Thanks Dan but do you have the Contact Center metrics for BPOs?

15/04/2024by OmniTouch International OmniTouch International No Comments

THANKS DAN BUT DO YOU HAVE THE CONTACT CENTER METRICS FOR BPOs?

I’ll never forget it.

After a quality coaching class with a group of Team Leaders in the shared services group of a bank, one of the Participants sent me this email –

“Dan, I loved the course. I learned how to better coach my people. And I appreciated that you shared the high level metrics we can use to track progress.

But as you know, I work in a BPO setting. So those metrics don’t work for us.

Can you send me the metrics for BPOs?”

But there aren’t different metrics for BPOs

There aren’t different metrics for BPOs than for an in-house Center.

A Contact Center is a Contact Center. Whether BPO or in-house.

Even those places that still don’t want to call themselves a Contact Center – but actually often are.

The pool of operational Contact Center metrics is well understood.

What differs from Center to Center are the decisions around which metrics are selected, prioritized and pursued.

In some Centers, the metric set choices are tangibly more Customer Experience oriented.
In some Centres, the metric set choices are tangibly more cost or efficiency oriented. (And to say that the BPO Participants in this particular workshop were pummeled into efficiency wouldn’t be an exaggeration.)
In some Centers, there are metrics choices that are just plain wrong from an operational standpoint. Even today when the Contact Center ecosystem is well understood.

But whatever these metric choices are – recognize that they represent one of the single most important decisions you will ever make.

As shared by a Customer Experience thinker some years back, people do what is measured, incentivized and celebrated.

And when you’re talking about Agents, Team Leaders & Team Managers, metrics are very top of mind.

These metrics – the ones that have been selected, prioritized and pursued – dramatically influence the mindset & performance of the people in your Center.

To the point where they – including the Participant who emailed me – believe that the way your Center works is just how it is across the entire Contact Center industry.

That the way you do things in your Center is the industry standard.

Without realizing that the Center down the road or three floors up in the same office tower, has different strategies & priorities than you do.

And, as a result, has chosen a different metrics set.

https://www.omnitouchinternational.com/how-to-help-your-contact-centre-agents-improve-their-performance

You have to know what your doing

People don’t go to school to become professionals in the Contact Center or Customer Experience industry.

Many learn on the job – from people who also learned on the job.

What I’ve personally seen over and over is when a new ‘big boss’ comes in and realizes that the level of strategic Contact Center know-how in the current Team isn’t sufficient to achieve organizational business objectives.

So they set about to change that.

The choices around metrics takes know-how, thought and contextualization to your Customer & Business ecosystem.

Don’t just copy what someone else is doing.
Don’t rely on non-existent or irrelevant industry standards.
Don’t pursue the same things year after year without stopping to ask yourself why and if what you’re doing makes sense.

When I teach Operations Management work through all the metrics in easy to understand categories.

From there we begin to pull together the interrelationships that exist between metrics in the Center and even metrics for the Organization.

And perhaps my favorite part is when the Participants get together in groups and talk about how and why they’d design their Center metrics system. Based on everything they’ve learned up to this point.

The selection of metric sets for your Center is one of the most decisions you’ll ever make.

Because your choices have far reaching impact on the business results you will achieve.

And on the lives of the Employees & Customers that you serve.

It can’t get more important than that.

Thank you for reading!

Thank you for taking the time to read this today.

If you’d like to stay up to date on our articles, activities and offers just drop us your email address or add it to the contact form on our website.

Daniel Ord

[email protected] / www.omnitouchinternational.com

I think our Reports Person has lost the plot

19/02/2024by OmniTouch International OmniTouch International No Comments

When you’re not sure why the reports you generate matter, or wonder if they even make sense, it’s time to take a step back.

“I think our Reports Person has lost the plot.”

That’s what one of our Participants said to the group after we had finished working through the Contact Centre metrics topic in a recent workshop.

“They generate these complex reports that no one really understands. It’s a big relief to know I don’t have to just accept them simply because we’ve always done it this way.”

That share prompted another Participant in the course to display a report that was being used in their Centre.

As we all stared at the screen trying to figure out what the report was meant to achieve, here is what she said:

“My predecessor who created this report had been in the role a long time.

So our big bosses and everyone in the team assumed that they were an ‘expert’. And that this report was industry standard or at least ‘right’ in some way.

Based on what I’ve learned in this course so far I’ve already emailed our CEO and told them that we’re going to redefine some of the terms we use and present our performance to them in a better report.

I got a very positive response to that!”

I had my own story to share

I shared the story of how, after delivering a global workshop on-site with a Client, the reports person for that company spent nearly two hours explaining one metric that they created and used to track performance in their Centre.

That explanation was so confusing that even to this day, with half a dozen photos of the whiteboard in my phone, I still can’t quite make heads or tails of it.

And as it turned out – as I met others in that same company – nobody else could understand it either.

The calculations presented may have been highly accurate. And may have served a higher level purpose.

But complexity in place of clarity is never a good idea.

If you’re running a Contact Centre or Customer Experience group and your folks need a PhD to understand a metric that’s supposed to guide their behavior, you’ve already got a problem.

Because the very people who are supposed to make it ‘happen’ can’t explain it.Which means they can’t understand it either.

Lesson: Clarity matters.

Sometimes people who are new to the role have an advantage over those with years of experience

I sometimes find that people who are new to the industry have an easier time to stand up and ask, “Why do we do this? What is this report supposed to help us with? Is it actually helping?”

Experience is great.

But be cautious about assuming that years of experience – and doing the same thing over and over – is a reliable indicator that we’re doing the right thing.

https://www.omnitouchinternational.com/the-london-tube-map-and-cx-strategy-a-story

Reports are more than just reports

It’s easy to say they’re just reports. But that’s a big oversimplification.

Reports – and especially what’s on them – tell people in a formal and structured way what matters around here. If we measure it, then it must be important.

Which guides people’s behavior. And people’s behavior informs the work culture.

