The Contact Centre Operations Audit

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

Contact Centre 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 Centre 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 Centres 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 centre from what you thought was going on?

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

It is an admission that your contact centre 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 centres 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 centre 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 centres have evolved from straight forward, efficient phone centres to multi-channel contact centres We have found this to be 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 centres 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.

Time and again we 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 every audit we have conducted this opportunity has existed and the benefits can be realized within a couple of months. We 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-centres are transforming themselves into revenue-generating profit centres 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 if 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 centres 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 we lay out the steps you will need to go through to conduct an audit along with what one should look for.

Part 2 — Running the audit

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

This is the second segment of a three-part series. The first part described the objectives of the Call Centre Operations Audit and it also identified the value. This second part addresses the steps required for conducting an Audit and the things to look for. The final part will focus on results by industry, benchmarking and outcomes.

The Call Centre Operations Audit

The Key to Operational Excellence - Recap

In the first segment, we introduced the concept of the Audit. We addressed the purpose, scope and it’s value. The salient points follow:

The Operations Audit is not a solution but rather an organized way of flushing out opportunities for service, efficiency and revenue enhancements and identifying their value for implementation.

The purpose of the Audit is to:

Identify the current cost per contact and/or cost per minute + Identify and evaluate service & efficiency issues relating to workflow and contact handling.

Once the method is in place, the Audit practice should occur annually

It should not be overly time consuming (such that it interferes with the daily routine) and it does not need to be an expensive practice. This is where the automated

BaseLine audit process we've developed can really add value as it allows organizations to take full control of the assessment process without disrupting the day-2-day operations. And the fact that the cost is negligible (about the equivalent to the tax you would pay to have a consultant come in to do it in the traditional way) is a big bonus!

The scope of the Audit needs to extend to every aspect of the Call Centre including over 30 critical Key Business Drivers (ie. Workflow, Technology, Service Metrics, Total Operations Cost, Human Resources, Quality, Workforce Management, Volumes, Back Office, Drivers, Blockage, Telephony, Software, Work Types – Incoming & Outgoing etc.) It must also recognize and thoroughly understand the corporate entity within which the call centre exists by identifying the corporate values, definition of “service”, short & long-term strategy and market positioning. This is critical in order to interpret the data in a meaningful and relevant way.

It attempts to measure ALL work

(phone and non-phone work).

The Audit must clearly define and identify a loaded cost per contact minute and per customer interaction.

There must be an exact and quantifiable cost or service enhancement for each proposed change.

The Audit must breakout and prioritize opportunities in terms of short and long-term implementation.

One master project plan is required with two sub-plans in order to clearly define and ensure execution.

The Audit will allow you to benchmark your operations against previous studies, against your competition or other internal centres 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.

How to Execute a Contact Centre

Operations Audit…

In the previous article we identified that the Audit process was like taking a “snap shot” of your operations. It requires that an immense amount of information is captured and then organized such that nothing is missed; the various inter-dependencies, redundancies and/or synergies are clearly highlighted. This structure is a critical driver and influencer of the depth of the analysis and subsequent recommendations.

• The Steps to Completing an Operations Audit
• Pre-Site Visit
• – The Assessment Questionnaire
• Site Visit
• Data Analysis
• Action Plan
• Pre-Site Visit
• – The Assessment Questionnaire

This first section is by far the most important part of the Audit process. It determines what information and materials you have to work with and how it will be organized. If there were ever to be a more appropriate use for the expression “Garbage In – Garbage Out” it would apply to the Audit process.

The purpose of the Assessment Questionnaire is also to guide (provide structure) for the site visit portion of the Audit. The information required will be detailed in the form of questions. Questions should be organized by Key Functional Discipline (category). Key Functional Disciplines (KFD) can be analyzed for each channel in order to achieve a thorough understanding of the operations. Each Key Functional Discipline (KFD) should have numerous questions that address all aspects that relate either to the KBD or the corporate strategic direction. The primary KFD’s along with their purpose follow.

Key Contacts

Strategic Direction

Should include long-term and short-term strategic plans in terms of service & sales from two perspectives: corporate strategic direction and tactical strategic directions

Operations Overview

- A brief overview of the operations including, lines of business, products and services offered, size, scope, hours of operation, headcount, unique sensitivities, % Inbound & Outbound etc. The purpose of these sections is to get a high-level understanding of the business and contact centre operations.

