Starting 2023 without the spectre of pandemic lockdowns, but instead with the uncertainties related to Brexit, the recession, industrial action and increasing energy prices, means maintaining a team of people with the capability to deliver against your business objectives is critical. This may be the number one challenge, along with managing increasing business costs.

It is tough out there across many sectors. This makes re-evaluating growth plans key and the potential use of a telemarketing partner a consideration that carries more significance than in past years. The selection of the right partner could be the catalyst if you had the time to find the right one who will work flexibly to support your requirements.

Mitigating risk

We all understand what risk is, but how do we manage risk on a day-to-day basis? The key when selecting the right people to work with is to ensure we understand their capabilities. The trouble is, 4% of the UK population work in either a contact centre or at home on the kitchen table on behalf of a contact centre.

So how do you find the right partner when there is such a wide choice, offering a variety of services?

Outbound calling at their core

Contact centres are in the DNA of their senior teams and they surround themselves with like-minded people. Many are even owner managed.  However, strong outbound, telemarketing DNA differs slightly. It is a different discipline like the difference between Mo Farah and Usain Bolt, both are fantastic athletes, but they have their areas of expertise in the same way your businesses do. (Why the reference to gold medalists? Well, telemarketers in this space have to be winners too).

Access to the right data

You may have a file of existing records that you need support in dialling. A partner can do this for you, providing detail and appointments in a flexible range of formats. But if new data is needed, they can also support in obtaining the right lists for your needs. Working with their existing tried and tested data providers, means they are better placed to commit to the success of that data.

Proven staff

Established telemarketing providers know the right kind of people to deliver your campaign and can clearly articulate this. They understand the strengths of their teams and will know, from experience, which individuals will be best placed to deliver success for your business.

Sector experience

You can use partners who have specific sector experience,  taking advantage of their understanding and insights of the industry (including tested data and specific experience) to increase your probability of success.

Operating with transparency

A good partner will be able to readily provide you with  performance reporting, share call recordings and suggestions for how to develop or rest a campaign. They will work to and thrive on having clear KPIs. They will be focused on the outcome and can talk with passion about their results.

Offering you a secure environment

Telemarketing companies have to be compliant to remain in business, whether it be data handling or managing calling in line with regulations. They have to be efficient and invest in the right contact technology to enable them to deliver services for multiple clients. With many contact centre technologies available, it is important to know that they have selected the right platforms to deliver what you need.

For many years we have seen additional contact channels being bolted onto the side of an existing model and not achieving the desired results. However, at what point do you make the brave decision to put a line through your existing technologies and start again with a blank page? We’ve all seen e-mail being run for multiple agents using a single Outlook inbox, cherry picking work items that they can do, repeatedly the more difficult tasks being left for someone else to manage.

As times get harder, cost to serve increases and customers become more demanding as a result of a hardening of the economy, we need to ensure that our people are able to work as efficiently as possible. Is now the time to make a shrewd investment in new technology which empowers your people to be more productive, do more with less, and offer a properly joined up service where a single view of the customer is available?

A single view gives the opportunity to ensure that you are effective in managing the next best action, understanding customer propensity and what that customer is likely to need next. The real opportunity comes from knowing this before the customer even works it out for themselves. The best service being no service at all, minimising effort for the customer, but also for your contact centre considering that you are likely to be picking up the cost of that service.

So, with a proper multi-channel set up, one view of the customer and effective analytics, what opportunities will you have to maintain your current base, grow wallet share and save costs? The answer seems evident in my mind.

Additionally, those brands that take the best care of their customers in hard times are more likely to be better remembered when we come through the other side.

Always consider using the paths that others have already trodden. If you are experiencing challenges in growing or maintaining your brand, the benefits of using an outsource provider to support your customers whilst you focus on the broader business should not be underestimated. Those outsource providers will have already worked out the conundrum of effectively managing those multi-silo activities to a mature multi-channel approach.

At the moment, we all know that a little bit of help from someone who has been there before and already made (and of course learned from) those mistakes, could be a conversation well worth having.

