Musings Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Customer Contact Panel

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

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

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

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

Just before revealing that the new domestic energy bill price cap in October would rise by another £800, on top of a near £700 increase in April, Ofgem said that it was ‘minded to’ change the frequency of the price cap setting. From October the price cap will be set quarterly, partly in the hope that when energy prices do eventually start to go down consumers will be able to benefit more quickly.

So, what does this mean for energy providers, which are already struggling with the consumer impacts of a massively challenged – and arguably dysfunctional – market and high contact volumes?

The cost centre

If you are responsible for an energy supplier’s contact centre you can forget about engaging in the old profit centre versus cost centre discussion. Your operation is now firmly in the cost centre category. The market is effectively dead, with little or no customer migration between suppliers and E.ON warning that 40% of its customers will be experiencing fuel poverty by the autumn.

The support centre

That level of financial exposure amongst consumers means that the high degree of vulnerability awareness that Ofgem has long required will only increase still further. Energy firms’ agents are right in the front-line of the cost-of-living crisis. An increasing proportion of contacts will be looking for support and enquiring about the suppliers’ own schemes as well as the growing range of government support measures. Keeping the front-line team resilient, protected and engaged is a massive challenge for contact centre leaders to add into the mix.

The Insight Centre

But – as we all know – there is one area in which the contact centre excels and that’s acting as the organisation’s ‘eyes and ears’, benefitting from thousands of interactions with customers every day. That insight might now be redundant from a customer acquisition and revenue generation perspective, but it’s more vital than ever when it comes to understanding the customer experience and reducing costs.

In most organisations, one of the biggest drivers of customer contact (and confusion) is the communications the organisation itself generates. With the price cap being adjusted every 3 months then it is almost inevitable that contacts will rise. And this is where the contact centre can really help.

If people don’t understand how the ‘smoothing’ of bills over the seasons through the use of direct debit works, then show your Product and Marketing colleagues how they can do that better – before the customer calls or chats to ask the contact centre.
If customers can’t easily find the answers they are looking for through the self-service app or portal then the functionality needs to be shifted and re-ordered to reflect the changed times we are living through.
If customers are looking for different ways of paying their bills – be that bill-splitting for people in house shares or even a traditional direct debit with the ability to make fractional top-up payments flexibly – then the contact centre should champion the need to develop the customer proposition accordingly.

A quarterly price cap will inevitably just put more strain on the contact centre and its staff, but if the rest of the organisation can be engaged it might just help spur some process and experience improvements along the way.

If you are facing these sorts of challenges, in the energy sector or elsewhere, and would like to talk them through, why not get in touch.

When Robert Leiderman first published ‘The Telephone Book’ in 1990, the pages led the reader through a journey of structure, process and measurement and supported that narrative with sound marketing principles such as Millington’s 4 Leverage Points.

‘The Telephone Book’ defined and scoped the effective use of the telephone as a business tool and set the framework for the development of call centres in the 90s.

The operating models so eloquently described by Leiderman, based on evidence accumulated through his work in the US with Simon Roncorroni, positioned the telephone as part of the customer communication process and was quick to highlight its weaknesses as a stand-alone communication tool. Working alongside data specialists driving voice contact, direct mail responses and brand development across print, TV, outdoor and radio, voice responses could begin to put more measurement around the brand orientated ads through the addition of phone numbers. This methodology, pioneered and developed by David Kyffin of Adlink, and later of Greys, focused on aligning response volumes with the ability of the call centre to answer the call, effectively putting CX above the volume of leads.

Fast forward thirty years and we now have a bigger response media toolbox, which provides greater transparency and measurement of data flows. That toolbox includes new solutions capable of augmenting the human component of customer interaction, making customer engagement design much more complex and dependent (as Robert Leiderman so clearly stated) on robust measurement and understanding.

With so much technological innovation out there it’s easy to be distracted by the variety of available options. Now is the time to get back to basics and spend more time acquiring a deeper understanding of existing data flows and less time being amazed by the sexiness of ‘modern tech’.

If you would like further information contact us.

Who would have thought on New Year’s Eve, when we were celebrating with friends and loved ones, and pontificating on what 2020 would bring – the celebrations, trips, events and the hope that something would knock Brexit from the headlines, that we’d now belonging for the day we can just meet friends for a coffee or go around to see our families.

