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contact center Archives - Infinite Green

Mar 30
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The Bigger Picture

By Business, Scott

As a consultant, I get the opportunity to provide an outside-in perspective to clients. Some of them request this perspective asking questions such as “What is the rest of my industry doing?” or “How do other contact centers approach this problem?” They are genuinely curious about how to leverage the learnings of others and apply it to their own business problem. Others are not so open to this type of outside-in perspective. Often times, clients take a defensive stance trying to justify that their operation is so unique, benchmarks or best practices just don’t apply to them. Usually, this feedback comes from leaders that have grown up in the operation for many years. These leaders get so attached to their own operational construct, that any process or operational suggestion meets with a closed minded and defensive response. The resulting business outcomes are predictable, little change in customer satisfaction scores, operational metrics, and employee engagement scores. Worse yet, your company gets outpaced by your competition.

The challenge comes in how you get your leaders into a position to see things with a different lens. Many companies send their teams through some kind of packaged leadership training program. Others, send them to conferences where they see presentations / best practices from others who have faced the same business challenges in the hopes that they will come back and try to apply some of these to their companies’ operation. In either case, there isn’t enough emotional investment to make real change happen. Some minor changes may occur, but nothing of real business value.

From my experience, the most material changes in operational results occur when leaders have an emotional and vested connection with overall company outcomes. Instead of holding them accountable for handle time, utilization, productivity, and other standard contact center metrics, try holding them accountable for company level metrics. Sales / revenue growth, customer acquisition, shareholder value, and other top level score carded metrics for the company’s executive team. This will force contact center leaders up and out of the operation and talk to other leaders about how the contact center contributes to the company bottom line. So, instead of looking at handle time as a measure of success, they will start looking at company value per contact. This will result in your contact center connecting the dots to other business processes throughout the company, which will in turn drive real business value.

I often ask “C” level leaders what value their contact center provides to the company. More often than not, they can’t answer the question. I have a standard response for these situations. “Close down your contact center for a week, and your customers will certainly tell you where the real value is.”

Now, go change something!

Oct 23
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Omni-Channel Design Gone Wrong

By Scott

I had recently tried to upgrade our TV service here at the office so we could watch some local playoff games. First step, let’s go to the xfinity web site. After all, every company has options to upgrade services within your web account right? This is what we continue to be preached about in monthly statements, email promotions, mobile applications, and our good friend the IVR. xfinity promotes it so much, I bet I could get a free bowl of soup by just logging in.

After logging into my account and looking around, I couldn’t locate any options for upgrading services. Customer experience breakdown number one. So, I see an option for web chat. Great, I love web chat let’s give that a whirl. I get connected to Arron who asks me a series of account questions. I think to myself, why is he asking me account questions if I am already logged into my account on the web. Shouldn’t my information be passed over to Arron including my search strings on upgrading TV service? That web chat button I selected was in a secure location on the web site after all. I pass over my account information to Arron who validates that I am who I say I am.

Finally time to ask the $1M dollar question “how do I upgrade our service so I can watch my local sports teams?” Arron then responses with, “are you a residential or business customer?” I start thinking about the information I just provided and the fact that Arron should have my account profile in front of him and he should already know the answer to that question. I bury the snide comment, let that slide as an experience issue and answer “business.” Well, good old Arron indicates that this web chat option is only for “sales.” I respond in kind with the most logical response I can think of, “isn’t upgrading services where I provide xfinity more money on a monthly basis considered sales?” I wait a few minutes for my new friend Arron to write a response. Looking into his vast knowledge base of canned responses that were pre-designed by some Six Sigma project team 5 years ago who had no real experience talking to customers. So I wait, and finally the response comes through “you will have to call our business services number to complete that request.” Customer experience breakdown number two.

