Whilst these are not-for-profit organisations created to provide affordable homes and to support local communities, they must ensure that support is of the highest possible standard at the most effective cost so that the maximum amount of income possible can be reinvested where it is needed most. However, as cost pressures increase how can housing associations ensure that operating costs of contact centres and service management are not eroding the monies required to maintain and build additional properties and give more families the opportunity to have a space of their own.

As England alone needs 340,000 new homes per year, including 145,000 social and affordable homes, there is significant pressure on providers with new residents to be considered, operating costs will increase because of inflation and rising wages and as the number of residents grows the cost to service them will too.

A number of organisations have turned to outsourcing as a means to support their residents, there are many benefits to this approach of using private sector expertise to deliver this including:

The automation conundrum

Working in an environment where customer contacts are often of high emotion brings challenges. Whether moving in or out of a property or if there is a repair that needs to be made, residents are more likely to be calling at a time of stress or need and who wants to speak to an IVR when feeling emotional, not me for sure.  So how do the opportunities to bring technology and automation reconcile with the imperative to deliver a personal service when support is needed? How can the use of technology ensure that those with the greatest need are attended to first?

Perhaps one solution is to get proactive, the use of insight and analytics solutions can unlock vital information and highlight trends within the housing stock, allowing housing associations to identify and remedy an issue before it even happens.

Where agent support is required it is key to ensure that they have delivered all the essential compliance and safety information that may be needed by a resident. Use an intelligent scripting and decision making tool, coupled with speech analytics, to make sure agents have done all that is necessary on the call, providing certainty for the organisation, the agent and the resident. Layer on top coaching tools and analytics and then your agent’s ongoing development is covered, whilst ensuring that key trend data is made available to the organisation. Having these processes in place means that all the right information is passed to engineer resources accurately the first time. This reduces the need for them to go back to a job, avoiding additional costs to the organisation and inconvenience to the resident.

So in summary, effective contact management can help deliver efficiency in scheduling and planning of work throughout your organisation and therefore improve service whilst reducing outlay. Plus feeding all repair data back into the analytics engine can then help with proactive scheduling of work to reduce risk.

Differentiated service

It should be considered that housing associations are the main provider of supported housing in England with 300,000 homes for older people and 115,000 for people who need extra support.

Outsourcing providers are dealing with vulnerable customers on a daily basis across all sectors and can bring both personal and technical expertise to support and develop services in this area. Access to voice analytics software in real-time can assist agents in identifying where additional care may be needed, more than a simple flag on a CRM to signify that a resident was vulnerable at the point of moving into a property. This data is linked to contact number and query routing technology to ensure that people at high risk are connected to the right support quickly. Technology can now pick up on vital clues that a resident’s situation may have changed and therefore they need to be considered as vulnerable.

Channel divergence

People are now communicating in more ways than ever before and often on multiple devices. Conversocial have previously stated that: ‘Customer care teams today are 10 times more likely to resolve customer inquiries via a private channel, like Facebook Messenger and Twitter DM, than they were years prior. What’s more, the rate of growth of conversations using private channels has accelerated to 20 times that of conversations using public channels (i.e. 900% vs 45%).’

When customers need help they should have the opportunity to interact in the channels that they feel most comfortable in, so whilst an e-mail is great for a lengthy dialogue after the event perhaps, a call has historically been the first action if you have an issue, but what about messaging platforms? These have become the key method of interaction in day to day lives and provide the opportunity to ease communication with residents. The ability to send a message and see it was received in WhatsApp, switch to a call or even a video call so that the contact centre agent can physically see an issue and in turn provide visual reassurance.

Who can you talk to about your options?

Having worked closely with a number of housing associations we have an excellent understanding of what is required to deliver excellent customer care at an affordable price. We have built a ‘best of breed’ network of over 180+ contact centres and 100+ technology providers, which makes us perfectly positioned to recommend and source the ‘right’ contact solutions for your business. We are entirely independent, so you know our recommendations are not driven by self-interest. Our selection process is managed by industry experts, so you will always be in safe hands.

For more information, get in touch.

