Connectors 

I came across one of those at the weekend on Nick Clark of Boston Consulting Group’s Service Matters newsletter on Substack (which is always a good read and I’d recommend you subscribe to).

In this brief article, Nick highlights an often-forgotten factor in the (never ending?) quest to deliver seamless, omnichannel service. Whilst acknowledging that data and platforms are vital, he says we should focus on the ‘connectors’, that is the technologies or techniques that customers use to transition from one contact channel to another. We know they are vitally important. And unless they work well and with minimal friction for consumers they will be neglected, often undermining an organisation’s channel shift ambitions.  

However, mapping their function and availability in customers’ service and support journeys is something that’s often only done late on in an extended programme of work. Or maybe not at all. 

Nick describes the graphic we’ve re-used above as non-exhaustive, but it’s a great starting point and framework to use when seeking to understand how you currently support omnichannel service and how it could work better in the future.  

The matrix is a simple concept, but it allows you to rapidly summarise what needs to be in place to allow your customers to pivot between channels – in a way that works for them (easy and intuitive) and you (transitioning data and context across channels, along with the customer).  

Building that dynamic, customer-led view of how you can help customers shift channels will also help you better serve them within a single channel. As you develop scenarios and journeys, overlaid with an awareness of consumers’ real-world behaviours, you can better design quicker resolution and outcomes. 

So, that’s connectors. A new term and concept to me, that I think I’ll be re-using a lot in the future, thanks to Nick Clark. 

Connections 

And connections? Creating valuable, effective connections is what Customer Contact Panel’s all about:  

• Connections between you and your customers and prospective customers   

• Connections between you and service and technology providers who can elevate your customers’ experience  

• Connections between any of us who are interested in the world of the customer    

Nick Clark has generously shared his insights and when we at CCP have what we think are useful connections, ideas and examples of CX success we’ll do the same. A lot of our challenges are shared and we’re at our best working together to meet them. 

Want to explore how best to help your customers get the most effective service, through the channel and at the time of their choice? 

Then get in touch, we’d love to chat. 

Our very own Neville Doughty recently caught up with Sean McIver for MaxContact‘s latest episode of Talk Time, discussing how successful outsourcing is built on a foundation of trust, respect, and a shared commitment to sustainability and fairness.

Take a look at the snippet from Nev for a sneak preview.

To listen to the full episode, click on this link.

The full range of Talk Time episodes can be found on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

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.

The shift to homeworking during the pandemic expedited the implementation of Teams and other messaging channels for many organisations, necessity being the mother of invention.  Other organisations, especially Tech and developer teams perhaps had been using Slack for some time, but the need to work collaboratively and remotely brought these methods of working into the mainstream.

Making people more accessible through a quick ping on teams or starting a call has all kinds of advantages, a quick clarification on a point, the occasional meme, some great team interaction.  So why would I be calling out the same platforms that enable this to happen as a risk?

A few questions; maybe once you’ve answered these then you’ll dare to think the same?

1. How many different Teams channels do you have, I call them channels, but you may call then conversations or groups?  There’s a new incident to deal with, someone creates a group, you know what I mean.
2. How often do you search for a document that you were sent off the back of a conversation and it takes longer to find than it used to, this may just be me getting older…
3. When you’ve been away from the office for the day or off on holiday for a week, what do you do with your Teams messages, all those conversations sat there in bold?
4. How often are you working on a document and a ping, ping, ping begins?

Teams (or other such platforms) have the ability to steal your time:

1. Having multiple conversations means additional time keeping up with them. Depending on the number of people in the conversations and what they are related to, there can often be chatter on a related item that you don’t need to respond on, but you still heard the ping and therefore read the message – concentration can be broken by this and as a result productivity impacted.
2. The conversations that you don’t need to be involved in the additional comment/back and forth, could be like the equivalent of going and sitting on the desk of a colleague whilst they have a conversation that you don’t need to be part of.
3. Those multiple conversations can mean that if there is a document or a link that was shared, it could be in one of many places.
4. When you were away from the office and you missed a conversation that was it, you’d missed it and if there was something material you needed to know you were either sent an e-mail to catch up when you got back or someone made a note to ask you for input, you would not have replayed all the conversations.
5. The ping, ping, ping – that can be avoided by setting do not disturb, but realistically how consistently do people do this?

Practically, what can be done to minimise the risk and take all the benefits?

