Is your Contact Centre causing you headaches?
The pandemic has cause caused a lot of re-thinking about the future of work. So much is changing at once and at a pace not seen before.
Key factors influencing and impacting contact centres in no particular order are:
1. Blending office and home working
2. Inadequate IT infrastructure to support the new ways of working
3. Leaders insufficiently trained and developed to cope with the new challenges
4. Rapid digital adoption by customers coupled with growing expectations of omni-channel offerings
5. A lack of decent MI to support decision making at the front line and for managers
6. Five generations in the workforce with differing expectations of employers.
The world is awash with technology solutions offering almost magical solutions to business challenges and world peace! I dont remember who said it but the old adage ‘if its too good to be true, it probably is, is apposite here!
I know that sinking feeling when your managers are saying we need more folks, HR saying we need to pay more, the SLA’s are bright red and you can’t train people fast enough. Oh and complaints are rising.
Turnover is up again in almost all call centres and it’s very costly - very roughly £10,000 per employee in lost productivity, double bubble costs, training and recruitment fees.
So, what’s the solution?
The answer is that there is no simple fix. An out of service contact centre is a very expensive and difficult thing to sort and if you are not getting to ‘today’s work today’ you are heading for problems.
The key is not to panic! Headless chicken managers are the most unproductive and they have a habit of spreading the panic. Or worse, they just whip the tired folks harder!
The answer is to take a root and branch look at what you are actually doing for your customers by using a decent methodology such as systems thinking. Ignore the backward looking SLA’s and spend good quality time with your teams looking at the customer processes end to end. Don't rush for any technology solution as you don’t actually know the problem you are trying to fix.
You will be amazed when you start really looking for failure demand, handoff‘s, call backs and hidden back logs you will be amazed how much ‘hidden’ productivity gain you will find. How many times are you actually speaking to a customer to resolve an issue? ‘One and done‘ is critical, customers love it and it’s the most productive but it needs skills and tools.
Take another example, if your email queues are not worked every day you will have failure demand because customers will be calling to find out when you are going to respond to the email.
None of this is easy and you need MI that shows what is really going on, even in centres with green SLA’s, I have seen 40% failure demand. The business just staffed to meet the SLA and the failure! A very expensive solution.
I am very happy to offer constructive advice to your team, undertake some diagnostics and provide Exec feedback and an outline plan to help if this is your challenge.
Call me on 07795423940 or email richard.beaven@unlikegroup.co