Nine contact centre challenges (and how to solve them).

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Beyond

expectation.

Nine contact centre challenges

(and how to solve them).

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The challenge of eff ective customer communications has never been more diffi cult, or more critical to an organisation’s success.

The contact centre is a vital component in your organisation’s customer contact strategy, tasked with delivering the best possible experience across every interaction, whilst simultaneously keeping costs to a minimum. On top of this, today’s customers are more demanding than ever before and want to communicate across a continually expanding choice of contact methods.

Azzurri has picked the brains of contact centre leaders to uncover what they see as some of the biggest issues facing them today. Here we’ve highlighted nine pressing concerns and asked our Contact Centre Practice experts to investigate both the challenges and opportunities they represent.

Nine key challenges for contact centres:

1. Seamlessly integrating social media and other channels

2. Managing variable call volumes

3. Agent home working strategies

4. Improving agent empathy

5. PCI Compliance

6. Making Self-Service work

7. How to eff ectively measure the customer experience

8. Moving to the cloud

9. Achieving consistency and seamless interaction ﬂ ow

Most contact centres are already facing the challenge of eff ectively integrating diverse

communications channels like web, SMS, social media and potentially video, alongside the more traditional voice and email.

This multitude of communications channels often require diff erent agent skills sets (for example written vs verbal), and organisations need to determine how to utilise the appropriate channels to communicate with their customers relevantly, intelligently and in a timely manner. But it is now becoming clear that you cannot see any channel in isolation. Customers increasingly use multiple channels to resolve a single issue with an organisation and you need to be able to help them easily navigate through multiple channels – what is now often called omni-channel.

Because traditional contact centre platforms evolved as functions of the telephone system, the challenge of adding new contact channels, such as email, was initially met by bringing in new systems to handle those new technologies. This led to a very ‘siloed’ way of operating, where voice, email and other media were separated not just by technology, but frequently by process

Introduction.

1. Seamlessly integrating social media

and other emerging channels.

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and people too. But the numbers of channels available to consumers are growing all the time and that makes this approach signiﬁ cantly more complex. Social media, in its many guises, just adds to the pain, and even for contact centres who will continue to separate voice and other channels , you need to think about blending non-voice tasks to some extent. For most, a true multi-channel contact centre platform is needed. This handles all diff erent media types seamlessly, including voice, and provides a single, uniﬁ ed reporting platform to make it easier to plan and manage your resources eff ectively.

While the technology may already exist, its adoption is still lagging behind. 25% of organisations we quizzed in a Webinar* still handle all diff erent channels in silos, while 58% silo some systems while blending other tasks. In a large contact centre with signifi cant numbers of appropriately skilled agents, a non-blended approach can be extremely eff ective. But for smaller operations trying to cross-skill agents to handle multiple channels can cause issues. An agent being pulled from answering emails, to calls, to emails again based on peaks and troughs can be jarring. It’s also unproductive if the agents have to log into multiple systems with multiple passwords. While for the managers, activity reporting, resource and SLA management can become problematic. The 15% of organisations quizzed that have adopted a fully blended, multi-channel approach are often in a far better position to build relationships with a wider range of customers, as they are able to use the preferred communications technique for every customer on every occasion. That customer will feel valued and in turn be more receptive to the brand. You can also seamlessly manage interactions across multiple channels, which can help resolve more complex queries. They achieve this by having a single routing system which handles the diff erent channels such as email, voice, message channels and social media, which can route out to any person in the contact centre. This off ers benefi ts including unifi ed reporting, a unifi ed front-end and better SLA and resource management. The downside is that you are restricted to some degree in your choice of system (you can’t select best in class systems for each channel for example).

One increasingly urgent challenge is integrating social media into this mix. Now a vital channel for B2C organisations and increasingly so for B2B organisations too, they represent an ability to put a ‘human’ element into a brand and engage with customers on sites they know and trust. The technical challenge is to fully integrate with social networking sites, so that inbound communication starts on the site but then enters the contact centre environment (for monitoring, responding and archiving). Contact centres will not be conﬁ ned to reacting to inbound customer contact either. They will proactively monitor consumer discussion on social networking sites. Monitoring social media requires a large overhead, but if not handled it can be damaging to a brand (one complaint may reach an audience of thousands), so it can’t be ignored. Organisations can’t eliminate complaints, but you can proactively brief and train agents to handle the queries or pre-empt complaints.