Running effective sales operations has never been easy and I’m not sure this will change anytime soon. Delivering the buzz of a thriving sales environment can be tough. Costs are increasing; people, heat and light all cost more than they used to. So, when contacting a customer or potential customer, are you making the most of the opportunity?

Nobody can say that the last few years have been smooth. If we are honest, we’ve been subjected to unprecedented changes and uncertainty for more than half a decade now. Since the Brexit referendum, businesses have been subject to uncertainty long before the pandemic and the current financial challenges that we are seeing. So, as we enter 2023 what are your key goals and how do you intend to ensure that they are consistently delivered?

With so much time potentially lost due to uncertainty in recent years, is there a risk that people are trying to do too much too fast? In doing so, key items are overlooked, and processes become less efficient, as discussed in Steve’s article last month: Is it time to “move more slowly and maintain things”?

Narrowing our focus and prioritising is key to executing our plans. It all sounds so simple in Covey’s Four Disciplines of Execution; once you have established what your goals are; be sure to determine how you are measuring success; think about how you ensure that the key inputs are tracked so that your success can be predicted; keep score and check in regularly so that those accountable for delivery are indeed delivering.

We would do this on a daily basis with call centre agents, the metrics are all there in abundance:

  • “How many sales are you going to get me today Nev?”
  • “How are you going to reduce your AHT this week Nev?”
    (I know we don’t really talk about reducing AHT any longer as an industry, but when I was an agent, we did).
  • “How many repeat calls did you generate last week?”

These are items which are easy to commit to, track and report back on the following day or week. But this becomes harder to do when we move away from the calling floor.

Why is this?

Well, on one level the answer is simple; we make great efforts as managers (or we should be) to make the task of the front-line agent as easy as possible. You have one focus, (admittedly made up of lots of parts), but essentially answer the call, resolve the issue or make the sale. In some cases, resolve the issue and make the sale. But, once we step out of the operations and into the wider business, there are more moving parts, more conflicting priorities and many decisions that need to be made.

That being said, has the world of work changed in the material sense as much as we expected over the past couple of years? Or have we returned to the way things were, but with a different set of expectations?

So, my wish to you all is that you have a great holiday period, that you have time to recharge, reflect and celebrate your successes from recent years.

We have all been tested but consider this, could you achieve more if you focus on doing fewer things but with full commitment in 2023?

If that means outsourcing your contact centre operations or needing support in finding the right technologies to advance your business, we should have a chat.

Running effective sales operations has never been easy and I’m not sure this will change anytime soon. Delivering the buzz of a thriving sales environment can be tough. Costs are increasing; people, heat and light all cost more than they used to. So, when contacting a customer or potential customer, are you making the most of the opportunity?

For those buying data there has always been the question of when to give new agents the good quality data. Do you save the good stuff for when they have learned their craft and making more sales? However, this may risk agents losing heart by working through sub-optimal data and as a result, prolong improvements in competency.

We now live in a time where compliance is a given. It ensures that robust processes in sales and payments are fulfilled in the right way, but I can remember a time when I had more agents going through a validation than I had sat selling on a given day. We had to slow the dialler and then the whole operation became less effective. What I would have given for a machine to listen to the calls as opposed to waiting for a QA to listen through the calls and sign off on the sales.

Optimisation of diallers, best time to call, propensity to answer, propensity to purchase – the variables can feel infinite. The technology that we see now can be applied to ensure that when the phone is answered the agent is in the best possible place to make the sale, through matching on customer knowledge, demographic and buyer behaviour. But then the agent still needs to have all the right information available to them to make the offer and close the sale. We see all manner of ways to deliver this knowledge to them.

Many in contact centres have spent a lifetime talking about quartiles and quintiles and moving performance along a bell-curve. But are you making the right interventions at the best time? Is effort being targeted at the set of agents who will give you the biggest uplift? How good are you at spotting your next rising sales star?  There are an embarrassment of measures and metrics in contact centres but presenting them in one place is easier now than when I was a Team Leader. Agents are able to interrogate their own performance at their desk as opposed to their Team Leader pinning their performance data on a noticeboard.