Communications Types

- All incoming communications types broken out by the following distribution channels: telephone, email, fax, in-person, written, other – non-phone work. All outgoing communications types also broken out by the same distribution channels also need to be included. All other work executed by the contact centre that has not been addressed in any of the other categories. Examples include: fulfillment, research, administrative, other work types not identified. Each communication type must be assigned a unique reference number and distinctly separated by distribution channel.

Volumes

- For ALL the reasons why people contact the call centre (all methods noted above – ie. phone, fax, email etc.), do this for Inbound, Outbound and Other (noted above). Remember to detail the following information for each. Volumes are

CRITICAL and should include an understanding/analysis of: volumes (by month), volumes (total year), length of time to process or complete, how many require french? If this information is not available try to estimate by providing a number AND percentage. Always create a documented audit control system that includes reference numbers for each communication type by contact channel along with all of the variables noted herein.

Key Drivers

- Addresses how the volumes of work (see above) are affected by seasonality and also identifies the number of times a customer will contact you. It should identify these trends by week, month etc.

Workflow

- For the most common Communication Types (above –for all distribution channels detail all of the tasks & procedures from the beginning of the process through to conclusion. Remember to include:Interactions with other systems, other departments etc. It should also identify the value stream specific to complaint and problem resolution considering the same variables.

Staffing

- Questions should address all aspects of staffing so that you obtain a through understanding of all costs, use of full-time & part-time personnel by job function, headcount by day of the week and time of day, vacations etc. Roles & responsibilities (RACI analysis), overtime, turn-over rate by position, performance evaluation criteria, lateness & absenteeism tracking etc. Remember to Include support staff, admin, fractions of personnel (ie. Executives and support services/staff etc.)

Shifts

- For each job function, identify the actual time each person worked by day, week, month (identifying part-time and full-time personnel. Also identify the process of how schedules are determined. This is very important. Is a time of day erlang analysis part of the process?

Training

- Detail the entire curriculum for both initial and ongoing training including subject matter, methods used and time spent on each for all roles, frequency of ongoing training and the annual budget

Database & Technology

- Identify all of the database & software applications for contact management & outbound, email management, knowledgebase, chat, workflow & procedures including; complaints trouble-ticket, quality monitoring system specifications, license agreements, maintenance agreements etc. All costs related to capital purchase, leases, data transmission costs etc. A detailed understanding how each tool is used in the business. Limitations with the technical architecture, corporate biases with any functionality or supplier also need to be identified. What do agents have readily accessible and how is it used?

• Service Performance Targets
• - Phone and non-phone work
• Production Targets
• - Phone and non-phone work
• Agent Observation

- Side-by-Side Monitoring for both Phone and non-phone work are critical. Time each function and log. Remember to include reason and result for each. Cross reference to the workflow for that particular contact or work type for a “reality” check against the way it is understood (or suppose to be conducted).

Complaints

Telecom

A complete understanding of the telephony platform from the perspective of cost, functionality, process flow & programming and capacity (including lines) compared against current and traffic capacity. This is another large section and would typically comprise of 50 + questions.

Reporting

- Detailed reporting including: management and time of day reporting, reporting on other non-phone work where-ever possible and should also include an analysis of telephone bills by line.

• Financial
• Total OPEX budget
• Facility
• Morale
• A Co-operative Effort…

To be successful this process must be a co-operative process of sharing information and concepts.. Before the site visit can occur therefore, it is essential that your operations team also prepares in advance by:

1. Identifying and assembling relevant reports or supporting materials for all sections

2. Provide the ability for the auditor to listen to both sides of an agent conversation

3. Identify Functional Experts And Make Them Available For Interviews.

5. Determine How The Assessment Will Be Positioned To Personnel.

This is not a “Make Work” Exercise…

If a report, manual or information requested is not readily available simply schedule some time to interview the appropriate individuals.

This process should been designed such that it does not distract you from your daily routine & responsibilities.

Site Visit

The On-Site visit should be fast and non-intrusive. No one should be occupied for more than 3 consecutive hours on any occurrence.

The site visit MUST be guided completely by the Questionnaire.

The purpose in this stage is not to make any recommendation or conclusion but rather to obtain as many answers to the questions and to observe the day-to-day operations. The objective at this stage is simply to gather as much information as possible and quietly observe a typical day.

You need to be good at Puzzles…

In almost every case we have observed that at least 40% of the information is not “readily” available. The auditor therefore needs to be able to ignore the response….”sorry this information is not available” and tenaciously (but respectfully) continue asking the same question in other (creative) ways to get at the same desired result. If after all of this, the information is still not available one must draw a line and make a decision as to when to end the data-collection phase of the Audit.

