, Speech Analytics, Sentiment Analysis, and virtually Automation of every kind. These advancing technologies provide the business the means of creating a Customer Contact Strategy to meet the needs of any imaginable process to satisfy customers, both proactive and reactive. But few know where to begin when it comes to developing or expanding their Customer Contact Strategy, and many are simply doing what they’ve always done.
While there are many options for moving forward, too many operations do not include the baseline necessary features to help you move from a Contact Center Operation into developing a Customer Contact Strategy.
Today’s changing contact center requires that operational managers step back from what they know to begin developing new thought philosophies about the contact center operation and this requires more strategic thinking outside the all-too-common operational KPIs.
As an example and as I have said in many presentations and previous blogs, KPI data and reporting are simply ways of quantifying a result. The black-and-white metrics of any reportable KPI should be viewed as symptoms to a much greater story.
Yet, few managers and supervisors I meet take the time to truly analyze the data with a focus on creating programs and/or strategies to improve their operations, educate personnel, and strengthen customer satisfaction. Frankly, many managers and supervisors have not been given the tools, insights, or experiential education required to help develop strategic thinkers.
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Looking for a fresh perspective on your contact center operations?
Check out our Contact Center Accelerator Program to unlock the full potential of your contact center
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Looking Beyond Key Performance Indicators Within The Contact Center
Data offers us a fantastic way to gauge performance and success within the Contact Center. However what we see in black-and-white is not always what we could see.
To offer an example, I recall this client encounter:
Many years ago, I met with a collections contact center operation. As part of our KPI analysis, we reviewed the performance results of 5 collectors. Surprisingly, the manager of the collections department immediately pointed out the collector that had made the least amount of calls.
While other users were making 95-125 calls, the “slower collector” – their words not ours – had made 75-80 calls. The manager seemed embarrassed by this review and quickly made excuses for the specific lackluster collector. In my mind, the manager was taking a one-dimensional view of the quantity of calls.
Having seen the metrics, along with disposition results – some may refer to dispositions as wrap codes – I immediately noticed this:
The top performers had placed upwards of 95-125 calls, and had collected payments on approximately 55% of their calls. The so-called “slower collector” had placed 75-80 calls and had collected approximately 65% of his/her calls.
After a quick glance and quick visual calculation, I simply said: “Looks great. I see that your ‘high performers’ appear to be collecting payments on approximately 55% of their calls, while you’re ‘slower collector’ appears to be collecting payments on approximately 65% of his/her calls. Since you’re in the Collections Business, I would point out that your so-called slower collector is actually out performing on your company objectives over those that place more calls. Clearly there is something about the “talk-off” of the slower collector that is producing results. It might be a good idea to do some QA on the slower collector in order to discover what about his/her talk-off is producing results. I would do more QA on the ‘high performers’ as well. While the ‘high performers’ may be making more calls, it’s possible the focus on the quantity of calls is not producing the results you may seek as a collections organization.”
Focusing more on the KPI’s vs the overall goal is a mindset that I have seen many Contact Center Leaders, because that is a large part of their role. When the KPI’s don’t create a direct line to the goal of that team, in this case collecting dollars, bringing in someone to have a larger macro perspective can help reframe what good looks like for your organization.
This is one example of how being focused on only a single aspect of the KPIs didn’t really offer the true performance insights of the individual collectors. It was clear that the message to collectors on the floor was: “more calls = more payments” yet the overall objectives got lost in translation. Today, quality far exceeds quantity when considering Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty.
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The Contact Center In 2020 And Beyond
As we move into 2020, our goal is to assist and educate our clients and challenge them with deeper insights into the contact center operation, and more specifically, offer direction in strategic thinking – redefining the contact center managerial process, moving away from the all-too-often-found one-dimensional thinking by challenging them to rethink how they view data, understanding the importance of culture, and using applications in practical ways to develop educational and operational strategies.
High on the top of my list of recommendations for anyone interested in accelerating their contact center operations are the following two books. The insight and common-sense perspective you will gain from the content of these books will be invaluable to you as you move forward.
Kicking off 2020, I started this blog as a series, offering my experience, thoughts, and insights I have seen and learned from clients across a wide spectrum of industries and operations over the past 25+ years. In the upcoming weeks, we will take a deeper look into the following topics as they relate to the contact center operation.
- Developing a Customer Contact Strategy
- Contact Center Solution Must-Have Options
- Automation: Where to Start
- Building a Culture of Customer Satisfaction & Loyalty
- Turn KPIs Into Strategies
- QA & Call Analytics – A Must
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Looking for a fresh perspective on your contact center operations?
Check out our Contact Center Accelerator Program to unlock the full potential of your contact center
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