1. Agree an approach for creating new groups, I’ve seen great examples where a channel is set for dealing with a specific type of issue, key people are on the group, if it is needed the bat signal goes in there, detail of the issue and the team are good to go.
2. Be brave enough to suggest that you don’t need to be in that group any longer and that you plan to remove yourself (if you are needed you can always be added back in).
3. Agree where you are sharing documents, if they are in a meeting then share in the chat for that meeting for example, this works especially well for recurring weekly meetings.
4. Be selective as to which threads you go back and review when you come back to the “*the office” (*wherever that may be)
5. Schedule focus time so that you can get deep work done without interruption, put that time in your diary, it will block the time out so you don’t get the pings, if something urgent comes up, people can still get hold of you.

Agree, or disagree? Let us know your thoughts!

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?

The journey from paper-based telemarketing teams to Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) driven call centres, through to today’s customer experience platforms, not only demonstrates mankind’s need to access relevant and timely information, but also our business needs to deliver ‘information’ at a lower cost.

Every entity has a customer. Every customer receives information about the product or service that they engage with, often irrespective of whether the individual wants to or not! That paradigm has not changed.

The big change of course is the internet. The ‘cloud’ and the plethora of engagement channels that enables, along with the enablement of tech’, to measure the data flows within them.

This means that ‘information’ is no longer just something we just see on a page, a poster, a screen or dial, it’s something much more accessible and much more about the choices we make, or at least the choices that we think we make.

Thirty years ago, the information we needed to fine tune sales messages was created through carefully managed manual processes. And whilst this still may be true, for some entities more than others, the possibility for tech’ to provide a solution to the ‘process cost’ problem is much more available today than it ever has been.

To put this tech’ revolution into some context, if you have never picked up The Telephone Book by Robert Leiderman, give it a go. It’s a great read and puts into context some great stories of how different organisations approached how to find, get, keep and develop customers using the telephone. The fascinating thing for me is that these stories are just as relevant today as they were 30 years ago when the number of ‘information’ channels limited how we shared information.

Today, with so many customer engagement channels open to us as both business entities and consumers, the ‘information as a service’ not only costs us less in terms of time and effort but is more immediately and easily available through the contact centre technology options that bombard our searches and our inbox. Whilst the last three decades have given us more technology choices, they have also bought us a ‘complexity of offer’.

Historically contact centre tech’ vendors were very simply categorised as voice, process or efficiency based. Today technology categorisation, even to the well initiated feels more complex. With a plethora of other customer engagement channel choices, automation choices and the use of true AI monitoring all of the customer engagement and back end data flows, technology selection feels more daunting, when really it should be simpler.

To paraphrase Leiderman, maybe simplicity comes by thinking of our tech’ requirements being driven by how to find, get, keep and develop customers using data. In our API driven economy, that feels to me like a much easier ask.

If you need help in framing your contact centre tech conversation, then please get in touch.

It’s not surprising that it did, because Microsoft’s findings – based on feedback from 20,000 people in 11 countries – highlighted a number of fascinating trends that home and hybrid working seems to have reinforced. The first of these is “productivity paranoia” 87% of employees reported that they were productive, but only 12% of their managers said that they were confident of their teams’ productivity. View Microsoft research here.

So, what are we to make of that?

Firstly, it might be that there has always been such a chasm in workers’ and bosses’ perceptions of their productivity, but that’s not what Microsoft conclude. So, at a minimum, the past couple of years has made managers less confident that they know what their teams are doing, how well they are doing it and how quickly. Microsoft thinks that a lot of that is due to managers lacking information, data and reporting that tells them about their employees’ performance.

That will still be at least partially true of some contact centre people working from home, but overall contact centre managers have far more employee performance data than their peers in just about any other type of business, pre or post Covid. But we know that there is still plenty of managerial “productivity paranoia” in home working and hybrid contact centres.

On the surface, contact centre managers’ “productivity paranoia” is surprising. We all know that one of the great strengths of contact centres is their ability to generate statistics. Unlike lots of areas of work, nearly all of which will have to a greater or lesser experienced a move towards full or partial home working over the past 2½ years, contact centre managers are knee-deep in management information about their employees’ performance.

However, most times the easiest stuff to measure is, arguably, the least important. We know about wait times, call durations and throughputs per hour, but far less easy to measure is experience, genuine resolution of queries and emotional engagement with customers. And that challenge isn’t much greater just because someone’s working at home than when they are sat in front of their boss.

A further complication is that the kind of contact centre activities which are very easy to define, target and measure are ideal candidates for automation and/or process improvement (most likely in your organisation’s digital self-service real estate and tools). So the challenge here is not to manage these activities more efficiently, but get rid of them altogether. In a sense, if you are wholly confident of your team’s base efficiency then you might just know a lot about the wrong things.