Operations Managers are now able to see all that data rolled up and see how the Team Leader training interventions are driving performance all there on one screen. The possibilities are great, however it comes back to the culture – do you have the right culture in place to ensure that all these tools are being used effectively?

Challenging times are ahead. If your sales centre isn’t performing at the optimum level, there are plenty of options to drive performance. Some may feel familiar, but it never hurts to see what could be done differently.

Get in touch if you would like to discuss this further.

Entering Q4 with the headwind of a cost-of-living crisis there’s uncertainty for some as to how busy they’ll be this year. However, all have the challenges of potentially needing to do more with less as increasing costs and potential recruitment issues could mean fewer contact centre agents.

Whether by design or not, the same difficulties apply and that message in the IVR saying “due to covid” isn’t well received by customers any longer.

So how do you balance demand and costs to serve? Service from a cheaper location, provide self-serve options, automate… all well-trodden paths with many failing to flourish if not approached in the right manner.

But isn’t voice king when it comes to resolving emotive issues, customers want to be able to engage via multiple channels based on their requirements. We’ve recently heard that:

So, with these numbers in mind, what are the options and where does voice retain the throne?  If staff are harder to find and more expensive than ever, then is the key to ensure that they’re being used as effectively as possible? A ‘well trained’ bot can make a difference in the triage of those 67% who prefer self-service to ensure they only speak to someone if they really need to, it keeps people free for the 83% that want to engage immediately too.

Asynchronous messaging offers flexibility for a customer if they don’t have time to talk but need support, there are opportunities using WhatsApp or web messaging, for example, to easily send photos of what’s causing the issue and switch channel to voice at the right moment.

Proactivity remains a jewel in the crown when trying to minimise customer effort. For example, my train tickets for a strike day are no use to me now. I need a refund but clearly for commercial reasons I’m not going to be immediately offered one, they’d rather I just decide to travel on another day, but that doesn’t work for me, whereas a proactive contact with a link to trigger a refund would. Other scenarios are easier though and brands making timely interventions can improve the experience for the customer, whilst managing demand and pressure on their own staff.

Voice is here to stay, especially for complex or emotional conversations and certainly when looking to make a sale. The key is ensuring that people have the right skills and information to hand, as well as understanding the insights from those contacts and improving processes where possible.  Or when outbound dialling that productivity and conversion are optimised through tools which support the agent in maximising their potential. Good people are hard to find so ensure you give them the tools to do a great job, failing that there is always the option of outsourcing – a problem shared and all that.

If brands are to be successful, they need to be:

Authentic: feeding the social consciousness in society.
Differentiated: tough to do in a market where replication is easy. Some form of ‘value add’ needs to be evident.
Responsive: perhaps in a crisis, but with the advent of ‘big data’ the notion of a ‘segment of one’ – brands need to be proactive and anticipate a need before the customer realises that they have it.
Consistent: failures in delivery will typically lead to a customer switching to an alternate supplier if expectations are not met.

Forrester stated that: “Consumers expect any desired information or service to be available, in context, at their precise moment of need.”

So how do we ensure delivery against this level of customer demand? The agility that is required to do so has led to a number of older businesses failing and the growth of many start-ups that are now leaders in their sectors.

Critically many of these do not even own the commodity that they are marketing:

All of these businesses are effectively selling a service that utilises something that belongs to another. This demonstrates the evolution of economies from commodities to goods, then services and latterly to experiences.

Based on this premise, customer needs have changed:

This movement from commodity to experience offers the opportunity to maximise revenues and margins. Take for example Starbucks, the value of coffee beans in raw form versus what is charged as an end product in a coffee shop.

As we face a cost-of-living crisis it will be interesting to see if consumers become less interested in the experience and go back to focusing on costs. For many businesses it may seem like a necessity but there are smarter ways to do this.

If you need help finding new ways to improve efficiencies, whilst maintaining or improving CX, get in touch.

