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:
- Finance will be more focused on revenue growth from either selling more to existing customers or winning new ones;
- Marketing may consider the growth in brand recognition as a key in delivering that growth;
- HR will want to see the growth of the people that they are developing and progressing; AND
- 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.