AI and the march to automation is a hot topic right now, with much being made of the gains that can be made through AI handling enquiries.

But the benefits of technology are perhaps being primarily considered in the context of larger operations, where the costs of servicing customers are easy to see.

What about the hidden contacts that organisations may be managing? The ones that are increasingly challenging to manage, that AI – for now at least – can’t deal with?

Information is power

Customers are better informed than ever before. They just need to spend a few minutes online to arm themselves with what they need before contacting you. From looking up reviews to seeking advice from social media groups on how other customers escalated a given complaint, or checking how regulations apply to your sector and how they should be applied in the context of their situation.

They may even know more about complaints to your organisation than some of your management team. Which means your responses need to be on point now more than ever.

Yet if former Dragons Den investor Piers Linney is to be believed, most contact centre activity will be automated by AI five years from now.

“There are undoubtedly times when speaking to a person is the only thing that will do.”

Realistically, nobody is denying that there are use cases that can be automated with better outcomes for customer, agent and organisation alike. Win-win. However, there are undoubtedly times when speaking to a person is the only thing that will do. And therein lies the risk of creating hidden contact centres in this futuristic AI-driven world. Indeed, they already exist.

What is a hidden contact centre and why do I need to worry about it?

In many organisations, contact centres already exist informally, even when they have bona fide real ones.

Groups of non-contact centre people are engaged in dealing with customers through calls, e-mails, chat or webforms, perhaps as part of their wider role. They are likely disbursed across multiple site locations or functions, handing off customers to each other and collaborating to resolve those queries.

Customers may be end users, other businesses or internal customers. The thing that unites them is that the queries are likely to be complex. And because it’s not their day job, everyone works a little harder to get the job done, sometimes at the risk of their other core tasks being delayed until the demand has passed.

Of course, none of this means these teams are doing a bad job in serving the customer. Processes may not be documented well, with best practice held in the heads – or languishing on the desktops – of team members, so they’re the best people for the job.

“The trouble with informal contact centres is that they aren’t set up to be responsive. Or have audit trails.”

But the trouble with informal contact centres is that they aren’t set up to be responsive. Or have audit trails. During holiday seasons cover may be limited and there is unlikely to be out of hours support for the customer. Reporting on contact volumes and contact types may not exist. Feedback loops for potential process improvement is probably dependent on the capacity in that team on a given week. And when servicing internal customers, inefficiencies may be magnified.

However, there may be limited opportunity for automation and self-service.

So maybe it is better to stay hidden?

Perhaps for some, ignoring all of this could be appealing. Especially if there are several “fractional” resources who are supporting and spreading the load. However, if those people are being taken away from their core roles, the decision (or lack of) not to address this could be a costly error. Those resources could be expensive for dealing with what in some cases may be low level queries. And not just in the time it takes them, but also unrecognised costs of double handling of queries, opportunity costs and even lost customers or lost revenue.

The first step is understanding if you have hidden contact centres. Speak with your people to understand what may be preventing them from getting core tasks done. If customer contacts, queries and complaints are part of that workload, perhaps it’s time to review and consolidate work to specialist staff who are set up to deal with these contacts.

Four red flags to watch out for:

1. Team attrition – perhaps because they’re not getting opportunity to do the role for which they were employed?
2. Customer attrition – are you seeing customers leaving you or not putting additional business in your direction?
3. Non contact centre customer contact handling – do you have a group of people who you may not term as contact centre, but they are all consistently doing a role dealing with customers?
4. Customer service levels aren’t matching your ambition – is it aligned to your values? Does it feel like a cost/burden?

If any of those resonate, then perhaps it is time to take time out and review whether you do, knowingly or otherwise, have a “contact centre” that could benefit from review or consolidation. To consider how this may benefit your people, your customers and ultimately your business.

What can you do about it?

First up, talk to people who understand the risks and opportunities of hidden contact centres. They’ll help you to decide on the approach that’s right for you, potentially with solutions you hadn’t considered. Whether you still want to keep activity within your team, or whether you need some additional help to provide increased coverage or flexibility.

For example, additional support and flexibility, including potential out of hours coverage, could improve services. You may not need dedicated resource, but the availability of someone to engage with your customers in conversation and support them at the right point in time may reduce the burden on your team during core hours.