Brand consistency is a key issue and multiple channels provide a challenge in this regard. Siloed channels have in the past led to siloed knowledgebases – all built and managed separately. This can lead to real issues of inconsistency, as diff erent answers are given to the same question on diff erent channels. It is now being recognised that diff erent channels need to share a knowledgebase, so that regardless of the enquiry source channel the customer uses the information given is similar. It is also important that when a customer gets through to an agent that the agent can see as much detail of all the customer’s previous interactions as possible, regardless of the channels previously used.

Finally, when introducing new channels it can be diffi cult to know how much resource to place on them. How many people do you need to monitor social media? You do not want to have agents

The technical challenge is

to fully integrate with social

networking sites, so that

inbound communication starts

on the site but then enters the

contact centre environment.

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sitting around doing little, nor do you want to have long wait times. Blending does provide an answer to this by giving you the ﬂ exibility to respond to diff erent channels without having to have dedicated people. It has been particularly eff ective with social media where research shows that response times are dramatically lower – perhaps reﬂ ecting the fact that many organisations do not have the volumes yet that make it worth having dedicated resources, so it is often badly monitored – whereas with a blended system it can simply go straight to the front of the queue.

Whichever approach you adopt, tackling multiple channels will raise various challenges. Whether it’s around your agent skills and capabilities, protecting your investment in incumbent systems or scheduling and forecasting to meet diff erent customer demands – the key is to take a step back and evaluate your strategy as a whole. When these customers contact you on any channel, the challenge is getting them quick access to expert advisors who are comfortable communicating on that medium.

Unfortunately, it’s not always possible to predict peaks and troughs in your contact centre. While seasonal peaks or product launches can be properly resourced and scheduled – unplanned peaks through adverse weather or a product fault for example will happen and can catch you out.

So what are the options?

Moving the peak with callbacks – by off ering the option of a scheduled callback to customers

sitting in a queue you can reduce lost calls and help to eliminate peaks which are stretching your resources. This enables you to reduce queue length, queue time, remain in control of your call volumes and it is fairly easy to achieve. If you understand your call volumes and patterns, you can even take your peak traffi c and schedule callbacks during your troughs. However, scheduled callbacks can turn into a vicious circle, as tasks haven’t actually been completed, merely deferred. An unexpected peak can then cause havoc as tasks build up. Additionally, there is no guarantee the callback will be answered by the customer and even when they are, the average handling time can increase (because the agent has to preview the record before dialing, and the customer may not have the relevant information to hand).

* Webinar: hosted by Call Centre Helper. Presented by Azzurri Communications and Katalyst Consulting. April 18th 2013.

Poll What is your multi-channel strategy, do you?

Blend everything

Blend some things, but silo others

Silo everything

Blend? Silo? It's all voice isn't it?

15%

58%

25%

2%

15% 58% 25% 2% % of r espondent s

2. Managing variable call volumes.

P

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Manage your resources – by increasing the number of agents in your contact centre to handle your

highest peaks in traffi c you can reduce queue time and enhance the customer experience. By always servicing the peak demand, you adopt a ‘customer ﬁ rst’ strategy which will maximise your customer experience, but it’s not always that straight forward. Peaks are not always predictable, so this can lead to situations where you are left with idle agents and others where you don’t have enough, which can make workforce management almost impossible. Servicing your peak call volumes by adding more staff can also lead to expensive and complex shift patterns, and you may simply not have the physical space within the contact centre to put everyone. This is something that outsourcing can help with, but then you need to bear in mind how that might aff ect your customer experience.

Self-Serve and automate transactions – this takes a direct approach by reducing the total number

of calls by off ering various Self-Service options. This has the dual beneﬁ ts of delivering maximum long-term cost savings and also saving your agents for higher value or more complex interactions, which can improve agent satisfaction and retention. Also customers are often happy to self-serve for simple transactions. Moreover the self service facility will typically be available 24/7.

However, forcing Self-Service can negatively impact the customer experience when they want to deal with an agent and fi nd resolving their issue with your Self-Service options (be it web, IVR, mobile apps etc.) frustrating. Poorly implemented Self-Service can lead to repeat contacts, frustrated customers and ultimately more strain on your contact centre agents. As a strategy Self-Service can deliver huge benefi ts, but there can be large up-front costs, so decide what should and shouldn’t be automated by considering your customers’ needs fi rst.

