Can BI Tools ever replace the need for Human Contact Centre Management Experience?

by Peter Elsey

With Contact Centres often being the only point of communication between companies and their consumers, and with NPS having become the leading KPI of choice in the industry, there is renewed focus for Contact Centres to invest in technologies that give them a better view of the Customer Experience; for example, Omni-channel solutions that can provide a single view of the customer journey, and mechanisms to monitor customer speech and even their emotions.

This is all well and good, but isn’t this just icing on the cake? 75% of customers just want a fast solution, so when their support team is unable to deliver this, how are Contact Centre managers supposed to know how to respond?

Despite NPS being perceived to be metric depicting a certain maturity in CX Strategy, recent studies have shown that simply getting a quick and effective solution when making contact with organisations represents 75% of the overall customer satisfaction score.

So if accessibility to effective support is still so important, it is therefore still vitally important for Contact Centre managers to not lose sight of the core elements that determine their support team’s ability to deliver on these simple, but key building blocks that drive NPS.

Thankfully technology is catching up, and automated support processes (Voice & Chat) are becoming commonplace, not only helping organisations to get rid of a high percentage of expensive inbound calls, but also by providing customers with a fast and efficient resolution to simple, day to day enqueries.

With a heightened awareness about the significance of CX and its effect on future buying decisions, we would hope that unexpected call volume spikes and Service Level woes were a thing of the past, but today, arguably more than ever before, things can and do go very wrong.

With physical goods no longer designed to withstand years of use, with new products, new technology, new software and new services being rushed to market, often without adequate testing, this generates unforeseen impact on a customer base whose expectations of service are only getting higher.

So what happens when something goes wrong, and the customer service environment destabilises?

When issues arise, either in the market, or within the Contact Centre itself, often this can result in customer bottlenecks which, if left unattended, can have negative rippling effects, and a detrimental effect on your NPS.

So with availability of support staff still being a rudimentary indicator of Customer Satisfaction and hence a strong NPS driver, it stands to reason that Service Level, still remains one of the main KPIs of choice for many Contact Centres, certainly internally, and many companies do still use it to benchmark the heath of their customer service delivery.

As odd as it may initially sound, and considering the gravity placed upon it, Service Level by itself is not a primary KPI. It is what is known as a consequential KPI, a by-product of managing a series of other KPIs, or metrics further down the pyramid. In just the same way as NPS is made up of multiple component parts, Service Level is also determined by other factors such as volumes, productivity, transaction times and staffing.

So from this we can ascertain that a poor Service Level is not curable by itself, and by itself is not the problem, it is merely an indicator or symptom of something else not working in the Contact Centre. So with this in mind, when Service Levels start slipping, how are mangers supposed to know what to look for, and therefore how to go about fixing it?

What are the common Points of Failure in Contact Centres?

In Contact Centres, there are several critical dependencies and potential points of failure that can directly affect your Service Levels.

This can range from problems with Staffing, Productivity and Real Time Management, to Customer Activity, Process Breakdown, Systems Performance, or due to a sub-optimal Support strategy being deployed.

Martin Shaw, founder of CCA and former Head of Customer Service for several MNCs based out of London and Kuala Lumpur, has had significant hands-on experience of these dynamics.

“When I was managing Contact Centres, I never had a problem seeing when my SL% was down, such was the emphasis placed upon it, and most of the reporting tools we had, could at least tell us that much.

“The challenge was in finding what was causing it and getting a clear enough picture to be able to take corrective steps and put out the fires in a reasonable timeframe.”

“When I noticed SL% dipping in one of my departments, I would immediately go and see my managers or Business Analysts, to try and find out what was going on. With the early findings I was given, I would call on my experience in handling similar symptoms before, to then direct the business analysts to target specific data silos to validate the suspected root cause, so that I could make a decision.”

“With many years of Operational experience, a lot of the time I got it right, but sometimes I didn’t, and we’d have to start over from scratch, and this took time.”

But what about newly promoted managers who have not have been fully exposed to these dynamics before, and are unable to cut through the noise of big data; or even senior decision makers who wouldn’t normally have direct access to the various Operational reporting systems, so are fully dependent on someone else to get even basic information?

A common knee jerk reaction is to jump to conclusions, for example that volumes are spiking or that you don’t have enough staff. While, without a doubt, injecting extra staff is going to help your Service Levels, this probably wouldn’t be a great business decision.

The key is to find out what is the causing your performance to slip, and to normalise service as quickly as possible, protecting as many customers as possible from negative experiences. This is where better visibility is essential.

“CCA is more than just an automated reporting tool for Contact Centres”, adds Martin Shaw, CCA’s founder. “The way in which the entire visibility layer has been designed, managers at all levels are provided with new information about emerging issues, anomalies and root causes in their own departments within seconds, across the entire data spectrum.”

For years, Martin has had to carry the weight and full accountability for large and complex Contact Centres, and things often went unchecked, so opportunities were missed.

“Giving managers independent access to Insights about their own teams, empowers them to understand issues, respond faster, and make better decisions; this seamlessly raises the bar.”

To succeed in the rapidly evolving CX landscape, Contact Centre leaders need to keep their finger on the pulse at all times. The only way to achieve this, is to undertake comprehensive data analytics on all relevant data sets, autonomously.

In this way, any non-compliance or potential customer impact can be flagged, and quickly understood by decision makers, fast-tracking recovery initiatives, removing the risk of potentially very heavy fallout.

“One of CCA’S key strengths is in highlighting what is broken, very quickly, and seamlessly guides managers towards the likely root causes and next course of action.”, continues Martin.

“This removes the dependency on human experience and manual effort to diagnose problems, which can stall the decision-making process.”

Having better visibility has untold benefits for the efficiency of the Operations, as well as an improved quality of service that Contact Centres are able to provide, even in Contact Centres that appear, on the surface, to be performing very well.

Instead of managers wasting precious time compiling and analysing reports or worrying about data integrity, they can use these BI Tools in order to be able to focus their energy on decision making and driving their CX Strategy forwards.

This means that when we as customers encounter issues, the easier it is for us to get the appropriate support that we need, the better our CX journey will be, and the more likely we as customers will stay loyal, and recommend your brand to others.

About the Author

Peter Elsey

Peter is a freelance technical consultant specialising in optimisation technology for Contact Centres, and is a leading advocate and promoter of CCA.

He has previously worked with several MNCs in Europe and South East Asia, delivering high ROI solutions for his clients (hardware and software).

CCA is an award winning umbrella Contact Centre KPI visibility solution that provides decision makers with new Insight, by exposing emerging trends and bottlenecks across all vital components of the Contact Centre.