Contact Center Holiday Check List

It’s that time of year again for Holiday shopping, Turkey dinners, Christmas Cheer, and busy call centers! Give your customer’s a hassle free customer experience this year with this handy check list:

Finalize Your Contact Volume & Staff Planning Forecasts

Starting in Q3, you should already have your Q4 contact volumes and staffing forecasts prepared based on historical data, sales forecast, and current / planned promotional activities. Any required additional holiday staff should already be hired, trained, and on schedule.

Finalize Your Staff Holiday Training

Most of your support staff should have also completed holiday sales, product, procedures, and refresher training. Don’t forget to add a refresher module on how to deal with difficult customers and stress management.

Check Systems & Implement Fall Back Procedures

We’ve experienced system failures at one point or another in our contact centers. The best to “prepare” for unforeseen technical issues is to have a fully redundant fallback solution in place with detailed procedures. For example, how to route overflow to a outsource partner or how to receive calls in the event your ACD goes down. The holiday season is not the time to start scenario planning and practice. Make sure you mark this item off your check list well in advance.

Review Your Online Customer Service Channel

Social media and mobile has fundamentally shifted customer expectations about customer service. Make sure you have a dedicated social media team in place to monitor and respond to customer comments, complaints, and problems submitted via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or some other social media channel. The team set up an app like Google Alerts or Mention to help monitor what’s being said online and across social media. And don’t forget to be proactive, responsive, positive, and friendly.

Don’t Forget to Have Fun

The Holiday season may be a challenging and stressful time for contact centers but it doesn’t mean it should zap out the joy. Don’t forget about your front-line staff dealing with your customers. You can schedule extra breaks to deal with the stress, organize a “Secret Santa” event, or bring Santa to the contact center to surprise and “delight” your staff.

Contact Centers Taking Off To The Cloud

The contact center industry has dynamically changed over the past ten years and continues to evolve to keep up with the increasing marketplace competition as well as the growing demands of customers. Remarkably, technology developments have allowed contact centers to look into wider options to improve their services such as moving into cloud-based systems.

Contact centers using cloud-based applications have showed significant growth from 31.8% in 2010 and 40.9% in 2011 to 62.4% this year. And with the numbers rising, it shows no signs of slowing down.

The latter percentage uses 45 different types of systems and applications, where the top priority for contact centers in the next 18 months are:

• Interactive Voice Response
• Automatic Call Distributor
• Computer Telephony Integration
• Workforce Management
• Speech Recognition
• Customer Relationship Management
• Dialer
• Web Chat
• Recording
• Quality Management
• Email response management
• Performance management
• Social CRM servicing applications
• Social media listening/monitoring tools

DMG Consulting projects that there will be a 10% increase (from 35% to 45%) in the cloud-based contact center infrastructure each year from 2012 to 2015. With the security and integration well covered by cloud-based vendors, this figure might double as it presents a more feasible and reliable solution for businesses.

Social media will not replace email, voice, and chat

The next 18 months predict that voice and email will be the top contact center servicing channels at 14.9% and 14.4% respectively. Social media, particularly Facebook (7.9%) and Twitter (7.8%), prove to be an efficient channel to reach customers. However, even with its popularity in providing good customer service, social media will not overtake the regular contact center servicing channels such as web chat (12.7%), web self-service (10.6%), SMS (9.3%), mobile (8.9%), and instant messaging (8.6%). Nearly 4.7% of contact centers will utilize the use of video while 0.1% will try to use other means aside from what has been mentioned.

Many companies expect cloud based contact centers to yield improvements such as: agent productivity (55.8%), increase in the use of self-service solutions (45.1%), utilization of more channels such as SMS and social media (40.8%), reduction in service costs (38%), and boost in their reports and analysis (29.6%).

Customer Service Metrics

I always equate a company's customer service department with that of a "heart". It's the function through which customer communication flows - both inbound and outbound and across channels. Collecting disposition codes for example, can help you focus on meaningful improvements related to the product, service, communication, service standards, or sales channels. 

Selecting the appropriate set of metrics for your company depends on your industry and stakeholders. For example,

• If you provide inbound sales support then you need to track revenue generated.
• Senior Management needs KPIs compared to line mangers that need real-time operational data.