The auditor must then begin the Data Analysis stage by piecing the answers together using the information that was collected.

Data Analysis/Interpretation

Once the site visits are complete the remaining work can be completed off-site so there is no disruption to the daily operations. The information gathered should be analyzed in detail and then related to one another to identify issues and opportunities. The analysis phase is a critical portion of the Audit

Various templates can be developed for each KBD along with tools (ie. Erlang etc.) to help interpret data.

Action Plan

The Call Centre Audit will culminate with recommendations at the following two levels:

The Call Centre Audited

The Entire Customer Interactions Operations (macro picture)

The purpose in approaching the recommendations at two levels is to identify potential synergies that might exist between other areas that may currently be separate. This could open up entirely new opportunities for contingency, efficiency, revenue or service enhancements that may not have otherwise been recognized within the parameters of an existing call centre.

Recommendations can be benchmarked against similar centres in the same vertical and other call centre operations on key operating variables such as service metrics. – see next article submission for this

Qualifiers

In order to qualify as a recommendation, it must create one of the following results:

• Service Enhancements
• New Efficiencies
• Incremental Revenue
• Quality Enhancement

Recommendations should then be organized in one of the following two ways:

• Recommendations that will not cost anything to implement
• Recommendations that will have a +/- financial impact to implement
• Change Management Strategy & Project Plan

Recommendations also need to be categorized further by the following priority codes:

• Priority #1 = NOW
• Priority #2 = 6 – 12 Months
• Priority #3 = Longer Term
• Priority #1’s

Quick Fixes should be addressed immediately and should be placed on a project schedule and mapped to a specific measurable result upon completion. While short-term task-items will yield more immediate results and will likely be well received, you will also need to balance this with the potential for implementing task items that result in only short-lived gains.

Moreover the work to develop and implement many of these items could require re-doing if it is done in a manner that does not take into consideration the higher level priority items and longer term tactical direction. As a result, these items will need to be carefully balanced to avoid redundant work and subsequent confusion.

Longer Term Priority Items

The primary catalyst for realizing these gains will come from Isolating and mapping skill requirements to tasks and establishing common measurement processes for each. A detailed Action Plan should be developed to address this by systematically focusing on the overall infrastructure such that all work can be standardized, tracked and resourced appropriately.

The infrastructure therefore, should be the basis for service & financial gains. Once in place, virtually all of the recommendations could be implemented.

Summary

Although each category of recommendations will likely exist as independent endeavours with separate project plans, it is essential that they all roll-up to one higher level plan. This is done to reinforce the longer term goals and direction and also to ensure that the way in which work is done in the NOW stage lays a foundation for the future so that nothing has to be re-done in later stages. This is an important area to be aware of when implementing. It is far too easy to get caught up in the short-term gains with short-cuts to solutions. This approach may yield short-term results but high (unnecessary and frequently redundant costs) later on.

In order to achieve the best results and internal commitment to the recommendations, the effort regarding the implementation should come from inside wherever possible. The final report must include a high level project schedule that details the Priority #1’s along with recommendations for resources that could be utilized to help implement the action items.

Part 3 — Benchmarking the results

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

This is the final segment of a three-part series. The first part described the objectives of the Call Centre Operations Audit value of the output. This second part addressed the steps required for conducting an Audit and the things to look for. This final segment focuses on results by industry, benchmarking and outcomes.

The Call Centre Operations Audit

The Key to Operational Excellence - Recap

In the first segment, we introduced the concept of the Audit. We addressed the purpose, scope, it’s value and the method for executing.

We identified that the Audit process was like taking a picture of your operations. It requires that an immense amount of information is captured and then organized such that nothing is missed; including the various inter-dependencies, redundancies or synergies.

Diverse Results…

It is designed to produce results in the following 3 ways:

1. Isolated Focus - Benchmarking

At a macro level, the Audit deliberately provides a “balanced” picture of all aspects of the operations including over 30 Key Business Drivers (KBD);

• Understanding the Strategic Direction of the organization
• Workflow & Procedures
• Communications & Work Types
• Volumes
• Peaks & Troughs & Key Drivers
• 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
• Financial

When organizations look at results, there is a tendency to isolate specific areas and focus solely on those rather than the balanced picture. This causes some significant issues when making decisions based on these results.

Firstly, opportunities that are identified within isolated functional areas could easily create redundant work in other places thus creating short-lived gains and longer term costs. It follows therefore that other opportunities for revenue enhancement or new efficiencies could be missed entirely simply by limiting the focus to one or two areas.

