21st Century Contact Centers

I spent time with a client who has a contact center which takes no calls. Rather it receives and handles emails. So as I was doing my diligence inside their center I was looking at their wallboard and saw that they had multiple queues, set up in skill sets (so as to be able to handle only certain types of emails). Well, you know what I always say "...the more queues you have to handle a universe of (in this case) emails, the more agents you will need to service those emails...". In fact this center operation was operating with this very problem. I did some digging and found that there were agent queues that were idle while other queues had emails stacked up waiting. Sounds familiar, huh? They wanted to cut costs and boost service they provide to their customers, they also had a problem in that they were staffing using spreadsheets and they just had a feeling that they could do a better job.

I recommended they look into a new fangled switch that enables them to do "universal queuing". That is it will route emails, calls, chats, any manner of contact in the same way. So you can set up primary, secondary, tertiary agent skills and as long as you can ID and segment these contacts you can route them to the proper agent. This enables you to eliminate all your hard queues an improve service to your customers. Not to mention the fact that the agent population required would probably shrink by an estimated 20%, plus you now get real switch data that can be fed into a workforce management/scheduling tool, further tightening your need for agents and further improving your ability to manage to adherence and forecast needs more in line with reality.The good news is many of the name brand contact center switch vendors do sell cloud based switches that you can get implemented easily.

Reduce costs? Improve service? Better data for management and staffing forecasting? Is this heaven? No its your contact center in the 21st century. You can do it!!

Skip Stringham

It continues to amaze me...

It continues to amaze me when I visit a call center which does not track, measure or manage FCR (First Call Resolution). Think about this for a moment.....are you one of these? Not managing to FCR, will - guaranteed - cost you repeat calls. So, that means if after some diligence you discover that you are operating at an FCR rate of 60%, then probably a high percentage of 40% of your calls are repeat calls. What is your cost per call? How many calls does your call center receive in a year? If you receive 5,000,000 calls per year, then 40% or 2,000,000 calls per year could be repeat calls. If your cost per call is $3.50 then the impact of operating at a FCR rate of 60% is somewhere in the neighborhood of  $7,000,000. Even if its half that, you are spending wayyyy more money than you should to service your customers; not to mention the poor CSAT rate. But we'll save that for another blog entry.

So, now, what are you going to do about it? Would you agree that you could easily justify a minimal expense to figure out what your real exposure is and how to improve your current FCR rate? FCR by the way has been shown by the SQM Group that when increased by 1 percentage point will not only reduce your overall annual costs by an average of $276,000 the but additional impact will be 5 - 10 times that in savings by reducing the number of customers you currently have at risk. Risk of defecting as your customer, risk of going to the competition, risk of your company losing valuable and hard earned revenue. These customers are definitely not happy customers, so improving FCR will definitely improve your CSAT rate.

This FCR thing keeps getting bigger and bigger doesn't it. So what are you waiting for? Don't wait too long, your competition may be managing to a pretty high FCR.

Skip Stringham

Just wrapped up client we traveled over half the world for.

We found multiple locations each with differing goals, performance KPIs and very individualistic ways for reporting these numbers. In fact it was one of our findings that is sure to be impacted when our recommendations are implemented. We focused on improving efficiency and effectiveness of a global service organization that has been cobbled together over the years through acquisition and expansion. Needless to say they were multiple locations operating individually rather than as a global unit. Costs, handle time, systems used were all over the board. In fact each agent had at minimum 5 systems open and minimized at all times. Handle times varied by location and ranged from 3 minutes to 45 minutes - all dependent upon which systems they had to use for which call. We did our analysis, and made some specific recommendations to integrate as much of the databases and systems as possible into a value added "presentation layer" (really a poor description). This would serve to consolidate all data into virtually the same place and ease the searching and copying and pasting time each agent spent on each and every call. The entire savings from the global aht reduction is to be used to pay for the upgrade to a global network provided by AVAYA which will allow the client to route all channel types contacts to universal agents segmented by skill set. Cool solution, reducing costs and driving up customer experience scores.....we go from client to client the next one is a contact center that takes no calls, stay tuned..

Back in town...

Just back from visits with client contact centers in Amsterdam, England, and Ireland. Delivered our recommendations in Amsterdam and began our assessment for the new client in their centers in England and Ireland. We will still need to visit more locations but it is sure to be interesting.

Blending in the contact center

I have a client who has a golden opportunity to reduce costs and improves service. They are very global, multi  channeled and most of their contacts take place via the phone and email channels. These two channels are staffed separately. One group handles emails, the other handles phone calls. As I sat alongside agents in each group I noticed the pace of the incoming transactions - it was not demanding. Upon further investigation I discovered that these two groups already lend agents between the two channels and I was told the transition in this move between groups is relatively easy. In keeping with my favorite contact center maxim - the more queues you have in place the more agents you will need to staff those queues - I quickly decided that if the technology can handle it, and merger of channel support groups was in the offing. I was glad to discover that their in place technology can handle a Universal Queue of emails and phone calls, as well as other channel contacts, and the agent desktop can be easily modified/updated to further support the agent in their control of their place in that queue. The result, sure to be as we suspected...few agents required after a very non complicated merger of functional agent groups.

The desktop and the ACD integrate by way of a Media Bar (new term for a combined piece of middleware and a softphone). Stay tuned as this project progresses.

Multiple queues or one big queue?

Contact centers are struggling with the need to reduce costs and boost sales effectiveness - "duh" you say?
Its an age old contact center axiom, the more queues you have serving a universe of calls, the more staff you will require to serve that same universe of calls. So your big strategy for 2011 should be to find ways of reducing the number of queues you have in your center(s). Suggestions: utilize skills based routing rather than hard queue delineations for your callers. If you can ID and segment your callers properly at your IVR then this will allow you to minimize groups, reducing agent needs and improving customer experience as you deliver their call to the best skilled and available agent in your center(s).