Challenge yourself from time to time to be really clear on which reports matter and which ones, perhaps, don’t.

Because it’s so worth it to get it right.

https://www.omnitouchinternational.com/why-years-of-experience-is-not-the-best-predictor-of-contact-centre-success

Thank you for reading!

Thank you for the time you took to read this today. I appreciate it!

If you’d like to be kept updated on new articles and information just share your email address directly with my by email or on the contact form on our website.

Daniel Ord

[email protected]

www.omnitouchinternational.com

Why years of experience is not the best predictor of Contact Centre success

26/01/2024by OmniTouch International OmniTouch International No Comments

Why years of experience is not the best predictor of Contact Centre success

You’ve heard it, you’ve read it and you’ve seen it.

The years of experience line.

Whether it’s a conference speaker, a LinkedIn blogger or someone where you work.

Where they tell you some variation of “I have over 5, 15, 35 years of experience in the industry.”

But years of experience on its own has never been a reliable predictor of success in the Contact Centre profession.

Or arguably any profession.

Why not? You’ve heard some of these too.

One of my favorite sayings is this one.

Practice doesn’t make perfect, it makes permanent.

It refers to the idea that people can end up doing the same things in pretty much the same way, over and over.

To the point it becomes habitual and engrained.

The way they write their emails. The way they measure quality. The way they calculate productivity.

Sure, when you look at a calendar a number of years have gone by, let’s say five years.

But a closer look reveals that sometimes its been the same single year of experience that’s been largely repeated over and over for five years.

What’s ultimately important is the quality of experience you earn over time. Not just the duration of that experience.

Here are a few factors we see that influence that quality of experience.

Who’s your Boss?

We know that ‘who’ you work for makes a tremendous difference in the quality of experience that you earn over time.

Some bosses have a talent and zest for developing people. For pushing them out of their comfort zone and into new possibilities.

The best career booster of all time is to hitch your wagon to a boss with high expectations – even when working for them can’t always be described as easy.

Other bosses are more hands off. It’s just their style.

Or perhaps they just don’t have the depth of their own that enables them to successfully grow other people.

“You can’t pour from any empty cup” is an expression used to talk about self-care.

But I think it can be repurposed to describe the depth required inside ourselves to grow the people around you.

Not all the bosses out there are ready or able to grow people – they don’t have that depth – or not yet.

Who is your Employer?

Years of experience working for a superb Employer beats years of experience working for an average Employer every time.

Sometimes when I’m asked for advice on how to grow in the industry I’ll suggest working for the very best organization you can.

Because they very often do things differently.

That Contact Centre across the street from you? Or the one a few floors up from you in your office block?

They could be doing a much better job, simply because of who that company is and how much they actually believe in the value of Customers and Employees.

There are very real gaps between average, good and great Employers.

https://www.omnitouchinternational.com/cx-lessons-we-can-learn-from-the-contact-centre-industry

Delivering positive impact does not require years of experience

I regularly meet Contact Centre Leaders who are literally brand new to the industry.

The mission for these new Leaders?

To put it bluntly – to fix and/or reinvigorate the Contact Centre. To bring it back to life.

Typically these people bring real-world commercial success from another department, an open & questioning mind and the ability to reimagine and redefine Contact Centre success.

I think they (often) succeed, in part, because they don’t carry the baggage of years of experience. And the hard coded beliefs that can come with that.

They don’t have to unlearn and relearn. They can just learn.

And then consider apply what they learn to the context and culture of their Organization.

Most people don’t go to school for this kind of work

There’s no question that experience matters.

Being in the trenches gives one an understanding of the job, the context and the culture that can’t be achieved by studying for an exam.

But the value of experience shouldn’t be used to denigrate or diminish the value of know-how.

What about the essential dynamics, principles & practices that have been examined, tested and used successfully in the Customer industry?

Know-how has its role too.

Surgeons aren’t expected to learn on the job.

You wouldn’t want your appendix removed by someone who wasn’t, in some way, formally qualified to do so.

Nor would you want someone to do your taxes just because they have a ‘passion’ for taxes. Yikes.

Yet in Customer Service and the Contact Centre industry this is often the reality. Because many people end up in the Contact Centre profession by accident.

They didn’t go to school to be in the industry. They end up learning on the job. Which as you’d imagine can be very hit or miss.

It takes leadership, not just caretaking

Some level of caretaking will always exist.

Once a robust process has been designed and implemented it should be nurtured and protected.

So that it can grow, develop and become a natural part of how you work around around.

I think of mature Voice of Customer programs when I think of this aspect. Or I think of how Interaction Quality is defined and implemented.

But at a higher level, it’s always amazing when folks in leadership roles take a big step back and ask:

Why do we do the things we do around here?

Are there things we can do better than we are right now?

Has what has made this Organization successful up to this point going to make us successful headed into the future?

Because to make things better we almost always be dissatisfied with the status quo.

Otherwise why would we change?

What’s the better formula for success?

(Know-How + Experience) x Regular intervals of reconsideration

When you’ve got mastery level Know-Howof your Customer ecosystem, you avoid wasting time and effort on topics that were solved long ago and by others.

You don’t make rookie mistakes that can have lasting damage.

Experience gives you the context and culture within which your industry knowledge needs to be applied.

No two Organizations apply the same know-how in the same way – they contextualize it. That’s as it should be and it’s so impressive in practice.

And Regular intervals of reconsideration simply means that we don’t sit back and let the years go by without reconsidering what we’re doing.

To make sure that what has made us successful up to this point still makes sense for us to keep doing- or not.

The best Contact Centre folks recognize the management of the Customer ecosystem as a business discipline. No different than finance or engineering.

And rather than talking about how many ‘years of experience’ they have, they talk about the impact they’ve made for stakeholders across Customers, Employees and the Organization at large.

And that’s a cool thing.

https://www.omnitouchinternational.com/when-good-people-follow-bad-contact-centre-process

Thank you for reading!

