Insight from Interactions

How many call center managers feel overwhelmed by cutbacks? Continuing economic uncertainty means continuing pressure to cut costs, staff and staff hours. But what about quality? Are cutbacks the only way to manage costs? I say no. In fact, here are some strategies for optimizing your Customer Dynamics – that is, to help you not only maintain but even improve quality of service for increased customer satisfaction, while keeping more staff, improving their morale and lowering costs.

Use more part-time agents. I find it surprising that, according to a survey of contact center managers conducted by the Society of Workforce Planning Professionals (SWPP), nearly half (45%) of contact centers use few or no part-time agents. Specifically, their survey results show that 17% of respondents do not use part-time agents at all and 28% employ only 1 to 10% of their staff on a part-time basis.  Staffing contact centers with up to 25% part-time agents can deliver schedule flexibility and staffing cost savings over using full-time agents alone. By creating flexible schedules for part-time agents you can eliminate most overstaffing and, in many cases, improve customer service during peak intervals as well.

Offer voluntary time off (VTO). Enabling part- and full-time agents to volunteer for time off without pay is a great way to provide the best service at the lowest cost.  Because it is voluntary, the agents that sign up for it actually want the time off instead of the pay, so it can help improve employee satisfaction for a portion of your contact center staff. Plus, it can shave costs off the bottom line. SWPP 2007 Workforce Management Professional of the Year Kim Newkirk (Henderson) of Bluegreen Corporation launched a VTO program for her business, cutting $215,265 in payroll costs and eliminating 17,360 hours during off-peak periods.    

Of course, there are some prerequisites to making VTO work.  You need to have intraday managers who have the time and workforce management tools to determine overstaffing conditions.  You also need change management capabilities, including the means to communicate the program effectively to supervisors and agents. And once the program is in place, it requires ongoing communication regarding time-off slots available, time-off granted, schedule changes and more. There are a lot of moving parts. The good news is that leading workforce management systems can help you automate some or all of this communication between the workforce management team and the agents and their supervisors. 

While employing more part-time agents and VTO initiatives will take some time and effort, the rewards can be great.  If you are faced with layoffs, these programs can help retain a larger workforce because many agents would be willing to work fewer hours if it meant that they could keep their jobs.  These programs also can save the investments you have already made in those individuals.  Then, when the economy turns around, you can easily increase hours without incurring significant hiring and training costs.  In the meantime, you will save your company money while improving customer satisfaction:  a win-win-win, and a way to break away from the cutback mentality.

This year’s NICE annual benchmark study on contact center trends revealed increases in the overall volume of customer interactions, and in the number and variety of channels by which these interactions occur. Neither of these trends is likely to surprise anyone in the customer service industry. What may surprise you, though, is the amount of untapped potential—lower costs, lower churn and more—in all those interactions.

Companies interact with their customers across an expanding and increasingly complicated landscape. It can be chaotic, to be sure—but there’s an upside. More interactions and more channels across which these interactions can unfold more opportunities to forge strong customer bonds, maximize profits and create lasting competitive differentiation. The key is understanding and optimizing the dynamics—the Customer Dynamics—they represent.

Customer Dynamics  is an exciting concept that describes the ongoing, complex interchange between businesses and customers occurring across all customer touchpoints (phone, chat, email, etc.). By optimizing Customer Dynamics, organizations can have both happy and loyal customers and be highly efficient and profitable.

Today NICE announced  a new methodology and tools with which companies can generate tangible business value through Customer Dynamics optimization. This systematic methodology works in conjunction with our NICE SmartCenter suite. We’ll get into the details in upcoming posts. But the basic idea is straightforward.

We help you take charge of the complex interactions you have with your customers by capturing intent (with our multi-channel interaction recording platform), analyzing intent to rapidly reveal meaningful insights (with cross-channel interaction analytics), and then taking decisive actions to impact your business performance (with our new Real-Time Guidance offering and additional solutions). From intent to insight to impact, NICE offers companies a way to understand exactly what’s going on in all those interactions, to see patterns in the chaos, to glean insights and, finally, to act and make a difference for your business.

