The Contact Center Operations Audit - Part # 1/3

A Blueprint Guide toBenchmark, Enhance Service Delivery & Realize Cost Savings All At Once.

Contact Center operations are highly complex. They touch virtually every functional area of a business including people process and technology.

Operations personnel are required to multi-task and support multiple products/services and functional areas (i.e. Departments - Billing, Customer Service, Complaints, Sales etc). Each of these areas almost always operates with unique workflow and omni-channel customer touch-points.

Balancing  Channel Dynamics...

The evolution to managing multiple distribution channels such that you're able to get the most from every customer contact while delivering superior service and  maintaining control of your expense line can be tricky.

The Contact Center often acts as one of many distribution (and termination) points but it rarely replaces the infrastructure inherent with different departments.

This breeds serious issues regarding efficiency and contact effectiveness. Contact Centers acting as a termination point for various departments creates operational infrastructures that are too complex and expensive to maintain. This complexity often clouds the strategic vision such that the corporate definition of customer service is often undermined

So how do you get a handle on the expense, the complexity, missed opportunity and the customer experience? How do you know if your customer interactions are effective as they could be? How do you place a dollar value on differing degrees of service? How do you sort out what is really going on in your contact center from what you thought was going on?

The Contact Center Operations Audit is designed to bring all of this into focus. This article will define and highlight the value of the Audit.

Future issues will address how an Audit should be conducted and what one should look for. In short, this series will provide a roadmap for executing your own operations audit.

A Structured Approach…

The Contact Center Operations Audit is not a solution. It is an approach.

It is an admission that your contact center is complex and needs to be viewed as a “business” entity. The audit will allow you to methodically understand your “business” from the perspective of cost, revenue and the customer.

While it is designed to snap a picture of your customer interaction and all supporting (back office work) activity at just one point in time it is a critical process that when repeated (i.e. annually) will enable you to benchmark and make informed changes or decisions regarding your business.

It’s scope spans all customer interaction activity including; field sales, email, customer service, face-to-face contacts, web inquiries & chat, mail, fax, investigation, analysis, forms processing, inbound/outbound etc. The workflow & procedures and technology for each channel need to be addressed along with any critical linkages that may exist.

Approximately 30 Key Business Drivers (KBD) are analyzed for each contact channel in order to achieve a thorough understanding of the operations. They include (but not limited to):

• Understanding the Strategic Direction of the organization                            

• Workflow & Procedures

• Communications & Work Types

• Volumes by type, by contact channel

• Task analysis (competencies required mapped to the role)

• RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) by task

• Peaks & Troughs & Key Drivers

• Time of Day Analysis (volumes, service metrics)

• Back office work time of day analysis

• Back office work - Lean analysis (time & motion etc.)

• Fulfillment

• Training

• Human Resources

• Service Metrics

• Telephony

• Systems & Technology

• Software Applications

• Workforce Management & Forecasting

• Shifts and Operating hours

• Quality Assurance

• Real-Time Monitoring

• Marketing

• Complaints

• Blockage

• Reporting

• Facility

• Benchmarking

• Net Promoters Score (NPS) & Customer Experience

• Financial (Cost per contact minute, Cost per transaction etc.)

An Invaluable Habit…

The Contact Centre Operations Audit is based on one simple premise:

If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

It allows you to fully understand the dynamics in your Customer Interaction activities by measuring all work (phone and non-phone). It will flush out important gaps that need to be measured and highlight the need to begin tracking. For example….

Contact Centre personnel typically spend more than 50% of their time off of the phones doing non-phone support work related to a customer interaction.

Virtually all call centers have justified and installed sophisticated technology that measures every aspect of telephone activity in great detail. Agent performance and even the assessment of service delivery in general are all driven by the statistics generated by this technology.

But what about the work performed by agents when they are not on the phones? In most cases this work is completely ignored.

With more than 80 completed call center operations audits, we have found that in almost every case agents typically spend more than 60% of their day off of the phones doing other work yet it is very rarely tracked.

This presents a tremendous opportunity for untapped financial savings and service enhancements.

Over the years as call centers have evolved from straight forward, efficient phone centers to multi-channel contact centers I have found this to become an ongoing issue in every vertical industry including, help desk, customer service, counselling lines ,reservation services, sales etc.

A Value Proposition that Can’t Be Ignored…

Because call centers are so complex, one can be overwhelmed at the amount of information and degree of analysis required. Manpower, time and priorities are all reasons why organizations don’t conduct audits regularly.

The work involved is not difficult and with a sound audit process, the site visit portion shouldn’t take more than a few days and the analysis 5 - 10 days after that. A structured process will remove all of these obstacles and will provide you with the tools to execute this work and isolate the opportunities very quickly. In fact we have successfully found ways to automate much of this work with our BaseLine product which further reduces this work time and lowers the cost to something that becomes quite negligible.

Over and over I have found that once organizations achieve a solid understanding of all customer interaction activity; how it works, what it costs, the frequency etc., opportunities for measuring and improving effectiveness become obvious.

The benefits from this work will be numerous and almost immediate.

The audit will flush out opportunities for efficiency gains that are obvious. We call this the “Low Hanging Fruit”. It is always there. In 100% of the audits I have conducted this opportunity always exists and the benefits can be realized within a couple of months. I have seen situations where annual savings from low hanging fruit amounted to  $500,000. In fact in one case, a Help Desk for a Computer manufacturer, they were able to improve their service level by providing more skilled product specialists on the phone and save just under $1,000,000 annually US simply by replacing a manual qualification process with an IVR application and adding more product specialists to improve service delivery.

Longer-term opportunities for efficiency gains are also always there but will take longer to implement. These opportunities are typically where the substantial savings will be found and need to be rolled out carefully according to an implementation and risk mitigation schedule  which is embedded into a change management / transition plan such that it is balanced with your culture etc.

Traditionally service oriented cost-centers are transforming themselves into revenue-generating profit centers in a way that does not deter or undermine the strategic mission of the company. We have seen this in the most unlikely situations (Help Desks, information lines, registration services etc.).

Savings or opportunities for incremental revenue won’t always come from changing the obvious things like workflow etc. The audit process will also have you re-think your operations from different angles and initiate questions such as: Why do we do this like that?, What would be the cost if we shaved 5 seconds from our calls? What would be the impact of is we raised our service level or shifted some interaction activity to another channel?

The audit will provide you with a concise snap shot of your operations in a way that the information can be used in a meaningful way.

Benchmarking

The audit will also allow you to benchmark yourself against previous studies, against your competition or other internal centers on a myriad of base-lines such as cost, service metrics, call effectiveness, etc.

The initial time and investment to embrace an audit process is nominal when compared to the substantial gains that will be generated.

In the next article, I will lay out the steps you will need to go through to conduct an audit along with what one should look for.

Eric Young
President
Tele-Centre Assist Inc.
www.telecentreassist.com