Arron could have easily had someone from business sales call me, but I guess that must be another team, phone skill, contact center location, organization, VP, and P&L. So, he provides me the xfinity business phone number to call and I give it a go. The first tree in the IVR prompts me to select 1 for residential service, or press 2 for business service. Since the phone number Arron provided was specifically for BUSINESS users, I am befuddled why they are wasting more of my time. So I select option 2, and another prompt comes up to enter the zip code of my billing location. I enter my zip code and again the IVR prompts me to select 1 for residential or press 2 for business service. Customer experience breakdown number three. I enter option 2 and it finally routes me to the next available agent. I get Jodi on the phone and I explain what I want to accomplish. Once again, I get the question, “is this for residential or business service.” Customer experience breakdown number four. I explain that this is for business, again, and Jodi says “oh, that is handled through our business services team and I need to transfer you.” Customer experience breakdown number five. Ok, I am at about 30 minutes into this experience and have navigated four different interaction channels thus far and this ongoing fight between organizations is evident and I am caught in the middle. I imagine the cost to support businesses is far more expensive than it is to support residential services so even though the customer called the business only number, AND selected the business service IVR option, route the call to residential support.

After I get transferred and use my 4th channel, I get the answer I needed and decided not to proceed with the purchase out of frustration. 30 minutes of my time and xfinity’s time wasted on a question or transaction that could have been solved in 2 minutes. It’s no wonder that their services are so damn expensive and customer experience scores for the Internet Provider / Cable Services are consistently the lowest in the industry.

So, for a company to claim to have “omni-channel” support, shouldn’t the customer expect to get 100% of their needs fulfilled in any channel? I would argue yes. So here are a few lessons learned for companies looking to improve their own customer experiences.

1. If you have an on-line account portal or information. Make it clear up front what services are available or not available BEFORE trying to force the customer to self service
2. On line chat options are a great option for companies looking to improve service but they must be able to perform 100% of the activities that a phone agent can
3. If you must have the customer switch channels, make it easy for them and proactively call them. Don’t just give them a number to dial
4. Route the call to the correct skill the first time! Customers would rather wait on hold a few minutes rather than getting transferred multiple times

Just think xfinity, if you actually rethought your end to end support model, you could have saved about 30 minutes of expensive contact center support costs and increased revenue to boot!

Now, go change something!

Scott McIntyre
Chief Instigator – Infinite Green Services

Jan 30
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When Domain Expertise Gets In The Way Of Change

By Business, General, Scott

So, your contact center has been in place for many years. It probably started many years ago from a few people taking phone calls during regular business hours and has developed into a multi-site, multi-channel, multi-shift operation. What started as an agile team adjusting to shifting and changing customer needs and quickly expanding products and solutions, is now changing at a snails’ pace and not keeping up with company or customer’s needs.

What really has changed? Just because the operation is larger doesn’t automatically mean it takes longer or is harder to change. There are great examples of large organizations with the ability to quickly change at scale. Intuit software has over 5000 agents on the phone supporting customers across the world and their product changes every year to support new tax code. Their product has moved from desktop software to software as a service. Their customer segments and products continue to grow year over year and they continue to be a high growth company with no signs of slowing down.

So, if sheer size isn’t the barrier, the next culprit must be tools or systems. You didn’t have complex tools or systems when you were a smaller operation and were able to change quickly. Why do you need something different as a larger organization?  Companies like Zappos, USAA, and Amazon don’t have complex tool sets to service customers and have some of the highest customer satisfaction ratings of any company across any vertical and also have large, complex contact center organizations.  Granted, there are tools that would help facilitate more efficient and effective changes across an organization, but lack of tools isn’t a barrier for these companies and they don’t use it as an excuse not to keep up with change.

There is one common thread I have observed in the 50+ companies I have worked in and tends to be the root cause that prevents change. That common thread is people with too much domain expertise.  They have glued together processes, duct taped systems, and used their ingenuity to keep the operation afloat in the most efficient and effective way possible. Don’t get me wrong,  I admire these people. They have to span the organization, keep up with change, provide insights to multiple audiences, reduce operating expenses, and try to explain to the CEO why they missed service levels at 11:30 PM for a couple of calls while they answered 10,000 calls within service levels throughout the rest of the day.