If recruiting contact centre staff is a challenge for you, and managing and developing them is a further item on your worklist that you struggle to get to, it’s almost certainly time to seek guidance on how to address that.

And if you want to keep your ‘hidden contact centre’, it could be a smart move to examine your technology set up. Is it making it as easy as possible for your team? That doesn’t mean that everything could or even should be automated. However, implementing systems that enable omni-channel support – so that all details of the conversation can be easily linked and customers can skip across channels – will make it easier for both you and your customers.

“Technological developments over recent years mean that you could be able to improve life for your people and your customers.”

Contact centres take all kinds of forms. They can be managed in many ways and no one size fits all when it comes to dealing with customers. That’s why there are big in-house contact centres, hidden contact centres, and many different specialist outsourcers who deal with specific sectors or tasks – and often in ways that can give a competitive edge. Knowing which approach will help you to gain your competitive edge is critical.

Importantly, technological developments over recent years mean that you could be able to improve life for your people and your customers, reducing the impact on your business and the cost of servicing your customers. But wholesale automation is not the answer for all. And may never be, five, ten or many years from now.

Want to chat further?

Drop us a line. A problem shared is a problem halved and we love to share our expertise, whether you’re a client or not.

As the move towards the electrification of road transport accelerates, so too does the rapid development of the nationwide EV charging infrastructure. However, unlike most newly developing business sectors, the world of electric vehicle charging is taking shape under a significant amount of regulatory guidance and expectation. This doesn’t just extend to planning concerns about the physical appearance and location of chargers, but also how they work and the experience of their customers.

The regulations in place are designed to ensure a whole series of goals including: 99% charge point reliability; physical accessibility and inclusiveness for users; ease of contactless payments; pricing transparency; and the growth of payment roaming providers, which offer the ability to access multiple competing networks from a single app.

“Ultimately, charging your EV should be easier, cheaper and more convenient than refueling a petrol or diesel car, wherever you live” Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

What about customer service?

The Public Charge Point regulations also provide very specific and demanding expectations about how the network operators provide contact centre customer service support. Charge Point Operators (CPOs) are legally required to provide a Helpline service accessible from a freephone number. The helpline must be staffed (presumably by real people, not hallucinatory bots) 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Starting this summer, CPOs will need to provide monthly reports of their customer service helpline performance, both to their regulating department in government, the Office for Zero Emission Vehicles (OZEV), and the Secretary of State at the Business department.

The reports are detailed, too. They will cover:

• total number of calls the helpline received
• reasons for the helpline calls*
• time taken to resolve the helpline call
• if the issue was not resolved by the reporting date, the reason why

*regulators often seem to think all customer contact is by the phone, still …

Naturally, there are enforcement powers which include a series of fines, including up to £10,000 for Helpline failings. But more significantly, if CPOs fail in their various obligations, they can be hit by a block on any further expansions of their networks.

A massive growth opportunity

The Government is targeting a minimum of 300,000 public electric chargers by 2030 – an almost six-fold increase on the 54,000 there are now. By comparison, there are currently c.8,000 petrol stations in the UK with c.66,000 pumps serving around 37 million internal combustion vehicles.

For CPOs, they need to scale their operations at a pace unlike, say, their predecessors of a generation ago – the mobile phone or internet service providers. They are faced with the same customer experience challenges of supporting consumers as they navigate a new marketplace, taking people from the shock of the new to their escalating expectations of a vitally needed utility service. But now they need to do so with an added layer of regulatory demands and targets – on top of the operational pressures of exponential growth in locations, customers and contacts.

Some CPOs may be attempting to build their own capabilities. They will need world-class technology and experienced customer servicing hands to design a service that not only meets customer expectations, but regulatory obligations too. For those who wish to outsource, they’ll need the right contact centre providers, and should pay particular attention to those with experience in regulated industries.

Either way, there is a huge opportunity to bring existing customer servicing expertise to this market, particularly for those who can demonstrate their ability to design and execute for scale, quickly and reliably.

The road to success

To do so successfully will mean designing a customer service infrastructure that combines:

1. The smart use of data from their connected networks;
2. Seamless advisor insight into the customers’ status and history – and third-party applications, like those for payments and roaming access (giving consumers access to multiple charge point networks);
3. The resources and planning know-how to deliver a reliable but efficient 24/7 service;
4. Skilled front-line advisors trained and willing not just to guide new customers through new processes, but support people at potential times of vulnerability and stress; AND
5. The ability to expand service provision to match the scale of growing networks, while enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of customer service operations, applying insights gained on the ‘front line’.