Thank you for reading and if you’d like read more simply send me your email address or add it to the contact form on our website!

Daniel Ord

[email protected]

www.omnitouchinternational.com

Cover Photo by Ben Moreland on Unsplash

10 Contact Center Operations Management questions – how well do you do?

15/01/2023by OmniTouch International OmniTouch International No Comments

In this post, I share 10 Contact Center Operations Management questions for Contact Center leaders who want to gauge their mastery of specific Contact Center know how required for successful operations management.

Because while passion and experience are helpful, Contact Center know how matters too.

A bit of background on the Contact Center Operations Management questions

Managing a Contact Center is a business discipline. It requires very specific know-how. And when I teach Contact Center operations management I cover four modules:

Managing Wait Time
Creating Efficiency
Forecasting the Workload
Contact Center University

The questions presented below are in multiple choice format and are drawn from the Contact Center management workshops I’ve run around the world for over 20 years.

Read through each question and choose the answer that you think is correct – that’s either a, b, c or d. There is only one correct answer for each question.

https://www.omnitouchinternational.com/what-kind-of-customer-experience-does-your-contact-center-deliver

The 10 Contact Center Management Questions

1. Which accessibility metric gives management the clearest indication of the wait time a typical caller experiences?

a) Average Speed of Answer

b) Service Level

c) Percent Abandoned

d) Percent Answered

2. Which of the following is the industry standard Service Level?

a) 80% answered in 20 seconds

b) 90% answered in 30 seconds

c) Industry standards only exist by industry (finance, hospitality, healthcare, etc.)

d) There is no industry standard

3. When managing the queue in real-time, which of the following real-time reports should you look at first?

a) Agent status

b) Longest current wait

c) Number of calls in queue

d) Average time to abandonment

4. Which of the following statements is/are TRUE?

I. Occupancy is the percentage of time agents spend talking to customers or completing After Call Work.

II. Occupancy is a result of random call arrival.

III. When Service Level increases, Occupancy increases.

IV. When Occupancy is extremely high for extended periods of time, Agents tend to work harder to clear out the queue.

a) II only

b) I and II only

c) II and IV only

d) I, III and IV only

5. Which one of the following statements is true about Adherence to Schedule?

a) Adherence to Schedule measures the actual login time of an Agent compared with the scheduled login time.

b) The percentage of time Agents spend waiting for calls to arrive is the inverse of Adherence to Schedule.

c) When Adherence to Schedule increases, Utilization increases as well.

d) Within the context of Adherence to Schedule, login time does not include time Agents spend in After Call Work.

6. If an Agent arrives 30 minutes late to work at a Contact Center, which of the following actions would benefit the Center the most? Assume the Agent is unable to consult with his/her Team Leader on the most appropriate action.

a)Stay 30 minutes extra at the end of his/her shift.

b) Skip his/her morning and afternoon breaks, each of which is 15 minutes.

c) Come back from his/her hour lunch break 30 minutes early.

d) Take his/her breaks and lunch as normal and leave at his/her scheduled time.

7. Which one of the following statements is FALSE?

a) Measuring the number of calls handled by Agent is a good productivity standard.

b) Adherence to Schedule is typically an important productivity measure for a Contact Centre Agent handling Service Level-based contacts.

c) When Adherence to Schedule improves Service Level improves as well.

d) Most of what drives the Average Handling Time lies outside the control of the Agent

8. The best definition of Time Series forecasting is:

a) A method where the past is a good basis for predicting the future

b) A method which is only used in rare circumstances

c) A method that covers the qualitative side of forecasting

d) A method that does not require judgement

9. Your Call Centre supports email and is expecting 200 email messages to arrive between 9:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. The Average Handling Time of email messages is 8 minutes. Your promised response time is 4 hours. Assuming the Agents can work uninterrupted on these email messages only, which of the following staffing scenarios would meet your response time objective for these email messages?

I. 4 Agents working from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

II. 9 Agents working from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

III. 14 Agents working from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

IV. 40 Agents who each spend at least an hour working on email from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

a) II only

b) III and IV only

c) II, III and IV only

d) I, II, III and IV

10. Which of the following are ‘factors’ you need to incorporate in a monthly Agent labor budget?

I. Is my Agent in the building?

II. What is the monthly weighted average Occupancy rate?

III. Is my Agent on a break?

IV. Is my Agent on leave?

a) III only

b) I and II only

c) I, II and III only

d) I, II, III and IV

Would you like to know how you did?

https://www.omnitouchinternational.com/contact-centre-kpis-the-green-jaguar

If you’d like to know if your answers are correct I’m happy to help.

I’ve intentionally gone ‘low-tech’ here. There’s no need to register anywhere, set-up an account or pay to access answers. Your name won’t be added to a mailing list unless you give specific permission for it to be added.

Once you’ve answered all the questions just drop me an email to [email protected]

Let me know the question # and the answer that you chose (either a,b,c or d). Remember there is only one correct answer for each question.

You can use the following format in your email to me:

a
d
c
c (and so on for all the questions)

I always do my best to answer quickly and let you know which ones you got right and what the right answers are for the one(s) you got wrong.

Of course taking a few specific know-how questions won’t fully reflect the experience and effort that have gone into your Contact Center management work.

But it helps to know that it takes more than passion and experience to succeed in the industry.

And it’s the folks who have that know how, combined with their passion & experience, who create great outcomes for their Center. And that’s good for everyone.

Good luck with the questions!

Daniel Ord

[email protected]

What I learned from Thoreau about CX, Customer Service & Contact Centers

23/12/2021by OmniTouch International OmniTouch International No Comments

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” Henry David Thoreau

In the domains of Customer Experience, Customer Service & Contact Centers, folks look at and often see different things.

Sometimes it could be due to petulance (“I don’t like your definition of CX!”). Or to intellectual sparring (“That’s the wrong formula!”). Sometimes there’s an agenda (“Surveys are dead!).