Secondly, the inter-dependencies and support activity between functional areas are completely ignored with this approach making seemingly positive results much less than they may appear. This leads to significant ambiguity when benchmarking results or building a business case.

Benchmarking call centres is problematic at best and should be taken as only a rough guide because it misses the macro perspective for revenue, efficiency or service gains.

A call centre with impressive metrics could very easily be disguising an inefficient operation...

Of those companies included in a benchmarking study, systems could be programmed differently, metrics defined in unique ways….all to create an illusion of service excellence.

A few more examples of what to watch for when comparing results include:

IVR could virtually eliminate abandoned calls

IVR could virtually eliminate the opportunity for incremental sales

Counting calls abandoned after callers hear the greeting is dramatically different than counting it from the time the call is answered by the system. Companies often exclude abandoned calls before a 20 second threshold.

Call Handle Time is sometimes measured with wrap-time in and sometimes without.

Counting an abandoned percentage as a percentage of calls offered will be significantly different if it is calculated as a percentage of calls answered.

Inadequate trunking will artificially boost service performance

CDN’s, selective queuing based on IVR will skew results and ASA because the IVR will answer instantaneously.

Cost per call & call minute must be based on identical call types and formula’s

• The number of rings the phone system is programmed for
• Caller demographics
• Caller tolerances
• Trunk and network configurations

Blockage is sometimes reported as % of time trunks are busy as opposed to the number of actual # of uncompleted calls.

• Hours of operation
• Mix of part and full-time agents
• 2. Balanced Approach

This refers to the macro perspective which takes all aspects of the operations (including over 30 Key Business Drivers (KBD)) into consideration. This is the intended approach of the Audit because by looking at everything together (and not isolating specific areas), important inter-dependencies and synergies emerge.

This approach is highly powerful because it can accurately assign quantifiable measures and costs to each and every customer contact (ie. phone, fax, email etc.). Now that this information is available, one can actually manage and/or improve the business.

3. Leverage Approach

Call Centre management must understand the financial impact of operating decisions they make each and every day. While there is traditionally a strong emphasis on customer impact analysis, financial concerns are often side-stepped. What some organizations are beginning to understand is that careful financial analysis as applied to their operations will not only provide a basis for quantifying customer impact, but will bring clarity to even the most complex business decisions they might face.

Existing inter-dependencies and the nature of the linkages between functional areas will quickly reveal opportunities for both efficiency gains and possibly incremental revenue. These opportunities will begin to take a very detailed and tactical form such that a measurable gain can be identified in terms of service, time and cost particularly when the overall impact on the cost per contact is illustrated. Each opportunity therefore, can be easily cost justified in a way that cannot be disputed in any way.

Applying financial principles to operating decisions is necessary for companies to grow and compete effectively. For Call Centre management, this approach supports financial justification because one can easily demonstrate a Return on Investment and Payback Period. The logical conclusion therefore, is that by assessing a call centre operation with a model that incorporates a financial analysis the better able one will be at managing

Profitability.

Comparative Results

Observations

Benchmarking companies (even in the same industry) can be misleading at the best of times. One must be sure that they are truly comparing “apples-to-apples” in terms of the definitions, calculations, contact type, contact reasons etc. However, from the countless number of Audits performed across multiple industries we are able to make the following observations.

Industries that tend to be burdened by large volumes of paper report higher percentages of time spent off of the phones and therefore more significant opportunities for cost savings. This also tends to be evident within industries requiring highly skilled agents, such as insurance or computer organizations.

In the vast majority of the time, the greatest savings are found in redundant or inefficient workflow. Agents hired to interact with customers are spending far too much time off of the phones working through inefficient workflow.

The next largest source for savings is found in companies reporting above average service metrics but have not employed efficient scheduling and are therefore over-staffed.

The third largest source for savings is found in companies that employ licensed or highly specialized (skilled) front-line personnel. In these situations agents typically perform many functions, most of which do not usually require the specialized knowledge they are paid to have.

The results presented above only address short-term opportunities for efficiency gains and do not address the countless opportunities for revenue improvement.

As a rule of thumb, internal operations should function at approximately 10% below what an external agency would charge them to perform the same function. In almost all of the contact centres audited however, most operated with significantly higher costs. Given that the largest efficiency gains come from one or two common areas (ie. workflow), it wouldn’t take much to realize the short-term gains noted above.

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