“Consumers expect any desired information or service to be available, in context, at their precise moment of need”

Forrester

Contact centres have faced numerous well documented pressures over the years, but have been on the leading edge in changing how organisations engage with customers. However, as we face ongoing global uncertainty there are three challenges our sector must face head on.

Staff attraction and attrition:

What was already a challenge, seems to have got a lot harder for many. The ability to recruit from a wider pool with homeworking is now a threat as it opens local resource to others. The role of the agent has become tougher, along with their line managers whose capacity to manage and connect with their team in person has been impacted by remote working.
  
In summary, the role is harder – the profile and skills have changed, the people are fewer and when you do recruit them it is harder to spend time with them to support and develop and therefore retain.

Channel Shift:

Customers expect to be able to make contact through a wider range of channels, so that is a wider profile of SLAs to manage. The challenge is to make sure the conversations are joined up if the customer decides to switch mid-flight and the user experience for both the customer and agent are right, otherwise it could contribute to agent attrition and customer defection.

Organisations may need to implement alternate channels to reduce the cost to serve, with increasing cost pressures and/or contact volumes (sector dependent) businesses need to take every opportunity to move customers to alternate channels where they may be able to be served more quickly and therefore at a lower cost.

Automation:

Silver bullet or the opportunity to infuriate your customers and drive complaints? It is all in the delivery and there are clearly opportunities to make an impact. Providing self-serve solutions has become expected by many customers and perhaps for some organisations the easiest/highest volume activities have already been through this process. Are the gains more marginal? Where should your digital assistant sit? Do they have enough of the answers to provide a service to the customer? and how is your “bot containment” looking?

There are so many questions arising from automation, but I think we could all point to at least one example, as customer, where we feel it has been done badly. A definite conclusion is that there is plenty of work to be done upfront before you plug in and switch on the bot.

Bringing it all together

In contact centres we are consistently in a data rich environment and many of the insights we need can be hiding in the data we already hold. That information could help you to both resolve issues and optimise performance. Indicators which illustrate agent or bot skill, knowledge and performance can be accessed, assessed and actioned. Technology can probably support 60-80% of the challenges if done right, but can cause just as many, including for your internal team, if done incorrectly.

Using technology to augment or support agents and first line managers must be a key priority, along with assessing how well the tools your teams use are working and if they can be better utilised. Ask yourselves the questions, should your bot be enabling your people and is your bot running out of talent and acting as a triage that simply infuriates your customers before they get to your people and indirectly impact attrition?

For others, the answer may just be that you simply need more people now to get the job done. Then there’s the challenge to secure a budget to recruit, along with the recruitment. The questions then must be around whether there is damage being done to your brand as a result of not providing the level of service that you want or need, against what your competitors are providing. Are you impacting your future customer base because of decisions that are being made now?

If you’d like to discuss innovative ways in which to overcome these challenges and improve your customer contact operations, just drop us a line.

I have a belief that most things in life or business are what I would call “situational”. Your view and approach will depend on the situation that you are in, there is no single answer for a question, the right one will be based on the situation in each moment.

I’ve been in outsourcing situations where TUPE has been seen as:

a) Risky: to be taken if a contract moves a group of people with their roles and terms, which impacts the pricing of an opportunity for a client

b) A defensive advantage: as an incumbent if the contract places the liability on the other bidders

c) An opportunity: bringing the people who want to transfer across and reducing speed to competence

d) A challenge: if we win it and bring in the people, we will need a new site… how are we going to manage that and what is it going to cost?

I’m not an HR specialist and whenever I was in discussions regarding TUPE, I was always minded of what those conversations would mean to individuals, with worlds being turned upside down when an announcement of work moving was made. I can still recall as a younger manager in operations, when we had to announce the closure of a unit and one of the agents cried throughout the briefing. Moments like that stay with you. Outsourcing is tough, we know that, and changes impact our people hard.

So back to the question – is TUPE being turned on its head post-pandemic, as we face challenges in the recruitment and retention of quality people? Has remote working changed the impact of TUPE in the contact centre industry if agents are working from home? Does it matter where you are transferring them from?