Soften the peak with skill blending – if you have a peak in one contact centre stream, like

customer services, and a trough in another, say sales, you may be able move this peak traffi c into this available pool of agents. This has the value of maximising agent utilisation, reducing queue time and research has also shown that agents who deal with a variety of interactions have a greater level of job satisfaction. On the other hand, cross-skilling may not be possible or practical, so you may simply be transferring the call to an agent who can’t eff ectively handle the interaction, which will negatively aff ect the customer experience. A good multi-channel contact centre system will let you proactively and reactively manage skill-blending across all media types.

Many organisations are investigating supporting a home working strategy as part of their contact centre resource plan. There are a myriad of potential beneﬁ ts to both agents and organisations. These can include:

 Operational cost reductions and potentially better agent productivity

 Access to a more diverse and regionally spread talent pool i.e. the ‘grey workforce’ who have valuable skills but do not want to commute

 The ability to use freelance, zero hour contract workers to handle peaks in traffi c

 Flexible out-of-hours solution

 A business continuity or DR option in the event of severe weather conditions or incidents which prevent agents making it to the contact centre

 Improved green credentials.

However, there are still a number of barriers to home worker adoption, both cultural and technical,

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that organisations must overcome:

 Data conﬁ dentiality and integrity is a major concern for many organisations

 When it comes to managing and monitoring a remote team, there are a number of challenges including training and coaching:

 Agents can feel removed from the organisation and isolated working remotely

 You must ensure their home environment is suited to work i.e. having children or pets running around their feet is not the most conducive to productivity!

It’s essential to focus your strategy on the three key elements: people, process and technology. By removing the agent from the contact centre an element of control is lost, although there are technology solutions in place, such as virtual desktops, which can help resolve this. Ensure you recruit people with the right proﬁ le suited to remote working and ensure their environments are suitable (consider giving them company branding for their home offi ce for example). Invest in online training tools and employ diff erent UC tools such as IM, Skype and video communications to ensure richer interactions and make them feel part of the business.

However, it’s also important to organise face-to-face team meetings to complement these remote communications channels. The technology may be in place with various cloud based solutions on the market, but to ensure the successful adoption of home working, organisations need to develop a home worker engagement plan that ensures that agents are both monitored, communicated with regularly, have easy access to their immediate supervisor and access to adequate training. An option may be to rotate home workers through the contact centre and/or have supervisors attend the agents home for a proportion of one to one sessions – this can increase supervisory costs but the beneﬁ ts of inclusion are signiﬁ cant.

Poll

Not suitable and won’t be

trialling or implementing it

Currently in our plans

In place already

In place now, but failing

We’ve never considered it, but

may in the future

31%

On home workers, which statement best

describes your contact centre?

30%

3%

20%

16%

31% 16% 20% 3% 30% % of r espondent s

P

oll.

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While your agents may be highly trained, effi cient and process oriented, to achieve diff erentiation and satisfaction through service it’s important to achieve empathy with customers. The key is that empathy isn’t a skill, it’s a behaviour.

And while technology can help by arming the agent with the relevant information to handle the inbound enquiry quickly and effi ciently, it’s not the same as achieving real empathy. Recruitment is the key. Having middle aged agents selling tickets to a One Direction concert to younger customers or twenty something agents selling life insurance to the elderly, is unlikely to foster real understanding and bolster the customer experience. While soft skill training and coaching can help re-enforce the need for empathy, the ideal is to replicate your customers in your contact centre. In the B2C market especially, some ideas to help improve this are to hold customer open days in the contact centre or customer workshops to create a better understanding from the contact centre agents and consumer perspective. A more radical idea which has been tried in some organisations is to encourage customer input into your recruitment process, although that is certainly not a suitable option for all!

If you take card payments in your contact centre, you cannot hide from PCI DSS, it’s your responsibility! But while achieving PCI compliance is not a new problem, regulations are getting tougher and there is still no single solution or magic cure-all.

With a range of services, best practices, technologies and solutions available, ﬁ nding the right solution still presents a challenge. Most contact centre decision makers conduct on-going PCI compliance analysis - but there is no single, clear cut view of the requirements and punishments around the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). This is especially true around call recording, with hefty ﬁ nes looming for failing to comply.