Perhaps, within an organization, there’s simply a lack of shared understanding (“Hi everyone, we all listen to the same call but seem to come up with completely different thoughts about it.”).

But we all know that to get the right things done and move your organization perceptibly forward, a shared understanding across everyone is essential.

This is where Thoreau’s quote lands for me.

As a Teacher I constantly think about how can I help and inspire people to align around what they see.

What matters most. What matters less. What aligns to our vision & strategy – and what doesn’t.

And yet at the same time respect the differences that are bound to come up.

Diverge and converge – we can learn from Human Centered Design

When you’re starting the journey through change – whether that’s a Customer-centric transformation or redo of your Quality standards for the Contact Center – it’s always valuable to have different people bring different points of view to the conversation.

I liken this to the of the ideation phase in Human Centered Design where no idea is a bad idea. This is a ‘diverge’ phase where we open ourselves up to everything. Bring on those ideas.

But at some point, only a select few of these ideas are considered worthy enough to bring forward into the prototyping and testing phases. The rest get discarded.

This is the ‘converge’ phase. There’s a winnowing down. A selection process.

The best ideas get chosen.

Examples of the gaps between ‘looking’ and ‘seeing’

In the Customer ecosystem – which includes CX, Customer Service & Contact Centers – there are plenty of examples of the gaps between what people look at and what people see.

Gaps that ideally you can help to close and earn that all important alignment. That shared vision.

Here are a few gap areas that we see in our Customer ecosystem work:

Interpreting Interaction Quality

When you listened to that call recording or read that chat transcript from a Customer Service Agent, what did you ‘see’?

Quality opinions tend to be all over the place – even among folks who’ve worked together for years.

Was that a good email or a not so good email? What was great about that call? What could be improved in that call?

Getting people to ‘see’ Quality and align around a common understanding for Quality makes Customer lives better (yeah – predictability & consistency!).

It (should) fit in with the Organization’s strategy and strategic objectives.

And it makes Employee lives better too (yeah, we know what we’re supposed to deliver and we get clear and structured support from our company management to deliver that).

What a great Quality Assurance professional can do

Interpreting Metric results

– When you look at those 32 Contact Center metrics you report every week – what do you ‘see’?

Because I work inside so many Centers around the world, I see the level of variation in the ‘what’ people select and look at in their Contact Center KPIs.

So many Contact Center metrics are either unnecessary, secondary at best, interpreted incorrectly, are weighted too much (or too little) or are interpreted in different ways amongst the Team.

And because a Center is an ‘interrelated system of causes’, it’s important to understand the interrelationships and trade-offs that exist between metrics – not just metric performance in isolation.

Looking at a dashboard of metrics, and having the entire Team accurately interpret what they see – unlocks a world of potential.

What I learned from Thoreau? Don’t just look at dashboards – see and understand what they’re telling you.

Why are you still talking about Average Handling Time?

Interpreting how Customers behave

– When that Customer scolded you while you were serving at the Counter what did you ‘see’?

Don’t be surprised when some Frontline folks – after being scolded by a Customer – say they saw a ‘jerk’. Or that they were being ‘abused’.

Some discussion on how to better manage difficult Customer situations can change the way folks ‘see’ some of these situations.

Because there is a distinction between Customer behaviour that is indeed ‘abusive’ vs. Customer behaviour that we just happen not to like.

Helping your folks see that – and manage those situations better – is an important leadership responsibility.

And for those in leadership roles, our job is to help others see things too

In management workshops Participants ask the following questions:

– How can I get my bosses to ‘see’ that our Contact Center is a profit center, not a cost center?

– How can I get my Employees to ‘see’ that the values we’ve chosen for culture change really matter?

– How can I get other departments to ‘see’ how important CX is?

The cool thing is that when people see better, they do better.

They make better decisions. They align & unite around common language & goals. They improve their ability to influence & persuade others.

Not once in the 21 years I’ve been training has a single Client said, “Dan, we’d like to fly you halfway around the world and pay you some money to stand up and share your opinions with the Team for 1 or 2 days.”

Even writing that sentence makes me wince.

The way Clients put it sounds like this. “Dan, we have a challenge or an opportunity we’d like some help with.”

“Can you help our people see how to run our Center better? See what CX means and how to bring it to life. See how to be a better boss. See how to improve coaching outcomes. See how to communicate better with Customers.”

Not just look. But see

I like what I learned from Thoreau. And I came across his quote purely by accident – in a science fiction book I was reading.

But it helped me reflect on what I do in my own work. And see it more clearly.

https://www.biography.com/writer/henry-david-thoreau

I hope in some way it is helpful to you too. Thank you for reading!

Daniel

What lessons can Contact Centre folks learn from CX folks?

20/11/2021by OmniTouch International OmniTouch International No Comments

Daniel Ord of OmniTouch teaches Contact Centre & CX

What lessons can Contact Centre folks can learn from CX folks?

I’ve written about lessons CX folks can learn from Contact Centre folks.

Here’s a link to my earlier article:

CX lessons we can learn from the Contact Centre industry

Today I flip the perspective and ask – what lessons can Contact Centre folks learn from CX folks?

Because the nature of the work between the roles is different – no matter how much Contact Center folks rebrand themselves as Customer Experience.

And there are so many lessons Contact Centre folks can learn from their CX Colleagues.

Here goes!

Is the work done in CX and in Contact Centres really so different? Yes it is.

When people ask me about what it takes to run a successful Contact Centre, I like to use the analogy of a circus tent.

Imagine a traditional red & white striped circus tent up ahead of you. Lots of things are going on inside that big top.

As you enter the tent you’ve got the high-wire acrobats up overhead, the lion tamers over there and the clowns driving around in funny cars in the ring by the entrance.

There’s a lot going on in that tent. And it all matters. The Fortune Teller has her role. The Weightlifters have their role.

You get the idea.

Now imagine that your big top tent is your Contact Centre. There’s a lot going on inside the Contact Centre big top too.

When you walk inside you’d find Quality Assurance – that’s a specialized role.

