CONTACT CENTRE CHANGE MANAGEMENT – Didn’t you get the email? We’ve changed!
Yep – so many change plans fall to the lazy email – a BIG #FAIL!
Why is change management so tricky? It should be pretty simple, right? You only need to change the behaviour of several hundred people for 40 hours of their working week, whilst introducing new technologies and new processes whilst still expecting them to drive up NPS and achieve their performance targets. Oh yes, and you can’t take them off the phone because you have customers calling.
Does this sound familiar? How about this? Most of the change that is driven into your contact centres comes from your IT department or from a centralised Transformation Program that sits outside of the operational environment. If that sounds like your organisation, then read on.
This paper provides insight into how the Flare approach to change management can provide measurable benefit to both your project teams and to the Contact Centre operational business owners.
I recently headed up a change team on a transformation program for a major retail bank. We were a centralised team that sat outside of the main operation but we embedded ourselves within the business. We found that this approach gave us many significant returns:
1) We were able to use the SME knowledge to build out our applications and solutions and to carry out meaningful User Acceptance Testing – resulting in customer/user centric design. After all, who knows our customers better than the people that talk to them every day?
2) We engaged the operational teams and provided them with many channels to understand the what, how, when and most importantly why things were changing – investing in additional funding to permit teams time off-line
3) We provided mechanisms to re-enforce the change behaviour in order to achieve the business benefit sooner – quality monitoring, scorecard measures, reporting dashboards, new induction programs, on-line learning and team leader change management courses
4) We designed our change program to put our people first, before technology and processes. We measured employee engagement throughout each change activity in order to understand the ‘issues’ in real time and then adapt our approach as we went along
At the end of the 2-year program we achieved all expected business benefits including:
- Increasing NPS by 30%,
- Delivering 85.7% staff engagement – during the transition
- Lifting first contact resolution by 12%
- Driving multiple efficiency gains to achieve FTE benefits
Contact centres have some very distinct challenges when it comes to staff communication – it’s not like you can turn the lines off. However, by financially investing in creative ways to allow for involvement in the change, such as: face to face roadshows, active working groups, change networks, video and demonstration areas, you can drive a better outcome for the Contact Centre long term.
The Flare approach enables the project teams to deliver the business benefits more quickly and also ensures that the operational teams don’t spend the next 6 months ‘unpicking’ the problems that get left behind.
What’s the alternative? ‘Do change to your people’ and communicate it to them by email and newsletter?
Flare Design can help you with your change program in a number of ways:
1) Acting in a consulting capacity to your existing project/ change teams. Providing guidance, mentoring and skills transfer – helping them to avoid the pitfalls
2) Leading your change team, so that the strategy and approach is developed by Flare but provides skills transfer to your change team members
3) Providing the change resources required to deliver your entire program activities