This is a major undertaking, whether CPOs meet the customer service challenge internally or draw upon varying degrees of expert partner and/or outsourced service provision.

Here at Contact Centre Panel, we know that delivering high quality customer service in a fast growing, regulated market is hard both to plan and execute. It will be essential that CPOs capitalise on the expertise of those who have done it before and recognise some of the pitfalls and the tools and techniques on which to base success.

If you’d like to supercharge the design of your customer servicing environment, or find the right outsourced our technology match, get in touch. We’d love to help.

I recently had the pleasure of spending the afternoon at Masons of Yorkshire, seeing their distillery, and tasting their fantastic gins. It was a birthday gift from earlier in the year, I’ve long been a fan of Masons and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. No I’ve not started a Tripadvisor review in error, indulge me a few minutes and you’ll understand where I’m headed.

I was already familiar with some elements of their story, not the origins and the growth of a following before the decision to make a gin of their own came about which was great to understand, but I was familiar with their growth to a point when their distillery was destroyed in a fire, only for their team, local community and other distillers ensured they rebuilt and continued to grow.

“It’s destroyed I think but it’s just a building, everyone got out safely that’s what matters.”

So, within 24 hours of the fire in April 2019 the team were gathered in the kitchen of Karl and Cathy Mason to ensure they were moving forward and rebuilding and right there we have an example of resilience that is required to be a success, whilst a story itself that we could explore, I want to focus now on what I learned from Angela who guided us through the tasting experience.

This wasn’t the first time we’d been to a tasting, but this one unpicked several elements in a different context, first the quality of a product. One of the guests was raising the question of cost versus that of the long-established gin brands, why should he pay the extra? Having been talked through the distilling process and understanding the quality of the product you could see his mood change, the sourcing of the best ingredients/botanicals, switching supply to procure from the location that delivered consistent flavour, all natural, no concentrates, nothing that takes away from the clarity of the product. A true “London dry” flavour added only through the distillation process, not after.

So how does this relate to my contact centre operation?

OK, here goes, first, ensure you know your strengths, what makes your service or sales operations great, what mix of knowledge, talent, systems, and processes are required so that your customers are left with a warm glow, but with no bitter aftertaste and certainly not an experience that ends with a headache.

Next, think about what you mix best with.  We’ve all seen these pictures of glasses filled with fruit and herbs, is it a drink or a fruit cocktail?  Whilst in my work and day to day life those who know me understand how organised I like to be, however if I’m honest the notion of needing to fill a glass with fruit to make a drink feels like a waste of effort and planning to me, it always has and now I know why.

I get it now, these are probably marketing efforts to mask a less good product, if you buy the cheaper or wrong one, it may not taste as good as people hoped, therefore they feel the need to add to it and make it more palatable.

Therefore, taking the time to learn what little, subtle additions to your blend of sales or service you require to optimise is key, you mist likely don’t need a whole fruit basket, a small addition can make all the difference, as I saw when we were asked to remove the small piece of orange zest and replace with lemon instead.  Who would think my warming flavours ideal for winter would be removed and replaced with something more fruit based and summer like (I quickly swapped back to the orange).

Drink responsibly

On many levels, of course this statement is true, this article is not intended to encourage drinking or alcohol consumption in the literal sense of course, I do have alcohol free gin in the cupboard too and enjoy a just tonic with ice to be honest.

However, in the context of running operations, there are clear parallels here, making the decision to consume the wrong services from technology or outsource partners can be bad for your health, therefore understanding if you need to add anything to your glass, whether a little bit of orange zest in the form of tech or people to support you with increased winter demand, a little lemon to provide additional energy or expertise in call handling, or even some ginger to get to the root of your issues and understand what you need to do.

How far is far in a CX sense?

A key takeaway for me though was something I’d not thought about, in previous tasting experiences, there has been an angle of, “we put this tonic with this gin” so the tonics are already flavoured, there is still an element of adding the zest etc but by having multiple flavours of tonic we add complexity and limit flexibility.