Decision makers need to ﬁ nd the most appropriate solution to match their organisational and industry requirements. They must eliminate the risk of fraud and guarantee PCI compliance by ensuring that no payment information is available to the agent, or stored by the organisation. For example, in the debt collection industry, it’s key to the business model to accommodate as many payment channels as possible. But for other industries, certain channels may not be supported if it becomes too expensive or diffi cult to achieve compliance. Each organisation will have to review a combination of process, people and technologies, before determining the right approach for their organisation.

From a technology point of view, we see three broad approaches in supporting PCI compliance:

 Start-Stop recording – by stopping the call recording during the payment section of the call,

you can maintain your current customer engagement process. While this seems like a simplest approach, it keeps the whole contact centre environment in scope. So for instance, you must still ensure agents aren’t recording details manually and you need to demonstrate security

4. Improving agent empathy.

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across your data storage and networks. The conﬂ icting compliance requirements for diff erent bodies like the FSA and PCI DSS can also complicate this approach.

 Take the payment out of the contact centre – by outsourcing payments or transferring

from an agent to an IVR system you can reduce the scope of PCI DSS. However, you are still responsible and any payment card details being transferred across your data network bring that into scope. This method can also negatively impact the customer experience if they are transferred from an agent to an IVR and potentially back again, or losing contact with the agent completely.

 DTMF suppression to isolate details from agents – this approach requires all card and

authentication details to be input by DTMF (Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency). Your agent is able to stay on the line, guiding your customer and providing assistance with the payment process, because DTMF suppression technology takes sensitive card data out of the contact centre environment, preventing it from reaching the agent.

In all these cases there is a decision involving the balance between the customer experience, your willingness to change processes and the costs involved, which only the business can make.

Increasingly, many customers prefer self-service to other forms of interaction (especially when integrated with smart phone apps). It’s often more convenient and suits the 24/7 expectations of today’s consumers.

For the contact centre, Self-Service decreases the volume of basic enquiries, reduces costs and enhances effi ciency. For example, automated payments cost less for the contact centre, have no queue for customers and are faster to process than manual payments over the phone. Self-Service can be accomplished through a number of technologies, including online automated channels, IVR and mobile apps.

Poll

6. Making self-service work.

What is the status of PCI Compliance

for your business?

Nailed it

We know what we need to do

Panic Stations

PCI Compliance? What’s that?

19%

34%

2%

45%

19% 34% 2% 45% % of r espondents

P

oll.

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Contact centre decision makers are challenged with deﬁ ning not only which types of customer interactions should be automated, but also the correct method and how to monitor the customer experience when they are self-serving. It’s important to strike the right balance between optimising the contact centre processes and enhancing the customer experience. Self-Service isn’t all about reducing costs for the contact centre. You need to understand why people contact your business and why Self-Service for that particular interaction is good for the customers.

For example, a smart phone app may seem like a quick and effi cient way for a customer to pay their water bill, but is it likely that people will download an app for this purpose onto a mobile device with limited storage for a once a quarter payment? A web payment portal or IVR may be a better ﬁ t for both the customers and the organisation. Newer technologies such as Knowledge Management (Self learning, dynamic FAQs) and natural language processing (simplifying IVR queues) should also be reviewed. Any automation or Self-Service process needs to be designed from the customer’s point of view so that they are light-touch, easy to use and add value. If using the smart phone application or website portal is easier than calling the contact centre, it will become the method of choice for the customer. Designed from the customers’ perspective, Self-Service eliminates the need for a number of simple calls, or at least parts of calls, to be dealt with by live agents, freeing up those agents to handle more complex calls where they can add real value.

Measurement of the performance of contact centre agents is changing rapidly. While all contact centres have Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure agent performance, there is a shift from KPIs relating to call volume, to KPIs relating to interaction quality and customer satisfaction. However, satisfaction is hard to measure and many organisations have not yet outlined a set of criteria for doing so. Net Promoter Scores and satisfaction surveys are traditional methods of ascertaining customer satisfaction, but they don’t always tell the full story. For example, external factors such as severe weather aff ecting a delivery or a product fault or recall will aff ect satisfaction scores with your organisation, even if the contact centre agent has handled the call quickly, compliantly and professionally.

