The Elevator... and Other Contact Center Management Challenges

The Elevator... and Other Contact Center Management Challenges
You unexpectedly run into the company CEO on the lift (elevator), who inquires about the returns the contact center is delivering. Kathleen Peterson wonders, "Are you ready?"

Before 8 a.m., the path from parking garage to elevator lobby is almost serene. A good time to arrive, a bit ahead of the crowd, with the knowledge that there will be fresh coffee waiting for you upstairs in the contact center – the place that never closes.
Anticipating a solo flight up the elevator, you glide on athletic shoe wings, round the corner and BAM – knocked out of your trance by the sight of CEO Bob, alone, and waiting for the elevator. Excited? Three minutes alone with the CEO! Or is it scared? The doors open, we step inside and exchange cordial greetings. Bob is familiar with the contact center and asks, “What sort of returns are you guys delivering?”
This scenario may be fiction, but the situation is common. As leaders in the contact center, it is essential to be confident in your performance and your ability to communicate to executives - when preparing reports, plans, or stumbling onto an executive in an elevator.
Contact center managers need to practice thinking like executives. Adopting a mindset that routinely calculates your organization’s value and contribution is critical; linking this to supporting data closes the loop.
Today’s CEOs and executives are busy assessing everything: cost control, revenue generation, compensation, accounting practices, and customer relationship strategies. So it is important to study how they are thinking. Understanding this will help us to frame our communication from C-level (CEO, CFO, COO, etc.) to cube level.
When Donald Carty was CEO of American Airlines facing an industry in turmoil, he articulated a sentiment that many executives shared – and one that continues into today’s environment: “Nothing is sacred. We need to take a long hard look at literally everything we do, including some things that have always made good sense, to see if they still make sense in the new reality.”
This is a message that hits home for all of us. We must be willing to examine every aspect of what we do, and dig in for improvement and savings opportunities. Then we must be able to tell the story – in three minutes or less!
The following questions are designed to stimulate your thinking about key areas of focus when formulating your contact center value proposition (or elevator script). They are framed around the premise of uncertainty, (i.e., Are you sure?). Embracing uncertainty nurtures a healthy sense of doubt, challenges assumptions and spawns curiosity. This helps to move us from the comfort zone of certainty – one of the least creative states available to mankind—to a level of creatively motivated critical thinking. Think of this as your own contact center Socrates café!
Are you sure there is a solid foundation for building your contact center future?
Like the pilings of the Brooklyn Bridge or the steel and concrete substructure of a building, organizations need to rest upon a solid foundation—one that drives communication strategies, management practices, technology acquisitions, and customer relationships. Contact centers must operate on solid ground or they will crumble—increasing costs while decreasing customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and damaging their own identity.
Consider the following four foundational elements: vision, mission, brand, and business Goals - all are shared across the enterprise, with the exception of mission. A mission statement defines what each business unit is set up to accomplish, while creating a bridge to the enterprise elements.
The first thing to consider is vision. Do you know it? Would you search company archives for the last “Vision Memo” sent from headquarters? How many of your staff would answer the vision question in the same way? This same series of questions must be considered for each of the four elements.
The Mission, being the contact center’s own statement of purpose, must be real enough for people to act on, they must understand how their role contributes to the overall achievement.
Ask yourself, how is the company brand represented in the contact center? Brand is shared across the enterprise, and it doesn’t change. Roles change but the brand remains constant. Brand is no longer simply about advertising; it is about experiences and the contact center is crucial in delivering a branded experience. Define it, train to it, rate it on quality evaluations – embed branding the experience into the center. Perhaps in the process the contact center will emerge with a brand of its own!
What are the enterprise business goals, and is the contact center’s role in achieving those goals clear? Communicate the goals and the roles!
Asking these questions will help you to establish whether the contact center itself is integrated within the enterprise. When these areas are crystal clear, they provide management with a solid foundation to wrap all activities around - including making a case to senior management.
If you don’t feel you have a good grasp of these elements, get a copy of your company’s Annual Report, a document in which they are very clearly presented. Distribute your findings to the entire contact center team; challenge staff to talk about ways in which the contact center has embraced the foundational elements and identify areas that need improvement. Helping to make this connection will be the basis for a “big picture” view that helps the contact center see itself in terms of the enterprise as a whole rather than as an isolated back room operation.
It is also important for contact center supervisors, managers, and coaches to adopt the foundational elements in delivering feedback and assessing performance. This ensures keeping the elements alive on a day-to-day basis and constantly making observations of successes and shortfalls.
Are you sure the contact center is well understood across the enterprise?
There was a time when the contact center was considered a back room operation, a cost center that dealt with customer service issues. Recently, it has become the focus of many enterprise initiatives and is being recognized as the lifeblood of the enterprise. The center’s cost, the volume of contacts, the potential for revenue, the importance of customer relationships, and the changing marketplace all have played a role in altering the enterprise view of the contact center. The center’s management must be prepared to respond to these changes and build value-based relationships with others across the enterprise.