Which customers call your contact center most frequently and why? How do customers who use self-service channels differ from those who call you? What are customers saying about your competitors? How are customers reacting to your latest marketing campaign? What revenue opportunities are you missing? What is driving customer dissatisfaction? Who are your best-performing agents? How can you promote best practices and enforce procedures across your workforce? Where are your opportunities to reduce handle time? What if you had the answers to all these questions and more?

Customer Dynamics optimization is a new and exciting concept we look forward to discussing with you in the coming weeks and beyond. In the meantime, we want to hear what you have to say. Post a comment. Let us know: How would you have handled a customer situation differently had you understood the true intent of the customer? What insights have you always wished you could extract from customer interactions? What impact do you think Customer Dynamics optimization can have on your company?

First call resolution, or FCR, is one of contact centers’ most important metrics. The concept is simple, right? You just measure the rate at which contacts are resolved on the first call, without the customer having to call again, and you have your FCR rate. Okay, sure. But how do you know when the same customer calls more than once regarding the same issue? Here’s a hint: it isn’t by caller ID. Tracking calls by calling number yields too many false positives (a customer might call two times in a row for two completely different issues) and false negatives (a customer might call from home, then call again from a cell phone.) So how can you truly measure FCR?

Hear the voice of the customer. The best way to know a call is a repeat call is to listen to what customers tell you. It does not take a rocket scientist to know that, when a customer says “I called yesterday,” or “this is the second time I’m calling,” you have a repeat call. All it takes is good speech analytics  software. This is the best way to avoid false negatives, and identify repeat calls regardless of the caller ID used in each case.  

Identify the customer, not the phone number.  What about repeat calls in which customers do not mention they already called? To cover these, rather than using caller ID, look for customer ID or, even better, problem or ticket ID. The best way to identify these is to peek at the agent desktop. Agents typically use a CRM application that shows the customer ID, account number or ticket number. This data may be “scraped” from the agent screen and associated with the archived customer call such that it can subsequently be used to identify repeat calls.

Measure first contact resolution, not first call resolution. Do you allow your customers to contact you via email? How about online chat? If you do any of those, you must measure first contact resolution across the different channels. A customer might send an email to address an issue, and follow up with a phone call if the issue is not resolved. Make sure you get a holistic view of the customer experience across all touch points, and that your agents truly do resolve customer issues the first time, every time.

Do you remember your local grocery store—the one closest to home when you were a kid? The owner knew you and your family members by name. He knew what you bought and, if you hadn’t paid him a visit in a while, he would ask your mother if you were okay. He knew what you liked and, if he didn’t have what you wanted, he would order it especially for you. In short, you had a relationship. His prices may have been a fraction higher than the larger supermarket, but no one there knew you. You didn’t mind paying a little more for that personal connection.

The bottom-line value of this kind of connection has not gone unnoticed among larger grocery chains. Over the last few years, they have been investing big bucks in innovative technologies to help them get to know their customers as well, if not better, than their mom-and-pop rivals. They issue coupons for the products customers are most likely to buy, based on their previous purchases, invite them to promotional events and more. The supermarket is going head-to-head with the neighborhood grocery store in the battle for customer intimacy.

The battleground extends well beyond grocers. Small to mid-size businesses worldwide face the same challenge. The key asset that differentiated them from large competitors was knowledge of their customers, attained through their customer service operations. But that advantage—a hallmark of the small to medium contact centers that support local and regional businesses—is eroding.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the simple call recording that’s done in the small to medium contact center (SMCC) today is regarded as standard but increasingly insufficient for competitive purposes. With the risk of losing the battle for customer intimacy, more robust applications for SMCCs have become a must. According to the Datamonitor report, “Small and Suite: The Mid-Size Contact Center” (April 23, 2009), “Because large enterprises also seek ways to personalize customer self-service, customer intimacy is a battle that mid-size contact centers cannot afford to lose.”

It’s somewhat ironic that today SMCCs need to invest in business applications to protect the intimacy advantage that once came so naturally. But as IBM correctly states, “To survive, mid-size companies must be agile enough to respond to the pressures to compete on levels not required in the past.” This may mean that SMCCs must explore the kinds of technologies—and price points—once reserved for bigger players. It’s an opportunity for SMCCs and their call recording solution vendors to provide advanced customer service applications that best fit SMCC needs and budgets. It will be interesting to see how they rise to the challenge.