contactcentreconnoisseur
Contact Centre Connoisseur
Matt Cameron's guide to life in a contact centre.
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How to Value our Failure
25th September 2019
When I was sprightly 24 year old, with a twinkle in my eye, I moved to London with all of the other expats planning on bringing Australia's international reputation into disrepute. Not long after my move, I was lucky enough to land a job with a small team in a telecoms company tasked with handling written enquiry and some of the bigger complaints the company received.
I worked in that team for over a year and in that year, the backlog of our work seemed to grow and grow and grow. This is not an uncommon story and one you’ll no doubt be familiar with. It usually results in hiring new people to work on the exponential growth of customer demand. While I would love to tell you that I had implemented some shiny new process to solve all our problems, that would be far from the truth.
There was clearly something broken and we needed a solution. After discussing my teams current state with management, one of the managers asked me what my future looked like. Perplexed, I replied by saying that I had not thought too far ahead. He went on to ask if had considered making a move into a leadership role. The answer to that was no and frankly, the thought of leading a team in this kind of situation scared me more than ordering prawns at a beach side restaurant in Phuket. At the time I just had no clue of how to make an impact on the queue outside of hiring someone new. If only I could get a do-over knowing what I know now.
Of course, our team was categorizing the work that we were completing. But we had no gauge of the value of our work. We knew we had X amount of emails, X amount of SMS replies, X amount of Ombudsman complaints but very little idea of the nature of these enquiries.
In the service sector, if we were to think of our business as a system, any customer demand will either be;
Value, providing for exactly what we were set up to provide, or
Failure, which is described as waste work that occurred due to failure in some part of the business.
Our focus should then be to eliminate the failure (or waste work). To do so we will need to follow the flow of demand through the system. Once we find the point at which the demand is stalling or failing, we can remove or replace the ‘waste’ work.
Obviously, the benefit for our customers is that they will not have to experience the same, on going issues. Additionally, we can delight our customers with an enhanced ability to provide value. I guarantee the agents in the contact centre will enjoy that interaction a whole lot more too.
If we can collect data on every interaction we can tackle the burdening load without having to invest in more head count. In order to do so, we’ll need to bring our people along on this journey;
Be transparent with your team: In order to collect meaningful data you’ll, in the first instance, be slowing your team down and asking them to take extra steps. Giving them the “why” behind this process will help build their confidence and get them to see the value of the work they’re doing.
Involve your team: Ask for their input – what should the categories be; what will make the process easier for them? This will help them feel heard and that you’re investing in them.
Track and Update regularly: Don’t make this a “set-and-forget” process. Create visual measurement that helps your team and business see the results and help create and embed a culture of customer insights reporting.
So there you have it. I can go back to my old work and let them know I’ve found the solution they were seeking 10 years ago. If only to be 24 again. Although, if I was 24 again, I would have probably been too busy trying to convince myself and everyone else in the nightclub that I know what I’m doing on a dance floor.
With all of that said, this process doesn’t only apply to my workplace from 10 years ago. The best part is, it can be applied to any service sector work. You’ve decreased incoming customer demand, you can put more time and effort into providing value to your customer and you haven’t needed to hire anyone new. And I thought my Double shot, Unsweetened Almond milk Latte was lean.
Written by Matt Cameron
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Musings from a Traditional Contact Centre
Friday 23rd August, 2019
By now I have experienced a wide range of contact centres. I suppose you could consider me as somewhat of a connoisseur (not a bad idea for a blog name actually). There are a few common things you would associate with contact centres; high staff turn over, stressful days filled with angry customers, scrutinous yet ambiguous performance reviews.
I try to avoid these situations like the cycling in spandex. The unfortunate thing is, they are hard to avoid. There are a lot of contact centres out there living up to these old stereotypes.
I did have the rare experience of working in the contact centre of a tech company that tried, as much as possible, to be an agile contact centre. However, I have recently experienced a good old fashion, battery chicken style contact centre. Apologies for all the negativity. I refuse to be another contact centre employee whining about their job. I come bearing the gift of suggestions. Pizza is to pineapple, what suggestions are to complaints.
Here are a few little thoughts of mine:
It’s a complaint we hear all too often. There is too little communication on what is happening.
A morning meeting is a great way to create some excitement for the day. In one of my work places, a morning meeting was so ingrained in our culture, we would probably have a melt down without it. A morning meeting is a great place to share important news for the day, known issues, sing awkward birthday songs, these kind of things. It is also really important to give your people a voice in their team, which will help to drive engagement.
Bulk of communication via email.
