The Contact Centre is a complex and high volume environment, with a multitude of product lines and services, ranging from Customer Service, Technical Support, Billing, Sales and Fault Reporting.
With it being so easy for customers to swap out to competitors through number portability, the Contact Centre can be a powerful weapon in maintaining customer loyalty.
Maintaining a sufficiently trained workforce in the Contact Centre is an ongoing challenge.
Staff turnover is typically very high, with a younger demographic, using telco Contact Centres as an easy stop-gap to earn rent and going out money.
If mismanaged even slightly, due to the high volumes of customer transactions involved, and the multitude of potential failure points, the Contact Centre can become a high pressure, high-stress environment, resulting in even higher staff attrition, and a long recovery cycle.
There is a delicate balance to be met, between quality and productivity, with efforts on the former leading to Customer Service excellence, and focus on the latter, potentially encouraging staff to take shortcuts in order to hit KPIs, leading to a negative customer experience.
With a high propensity of customers to attrite, effective Case Management and Turnaround Time is critical. There is a strong emphasis on minimizing Complaints (especially about the Contact Centre), so such cases need to be picked up and handled immediately before causing further damage.
Due to the incessant dependency customers have on mobile services in particular, customer activity into the Contact Centre is highly responsive to technological and systems performance. Any lapse, error or outage event will cause immediate flurries of activity into the Contact Centre.
Close monitoring of norms and attention to any sudden spikes/drop-offs trends and market behaviour is crucial in order to minimise negative customer perceptions. Such abnormal activity can also affect the integrity of forecasts for future volume forecasting and resource planning.
The deployment of Bots and AI are yet to make a significant impression on the volume of customer transactions into Contact Centres, so there is still a high dependency on headcount. Staff scheduling and productivity are always on the radar, as well as managing unplanned Shrinkage, which is rife.
Service Levels are the main benchmark to success (often regulated), with a high propensity of customers to abandon quickly, if they cannot access the Contact Centre immediately. Such detrimental impact can very quickly lead to missed SLAs, so effective real-time management of staff resources across all channels is crucial.