Over time, they get too close to the fragile operating model they have built. A once agile operating model where change was the norm must now flow through a few people because of the self-induced complexity created over time. They lose the true essence of what got them in business in the first place, providing a differentiated experience to the customer. They now fall back on process, regulations, costs, metrics, quality, industry vertical knowledge, and a myriad of other excuses to not change. They find comfort in this. Every customer issue that surfaces in the operation is a fire they alone must battle and at the end of the day they feel a sense of comfort knowing that they solved a few customer issues. They lose outside-in perspective, and now are the most resistant to change. Once motivated by company growth and culture, has switched them to fear, defensiveness, and knowledge hoarding.

When you identify this behavior, what do you do? Most leaders often try to rationalize with these operators. Trying to fix things one at a time. It’s like a game of whack-a-mole. One issue gets pounded down, another one or two pop up and as the game progresses, you never seem to make headway. You must look at your operation from the top down, not from the bottom up. I have seen companies invest millions of dollars on expensive consulting engagements only to get a bottoms up list of things to fix. Most of them sit on the shelf collecting dust because they fixed one thing, and two new issues popped up that needed to be solved. Time to remodel and move the furniture around to get a new perspective and don’t be afraid to break it.

Ask yourself, what value do you want from your contact center operation? If you can’t answer that question, think about what would happen if you shut the contact center down completely. That value statement should inform everything from hiring guides, to SOP, to performance goals.

Now, go change something!

Scott McIntyre

Chief Instigator

Feb 02
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The 2015 Service Supported Contact Center

By Business, General, Scott

Contact centers have gone through significant change over the past several years, the most significant being the use of cloud based services. These cloud services allow companies extreme flexibility and platform reliability without the hassle of upgrades, maintenance contracts, and slow IT response time to requested changes. These services are now mature enough to handle every aspect of a contact center’s technology needs with out the need of a large IT support team and millions of dollars spent to maintain it.

Tools like inContact, Corvisa, and 8 x 8 can do everything the old legacy ACD systems like Avaya, Cisco, and Aspect can do. I would argue that they can do it easier, cheaper, and you only need to pay for the capacity that you use versus investing for peak volumes. Infinite Green has implemented a few of these new cloud based tools and based on our experience, these tools can be designed and deployed in a fraction of the time that it would take with premise based hardware and software solutions. The same could be said for CRM or service based platforms including Zendesk, Spice, and Salesforce. These platforms contain all the functionality needed to provide a great customer experience including knowledge management, community, reporting, and scripting tools. For other specialty services you may already have running in your operation, these tools also come with pre-built adapters that allow for easy integration with other service based applications.

I remember a time when I was the business owner of a large contact center operation for a fortune 100 company where I was quoted $1 Million dollars and 9-12 months to turn on an outbound dialer on ourcomplex Cisco contact center environment. Not only did it cost me all of my project dollars that year, it still didn’t work by the end of the project. I had spent all that time and resources on something that we couldn’t even get working. Fast forward to today and Infinite Green has had many projects where with a few simple design elements and requirements, we turned up a full suite of integrated channels including outbound dailers in less that 4 weeks and most of that time was spent with change management issues in the operation.

Technology is not the barrier anymore, it is quite the opposite. I would argue that it would take longer to run through a change management cycle within your operation than it would to make significant changes to your contact management or CRM service platform. They are that easy to change. If you haven’t had experience with these service platforms, I highly recommend you check them out. Carve out a small piece of your contact center operation and give them a test drive.  Find someone on your team that has some technical skills and is curious about how these tools work. Give them a sandbox environment to play in and give them a month to develop a good understanding of how they operate. My guess is you will have an actual proof of concept up and running with live customer calls in no time and would never even consider going back to your legacy platforms ever again.

Scott McIntyre

Chief Instigator – Infinite Green