Sources:  

6M number from National Housing Federation https://www.housing.org.uk/about-housing-associations/what-housing-associations-do/

As the days get warmer and the nights get inevitably longer, thoughts for many will turn to handling peak demand, or for those who survived their last peak – reviewing how it went and learning lessons for the next one.

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.

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 the undisputed champion when it comes to resolving emotive issues, customers want to be able to engage via multiple channels based on their requirements. We’ve previously heard that:

So, with these numbers in mind, what are the options and where does voice retain it’s title? 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 is key 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.

Looking for peak demand support this year? Get in touch, we are here to help!

One of the biggest contact centre challenges of 2022 is still with us – the rising tide of rudeness and incivility, which is most often experienced at work by our frontline colleagues. Research conducted by Professor Christine Porath, across multiple countries, business sectors and customer-facing roles, demonstrates that this depressing trend is real and growing.

This HBR podcast about her article “Frontline Work When Everyone Is Angry” provides an authoritative view of the problem. But also offers some ways to combat this onslaught of unpleasantness and help protect the welfare of our colleagues at the customer service ‘coalface’.

It’s getting worse

Professor Porath shows that “rudeness or disrespect or insensitive behaviour” has worsened globally over 17 years and that by last August, 76% of people claimed that they had been treated rudely during the month.

Porath highlights that a lot of abuse is now experienced through digital channels, the use of which has grown massively. Even when not directly subject to abuse, people working in online content and community moderation are also exposed to damaging levels of intolerance and unpleasantness.

Covid and complexity

Porath also cites surveys showing a decrease in workplace community since Covid. As this McKinsey article explains, homeworking doesn’t necessarily worsen a sense of isolation and disengagement, but it often does. Traditionally, contact centres have – at their best – been cohesive and supportive workplaces. So in theory, contact centres should be well-placed to help support workers faced with rude and unpleasant behaviour, but many just aren’t.

At the same time, with the rise of self-service tools, the types of queries customers present to contact centres have become more complex, time-critical and emotionally charged.

So, our frontline colleagues are facing a toxic ‘double-whammy’ of consumer incivility and task complexity.

The costs

Colleagues’ emotional damage and distress are obvious, but there are clear performance impacts too, says Porath: “they lose attention, lose focus, make more errors, and perform far worse.” Added to which, abused and unsupported staff quit their jobs, fuelling costs, colleague stress and management challenges.

How to help

Increasing rudeness and incivility is a complex, societal problem – but there are concrete measures you can take to help make things better:

1. Support your people and allow them to support themselves

2. Use technology to protect your frontline colleagues

3. Reconsider whether “the customer is always right”

If you’d like to discuss how to better face up to the challenges of growing incivility and anger – or share with us what you’re already doing – just drop us a line.

We all recognise putting things off until the new year. Going to the gym, looking for a new job and paying bills. December is often a month where the bills are deferred and money is spent on Christmas. Most companies will struggle to collect money in December and often in January too. A number of consumers will be suffering a financial hangover in January, with some going further into debt in order to buy the associated treats and goodies. The gap between an early December pay day and January pay day can feel like months rather than weeks. Don’t be surprised if people don’t have the money to pay and will again be in defer mode.

With ever increasing rise in costs for businesses, writing off the money isn’t a palatable option. However, going in strong is not the best way to engage. People need help now more than ever. For a number of people being in debt will be a new experience, for a number of reasons. Therefore, getting prepared early with your Q1 strategy is a must.

As providers, we are now also more aware of the mental impacts owing money has on a person. That coupled with “January Blues” can be a potent recipe. Be proud of the support you offer to consumers. Some industries shun being public about how they work with and support their customers who are in financial distress. It’s felt to be a poor public image to even acknowledge that there is debt and that you have a team of people who are dedicated to manage it. Don’t be shy, you should be proud that you work so hard putting measures and teams in place who are ready to help engage and work through financial challenges with your customers.

Definitely make sure it is front and centre on your communications platforms at this time of year. Website, apps, call holding messages, emails, letters, texts and even carrier pigeon if that’s your bag. Make is easy for people to find, use and engage with. The content should be clearly written and the tone used is very important here.

A new year will often mean customers feel that they are starting again. Part of your strategy needs to be a refresher of where things were left at the end of 2022 and where we go next. This can be useful as a scene setter, but also useful as a reminder that the money is still due and that you are there to support and talk to people if they need it. It also works as a reminder for any “won’t pays” that you haven’t forgotten them and you won’t be going away anytime soon.