Once you’ve added something very specific to your mix, if you don’t like it, then you have few options open to you.  Using a generic tonic and adding flavour through the zest, herbs or lemongrass it turns out (who knew) you retain flexibility to try something and change it before you have over committed, like the example with switching orange to lemon, to ensure that you are getting what you need.

Only put in what you want, it’s your glass!

Know what you want and what you need to get the right mix for your customers, if you need help with this there are people who have developed the skills to guide you through the process, however they should ensure that they understand what you are looking for, what your tastes are and should offer you the flexibility to align to your specific needs.

Even within CX, Sales, Retentions or Collections there will be alternatives that work best for you, whether that is support you need with people or technology, in-house or outsource, never has the term “what can I get you?” been as complex as it is currently with the growth in technology solutions and outsource locations that we have seen in recent years.

Understand that your customer though may have differing tastes to your own and indeed to each other, therefore you may need to be able to switch it up, so be careful not to make your approach inflexible, if automating ensure you have an appropriate escape route.

Is it time to mix things up?

Tired of the same old thing, maybe it is time to try something different, perhaps you need a more refreshing conversation? If so, drop us a line at the Contact Centre Panel, we can help you find the right mix for you.

I sometimes wonder if we have reached a point in our evolutionary journey where there is little that is new in the world, just different ways of getting to the same outcome?  

A recurring theme for me in recent years has been the proverb “if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”.  

Clearly, this proverb was new to me at some point, but has been around for some time. As an advocate of outsourcing and the value of partnerships it really did resonate with me. It just made sense; using the experience of the collective to deliver a better outcome.   

What’s new to me, you may have done several times before.  So, sharing in the experience of others could help us get further than by trying to go it alone. The solo journey may initially have less friction, with nobody to challenge how I’m approaching things I could make all kinds of fast progress – but admittedly in the wrong direction!  

I’ve written recently about the value which can be achieved by focusing on your core activity, working with partners and leveraging the skills of specialists can enable a business to develop or reduce costs for example.   

But what if we cannot decide our direction?   

That’s the challenge for many organisations and it’s not surprsing. We’ve just been through what feels like eight years of continued uncertainty in the wake of the Brexit referendum, a global pandemic, conflict, and the resulting economic impacts, followed by the past 12 months which have seen unparalleled development in technology.    

That feels like a lot, right? So perhaps currently it may feel better to just hold station and wait a while?  The promise of automation that is here and about to be delivered could make decisions taken today feel dated by tomorrow?   

But indecision and just doing the same is never really an option is it?  What are your objectives, what is the ambition of your organisation? Working with others makes the achievement of these much easier.  For once I’m going to suggest forgetting your immediate customer experience goals for a moment, instead think of your headline business objectives – where does your business need to be 12, 24, 36 or 60 months from now?  

Sometimes we all need a little help  

A key strength is knowing your own weaknesses and being able to ask for support. Arrogantly assuming we have all the answers never ends well.  If you know where you need to be headed at the highest level, then the strategy to get you there can take an amount of focus – and when you are trying to deliver the day to day, implementing change can be hard.   

Often, we already know what needs our attention and what we’d like to do differently. But when there are competing priorities and differing options for solving challenges, all promising to do exactly what you need, then it can be hard to determine what’s the right option for you.  

Building your own solution when there are proven ones can be troublesome, even adapting what comes out of the box can be expensive, too, as we saw when Birmingham Council tried. 

So why not work with others to ensure that you deliver your objectives with minimal effort and maximum focus? Partnering with others brings multiple benefits,  

• Removes the bias of “we’ve always done it this way”; 
• Shared knowledge, both of what worked well and what didn’t;  
• Accountability increases rapidly when working with a third party;  
• Partners have other clients, a community that you can learn from, too; 
• Your investment in their solution also gives you access to their research and development, so you have ongoing benefits; AND  
• Phasing of a project can be based on wiider experience – where you start can be informed by your priorities, but with real world insights from prior delivery.  

The key is to have the right commercial agreements to ensure that your objectives are aligned and you can work as a true partnership, as outlined in Steve Sullivan’s recent article ‘Is the traditional outsourcing contract past its ‘sell by’ date?‘.

How far is far in a CX sense?

Whether you are an organisation with an inhouse contact centre, or if you are an outsourcer or have an operation that you have outsourced already, the rapid changes in technology and their impact to customer experience means that you have to be clear “how high is high”.  