In hindsight, we needed to be careful about what we were wishing for and appreciate many of the things we’d taken for granted.

However, nobody could have foreseen this one, or maybe the signs were there as warned by Bill Gates in a TED Talk in 2015.

The impact

Initially, there were some who ignored the #bekind memo and put their own self-interests before others by panic buying and ignoring government advice around separation. I saw a comment that said “I feel the world has sent us to our rooms to think about what we have done”. Perhaps it has, maybe the world is being reset? The tragedy is that it’s taking something so epic, which will see so many people lose loved ones, for us to acknowledge that the world we have been living in will be fundamentally different after COVID-19. Perhaps our only option is to embrace this.

Reflecting back

We are undoubtedly social creatures and need contact from those around us. For the past 22 years I’ve been working in the contact centre industry, an area which someone said to me a few months ago “seems to hate itself”. This stopped me in my tracks. I’ve always loved being part of the industry as it has afforded me the opportunity to work with some fantastic brands, especially from being in outsourcing, and given me a range of experiences. I’ve been able to help so many deliver improved service or support to their customers and assist people when they need reassurance or information.

I’ve the utmost respect for all front-line contact centre staff, every day they are communicating with customers – dealing with questions, challenges, complaints and fixing issues. Their line managers supporting them, a role which has changed so much. When I first became a line manager things were simpler, compliance extended to whether DPA had been completed, there was no social media and people didn’t talk about their feelings. Now a line manager has to be so much more than just an excellent agent, they need to fully understand how people, systems and communication work and interact.

Maintaining the energy

Why am I raising this discussion point? Because what gets a team through the day in a busy contact centre is often the buzz, the camaraderie and the sense of belonging. I find the energy and feeling you get when walking through the door of a contact centre is an indicator of the culture and performance of the Team(s) within. The fear of saying the “Q” word for fear of creating an avalanche of calls and when you know there is a problem, due to a change in the volume level on the calling floor, that comes before the words “systems down”.

Contact centre people are problem solvers, I believe we thrive in a crisis and see the best of people when things are going wrong – whether that be for our customers, the organisation we represent or that team member who is having a crisis at home. It saddens me to see photos of empty call centres with their energy dissipated, leaving me with a unfamiliar feeling as ‘our’ purpose has always been to fill buildings with motivated people delivering solutions to customers. But a challenge was set and it appears many have delivered at pace against that need.

I fear however, that we are an industry running on adrenaline which is providing a temporary buzz. The novelty of homeworking and the focus on the broader needs of our society are providing a boost, but this may be temporary and fade in time. Our industry is therefore responsible for making sure any gap is filled and levels are maintained. We’ve heard some great stories of people using technology to deliver virtual meetings and team events, perhaps further advancement of gamification will provide extra impetus maintain the energy and engagement in the future.

The challenges of homeworking

For years we’ve been talking about how homeworking would bring opportunities and change how contact centres employ people and deliver service, creating flexibility for both people and organisations. It was a win-win and was coined as the great opportunity – yet it never really fulfilled its potential. However, due to the pandemic, in 2 weeks it has been delivered, but at what cost?

The mission was to get agents and staff working from home, protect people from the virus and continue to support and serve customers, whilst maintaining revenues. But we now have further challenges, how do we ensure that those agents handling calls from emotional customers (and we are all in a state of heightened emotion right now) receive the appropriate support and guidance from their team? How do we ensure that the services being delivered are compliant and useable long term, when potentially unsecure interim homeworking solutions have been adopted first?

The future

The landscape has changed, if done correctly then there could be an appetite to maintain homeworking as it offers the flexibilities and opportunities as I previously mentioned. This was realised, when it was proved, that a solution to enable homeworking could be rolled out at the scale we are seeing now. In the future, could we see the contact centre becoming merely a hub for workers, offering the flexibility that many people require and giving options to both those who choose to work in the office or from home. It will open up new talent pools, enabling workers who were unable to adhere to constraints of working from an office i.e. parents with young families or people living in more remote locations. This will become the new norm so will you be ready to embrace this?