Therefore, the communications and handling for January needs to be a little bit “Christmas Carol” based. What does the past, present and the future hold?

Why not go one further and offer a new year’s incentive? We know the gym does it, so why don’t you? Discounts for paying off quicker, reduction of debt owed on settlements, or anything else that you feel could work for your business.

What is undeniable is that the pace of change facing organisations across all sectors is showing no signs of slowing. The necessity for firms to change and constantly innovate is clear. So, can we dispense with iterating, pruning, maintaining and some other ‘boring jobs’?

It sounds like contact centres and all teams tasked with guiding and engaging with customers need to get with the programme of relentless change, yes? Definitely. But unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that customer-facing functions have the freedom to ‘change and move on’.

Although contemporary technologies allow firms to implement new tools and solutions without the lengthy delays of a few years ago – and often do so using their expert frontline teams directly – this does not mean that hard work finishes at the point of implementation. For customer-facing teams and operations, with their need to reflect and adapt to changes in firms’ propositions, markets and customer expectations, the successful initiation of a new technology often just creates another maintenance, administrative and optimisation task.

Failing Bots

In the past few months, I have seen various examples of expertly optimised chatbots. One failed to recognise any of the eight most common query types for the business sector it operated in. Another failed to resolve 20 easy and theoretically bot-friendly queries in a row. Instead, everyone of the contacts had to be passed to a live advisor.

Does this mean that bots are useless? No, not at all, but they require progressive, iterative optimisation to ensure they resolve as many queries as possible, in a way that’s friction-free for customers. Bots can’t be switched on and left to their own devices; they need informed, experienced customer service people to guide their processes and learning.

Multiplying Templates

Recently a former client explained that after an apparently large number of inconsistent email templates had been identified, they started a project to review and simplify the templates. As a result, the previous total of 1270, which had built up over many years, were reduced to a far more manageable 70.

So, is the use of email templates doomed to failure? Again, no, but in order to maximise the effectiveness, relevance and the degree of colleague adoption of templates, a person or team needs to be tasked with their ongoing review, maintenance and curation.

Dull but essential

Neither helping a bot to learn or editing and managing text templates are glamorous jobs, but they absolutely need doing. To some extent this maintenance will directly reflect and support the exciting change agenda. But at other times it’s just another routine task that can too easily be overlooked or dismissed in the face of seemingly more demanding priorities.

Over the coming few months contact centre people will be getting increasingly skilled at re-stating business cases for the value they can generate for both organisations and their customers. They need to ensure that they champion some of the ‘dull but essential’ tasks of process maintenance and optimisation, too.

If you’d like to discuss how you are facing up to these challenges, or how best to effectively optimise technology both new and old, just drop us a line.

Whilst it’s a good thing to raise awareness it can also create a level of concern and chaos which can drive differing behaviours by our clients, consumers and colleagues. Now, more than ever, it’s key that we spend some time reviewing where we are, all of us.

Ever-increasing demands on spending coupled with a real-time reduction in incoming salaries have brought into sharp focus a pivotal economic landscape. Our frontline colleagues will be having a number of very distressing conversations whilst personally experiencing financial challenges. Can we do more to help them have these conversations?

How close are we to how our consumers are feeling? Have we evolved our processes? What our consumers or even regulators may have deemed acceptable in the past has in all likelihood changed.

Collections, debt, financial risk and financial vulnerabilities have always been difficult waters to sail for consumers and providers alike. A level of sensitivity and pragmatism is needed across all areas. No longer should people be using a broad-brush stroke approach in their business strategy for non-payment. A number of new consumers, who may have never experienced being in arrears or at financial risk, will now fall into a number of your processes.

Existing customers in financial distress, who had previously found a balance in how they manage their money may well have had their stability upset further by the demands on their budgets.

There are two sides to every coin. How do you balance off the support offered to customers and the business commercials? Undoubtedly customers need financial help, more time, cost reductions, more support and payment options and in bigger numbers than seen before. Ethically you must ensure that you are doing all you can to support your consumers and colleagues through this difficult time.