Select meaningful KPIs and metrics that you can easily measure and track over time. Your support systems should preferably automate the logging and tracing of such metrics. Based on experience, however, some manual calculations may be necessary which is perfectly acceptable as long as the data is captured and available in your database.

common inbound contact center metrics

• Calls Offered: (1) Total calls offered to a queue; (2)the total number of callers seeking service or contact (before reaching an IVR or recorded message); (3) the total number of calls that were available to be answered by the queue (post-IVR selection and recording). It's important to differentiate exactly when you count a call as "offered." It can be measured at the network level, but is usually measured at the switch. Thus, blocked calls ("busies") can be missed.
• Average Speed of Answer: Average time (usually in seconds) it takes for a call to be answered by the service desk. 
• Average Handling Time: Measures the average duration of one transaction, typically measured from the customer's initiation of the call and including any hold time, talk time and related tasks that follow the transaction.
• Average Talk Time: The average amount of time the agent spends communicating with the customer. ATT is included in your Average Handling Time calculation.
• Average Wrap Time: The time required by an ACD agent after a conversation is ended, to complete work that is directly associated with the calls just completed. Does not include time for any other activities such as meetings, breaks, correspondence, etc. AWT is included in your Average Handling Time calculation.
• Abandonment Rate: Measures the percentage of callers who select a destination but hang up before the destination is reached. It can be a measure of the percentage of callers  who enter an automated attendant or IVR menu, but who hang up before the IVR delivers the call to an agent queue. But most often it is used to measure the percentage of callers who enter an agent queue but hang up before reaching an agent.
• First Call Resolution: First call resolution is properly addressing the customer's need the first time they call, thereby eliminating the need for the customer to follow up with a second call. FCR is notoriously difficult to track but there are a few methods you can use in combination: (1) Repeat-call tracking technology – tracks whether or not a customer calls the contact center a second (or third or fourth…) time regarding an issue they previously called about; (2) Post-call customer surveys – conducted (via IVR, live surveyor, or email) immediately or very soon after a call and asking the customer whether or not the their issue or inquiry was taken care of completely; (3) Quality monitoring – entails having internal quality monitoring staff listen to and rate the call as “resolved” or “unresolved” (as well as to confirm that it was the caller’s first contact with the contact center on the issue in question). 
• Response Time: Measured as the total period between when a customer makes a request and a response is given. Setting an appropriate response time depends on the contact channel used by the customer, your industry, customer expectations, and available resources. As a general rule of thumb:
• Resolution Time: Measured as the total amount of time between receiving the customer's initial request and providing the correct answer/fix. 
• Schedule Adherence: Determines whether or not agents are working the amount of time they are scheduled to work. It’s measured by taking the total time a call center agent is available for call work and dividing it by the time they are scheduled to work, expressed as a percentage. Call center schedule adherence can take into account time spent on breaks or doing other, non-call related work (this is called "compliance"). Most call centers define a target schedule adherence percentage that allows for some cushion time beyond the known scheduled lunch and break times.
• Agent Attrition: Your attrition rate measures how many agents left the Customer Service department over a given period of time. The best way to calculate your agent attrition rate is:

{ The total number of resign (voluntary and non-voluntary) / Average number of employees in the month ((# of full time employees on 1st + last day of month) / 2 } x 100%

social media metrics

Customers are increasingly using social media to interact with customer service in addition to traditional contact channels. Your social media metrics should includes:

• Inbound Volume: The number of messages your receive by channel.
• Volumes by Categories: Try and group inbound contacts by disposition code. For example, billing, cancellation, technical support. This information will help you refine and optimize your online FAQs and/or collateral materials.
• Response Time: This is still measured as the total amount of time you reply to the customer's initial request. Nearly half of all customers that use social media to lodge a complaint, typically expect a response within 1 hour. 
• Average Handling Time: Measures the average duration of one transaction, typically measured from the customer's initial social media initiation to the time the interaction concludes. 
• Deflection Rate: Deflection refers to the percentage of issues moved to another channel rather than being resolved directly within social.