And as we look around we’d find Workforce Management, Training, IT, Human Resources, Finance. They’re all specialized roles too.

They’re all contributing to Contact Centre success.

And of course you’d have all the people that get the work in and out each day – the Agents, the Team Leaders, the Directors.

In a great Contact Centre all these disparate roles work in harmony together to achieve results. Everyone knows what everyone else does and has a basic understanding of each other’s contribution to success.

All under the direction of a skilled & knowledgeable Contact Centre Head.

But the Contact Centre tent isn’t the same as the CX tent.

So what’s inside the CX tent?

Like the Contact Centre tent, there’s a lot going on inside the CX tent too.

Let’s walk over to the CX big top.

I teach Customer Experience Management and help people earn their CCXP Certification. And competencies that I cover in our training would be found in the CX tent including:

· Customer Experience Strategy

· Voice of Customer & Customer Research Know-How

· Experience Design

· Metrics, Measurement & ROI

· Culture & Change Management

And each of these are big topics.

Just consider Voice of Customer & Customer Research Know-How.

By the time you factor in qualitative & quantitative research methods, triangulation, prioritization, data analytics and reporting & actioning of results you’ve covered a tremendous amount of ground.

And just like in the Contact Centre, the disparate CX roles work in harmony under the direction of a skilled & knowledgeable CX Head.

With the added complexity that CX is at play across the entire organization. All functions, all departments, all Employees, all Partners, all Vendors.

Everyone in the Customer ecosystem.

When I listen to people talk about their work I ask myself – are they talking about the work that falls within a function or department – like Customer Service?

Or are they talking about work that spans the organization – such as lifecycle and journey analysis, rollout of listening posts and organization wide culture change.

How they describe their work provides input into whether they work in Customer Service/Contact Centre or they work in Customer Experience.

https://www.omnitouchinternational.com/cx-lessons-i-learned-judging-cx-awards-this-year

Ok, the tents are different. You made your point. So what can lessons can Contact Centre folks learn from CX professionals?

I continue to be inspired by the level and maturity of CX work being done out there in the real world.

And the lessons Contact Center professionals can learn from CX professionals are powerful. Lessons they can use to make their Contact Centres better.

For this article I’ve selected five lessons that stand out for me.

1. How to craft a CX Vision

I am endlessly blown away by the work that CX professional put into crafting a powerful CX Vision.

We teach the process and quite a few Clients have shared the outcome of their process with us. It’s intensive and can take months.

Because it involves aligning to business strategy, brand values and Customer expectations.

And then blending all of these into a powerful statement that defines – specifically – what kind of experience we deliver around here.

It’s so much more than asking ‘what’s the industry standard for this or that’ – which seems to be a trap some Contact Center folks fall into.

Strategy flows from Vision – so getting that Vision right – and taking the time & effort to craft one that’s meaningful is something CX people do – and do well.

If your Organization already has a robust CX Vision, that’s wonderful. You can use that to help you guide and inspire the Service folks that work for you.

If not, then you have the golden opportunity to be strategic – and craft your own Customer Service Vision.

2. Tie strategy to business results

Even after more than two decades years of teaching in the industry, you’re still hearing consultants & practitioners debating whether Contact Centres are cost centers or profit centers.

I know it’s an important discussion – I’ve been in a few myself. I’m not minimizing the importance.

But really? 20+ years? Why hasn’t more progress been made here? (and likely a topic for another article).

What the best CX folks are getting right these days is aligning the CX strategy they come up with to the overall business strategy and key measures of success.

And showing senior management and their peers in other functions how and where CX can improve the business.

Not at the expense of Customers (that’s not CX). Or pushing or tricking Customers into doing what we want them to do.

But in that wonderful intersection where it’s good for the Customer and good for the Organization.

It would be superb to hear more Contact Centre folks talk about their alignment with business strategy and key measures of success. And great CX people can help a lot here – even if they aren’t Contact Centre experts per se.

3. Start thinking in Customer journeys and not just in touchpoints

Contact Centres, by the nature of the work they do, are focused on what happens within the context of a Customer interaction.

On that call, email or chat, did we show empathy, did we solve the problem, did we use time well.

And mastering the Contact Centre touchpoint and delivering great conversations with Customers takes a lot of know-how and skill.

There’s no diminishing the power of getting this right.

But that means that in the Contact Centre, we tend to think in touchpoints and not in the totality of the Customer journey.

Which means that we’re missing the big picture. And the opportunity to make Customer lives better.

It’s proven that Customers think in journeys. And that Organizations that study and improve at the journey level do better than those that focus at the touchpoint level.

So in addition to mastering that ‘touch’ the Customer has with us – that chat or email – it helps for Contact Centre to consider what I call the Journey perspective.

When I teach Customer Service for Frontline folks, I often ask them to think about these questions:

1. Where did that Customer come from – and what motivated them to reach out to us? (the before)

2. What does this Customer need from me right now in this touch? (the during)

3. Where will the Customer likely go or need to go next – and how can I help them with the next steps on the way to their goal? (the after)

I like to cover this when I teach Frontline Customer Service because I think it’s important to use a broader journey oriented ‘lens’ to consider what Customers are going through.

Over and above dealing with a single ‘touch’.

4. Understand Voice of Customer Research practices & principles better

I was taken on a Centre tour a few years ago where the Director was so proud that the individual NPS scores given by Customers at the end of their calls were instantly flashed on large TV screens posted throughout the Centre.

All showing the Agent Names and the scores they had received so far that day.

Oh dear. So demotivating and so wrong. And a classic example of just because you can do something doesn’t make it the right thing to do.

Here’s another example.

When I ask Contact Centre folks the last time they invited in a small panel of Customers, bought them lunch and asked them questions about what they like or don’t like about Contact Centre service, they sometimes look at me like I’m completely nuts.

Bring in a real Customer to the Contact Centre? I’m not exactly sure why that would sound so outlandish. Just imagine how much you could learn.