Today’s contact center is not a stand-alone unit. Think about what other areas to which the contact center can add value – operations, manufacturing, research and development, human resources, technology, training, finance, legal, executives; the list goes on and on. Collaborating with others will help to identify improvement opportunities that span a continuum. Every company has a customer contact continuum. Whether acknowledged or not, it exists. The contact center is really part of that continuum, impacted by many activities that reach well beyond the Center.
Consider this assignment: conduct a brown bag setting. Assemble managers, supervisors, and staff. Wrap the room in paper, get out your markers (or post-its), and start asking questions. Where do our contacts come from? What is the cause of the call? (This exercise works for all channels.) Where does the work we do go from here? How do we impact others? What revenue generating opportunities and cost considerations exist in our relationships?
This exercise will yield a visual of the customer contact continuum. Once the visual is created, take a step back and assess your current relationships and your visibility. How do others within the enterprise view the center - as a valuable asset or as a backroom and factory-like operation? Do we get what we need? What advances would occur if our relationships improved? How would cost and revenue be impacted? What do we have to offer to others? The objective is to help ourselves and others improve simultaneously.
There may be a flawed process that, once corrected, reduces the workload across the continuum, or the opportunity to cross-train resources for varying peaks, or technology improvements that allow increased automation or improved accuracy resulting in higher quality. Nearly all improvements across the continuum will benefit both parties and the enterprise – a win-win-win.
The point is that contact centers must manage their visibility to influence their value.
Today’s contact centers have genuine currency with which to barter for their visibility – information. Information is currency in this digital age and contact centers are a pure source of it. The number of contact hours often amounts to years of exposure to customers annually! What we learn from this and how we mine for information has the potential to assist every part of the enterprise in improving performance.
The center must begin to view data collection as part of its value proposition to others. Data about the customer, about product performance, policies, procedures, and every other conceivable aspect of the contact must be as important a focus as service level and abandon rates.
You must identify information the contact center has that adds value to others. Present it or discuss it with a focus on solutions to ongoing issues that don’t support the vision, damage the brand, or are contrary to current business goals. Think of it as the quid pro quo of value—we give this to you and you in turn do this for us. Have your plan well thought out in terms of win-win, or your audience may be short lived and short fused!
Formalizing the sharing of intelligence is the basis of the center’s value proposition. The more value we are perceived to possess, the more potent our visibility, the more likely we are able to make changes that drop real dollars to the bottom line.
Are you sure your planning process is stable?
The planning process is the least sexy but most necessary activity that takes place in the contact center. The first key to a stable planning process is having a dedicated, educated and empowered planning team in place. Many planning efforts fail due to inadequate or incompetent resources being allocated to the effort.
An excellent planning process takes skilled resources (not just available resources) and has them in the right place at the right time. It is more than simply having a workforce management tool; it is having a plan, good information flow across the enterprise, and dedicated, competent resources that administer the process and the system.
An important part of the planning process must be analysis. The ability to analyze and categorize transactions by frequency and complexity allows for improved training, call distribution and cost analysis. Transaction analysis will not come from your ACD. The most valuable information you have for other departments must be mined from your database or from your agents. I have seen successful results from very high tech CTI/CRM systems and CRM systems funded from data collected using the old pencil, paper, and scratch marks. This is something everyone can do and has one of the best returns on your time invested. An accurate forecast is a definite objective of the planning effort; but accurately forecasting things, which never should have happened, is a dubious distinction.
The planning team may also evaluate automation options and better channels for handling certain transactions. Many successful contact center operations have responsibility for customer contact across all channels. This organizational design keeps the knowledge of customer’s behaviors and preferences in an integrated unit able to nimbly react to changes in customer behavior.
Effective planning teams also recognize that in some cases of transaction analysis, elimination is infinitely more powerful than automation. Because they are not married to a single channel or process, the ability to see the “big picture” prevails and appropriate action is initiated.
Now it’s your turn to answer the question! “What sort of returns are you guys delivering?”
“Well, I’m glad you asked! We’ve just successfully cut our total number of transactions by 12 percent by working with operations on a research backlog that improved our service level, without the necessity of adding additional staff. Our planners have improved the IVR functionality; we now validate 70 percent of calls before they are presented, shaving time off all of those calls. We have worked with marketing to time the special promotions so they don’t conflict with other activities and we are providing them real-time data on customer response so adjustments can be made while the program is in progress instead of post mortems. Our efforts have increased our sales by 30 percent, and we expect that number to go up. If you have some time, I’d love to show you around. We have a cube designated at all times for visitors. I wonder if you wouldn’t like to stop in and drop in on some of our customer calls?”
Are you ready? Are you sure? Can you be the contact center’s three minute messenger? Check your foundation, calculate your value and visibility, confirm your planning process and communicate effectively. Act with creativity and curiosity – while embracing uncertainty and you’ll be looking forward to taking that elevator ride.
Think about it...what would your answer be to the question “What sort of returns are you guys delivering?”