Never underestimate the power of the contact centre

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In a hyperconnected world, customers have come to expect great experiences – anywhere and anytime – whether they’re checking their bank balance on their mobile, calling a gas company to query a bill or ordering a pizza online. 

In their quest to meet such modern demands, businesses have expanded their communication channels and this, in turn, has increased pressure on customer contact centres.

The contact centre, though, simply wasn’t designed to support this kind of multi-channel interaction –  predicated as it was largely on human agents in dedicated locations, fielding queries directly from customers, mostly over the phone.

Supporting infrastructures have struggled to keep pace. Vital customer information is often stored across multiple systems, and agents end up being as frustrated as their customers when they can’t access it in a timely way – or in some cases, at all. When Covid-19 hit, simultaneously boosting customer contact and rendering fixed-location contact centres temporarily unavailable, their limitations became far more than just a problem for another day. 

Businesses are realising that – far from being a headache – transforming contact centre operations is an opportunity to look strategically at the whole customer experience and, in doing so, to make the contact centre a true source of value for customers and business. Here are three ways they are doing it.

Optimising an existing process

There are legitimate reasons businesses have tended to put off the challenge of updating their contact centre infrastructure. It can certainly be intimidating to overhaul a system with multiple legacy platforms and a bias towards on-premise storage and systems, especially in heavily regulated industries. And because it’s seen as a technology problem, the tendency has been to approach the challenge by asking “what technology will solve this problem, in this process?” 

There’s nothing wrong with choosing to optimise an existing process with technology – for many businesses it will be the most practical way forward in the short term – but a tech-first approach can backfire. Take this case in point.

IBM was called in to help a business that had deployed a chat function to channel queries from its website. The idea was that agents would chat to and serve multiple clients simultaneously; productivity would increase and customers’ needs would be met.

What actually happened was that customer queries relevant to this particular part of the website required permissions that simply didn’t match that of the agents, so many of the chats ended with those agents apologising before manually directing their customers to call the contact centre. A horrible customer experience.

We stepped back and looked at the top call reasons, then mapped these against the queries that agents were able to answer. This was an experience-led approach that aimed to deliver a smooth and logical experience for the customer. It created a customer and business value-driven approach to the sorts of queries could and should be handled by an automated agent versus those that would benefit from the human touch. Happier customers and agents, and a call centre operation far more effective at peak times. (And no major overhaul of back-end systems, either, as this kind of optimisation can typically be delivered in weeks, not months.)

Growing through workflow redesign

When businesses start to look at their whole customer and employee operation, they can realise further benefits – for example, increases in productivity that the business can reinvest in an improved customer experience, to support increased demand, or even to increase order value. At the heart of this model is a single customer view platform that can access internal and external data and present it to agents in an easily consumable way. This underpins an intelligent workflow and process to enable the best experience for agents and customers alike.

For example, with a workflow like order-to-cash (a typical B2B contact centre process) there’s no point having a sales team negotiate a contract with a customer if, when that customer picks up the phone to place an order, the agent can’t immediately see the discounts, service terms and order limits agreed in those negotiations and act on them. With siloed business systems and processes, it’s surprisingly easy for such situations to occur.

A single customer view is a big part of the answer in cases like this, but, again, it’s about more than just technology. If you can take an experience-led approach to a process like order to cash, and view it from the customer and employee perspective, you can immediately break down these silos at an enterprise level and deliver significant value in the longer term.

Transformation

Most exciting thing for me is to see businesses realise the value of the contact centre as a source of insight, and to use these insights as a vehicle for genuine business transformation. Here’s another example.

IBM works with a mobile-first business that provides (among other things) mobility services. The client was frustrated by how little visibility they had into the customer and how they could better serve them. We worked cross-functionally, again taking an experience-led approach to transform processes (the operating model), roles (that employees would play) and technology, underpinned by the new “data brain” of the contact centre. This was in service of delightful experiences for customers that would support the growth of the customer base.

The contact centre operation was optimised with remote working, seamless omnichannel service (that improved ESAT and CSAT) and knowledge transfer from agent to system – for the benefit of all. A cultural transformation occurred with a closer working relationship between sales, customer service and marketing, and agents became empowered brand ambassadors who would lead the customer relationship.

Furthermore, the business now has the ability to unearth insights that will power long-term business improvements – for example, the dollar value of an infrastructure service resolution, or the diagnosis of key areas that were slowing revenue growth.

This is just one example of many changes that together add up to transformative opportunities for businesses who recognise just how powerful the contact centre can be.

Centre of opportunity

All too often, businesses see the contact centre as the symptom of a problem; some kind of gap in customer care or a deficiency in customer service. But as we’ve seen, businesses that reimagine the role of the contact centre can achieve much greater customer and business value. Get this right, and the contact centre will play a crucial role in business transformation.

And the secret? An experience-led approach that fuses the best of people, intelligent processes and, of course, enabling technologies. It’s literally about putting customers and employees first – as most businesses aspire to do anyway.

Find out more about how you can reinvent your contact centre in this smart paper.

Download your copy of “Reinventing the Contact Center” IBV Report