What kind of Customer experience does your Contact Center deliver?

To be fair, VOC is a highly specialized area.

But having an essential understanding of qualitative, quantitative methodologies, principles and practices can help Centres perform better.

To make better decisions on how they use the data & insights that come out of VOC work.

And avoid poor practices like posting up individual NPS scores.

5. Build cross-functional support

When you listen to CX professionals share their work experience, a common narrative often appears.

It sounds like this:

“I was the first person in my company to take on the CX role – it was brand new. I had to create my own job, determine my own priorities and consider how to achieve both short term and long terms results.

And in all these I had to align myself with other stakeholders in other departments, heads of functions, senior leadership, finance, the COO.

And now – 2, 3, 4 years later I’ve been successful. You know how I know? It’s not just that our Team size has increased – though it has a bit.

And it’s not just that we’ve achieved some cool results – though we have.

It’s that people in the company are starting to come to us – the CX Team. To ask for help. To get our opinion on how to handle something better. To help them solve a business problem.

That’s been the real sign of our success in building the CX practice in our organization.”

Don’t you love that? I know I do.

Contact Centres can only achieve their vision & purpose when they also build and sustain powerful cross-functional relationships too.

Not just to get the basics like forecasting done.

But to promote how the Contact Centre can support the efforts of other departments and solve business problems.

Thank you for reading!

I appreciate the time you took today to read this!

If you’d like to be kept up to date on our articles and other information just leave your email address in the contact form on our website. Or send it over to me by email.

Daniel Ord

[email protected]

www.omnitouchinternational.com

What Conway Twitty taught me about Agent resilience

19/04/2020by OmniTouch International OmniTouch International No Comments

How the popular country music Artist, Conway Twitty, taught me a life-long lesson about Agent resilience in the Contact Center.

What do I mean by Agent resilience?

Here’s a useful definition of resilience –

The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties, toughness.

Contact Center folks at the Frontline are always going through a lot. Constant changes in the work environment, unhappy Customers, stressed Bosses.

So while the topic of resilience is always relevant, it has a special resonance in the Customer Service industry.

The capacity for Contact Center Agents to recover from difficulties.

Here’s a lesson I learned very early in my Contact Center management career.

The lesson

Early in my career in the 90s, I was Vice President of Call Centre & Distribution Operations for Heartland Music. Based in Los Angeles, it was the job that got me into the Contact Center & Customer Experience industry.

Heartland ran TV commercials and mailed out catalogues to millions of Customers across the US.

TV commercials and catalogues that featured titles like ‘All the Elvis Presley’ hits you need to own or the ‘Top 100 Love Songs’ of all time.

Customers then called into our Contact Centers to place orders which we packaged and shipped from our own warehouses. And of course we provided Customer Service as well – anything from suggestions on what titles we should stock to ‘where is my order ‘enquiries.

It was a big and growing business.

So how does Conway Twitty fit into Agent resilience (and who was he?)

Country music was a big part of our offerings. And country music fans were generally sweet, loyal and supportive.

And though it sounds a bit macabre, whenever a popular Artist that we carried passed away, there would always be a marked and sudden upsurge in sales for their work.

That’s still the same case today – though it’s reflected these days by increases in streaming figures vs. how many ‘units’ were sold.

And an Artist passing way was an event that a Workforce Manager couldn’t really plan for.

We relied on our own internal back-up plans and a strong committed Agent workforce to get through most of our unexpected surges.

But Conway Twitty was the surge to end all surges.

An American country music singer, he also recorded rock and roll, R&B and pop music. And he received several Country Music Association awards for duets with Loretta Lynn – another beloved country music star.

I don’t remember which day of the week it was, but when I entered the office, our Operations Manager made a beeline straight for me.

‘Dan, Conway Twitty died.’

That’s all Frank had to say. We’d both been around enough years to shorthand the conversation.

The volume of calls in the Center had already picked up and we knew we were only at the beginning.

CX lessons we can learn from the Contact Centre industry

Six weeks later

I’m not exactly sure why Conway Twitty was different. But we were now six weeks into the surge and his sales were still going up.

Great for business but not so great for our Agents.

Occupancy was through the roof, hours got longer, and admittedly a few people started to get edgy.

And while we were dealing with normally sweet country music lovers, long wait times and out of stock situations put them on edge too. Meaning even more frustration for our Agents to deal with.

It ended up being about a 3-month period overall. Much longer than the normal two or three week ‘lift’ that we had seen before.

And here’s what I learned about Agent resilience

My Operations Manager said it to me first.

‘Dan, they’ll be ok. Do you know why? Because they know there is light at the end of the tunnel.

What to look for when you hire a new Contact Centre Manager

The light at the end of the tunnel

If you’ve been a fair boss, you communicate honestly, and you have a management team that’s aligned to the purpose – it’s amazing what your people will give back to you.

And I’ve seen them give back for a year and even more (in some cases).

But the real caveat for Agent resilience is that there is light at the end of the tunnel. You must be very open & honest about what you’re doing to bring things back to ‘normal’.

Even if what normal looks like coming out doesn’t look exactly like the way it did when going in.

Thank you for reading!

Daniel

[email protected]

Good & evil in Customer Experience and why it’s like a Marvel Comics movie

09/04/2020by OmniTouch International OmniTouch International No Comments

In this short post I consider the role of good & evil in Customer Experience.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe

I admit I’m not a follower of the Marvel comics movies. But when stuck on a long haul flight or in a hotel room with nothing on but CNN, almost any Marvel movie is a welcome distraction.

So I never saw them in any order, nor do I grasp the entire mythology.

But in the movies I did see, it was always clear which characters were ‘good’ and which characters were ‘evil’.

The Marvel universe is a pretty binary place.

What kind of Customer experience does your Contact Center deliver?

Good & evil in Customer Experience

Sometimes when I read articles & posts on Customer experience, I feel like I’m watching a Marvel comics movie.

