I've focused my last two posts on the branded experience. In my first post in this series, I focused on the importance of a branded experience. In my second post, I explored evaluating your existing customer experience. Now we'll explore making the experience predictable.
As you take steps to create a predictable experience, focus on facilitating change using the five key elements identified in my last post. Enable your center management to develop a customer-centric philosophy and communicate a basic strategy in terms of performance targets and quality standards. The same team should focus on your people, developing performance objectives for agents that broadly correlate to the outlined strategy. Make sure your agents understand the new plan and are rewarded accordingly as they work for the success of the enterprise.
It should now be possible to evolve your processes, because agent 'workload' has been calculated, and schedules and forecasts reflect this. Emphasis on queue and floor management techniques will support the agents in this effort. This is also a good time to upgrade your technology. Your contact center's key systems (including quality monitoring, customer experience and performance management) should provide the contact center with powerful analytics, easy-to-use management tools and accurate reporting.
The integration of technology is crucial at this point, because for too long the contact center, its agents and management have been tasked with improving interactions when, in fact, they have been powerless to resolve many of the issues required for a successful call outcome. With integration to other enterprise customer databases, departmental silos can be broken down, so even a newly hired shipping clerk can get information that identifies better ways to please customers. Once this powerful technology is in place, it becomes possible to expand your measurement metrics to provide true actionable intelligence based on every customer interaction.
As these elements fall into place, your customers begin to feel they have been serviced in the manner that meets their objectives.