Additionally, what is “high” for one organisation may not be for another, we perhaps need to talk in the sense of what is optimum instead?  Your service ambitions may be linked to cost as opposed to quality, it comes down to the value of the product and the budget of course, so delivery should be optimal.   

All customers change their expectations based on the all the different services that they receive from multiple brands. Each helps set the expectation for the next and the changing technologies alter what is available to be delivered.  

Ask yourself realistically:

1. How much automation do your customers want?
2. Have you already moved to self-service everything that your customers will tolerate?  
3. Do you really know which processes cause the most friction for your customers? 
4. Do you always have people available to engage with your customers when they need support? 
5. Can you afford to always have people available? Do you want to?  

 We could continue with the questions, however you get my point.

Conclusion

If you are about to set out on a journey to do things differently are all the potential stakeholders in your business in the right place to deliver for you?  

The level of change that we are seeing at the moment means that there are likely to be areas where your existing team may not recognise where they have blind-spots. But these are good people – they have done good things for your organisation and want to do more. Never underestimate the benefits of them working with specialists and learning from them, they will repay your investment in them if done in the right way.  

 Always consider what opportunity there is for knowledge transfer to your teams and how this can deliver additional value. 

Why not ask us to travel with you?

Working with partners offers the ability to look at things from additional angles, consolidating understanding and benefiting from wider experiences. If you have a thorny topic or challenge that your organisation is facing then why not ask the Contact Centre Panel team for a chat?

Let me play with the stereotypes for a moment when it comes to what different people think of when it comes to growth. We all think it, so someone should say it:

1. Finance will be more focused on revenue growth from either selling more to existing customers or winning new ones;
2. Marketing may consider the growth in brand recognition as a key in delivering that growth;
3. HR will want to see the growth of the people that they are developing and progressing; AND
4. Operations, well they are the lucky ones, they have to deliver all kinds of growth and balance the needs of the business and the people!

I know I’m biased because I started my contact centre life in Ops, at the “coal face” “on the phones” – however, our industry whether in-house or outsource plays a key part in the lives of the end customers, in the representation of brands and in the delivery of authenticity. Ultimately, sales projections and forecast customer retention rates can quickly fail to materialise if the customer service team don’t deliver on the brand promise.

Contact centre traditions

Where contact centres have always excelled is tracking data, the joys of an ACD. 25 years ago we had access to data that other sectors would have only dreamed of, then we had all this information in agents heads from the customer conversations they were having, the people on the phones were hearing of all manner of issues that customers were facing and still do.

Quality and coaching was a little harder, we knew when our calls were being recorded for training and monitoring purposes as “Arthur” would be sat at the end of the floor with a Sony tape recorder, so we knew today was possibly the day. Feedback and coaching would follow, but was limited to the 5 calls that had been recorded for you in the month and often you’d receive feedback on multiple at once. Growth was possible but perhaps limited…

Daily performance stats had to be pulled from the system, pasted into Excel and a macro run. I can remember when we got out first NICE call recorder and then implementing Witness with screen capture – it was the future.

The present day

Jumping back to the present day, I’m fortunate now to see a great number of contact centre technologies and tools. When one such technology was described to be as “Fitbit for contact centres” I was immediately curious. What follows (like with most) is you see a demo of the solution and you can immediately see how you would have implemented it when in operations and the benefits that it delivers, how it supports the whole team in the delivery of their roles and actively tracks the impact of coaching interventions. It then becomes clear that this is a solution developed by someone who has first-hand experience of the challenges faced by teams in operations.

Infact, Rob and the team at miPerform have developed a solution which no matter how often I see in demo, I’m left envious of the current team leader and ops manager population that I didn’t have access to this when I was a team lead.

Growth is not only good for you, but also good for your employees and customers alike

Current solutions have the ability to evaluate more contacts on your behalf and flag to you those that need closer attention, to identify the coaching required and track performance following delivery.

Whilst this may feel focused on the benefits to the customer and the business, it actually provides the opportunity for growth in the agent and manager populations. This will lead to more readily identifying growth opportunities and ultimately staff who are supported, developed and grow will feel more inclined to stay and therefore grow their experience and deliver better service to customers.

When customers receive better service they stay and may spend more, which delivers the growth the Finance team are looking for.

Which means?

