In this time of uncertainty, keeping the ‘lights on’ has been the challenge for many customer service centres, but that doesn’t need to be the only goal for strategic thinkers. We’ve come up with a list of 4 ways to take advantage of the current market, enabling contact centres to work better, smarter and more effectively, without increasing overall costs.
1. Standardise, Stabilise and Optimise – This is not as hard as you may think, it just takes a bit of work:
Define your goals
Create or document the current KPI’s against those goals
Create a detailed process flow of each working practice
Look for ‘waste’ in the process and ask yourself what can be improved with; automation, resource allocation, technology implementation, process optimisation, etc.
Redraw the process flow with this in mind
Execute the new process flow
Re-measure KPI’s
Now, once you’ve implemented what you find, go back and start again and then again and then again. It’s persistence, skill and repeated execution which differentiates the great from the good.
2. The Gig Economy – Many customer service centres are struggling with staffing levels for peak time support and need resource fast and on tap. The gig economy is fast becoming the go-to for reliable on-demand agent resource. Students, stay at home parents, furloughed staff, ‘retired’, you name it and there is a demographic that are looking for temporary, flexible micro-shifts in the industry. There are literally hundreds of thousands of people wanting to work from home for this type of role, and it’s easily scalable.
3. Speech Analytics (SA) – Speech Analytics works in parallel with your call recorder and it can have a compelling ROI. It’s a way to proactively and automatically manage service quality in an efficient and scalable way. The quality control team no longer need to listen to call after call for hour after hour, with speech analytics each call is automatically ‘listened to’ and graded against the KPI’s you set. This could be words or phrases, tone, sentiment, objection handling, or several hundred other metrics you deem fit. Look at the image to give you an idea of just some of the metrics.
A speech analytics system can recognise words and screen pop information or identify if an agent needs assistance in real-time, it can identify training needs, find areas for coaching, ensure new employees are compliant, provide opportunities for self-analysis/improvement, offer gamification to teams, identify problem trends and a host of other benefits which in this ‘new’ world of hybrid working and changing customer expectations is a powerful tool and the most efficient way to ensure quality and improve customer service with every call. Take a look at the screenshot below as an indication of just some of what can be measured:
4. Bots, Bots and more Bots - The bots have arrived and they’re making a big splash within the customer service space. Both for internal and external customers. Bots can do a variety of helpful things but in their simplest form they’re a way to provide information efficiently, 'just in time' and with minimal resource. For example, a customer may want a returns policy or insurance document and instead of requesting this over the phone they can converse with to a webchat bot and automatically be presented with the information. Another example of using a bot is when you ask Amazon Alexa or Apple’s Siri for a store opening times or directions etc. You can even provide value added information for example, provide a weather forecast or follow on information for what a customer might want to do next.
Often the biggest efficiency bots provide is on internal resource. Requests such as, ‘please reset my password, please can you provide my payslip, what’s the procedure for claiming expenses, how much annual leave do I have left, what’s the company policy on equal opportunities, my laptop is frozen what should I do’, all of these questions can be managed by bots, that’s not to say they don’t need a person present but perhaps by way of monitoring rather than managing transactional functions within a contact centre.
As you can see these are a few ways in which companies are taking advantage of the modern working environment. If you like to know more about these and other optimisation ideas contact us on info@soniza.co.uk