It looks like what Microsoft’s research crystalises is that the shift in working styles and locations has unearthed some hidden problems. Ones that have always been there but were easier to ignore when everyone was always in the same, shared location. However, the good news is that these are problems that contact centre managers should actually be closer to being able to address than their peers in other sectors.

If you’d like to discuss how different technologies and techniques can help you address some of these challenges and do your bit to banish “productivity paranoia”, just drop us a line.

PS As an aside, if you’re that rare exception to “productivity paranoia” and your boss is convinced that you are more productive than you actually are, then that’s a very different challenge. And anecdotal evidence suggests that having an idiot boss is more double-edged than you may at first think!

Am I fooling myself that nature will prevail or am I simply being lazy in not following the weekly routine of starting the lawnmower, begrudgingly filling it with petrol and pushing it up and down this green space telling myself it’s good exercise!?

I should succeed. Information is available, I have the vision and help is at hand. My daughter, whose family nickname by the way is Flower, works for the local Wildlife Trust. My wife, an abstract landscape artist, whose appreciation of colour is a gift she shares openly in her abundance of work. My options are numerous, and the more I’m asked to pay, the less it appears, my risk of failure.  Reading through the links that appear readily when I open the browser on my phone, I’m invited to spend thousands to take away my pain of failure. I could scrape up the field and returf with carefully selected grasses and wildflower seeds to match my soil type. Or maybe the lesser cost option of adding a layer of soil impregnated with appropriate seeds, again matched to my home ground.

Apparently, the problem I’ve failed to overcome in establishing my small contribution to biodiversity, is that wildflower seeds, however many times I scatter them over the autumn field, stand little chance of germination because they fail to compete against the established and dominant grasses. The most ecologically effective approach to solving this problem is to mow, scarify aggressively and plant yellow rattle, which suppresses the grasses and leaves space for wildflowers to grow.

So, when you mistakenly believe your budget is actually your business plan and you set forth with the best intentions to reduce your operating costs through automation, deploying BOTs where once there were voices, have a thought about my attempts at growing a wildflower meadow. Perhaps take the time to understand the full dynamics and nature of the ground you are seeding. Have a thought about taking the strategic long term aims, not tactical fixes. Think through your options of delighting your customers without necessarily spending thousands pulling up the old and laying down the new. Embrace the available help from familiar people who have proven experts in helping others and embrace the nature of what you already do to ensure that the new can grow and flourish.

Whatever you do, don’t simply let the grass grow and expect to get a wildflower meadow.

The summer break gives us time to reflect on the year to date. It’s always great to start with the successes and then the failures, or ‘opportunities’ as we are meant to label them. One such ‘opportunity’ that’s worth avoiding is that of ‘buyer’s remorse’, that sick feeling that starts in your stomach and rises through your chest, plants itself in your head and from that point on, haunts the conversation as soon as the subject matter is discussed.

Nothing presents itself better in this scenario than buying contact centre tech’. Why? Well, the answer is very simple and it’s all about context. That context is that buying anything, especially high value, and specifically, those that are complex and have multiple stakeholders, need a salesperson to sell them and contact centre tech’ is one of those things.

The scenarios witnessed all have one thing in common. The salesperson won. It’s like watching a gladiator against an unarmed soldier and in some cases, I’ve been reminded of that series of films that involved Predator and Alien, which perhaps reveals how long I’ve been around making these types of observations.

In all these procurement journeys, it was simply a case of one party going into play with more weapons, more skills and more technique than their combatant.

In that famous Monty Python sketch, ‘surprise’ is always an advantage. Although, as we know the element of surprise comes through knowledge and planning. Then comes the relationship development, even some personal social media interaction to cement the ‘advantage position’.

Tools? Well again, we all know what they are, but often fail to remember that salespeople these days are highly trained professionals who are targeted to win against people they have targeted to sell to.

Once the ‘trust position’ is established, out comes the ‘glitter and gold’ and of course, that’s all presented well to solve all the problems that the combatant has been sharing as the ‘relationship’ has been developing. Not that anything needs to have been mentioned. Typically, the professional sales team’s ‘intelligence unit’ have weaponry that gathers everything on the internet that your organisation has been putting out there, or even just checking something obvious like your company’s Trust Pilot scores and social media sites. These all are designed to reduce the risk of the sale not completing and the glitter and gold are deposited in the buyer’s jewellery box.

So, maybe take some armour and weapons of your own, make the tech’ purchasing journey an even contest and make sure what you end up buying is the gold you wanted.