Is it Possible to Do More with Less in Contact Centers?

Call center executives often struggle with the difficult challenge of doing less with more. With the right strategy in place, it is absolutely possible to improve operations with minimum resources to deliver maximum impact to the bottom-line.

Contact centers are not only ubiquitous, but are often a generator of customer dissatisfaction. More than 90 percent of customers’ initial impressions about a company’s brand are formed through their interaction with a contact center. This means that companies have a nine out of 10 chance to reinforce their perceived brand value with customers through the contact center the very first time the customer initiates contact – so, it’s important to immediately make the right impression.

In captive multi-channel contact centers, all of the customer channels, including voice, email and chat, must be seamlessly integrated with established service levels to meet customer demand. In organizations with a captive center that is augmented by an outsource center, the customer strategy, process, measurement and training must be appropriately aligned. For businesses that completely outsource or offshore call center functions, continuous training, process alignment and change management is required.

The reality is that most companies fail to recognize their contact centers as a mission critical function within the enterprise. In part, this failure reveals that most organizations don’t have a true customer strategy – or at least one that views customer base as a scarce asset with the power to encourage (or discourage) prospective or existing customers from conducting business via the Internet, word of mouth, Web 2.0 and social networking.

Even though many businesses recognize the opportunity in leveraging their contact centers to boost topline growth, the main business objective for most contact centers is cost control. In today’s economic environment, contact center executives and practice leaders are faced with myriad questions that require action – is it possible to do more with less in my contact center? Should I outsource, near shore or offshore my operations to take advantage of more cost effective labor pools?

While "cost cutting" and "cost containment" are viable business strategies, they are simply not sustainable. As long as businesses continue to make decisions about their customers from a costperspective, contact centers will struggle to provide high-quality service to customers, which typically results in lost customer equity, an erosion in shareholder value, and high attrition among contact center agents (another cost in and of itself).

This is bad news for any company. So, the key question becomes: Can process improvements help contact centers to lower costs while protecting the customer base they serve? The answer is a resounding, "Yes."

Three Guiding Principles to Process Improvements in Contact Centers

Over the past few years, there has been a lot of discussion around process improvement in contact centers. From aligning corporate strategy with tactical contact center priorities to Lean Six Sigma, contact centers are reducing costs - without sacrificing the customer experience - through the successful implementation of process improvement methodologies.

Since many processes exist in contact centers – from workforce management to quality assurance to skill-based routing – there are ample opportunities to identify potential efficiencies. The most prominent and routine process that exists in any contact center is the agent handling of customer calls. Process improvement is as much of a cultural investment as it is a financial one, so businesses preparing to embark on process improvement initiatives should follow these three guiding principles:

1. Establish Baseline Measures to Make the Case for Process Improvement

In a recent benchmark study, contact center executives were surveyed on the top three key performance indicators (KPI) they use to measure their organization’s focus on providing their customer base with an "experience" versus treating every interaction as a "transaction." The survey results revealed that "customer satisfaction," "total customer support" and "average call wait time" are the main KPIs measured by organizations as leading indicators for their contact centers.

Organizations implementing process improvements to drive change in contact centers should select a measurement that is transparent enough at the executive level to measure change in any direction – whether positive or negative – and warrant immediate attention and action. For some contact centers, the goal may be to reduce costs per call, another may want to improve first contact resolution by a given percentage and yet another may seek a specific percent change in customer satisfaction.

The key is to pick three to five critical baseline measures prior to developing process improvement initiatives, and track the progress of those measures both during the implementation process and postimplementation to determine success.

2. Ensure Executive Level Commitment Despite Earnings Pressure

In the case of a major financial institution, its stock was falling at an alarming rate due to the subprime mortgage crisis. As a result, the Board of Directors had fired the CEO, promoted the CFO to become the new CEO, and named the Controller the CFO. The first casualty of the new senior leadership team was an enterprise-wide Lean Six Sigma initiative that they viewed as "another flavor of the month" effort.

The company’s attempt to implement a strategic initiative aimed at reducing costs related to its contact center and delivering tangible bottom-line savings was squelched simply because its new senior leadership failed to see the value of process improvement during a time of intense earnings pressure. While the project champions did an exceptional job of demonstrating the value of the initiative to the CEO,they failed to illustrate that value consistently and frequently with the rest of the leadership team. Ensuring executive level commitment is more than having “sign-off” on an initiative - change management practices, creating buy-in, collaboration, frequent and consistent communication, and demonstrating measurable and sustainable results in a challenging economic environment are critical to the success of any process improvement initiative.

3. Start With a Process that Unnerves Your Customers

In another instance, a company was seeking assistance in capturing customer feedback through email surveys, focus groups, complaints and its contact center. In analyzing this feedback, the company identified a particular call type that drove customers to disconnect. As it turned out, they we were losing more customers than they were acquiring. A number of contact center agents indicated that they were not empowered to handle specific issues and, as a result, were unable to resolve customer problems. This was at the root of the company’s call center issues.

Through a process improvement initiative, the 10 most common call types into the center were analyzed, a cost was assigned to each call type, and a plan of action was implemented to listen to and evaluate the voice of the customer. The results included an improvement in first contact resolution rates due to the rollout of a self-service tool recommended by the customer base, a reduction in cost per call, a redesign in policies and procedures that empowered the contact center agents to make decisions in the best interest of the customer, and the transition of a contact center process that had been outsourced, which yielded $500K in savings.

Protecting Your Brand

To succeed in an increasingly competitive economic landscape, businesses need to change the way they view their contact center operations. Contact centers are the first line of defense in keeping customers happy, as it is the first point of direct interaction. Today’s consumer is hyper-sensitive and often lacks a sense of loyalty, so the importance of contact centers cannot afford to be overlooked.

If reducing contact center expenses, improving service levels, increasing customer demand and higher operational costs are forcing contact center executives to do more with less, business leaders should give serious thought to enabling contact centers with process improvement initiatives focused on improving the overall customer experience.

Your customers are a precious asset and short-term decision-making that is not in the customer’s best interest can erode trust in your brand. Forward-thinking organizations that prioritize process improvement initiatives to better serve their customers reduce expenses and improve the overall effectiveness of contact centers stand the best chance of surviving in today’s ultra-competitive economy.