Playing to Agents Strengths
Over many years the role of the Contact Centre Agent has been evolving and now, more than ever before, having the right people strategy is key to offering a differentiated service (and quite frankly delivering a planned service experience at the right cost!).
Living in the Past
For many years operating models have been developed, constrained by internal process needs and the capability of technology. IVR’s only enable routing to a relatively high–level and so silos are created. Sales, Service, Billing, Complaints… The delivery of the call types are very generic. For example a credit card agent with 3 weeks experience is just as likely to receive a complex credit card call as a credit card agent with 3 years of experience. Whichever way you look at that, its a problem! You either have over-trained or under-trained resources thrown at the same enquiry.
Time to Move Forward
The technology to route, and theory of skills based routing, is spot on. However, this adaptation hasn’t been easy for most contact centre managers to understand let alone implement. We are continually amazed at how many business claim to use skills based routing but they couldn’t be further from the truth. The reality is that the component parts, that make skills based routing really flourish, have been deployed as disparate initiatives. Simply put, none of the parts truly work together. The technologies are basically, and often lazily, retrofitted to adhere to the traditional operating model.
But its now time to re-think this space and actually deliver the benefits. And the benefits are big, we’ve proven it!
So, here are our 3 key ingredients to realising the full potential of skills based routing:
Ingredient 1: Most of you already have skill based routing (SBR) functionality. Building block 1 is just not being sweated….
Ingredient 2: The advent of open speech allows us to understand customers enquiries at a more granular level and with this comes a whole raft of opportunities that not only deliver a better experience for your customers but also for your staff. This isn’t an out-of-the-box speech system, this is one tailored to your business. I’m not going to dwell on the capabilities of speech, that’s for other blogs, but suffice to say, the technology can do lots more than most deployed today. We just need to ask more of the vendors. However, before you jump into the technologies, here is the place to start…
Ingredient 3: Alignment of Staff. Now this is the one we need to tackle. As humans we all have preferences and generally speaking what we prefer to do is normally what we are better at. I have interviewed many contact centre agents over the years and have found this to be the case. The old rhetoric has always been ‘agents get bored and we need to give them variety of calls’. We have proven this to be wrong! Agents prefer to handle the calls that they enjoy and are good at. Some people relish tricky complaints, working to resolve complex situations and winning the customer over. Some prefer sales, retentions and some people truly love the very basic, short sharp enquiry questions over and over again. We know this is true because we’ve helped implement these models.
Making it Work
When using genuine “intelligence” in the routing strategy calls can be sent to the best available agent, based on real proficiency and their own personal preference. Oh, and before you start dismissing this as creating islands of skills, which in contact centre terms defies the golden goose of economies of scale… this does not! Again, the details of this are for another blog but for the time being this is just to give some flavour to the thinking… So, here are some examples…
“I have an query about a charge on my credit card statement” Simple right? Hmm, not necessarily so. Your agents will tell you that this could spiral out of control. That’s not even necessarily the question. Really they might be saying “I want you to reverse my charge” With this more relevant insight this would definitely suit an agent proficient in negotiation, probably a more skilled resource. Yes, the query may be simple, but lets protect the risky side of this escalating. The upside here can be a transaction completed in 1/3rd the time, fees ‘retained’, FCR, and typically a happier customer having dealt with a skilled agent (not messed about and maybe then still not got their fees reversed. And yes, reversing the fees does make a customer happier, I’m just not sure if its good for business!
“I want to know your term deposit rates” This is a good one. So the simplest thing would be to provide the rate. Even a novice can do that. But don’t we want to maximise our chances of closing the sale. Lets not loose this ‘tyre kicker’ lets put this to our closer who can stop the caller shopping around and get that investment locked in. If we’re the only bank doing this then we will get way more than our 1/4 share of business, right?
“What time does your Windsor branch close on Friday” Somehow we missed our automation opportunity but why not serve up the ‘express team’ who have a mandate to get on and off the call. This leaves more capacity for other, more valuable calls. Oh, and yes, every call is valuable but surely some are more valuable than others and don’t we want to be able to prioritise based on that knowledge?! So this type of operating model moves away from silos of calls and allows you to ‘cluster’ your call types and target the appropriate level of expertise. It also enables you to set service levels that are both efficient and effective for your customer. They may wait slightly longer but they will get to the true expert who can help and that means they get served faster overall.
The upside for your agents is that they get to handle the calls that they enjoy most, for the majority of their day. As they handle more of these call types they become more expert and proficient. They can be set more meaningful KRA’s and can be more successful in their attainment of these targets. This in turn has a positive impact on their job satisfaction and the businesses attrition figures – a pretty good win/win.
However, this is all quite a departure from current thinking and requires a real leadership commitment for this change as it encompasses most facets of your business including; HR/Unions, training re-design, process re-design, adaptation of scorecards, coaching practices and quality models. It impacts forecasting and resource planning and technology. If you want to know how to maximise the return on your open speech implementation beyond just reducing transfer costs give us a call.
About Flare Design: We’ve coached, trained, and delivered change into the contact centres of many of the biggest customer service brands in NZ and Australia in the past five years. Our experience with the enabling technologies, possibilities in the development of operating models, and detailed experience of customer events/needs (through our time-in-motion studies) enables us to integrate the best of the technologies, processes, and customer needs into clear roles and accountabilities that maximise the performance of your people (realising their true competencies as well as preferences). The efficiency gains are obvious but in parallel these programs create job satisfaction and the benefits of such.