Driving sustainable growth requires key systems and processes to track performance and deliver the right coaching at the right time, to ensure that those processes and interventions had the desired impact, that staff are supported and then if your people are growing well you can confidently grow your business.

Are you too looking at ways to deliver growth? Drop us a line, we would love to chat with you.

I’ve spent the last 25 years working in contact centres and in a conversation earlier this week with another long standing, highly experienced person we agreed that many of the issues that we were dealing with 15 or 20 years ago are still challenges that face our industry today. When I was on the phones supporting a mobile phone network, I can remember receiving transferred calls that just weren’t for me to deal with. 

For instance, the Sales team pushing something through to Service when the issue was that a handset order hadn’t gone through correctly. Knowing that they weren’t going to make a sale to someone who had already purchased, Sales decided that it was now a service call.  I’m sure we can come up with a hundred examples if we wanted to.   

However, we can’t change what happened in the first half, we can only change the result through playing smarter in the second.   

If the process was broken can automation help fix it?

There is a potential for a law of unintended consequences; you may not get what you initially signed up for (ask Harry)…. If the process is broken and you automate it then you could just generate more improper transfers at greater speed, as the bot just powers through. Not the fault of the bot, it was just doing as it was told.

If someone is getting questions that sit outside of their skills then they could be spending time searching for an answer or be passing the call on unnecessarily, as a result CX suffers. But how to catch such issues before they are the talk of Feefo and Trustpilot?

Increasing QA sample size and use of auto QA tools has to be an opportunity to identify issues quickly and make critical adjustments to the process, training of the agent and or the bot.

What are the root causes of poor CX? 

Automation of QA and enabling first level managers to identify and address coaching opportunities more quickly is only half of the story.   

Access to more data and insights allows businesses to better understand customer effort and the issues creating friction in customer journeys, issues which could be driving churn, creating grumpy customers and maybe unhappy agents who are then more likely to attrite.   

Whilst we in the industry don’t like talking about AHT anymore, customers do talk about how long it took for their issues to be dealt with. The age old Wait Time, and Hold Time are still important to customers (they are important to the person paying for the contact centre too). Root cause analysis remains a key opportunity to identify where AHT can be reduced and agent workflows can be optimised.   

Customer surveys are great, but really they are much better when the meta data from the call, the quality score and the survey feedback are all joined together.  Customer dissatisfaction data should be an opportunity to identify training needs and make changes, it helps when you have the full context of the interaction in one place.   

If the customer had to contact more than once then it becomes even more critical to link all that data together, identify the processes that are most likely to generate multiple contacts and consider how you can remove those additional contacts driving customer and employee experience.

“Take action to reduce the number of improper transfers”

There are typically 3 key drivers of improper transfers, the key is to take action to reduce them.  I’m sure we’ve either all caused issues through the following or have dealt with the consequences of them during our careers.   

• Workflows not being properly configured: Often, Contact Centres have to work with legacy systems that make changes hard. And unfortunately, customers have a habit of not following the flows that were created when the business was established, or a new product or service has impacted the model.
• Agents not being properly trained: Sometimes you’ll be short on time, it happens – maybe there was an issue with recruitment and the service launch date couldn’t be moved, so what happens? Someone takes a decision to reduce an element of training perhaps, or the brief wasn’t properly understood.
• Inefficiencies in the Tech stack: When systems have been pieced together there can be gaps, something doesn’t quite work as planned, that new tariff hasn’t been loaded correctly, the link to the courier page isn’t working.

What can you do about it?  

AI powered insights enable faster understanding of issues, patterns can be seen more quickly, improvement areas can be identified and actioned before the end of the shift, not the end of the month.

1. Identifying coaching opportunities and actioning them quickly can make a material difference. Issues with processes not being completed right now may lay dormant for months, years even?  Consider change of tenancy processes, the details of the tenant or a meter read may be entered incorrectly now which doesn’t present as an issue until the customer receives their first bill (smart metering should prevent this, but what if the start date was captured incorrectly?).
2. Use of screen capture to see what actually happened, what the agent saw and therefore advised the customer can be critical to identifying system issues, or issues with accuracy of information in the knowledge base.  These are key considerations and opportunities for organisations to be more informed in their decision making.   

“If things are going well now, that is a reflection of the work that went in 6 months ago”

The performance being delivered by your contact centre team is going to reflect the work you have done previously to ensure that you have the right people, processes, and technology.   