One guiding principle to measuring satisfaction is having the right agent metrics which look from the customer expectation inwards, rather than focusing on internal measures that don’t have an eff ect on the customer experience. Measure your activity, not simply your outcomes, and focus on your organisational behaviour. One example of an organisation shifting to metrics focused on customers’ needs and satisfaction was a bank who implemented automated post-call surveys. By considering the customer psychology – calling back within 15 minutes, only contacting landlines and not mobiles, and only targeting customers who had spoken to a human agent - they’re able to garner solid feedback on the quality of their outcomes. Additionally, if a bad experience is reported the system can escalate it and have the customer called back to resolve.

Finally, it is always stronger if you can calibrate the customer’s feedback with your own

7. How do you measure the

customer experience?

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assessment, so make sure you can track feedback to a speciﬁ c interaction which you can then assess. It may be that your view of good service is not the same as a customer’s view – and you need to identify that quickly.

You’re continually challenged to do more with your contact centre, to adapt to the latest technology and deliver continually better service to your customers.

But IT budgets are already strained and even with virtualisation, the constraints of power, space and compatibility may limit what you can achieve with your contact centre operation. Cloud-based contact centres off er a possible solution due to their ability to scale very easily and off er ﬂ exibility in pricing and delivery. But can cloud contact centres develop and grow with your changing needs and evolving customers?

It is very easy to simply focus on the needs of managing your infrastructure, without considering the full implications for your contact centre operation. The move to the cloud has been rapidly adopted by many organisations. And when it’s done well, it really helps you to focus on the key beneﬁ ts you want to achieve. But when it’s done badly, it can put you in handcuff s that restrict the way you deliver a service to your customers and negatively aff ect their experience.

Organisations have to adapt to rapidly changing approaches to customer experience, especially as Generation X and Y customers increasingly adopt self-service and digital channels. These two generations really do not want to interact by phone if other preferred channels such as chat are available. However, how you look to adapt to these shifts and changes is unlikely to stay static and you plans will need to evolve with the customers’ demands. Simply replicating what is available in your contact centre today and putting it into the cloud would be a mistake. Make sure that your cloud-based contact centre considers both your current needs and potential future needs. Another key consideration when assessing a cloud based contact centre strategy is discovering any restrictions around integrating with third party applications. Getting ahead may mean having a unique capability that you can off er – so make sure you aren’t limiting yourself and do your due diligence.

That said cloud does not have to be vanilla. Suppliers can provide bespoke solutions from within their own data centres more eff ectively than if delivered on premise. The operational beneﬁ t is that customers typically receive a much higher level of platform performance without having to employ the operational support resources to manage it. A case where the somewhat clichéd phrase ‘allowing you to focus on your core business’ really does apply. Moreover increasingly the functionality required to be provided by the contact centre that once would have resided on customer premise servers is increasingly delivered via the cloud. As such contact centre providers are increasingly morphing from ‘systems integration’ to ‘services integration’ in what they deliver.

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To deliver a uniform standard of service, your customers need a consistent feel across all channels they use to interact with your organisation. They need the same information, delivered at the right time in the appropriate context of the channels they are using.

What this means is diff erent for each organisation. Some organisations are imparting complex information that needs access to a wide ranging knowledge base. Others need to pull information from speciﬁ c applications and present them to either the customer or the agents.

You need to understand in detail the experience you want to provide to your customers; then ensure that it is delivered in as smooth and consistent a manner as possible. For the agent, you need to simplify the way they can address customer issues and ensure they have a 360 degree view of all the interactions the customer has had with the organisation.

With customers increasingly willing to self-serve on simple requests, their interactions with your agents will inevitably focus on the more complex issues. Making the agent’s life easy will result in better service for the customer. Make sure you continually analyse your customer interactions and seek to continually improve the systems and processes behind them.

The Azzurri contact centre practice.

Azzurri’s specialist Contact Centre Practice designs, implements and supports contact centres for hundreds of UK organisations for whom customer contact is mission critical.

We use best-of-breed technology to enable and improve customer interactions, enhance customer experience and increase the operational eff ectiveness of your contact centre. Find out more at:

www.azzurricommunications.co.uk/what-we-do/contact-centres

9. Achieving consistency

and seamless interaction ﬂ ow.

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