That happens when the author of the article positions the company they’re describing in one of two ways:

When the company described in the post does things ‘right’ or right in the author’s opinion – then they’re good
When the company described in the post does things ‘wrong’ or wrong in the author’s opinion – then they’re evil

It’s never in doubt who is good and who is evil. The content & tone make it clear.

And when it comes to the evil companies – which are the posts you see most often – look out for these kinds of words –

They’re dumb, apathetic, lazy, careless, wasteful, ignorant, greedy, selfish, OK Boomer (ok I added that one).

It’s practically biblical how evil they are. And this is what worries me.

If a company doesn’t deliver the experience the writer likes, the default setting seems to be how dumb, apathetic, etc. they are.

But if Customer Experience is as binary as a Marvel comics movie, there’s not much room to manoeuvre. Not much room to improve.

I don’t ever see Thanos becoming the good guy or Wonder Woman becoming the bad guy.

The real world is more nuanced than a Marvel comics movie

The real world is more nuanced than a Marvels comics movie. Customer Experience deserves more than a binary good & evil measurement scale.

I had lunch with a Client in Asia not long ago.

She had navigated the pivot from Head of Customer Service to Head of Customer Experience. And our lunch conversation turned to organizational culture.

She had built a great service culture in the Customer Service function. That was one of the reasons she had been appointed the Head of Customer Experience.

And now she needed to develop that service culture across the entire organization. Into departments & functions where service wasn’t seen as the most important characteristic.

With her usual pragmatism she told me –

“Dan, we’ve been around a while as you know.

And we’ve got really great people in this company. In all departments. It’s not that we’re bad or we don’t care about Customers. We care a lot.

It’s just that we’ve become too comfortable. Things have been good here for a long time. The impetus for change is muted.

I think my job is to help our folks understand our future desired state as a company and why being too comfortable in what we do and the way we do it isn’t sustainable going forward.”

Her people are good, her colleagues are good, the management supports the change and she’s successfully completed her gap analysis.

Do their Customers complain? Of course they do. But as an organization they’re working on it. And as practitioners know, it takes time.

Saying they’re good or evil isn’t productive. It’s not even accurate.

They’re working to be better.

What can I do with my CCXP?

Why I don’t publish personal complaint posts

If I have a personal complaint with a company I contact them directly and privately. I give them the chance to address my issue.

If I was a ‘normal’ Customer I’d consider sharing my complaint on social media. And I’d write a detailed post of the bad thing or things that happened to me. And maybe I’d feel better having shared my tale of misery & woe.

But I don’t view myself as a normal Customer. I’m proud to come from the industry.

And I think industry professionals look at the bigger picture. We’re interested in the underlying dynamics or conditions that led to whatever it was that we experienced. We dissect the ecosystem.

Leave it to ‘real’ Customers to sit in judgement. I’d rather look for the lessons.

Good & evil in Customer Experience

Industry professionals don’t have to use ad hominen words like dumb, apathetic, lazy, careless, wasteful, ignorant, greedy or selfish to describe organizations.

They don’t have to rant.

I’ve never seen a conference event yet where the Host says “Welcome everyone, our next Speaker will rant and roll their eyes for the next 30 minutes or so. We hope you enjoy it!”

It doesn’t have to be about the role of good & evil in Customer Experience. It could be about the lessons to make things better.

Thanks for reading!

Daniel

[email protected]

What kind of Customer experience does your Contact Center deliver?

01/03/2020by OmniTouch International OmniTouch International No Comments

In this short article I discuss the question – what kind of Customer experience does your Contact Center deliver?

It ties together two of my favourite topics – Customer Experience & Contact Centers. And it’s the title of one of my best Keynote talks for various conferences around the world.

The Contact Center in the context of Customer Experience

The Contact Center is a touchpoint that only some Customers will use across some subset of all possible Customer journeys.

And for some organizations it can be less than 1% of Customers who utilize the Contact Center touchpoint at all.

Daniel Ord speaking on Customer Experience

Daniel Ord delivering a keynote on what kind of Customer Experience does your Contact Center deliver?

For example, imagine that on the spur of the moment you decide to stay in a hotel this upcoming weekend.

You ask a friend to suggest a place, you do some research online and finish by booking a reservation on your mobile phone. No Contact Center involved.

But with that said, when a Customer needs the Contact Center, it can be a real moment of truth.

An experience that has significant ‘weight’ in their overall perception of the organization.

So not every Customer interacts with the Contact Center. But every interaction with the Contact Center is really important.

The Contact Center is the formal living room in a house

Formal living rooms may sound old fashioned – but they’re still around.

When I was growing up we had a formal living room to receive and entertain special guests or to use for special occasions.

It’s a room that’s always perfect. It’s got the best furniture, the best art and it’s always spotless. Because even though it’s not used everyday, it must always be ready.

And I think of the Contact Center within an organization in the same way. It’s the formal living room in the house of your organization.

Not every Customer will need to use it. Nor will every Customer journey involve it. But for those Customers who do come into our Center, it’s our job to always be ready for them with our very best resources.

So what kind of Customer experience does your Contact Center deliver?

Much of the subject matter for our keynote talk – and for this post – is based on nearly 20 years of conducting Mystery Shopper research – especially for Contact Centers.

And most Centers have a list of ‘Quality standards’ they use to train Agents and measure their quality performance – and which they hope or believe will deliver a great Customer interaction.

Simple examples of Quality standards include:

Clarity in presenting the product or service
The level of Human Touch on display
The use of branded language
The conciseness of the email
The sales or upselling skill

The possible list of Quality standards is endless because there is no industry standard set of standards that work for every Center. If that were the case, all Customers of all organizations would be happy all the time. And obviously that’s not the case.

And what we’ve found in our research work with Clients is that there is a positive correlation between the sophistication behind selecting and defining Quality directives and the resulting Customer experience.

Or put more simply – when there’s more thought, effort and rigour put into selecting Quality standards – the resulting Customer interactions are better. And Agents benefit from being treated like adults – and not compliance machines who have to do things like say the Customer’s name three times.