Sometimes you may make the wrong choices, the best you can do is play what is in front of you, keeping an eye on the horizon so that things are less likely to come as a surprise. The thing is that through using technology and AI our ability to see what is on the horizon is much improved versus what it was 20 years ago.    

I was speaking with a partner who has seen a 48% increase in QA audit deliver a 30% reduction in AHT.  They’ve used the insights from the QA to reduce improper transfers, improve processes, provide better training for agents and ensure the tech stack is aligned.   

Now I know people don’t like talking about AHT but I’m guessing we’d all be happy to talk about the benefits that could be delivered in improved employee and customer experiences, reduced wait times, more investment time, lower agent attrition, reduced recruitment and training costs, increased customer retention and of course, that all means reduced costs to serve and improved profit margins.   

Need help finding a new star player? 

Harry Kane may be gone, but it already looks like Tottenham are marching on under Ange Postecoglou – where will they finish this season I wonder?

We’d love to chat with you about how you are planning on getting the most out of your team this year and delivering a winning performance.

In the past 12 months we have seen rapid acceleration of automation and AI solutions. However, when it comes down to dealing with customers, human relationships still have their place.

We are all customers and there are times when we just want to get something done quickly. In banking terms that may be a balance or transaction check, give me the information that I need fast and simple. It could be a renewal of your insurance or to check where an order is.

But what if the balance isn’t what you expected or you have a duplicate transaction? The renewal price has changed dramatically, or the order isn’t arriving today after all, and you’ve taken a holiday day to wait for it? Well, you probably want to speak with someone, you want understanding and empathy. Another human to say to you it has all been sorted and there is nothing to worry about, to apologise – and mean it.

So, it is likely there will always be some form of need for human intervention in the process.

People determine the processes 

AI can determine when a customer is likely to need to make contact based on analysis of various data points and the creation of insights. It can run tasks/journeys to make proactive contacts at the right times based on customer lifecycles.

However, it has not reached the point of autonomy yet where it can decide what the CX should look like, it can give the tools but you still need to direct the effort, so people remain key.

Are your automation objectives aligned?

 Few outsource providers have the technology inhouse to satisfy the needs of their clients directly, few clients have the experience to implement AI themselves. As an outsource community of CX specialists you have the opportunity to shape the service delivered and the enable your clients to deliver better outcomes for their customers, differentiate their brand and help them either grow their business or reduce costs.

There is no point putting your head in the sand; this change is here, it is happening now. To say “it’s coming and we will get to it” is too little, too late.

The best thing that you can do is ensure that you have the right partners to enable you to deliver the changes that your client needs and the right commercial agreement with your client to ensure that your business is sustainable.

“If you aren’t talking to your clients about AI and automation someone else will be.”

Those who simply try to protect their headcount will find that they are on the losing side when it comes to contract renewal. Don’t wait until renewal comes along to talk to clients about innovation and cost saving, they will see straight through this!  

There are benefits to automation that can support your business

We have seen massive change through homeworking during the pandemic, increased attrition, increased salary costs due to inflation and pressure on clients to manage costs as a result of reduced customer spend due to a hardening economy.

We have seen increasing amounts of work being placed offshore, however there remains the risk that other labour markets become increasingly competitive and then costs will start to rise again.

Customers expect automation for certain tasks, they crave it, so you need to be able to provide solutions for your clients.

“Choosing the right technical partner could be critical to your future success”

As a business you need to ensure that you have:

• Sustainable solutions that work for you
• Alignment of objectives with your clients
• Technical delivery partners that you can rely on and trust to deliver on your behalf

Remember you get out what you put in. Be sure to properly resource any implementation project, scope realistically, ensure you have a clear business case, deliverables, testing and sign off processes, choosing the right solutions is only half of the story.

Want to know more?

Join Us for our webinar on September 14th, when we will be discussing in more detail the opportunity that AI offers to the outsource community. 

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:

• Shared resource for around the clock support
• Access to broader experience and customer service best practice
• Lower capital expenditure – reducing office space requirements, IT equipment and software costs
• Access to the latest contact centre technologies without investment

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.

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:

• 67% of consumers prefer self-serve
• 96% will leave your brand if they have a high effort experience
• 83% expect to engage with someone immediately when contacting a company

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!