Focusing on consumers means analysing regular quantitative and qualitative data. Debt and money are a very emotive subject and not all consumers will be willing or able to discuss them in focus groups. However, take the opportunity to regular listen, read and see how your customers are feeling. Analyse your key metrics, your customer target quality, reviewing any compliance or regulatory change, processes, agent feedback and social threads.

Providing tools, new business policies, third-party charity support and tailored process solutions for both internal customers and external users is critical. The demands on people will be huge.
If doing this isn’t top of your business roadmap, then it definitely should be as this isn’t going to be a one hit wonder and won’t be going away any time in the short term.

If you need help balancing debt recovery with customer and colleague support, we can help. Get in touch.

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.

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.

No, I’m not talking about My Little Pony, I’ve never really fancied myself as a Brony. However, I am referring to businesses that are given the unicorn title due to them achieving a valuation of $1 billion or more. The term, first coined in 2013, initially was used to emphasize the rarity of such startups. The definition of a unicorn startup has remained unchanged since then. However, the number of unicorns has gone up.

To be a unicorn is no easy feat and each unicorn today has its own story with a list of features that worked in its favour. We have listed down a few factors that are commonly seen across all unicorns:

However, there’s a darker truth about becoming a unicorn. Even with a lofty valuation of $1 billion-plus, this does not guarantee success. According to Ali Tamaseb’s research at venture capital firm DCVC, up to 17% of businesses labelled as unicorns within the last 15 years have failed. And we have seen some big unicorns become extinct during that time, including the likes of Evernote, Zynga and one of the most famous being Theranos – with the latter being a little more complicated, I know. This has resulted in the loss of billions of dollars of investors’ money, and unfortunately the livelihoods of many hard-working employees.

There are real lessons here for businesses of every shape and size to learn from, and hopefully, avoid. We’ve listed a few here:

  1. Don’t overpromise – it’s great to have lofty ambitions, but a business can’t be based on something you’re not ready to deliver. Theranos is a great example of this.
  2. Value your workforce – whether a start-up with a handful of employees, or a huge corporation employing thousands, the people on the payroll are the ones who keep the engine moving, and to abuse them only hurts the business.
  3. Be realistic – the temptation to spend like you’re already one of the big players can take you down if you’re not quite at that level yet. Growing realistically and incrementally gives you and your organisation the strong foundation necessary to avoid toppling over as you grow. Patience is a virtue, and a lack of it can bring you to a premature end.

So if you are a unicorn, or any business of any shape or size, and are looking for the right support to enable sustainable growth – then look no further than Contact Centre Panel. We are here and ready to support you with your next contact centre related project.

However, since the lifting of restrictions we have seen employees return to the office on a full-time or flexible basis, which has seen CO2 global emissions rebound by 6% in 2021 – an increase of over 2 billion tonnes of CO2 versus the previous year.

Not all of these emissions are due to the return to work, of course. However, every industry, including the contact centre industry, should be thinking about how they can reduce their impact on the environment.

Here are a few thoughts on how you can make your centre greener:

  1. Use technology to enable successful homeworking – we all now know the art of the possible when it comes to working from home and the benefits that come with this. One being employees no longer having to travel into the office, which in turn means fewer vehicles on the road and less carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere.
  1. Think about your corporate social responsibility objectives – bring a cross-section of your employees together across the business and write down what your green and social objectives are over the next 12 months. Transfer these objectives into a Corporate Social Responsibility Policy to ensure all staff are following these objectives, including providing relevant training to educate your employees.
  1. Move to greener energy and lower energy consumption – look at how you purchase energy and whether this is the opportunity to invest in green energy, for example through the use of solar panels etc. Also focus on how you use your energy across the centre, reducing energy consumption and switching off during your non-operational hours.
  1. Reduce paper wastage using digital communication tools – try to reduce the amount of paper you use, by cutting the number of print jobs across your centre. Think about how you can use digital communication tools rather than printing a notice/flyer.
  1. Work with your local councils – councils often provide grants and other forms of support to help you kick off your green revolution. Even if it is just asking for advice, speak to your local authority to see what support is on offer.

Think global and act locally to help support efforts in making the world a safer and greener place for future generations.