These days the word Agile can fit right in between buzzwords like ‘Synergize’ and ‘Park it’. For me it really just describes a method of working with transparency. How can a team work as a team if we don’t know what others are doing? If we use sports as an example; We often hear of sports people having a connection so close to one another, it’s almost like they can read each others mind. They absolutely could not have a connection so close if they weren’t being completely open in their role. So where we can, I would always encourage openness in what we’re doing, what we’ve done and what’s in the future. Although getting buy-in may be your biggest obstacle, a wall is a great tool to make information as freely available as possible.
A lack of feedback.
How can anyone really know how they are doing when feedback is not regular and freely available. I thought I was a fantastic singer. Then one day someone told me I’m just “okay”. Needless to say I was shocked! I like to avoid adding more metrics as much as I can, but sometimes a feedback process may need to be implemented and measured just to ensure it becomes part of the team rituals. Feedback shows you care. Conversely, no feedback gives the impression that you don’t.
KPI reviews without allowing the agent to take the time to review their own work.
This is something I would define as a useless metric. To receive a score, for following process, decided by management and not have the ability to discuss the positives the opportunities is of little use to anyone. Most people likes to hear their own voice about as much as my old house mate liked to hear me sing. But I have always found great benefit in reviewing my own work and I have also seen great improvements in my peoples performance when we listen to calls together and use the review metric as a coaching tool. Most people want to improve and see progress in their life and career. There is really no need to incentivise it.
Management absence.
The idea of management ‘walking the floor’ may be something we’ve all heard, but I am finding it is something rarely seen in practice. The importance of this I cannot stress enough. Your people will have more faith in your leadership if you are present with them. Again, it is something that you may need to build into your daily process but ideally this would be something that comes naturally.
Quietly going about a large scale change.
Change is inevitable. Some companies may experience change more rapidly than others but it is still something unavoidable. Of course, some people are better at dealing with change than others. So we need to plan for change as much as we can. So creating some excitement while setting realistic expectations is a very important step in bringing people along on that change journey. Planned change predominantly comes from a place of improvement, so why not spruik the benefits for the people most closely affected?
IVR’s and working in silos
I actually thought this was a thing of the past but they are still out there. The dreaded IVR. In theory it works right? You train your people in a certain function, the customer chooses what support they need and they get through to an expert. Simple. In reality the nature of the demand may be complex or there may be more than one request. Or perhaps the customer simply chose the wrong option. All of a sudden, the expert is no longer an expert. I have even experienced new hotlines being set up to handle particular enquiries. Of course, the customer just calls the number they always call, only to be told the agent on the line cannot help them. Then they have to be transferred to someone else or worse, hang up and call another number <— an actual thing that happened. What I know is people are multi skilled and multi talented and more than capable of learning to service a range of enquiry. In fact, you might even find the variety in work will further engage your employees all the while increasing that highly sought after metric; First contact resolution.
Just a thought :)
Written by Matt Cameron
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The Benefits of Age Diversity
Wednesday 15th May, 2019
“No one wants to be on the phones.” If that sounds familiar, you are not alone. Contact Centres the world over are experiencing a similar issue of their agents avoiding the phone aspect of their role. Of course the natural assumption may be that this is a symptom of a millennial workforce, but realistically, any contact centre would also be experiencing an increasing millennial customer base.
While studies show millennials enjoy speaking on the phone far less than older generations, the same would ring true for your millennial customers that will likely be seeking alternative avenues of contact. This of course is a fantastic argument to promote increased traffic towards webchat but that is not the purpose of my blog today.
With the seemingly inevitable decline of manufacturing in many countries, left in its wake is a very capable and, for the most part, willing older group of workers out there looking to make their next career move. This move will be possibly unexpected and quite stressful.
My first point is to highlight that your baby boomers and GenX workers are far more likely to be comfortable on the phone. They of course grew up in a world in which you had to call your friends landline and speak to the parents before you could invite them out to play.
Of course the common argument is that our friends from older generations are not as tech savvy and it takes them longer to pick things up but this is only for fear of making mistakes. When you frustratingly watch your mum on her ipad, you will notice her clicks are slower but more considered than the peppering of clicks across your screen. I guarantee, the speed, or perhaps lack thereof, is only born out of how much they care. I for one, will take the care factor over the tech savvy any day of the week.
From my experience, I also see the benefit of a wider range of age in a contact centre. Our friends from older generations are often great exemplars of a professional approach to work. This maturity can be infectious; behaviour from which our younger generations can benefit.
I understand, workers from older generations come from a myriad of sectors and industries, but the reason I highlight the down turn in manufacturing is because employers are often setting up pathways for their employees to find new work beyond the aforementioned closures.
As an organisation, we need only present ourselves as an attractive and realistic option for ex-manufacturing workers. In doing so our we would benefit from these workers professional and considered approach and we’d be doing the right thing by our local workforce. A situation commonly referred to as a ‘win win’.
Written by Matt Cameron
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