In the contact center industry where customer interactions continue to grow, customers are demanding more, costs are increasing, resources are in short supply and management wants to direct and reduce costs. Running such an environment is extremely challenging.

Under such demanding conditions, how do you improve overall customer satisfaction and loyalty while planning for and meeting future customer expectations?  The answer is simple, but its execution is critical. 

The Pentagon of Power for Contact Center Success

The Pentagon of Power for Contact Center Success is five principal elements for improving customer satisfaction and loyalty. This must be the basis of any customer-centric strategy. The five elements are as follows: 

• People

• Training

• Business Rules

• Technology

• Measurement & Analysis

People

Maximizing the human element of the organization will always be the key, as employee competency requirements are always changing.  You should make it a strategic imperative to ensure each new hire is competent, flexible and customer focused.  He or she must not only understand the need for change, but possess the ability to quickly adapt to change.  

This requirement however should not only hold true for contact center personnel.  Every organization and individual within the company has a direct or indirect effect on customers.  It is up to the contact center management team to voice this concept and ensure everyone understands his or her role in the company�s customer-centric strategy.

Make sure everyone in the contact center has clear roles and responsibilities and the center has a healthy mix of experience, including �lifers� (those people who have made it his or her career to satisfy customers) and �opportunists� (those people looking to start on the ground-floor and move up).  Both lifers and opportunists can carry the message of the company�s customer-centric strategy to the larger organization, as they have first hand experience with how certain actions by the organization affect customers. The outcome of this kind of �evangelization� will always improve the competencies of the work force.

Finally, provide numerous communication channels to the contact center floor in order to foster teamwork.  Also provide coaching, monitoring and immediate feedback to the staff so as to aid in their personal growth.

Working for a leader in bundled telecommunication services, I implemented a Leadership Development and Product Certification Program. Our staff turnover was reduced to under 10% and we promoted 63% of the staff. Finding the right people and keeping them challenged will help your organization, the company and the customer. You will also be retaining exceptional employees and providing your customer�s access to motivated and well-informed agents. This improved our overall customer satisfaction rating from 55% to 96%.

Training

Once you have hired the right people, the proper training of these individuals will set the foundation for success.  Every training program consists of some type of curriculum-based classes that teach the fundamentals, such as the products and services the new hires will support and basic customer service skills.  How these classes are taught make all the difference.

The first step to success is to expand the basic customer service skills training curriculum to include classes on �Building Long-Term Customer Relationships� and �Understanding the Need for a Customer-Centric Focus.�  These classes will provide each trainee a better sense of purpose regarding customer satisfaction.  They will also provide insight about how other organizations impact the contact center and the customers themselves.

The second step is to ensure all classes are interactive and provide immediate reinforcement and feedback.  You can achieve this by testing trainees after each class and allowing them to take some calls with a mentor at their side to provide the trainees an immediate opportunity to put their lessons to work. After taking some calls, they can return to the training room for a post-mortem analysis, questions and feedback.

Finally, provide a means by which staff can partake in some form of continuing education, whether such classes are held on-site by an internal staff member or off-site by a third-party.

Working for a company that specialized in energy supply to the deregulated residential marketplace, I implemented a highly interactive training program for our new hires that immediately paid dividends as our agents felt more prepared to handle customer interactions, the learning curve was significantly reduced and the quality scores improved by 35% over previous training class graduates.  This model also improved our telesales by 26% and our customer renewal rate averaged 91%.

Business Rules

The purpose of training is to provide individuals exposure to what they will experience when they actually begin handling customer interactions.  Some customer inquiries will be answered directly without having to refer back to a resource, but the majority will not.  

Business rules provide the contact center staff with closed-loop policies and procedures for handling and resolving customer interactions that cannot be answered directly.  Business rules govern such things as the way in which organizations in the company communicate and otherwise interact to resolve a customer issue and the resolutions to specific customer issues.

Your business rules may be stored in hard copy format that contains all the information from training as well as any notes provided during the individual classes.  They may also be stored in an electronic knowledgebase or CRM (define - news - alert) application where the agents can search using keywords.  I suggest that you provide both, since agents learn, think and react differently.

In the hard copy format scenario, you must ensure you have a process in place whereby agents replace outdated material with the new material prior to taking any new customer inquiries.  The knowledgebase scenario provides for easier updating, but you should also have an approval process in place for changes to existing documents as well as for adding new documents.

Working for a communications and information services company, I developed more wide-ranging business rules and processes and implemented a searchable knowledgebase and as a result, we were able to reduce escalations by 20%, increase our first call resolution rate by 17% and we also saw a decrease of 16% in the average call handle time.  All of which saved hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Technology

Call center technology was once simple.  In today�s contact center world, technology is far more complex.  As a result, the solution most often taken is work faster, better and cheaper.  But remember, the easiest solution is not always the right solution.

You will always find ways to squeeze more out of your existing systems, but you also have to think about future customer expectations and growth.  The industry you are in and the demographics of your customers now and in the future will play a large roll in some of the technology requirements needed to be successful.

So, use available technology to gain efficiencies wherever possible.

On one end of the spectrum, I designed and implemented an IVR/VRU (define - news - alert) working for a company that specialized in energy supply to the deregulated residential marketplace that required no integration with a customer database.  Yet we reduced the number of calls handled by an agent by 18%.  On the other end of the spectrum, I implemented a workforce management & scheduling tool working for a communications and information services company that reduced average hold time by 54%, reduced the abandon rate by 8%, reduced staffing costs by 19%, and increased scheduled adherence by 17%.   In both cases, the financial savings were significant.

Measurement & Analysis

Finally, you need to have tools in place to measure your effectiveness in hiring, the success of training and ongoing education programs, the effectiveness of your business rules and the ability of your technology to create operational efficiencies in order to provide your customers contact and support options and exceed your customer�s expectations.

Remember, statistics such as service level, average handle time, average abandon rate and quality assurance scores are only part of the story.  Certainly, you should review these and other statistics daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly.   But there is only one judge of great service, and that is the customer.  If you are not already asking customers how they rate your service, then how do you know what they think?  We rate ourselves against internal targets every week. By those measures, most of us think we do a great job. But think again - because what we think doesn't matter!

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