I was asked 3 questions about contact centres for a website recently and I thought I’d share them with you:
1) What was the biggest challenge facing the contact centre industry in the last 12 months and how did they overcome it?
Whilst there are sexy new things we’re doing like customer help customer, analytics and new ways of knowledge sharing, its really about the same old challenges to brilliant operating basics that should be the focus for managers who are making big strides.
TOP OF THE LONG LIST OF INTERACTING BASICS ARE :
- a) Why customers have to contact you at all
- b) How the business model changes to focus on removing unnecessary contact, driving excellence in self service and engaging the whole business in removing root causes of frustrations and listening to feedback and intelligence from the contact points
- c) Operating effectively to meet demand
- d) Understanding what knowledge the website and staff need to answer customer needs
- e) the role of contact centres in providing feedback and intelligence to the rest of the business; and how to get the mountains of customer feedback gathered around the business to be useful
2) What are the key issues you expect the industry to be tackling in the next 12-18 months?
- a) Embedding new business wide processes that remove at least 20% of unit costs every year by using feedback and what front line staff know to drive change
- b) The move to customer help customer model causing the role of contact centres to change rapidly
- c) The same ones as before on brilliant basics of running contact centres and self service channels
3) Could you give us some insights on how companies can stop doing stupid things to their customers and the benefits it is bringing to their organisations?
Our mission is “How do we stop doing dumb things to our customers and our people?” so we have lots to say on this topic. If I can paraphrase the question – the most successful businesses are removing things systematically by installing and embedding new company-wide management processes based on a different kind of data. The least successful businesses keep kicking off analysis and then generating projects to fix things: we call this “it’s raining projects”. The least successful businesses are swamped with the feedback they request from customers, but don’t act on. For more contact peter.massey@budd.uk.com or take a look at www.budd.uk.com