Onboarding agents remotely, we can say is tough and in an ideal world, I would always prefer induction to be on site, creating the opportunity to form relationships that will ensure agents can support each other with challenging customers. If you TUPE a whole team into your organisation, relationships as a group have already been built and established. Remote working makes that sort of collective transfer a lot easier. However, integrating these individuals into your organisation as an outsourcer can be a challenge when you have to contend with different cultures and working styles.

Bringing people into your business with existing terms and conditions will mean that differences in rates between outsource providers will narrow. However, with living wage and inflation considerations, the hourly rate offers less opportunity to create the cost savings today than it did 20 years ago. Having people on varying contracts will create headaches for your HR team for sure, but could these be lesser than those that recruitment and training are facing with churn of staff currently?

In summary, TUPE provides much more of an opportunity today, than it did for organisations at the start of 2020. Yet, TUPE needs robust processes to ensure that people are properly onboarded and integrated within a business, especially if as an outsourcer you have made commitments to deliver improvements and efficiencies through your culture and methodologies. For organisations outsourcing activity for the first time, there is an increased potential that you could retain more of your existing in-house team through TUPE than you would have 2 years ago, if this looks probable then keep in mind our previous article on insourcing.

People have been so focused on whether they are working in the office or at home, that the ‘insource of partner operations’ as an industry concept seems to have gone quiet.

However, if client businesses have adopted a work from home model is there a missed opportunity here to utilise office space? To foster closer working relationships by having staff on-site provided and managed by organisations with specialist skills in the delivery of customer experience?

If both organisations work together to deliver hybrid models from a single site, then there are opportunities to create something really special. We have seen remote working delivered on an unprecedented scale throughout the pandemic and with the right systems and collaboration from IT teams to get the solution onto the agent desktop, then this could be an interesting way forward for some clients.

Savings on labour costs may not be as significant as they were in the past. However, for organisations looking to make a first step in getting support with servicing, whether that be sales or service based, there could be a golden opportunity here. Especially, if there is a lease on a site that means it would otherwise be practically empty, why not use that space as a hub for both an in-house and an insourced team?

Here’s a quote from the BBC article in which Meta chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, stated that the development would help companies customise their experience and that “The best business experiences meet people where they are,”. He said at the announcement of the new service that “Already more than one billion users connect with a business account across our messaging services every week.”

So clearly customers are already using WhatsApp to engage with businesses, the change here is more about the “how”.

I do agree that customers want to be serviced where they are, the whole point of frictionless CX is making it easy and if I’m having other conversations in WhatsApp, then why not add another? The rules are clear, I must engage the company in the chat, they cannot engage me. The addition to a “Contact Us” page of a “WhatsApp Us” is a good way to support customers in that space.

From a delivery of service perspective, it can make the conversation harder as there is the asynchronous nature of a WhatsApp. As a customer I may start the chat now but not pick up the response for 3 hours, the conversation could continue for the best part of a week. This creates an interesting challenge for the business and the people within it though. Does it mean that multiple agents are going to interact with that supporter who could send messages across a timeframe that exceeds a shift or a working day? Contact centres have already been managing this situation for sure, but is the result an impact to efficiencies that servicing via WhatsApp is trying to achieve as another member of the team needs to familiarise themselves to respond to the last message? Or should we be setting a lower SLA on the follow up responses, seeing if the initial agent will be back to deal with it and leaving it for them to manage when back on shift?

I remember a time when first implementing e-mail solutions, in which trying to get the system to manage the stop and start of the clock to deal with e-mails “within the SLA” was a whole project strand. This would mean sometimes missing the reason behind the “customer” need and focusing too heavily on what the “client” had stipulated. The model was focused on one mail in and one mail out. Thankfully, technologies have moved forward now and the right blend of technology can ensure the initial phase of a conversation via messaging platforms can capture key information so the agent is best placed to resolve the query. For me, one of the best things with WhatsApp is the ability to switch from messaging to voice easily if needed all within the one channel.

‘Meta Platforms Inc (including Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp) have over 3.6 billion active users.’

Statistica