So You're Thinking About Outsourcing Your Customer Service

You're a new internet startup and have no idea how to provide customer service support for your growing user base. You know you need to provide some level of support in addition to online FAQs but you have no idea where do start or what to do.

Start with understanding the different types of "outsourcing" options available:

• Onshore Outsourcing: Outsourcing operations of the company to another company located in the home country or region. Companies can reduce labor costs somewhat and benefit from highly skilled labor with little or no language or cultural barrier, but the cost of such operations is high compared to offshore or near shore locations.
• Offshore Outsourcing: Outsourcing the operations of the company to other companies that are located in a foreign country, and most likely have a different language and culture. Offshore outsourcing offers benefits like higher cost savings and access to highly skilled labor. 
• Near Shore Outsourcing: Outsourcing the operations of the company to an adjacent or nearby country having similar culture and language skills.  Near shore outsourcing offers some cost savings over onshore and has the added benefit of proximity for more frequent site visits, while retaining a highly skilled labor pool.

Weather or not you decide to outsource onshore or offshore, I suggest you evaluate your BPO partner against the following:

• Do they have an Internationally recognized certification - such as COPC?
• How many years have they been in business?
• What is the background and experience of the management team?
• What is the Account Manager's background and experience?
• What reporting tool  do they use? Do you have access to real time stats?
• How does the call center / office environment look and feel?
• What are agent attrition rates?
• What is the agent training program?
• Are there any customer testimonials?
• What is the pricing structure - contract flexibility?

There's one outsource provider, for example, that's been around for a few short years and positions itself as a new "startup" serving "startups". How ridiculous. The company is basically "learning" on the job with very little operations experience. Don't believe the hype. My advice: stick with an established player that has well defined processes, procedures, culture, management team, and recognized certification. 

Improve Your Inbound Customer Service with the Universal Call Path

What is the Universal Call Path?

• The universal call path is a blueprint for phone conversations.
• It helps CSRs so they can reliably and predictably generate extremely positive reactions from customers.
• Results from using the universal call path include:
  • All CSRs sound consistently nice, helpful, and knowledgeable.
  • The CSR team sounds uniformly professional.
  • CSRs, like musicians in a symphony, can easily be monitored.
  • CSRs are easy to coach, because clear definitions exist of poor, average, good and excellent work.
  • Calls are shortened, having the effect of reducing costs while increasing customer satisfaction through faster service deliver.
  • Calls consistently conclude on a very positive note.
  • CSR job satisfaction increases.
  • Training of new CSRs is faster.
  • Employee compensation is more accurately pegged to performance.
  • “Conflict” calls and other challenging and exceptional conversations are managed in a calm, reliable, and routine manner. 

Let's take a closer look at the Universal Call Path

Question 1: When are customers happiest with the service they’ve received?

Answer 1: Customers are happiest when they think CSRs have gone out of their way for them in getting information, solving a problem, and making it easier to do business with the company.

Question 2: How do customers express their happiness with CSRs?

Answer 2: They express their happiness in three ways:

• they thank the CSR in a strong way
• they “sing” by elevating their voices to new peaks,
• and they express their intention to do more business with the company.

Question 3: How can we induce customers to feel happy with us all the time?

Answer 3: Always seem ready, willing, and able to go out of your way for them!

The Universal Call Path is comprised of three parts

The Promise of Help

This phrase sends two crucial messages to the customer:

• Please be assured that you’re going to get what you call for.
• I’m going to take pleasure in helping you.
• The customer can relax and let the CSR get down to business and calls are shortened. 

The offer of Additional Help

This phrase performs two essential functions:

• It signals that the business of the call has been completed.
• It volunteers additional help, and in doing so, it makes a positive impression on the customer. This phrase, when combined with the promise of additional  help, conveys the idea that we’re willing to go out of our way for the customer.

The volunteering of help helps make us sound sincere.

Additional Elements of the Universal Call Path

The UPC incorporates two additional elements:

• Tone: An agent's tone must be synchronized with our words to help them sound more sincere.
• Pitch: Pitch, in speech, is the relative highness or lowness of a tone as perceived by the ear, which depends on the number of vibrations per second produced by the vocal cords.