Let’s look at some example Quality standards now.

What to look for when you hire a new Contact Centre Manager

So what’s an example of a Quality standard that was impressive?

One of our most interesting engagements was as the Official Mystery Shopper Evaluator for the Singapore Government. Which basically meant mystery shopping the quality of different government agencies for phone, face to face and email interactions.

And one of the standards set by the Singapore Government was amazing. They practiced what they called ‘No Wrong Door’. Let’s say the Customer had a personal taxation question but accidentally contacted the housing authority.

In most countries, the Contact Center Agent would tell the Customer that they reacehd the wrong place and perhaps give the number for the correct place to call – if that much.

But with No Wrong Door in Singapore, the Contact Center Agent will either arrange a connection to the right Agency or arrange for the right Agency to get back to the Customer directly.

And in a public sector setting that’s amazing.

Having lived in multiple countries, I sometimes joke that trying to get public service assistance through a Contact Center could be branded as ‘Every Door is the Wrong Door’.

That is unless you’re fortunate enough to live in Singapore.

What’s an example that wasn’t so great?

Isn’t it funny that we can sometimes come up with the not so great examples more easily than the great examples?

Here are three.

The ‘Ready to Serve’ Quality standard

The Client, a major mobile phone manufacturer, wanted our Mystery Shoppers to evaluate if the Contact Center Agent we reached was ‘ready to serve’.

Did you just read that twice? So did we.

The question we had was this. How is it possible for us to tell if someone was ready to serve? In our opinion, that sounded like something a Team Leader should be doing internally.

We went back and forth with the Client to get some clarification. But eventually our Client contact wrote us and said – “Look Dan, just ask the Mystery Shopper to do it”. Which was shorthand for ‘we’re done talking about this.’

So we sat down and came up with our own logic for this Quality standard and moved on.

But here’s the thing. If senior management selects a Quality standard that even they can’t explain clearly – how can we expect an Agent to bring that to life in their Customer interactions?

The ‘Tai Chi’ standard

For a University Contact Center, the Agents were instructed to immediately redirect the Caller to the university website if it turned out that the information was available there.

Don’t answer the Caller question. If it was on the website then send the Customer straight to the website.

I decided to call it the ‘Tai Chi’ standard because they really just tai chi’d Customers to the website! And avoid answering the question.

And their rationale for this standard?

They had attended a seminar where the speaker told the audience they should focus on efficiency. And to get people to use the website you have to force them to go to the website.

And you can just imagine the Customer Experience here.

After dialling, listening to the recorded announcements, punching through the IVR options, finally reaching a live Agent and asking their question – the Customer gets tai chi’d to the website.

Yikes.

The every Quality standard is measured as a Yes or No

For a few Centers we’ve worked with, management had decided that all or most of the Quality standards should be measured on a binary scale. Yes / No. 1 / 0. It happened or it did not happen.

Because they felt it was less complicated and easier to implement for them internally. That’s classic inside-out thinking. Do what is easy for the Center – not necessarily for the Customer.

I bet you can imagine what those Agents sounded like when we listened to the calls. Yup that’s right.

They sounded like robots. There was no style, no articulation, no effort.

When every Quality standard is measured on a binary scale, that doesn’t just set a low bar for Quality.

There’s almost no bar for Quality.

There’s an art & science to selecting Quality Standards

There’s an art & science to selecting the right Quality Standards for your Contact Center.

If you’re lucky enough to have a well-defined Customer Experience Strategy in place that can help a great deal. Because a Customer Experience Strategy describes the kind of experience you aim to deliver.

It provides a high level guide to coming up with the right Agent standards.

If you don’t have a Customer Experience Strategy, then a Service Delivery Vision can help.

A Service Delivery Vision is very much like a Customer Experience Strategy, but it tends to be focused only on the Customer Service function. Whereas the Customer Experience Strategy is meant for the entire organization.

Now – if you don’t have a robust Service Delivery Vision then the next question is this.

How did your Contact Center choose its Quality standards? What guided the decisions?

Here are some of the answers I’ve heard:

I think our Managers came up with these.
I think our Quality Assurance people came up with these.
The last Mystery Shopper provider we used came up with these.
Our Agents know how to talk to Customers – we don’t really use any standards.
I’m not sure but we don’t want to change them because everyone knows them already.
I’m new here and I don’t know – I was just asked to find a Mystery Shopper company.
We’ve used these for years and they’re ‘industry standard’ for our X industry

Answers like these aren’t indicative of any level of sophistication in Quality standard selection & design.

And as I shared earlier, we’ve found a positive correlation between the sophistication of the Quality program and the Customer’s interaction experience. And that makes complete sense.

Because when there’s more thought, effort and rigour put into selecting Quality standards – the resulting Customer interactions are better.

What we’ve learned about conducting Mystery Shopper Research on Chatbots

In closing

I may write a book sharing nothing but Mystery Shopper stories and the ins and outs of how to get Quality right. There are just so many stories and learnings.

Because your Contact Center does deliver some type of Customer Experience. The question is whether its the experience you wanted or planned for.

Thank you for reading,

Daniel

[email protected]

What a great Quality Assurance professional can do

10/01/2020by OmniTouch International OmniTouch International No Comments

In this short article, I share one story of what a great Quality Assurance professional can do.

When Cindy – the Quality Assurance professional in our Contact Centre – walked into my office, she looked concerned.

“Dan, we just heard the weirdest call. You know that new wooden sandbox set we’re selling? The one that ships in from the UK?”

“Sure Cindy – I know the one – it’s quite fancy but it looks great for kids. Why?”

“Well the Customer just received her shipment from the UK and she says it’s defective. That the sandbox has no bottom in it.”

“No bottom in the sandbox? What do you mean?”

“You know. A base in it. A floor for lack of a better word. The Customer says that it looks like you fill the sandbox by pouring the sand directly onto the ground.”

We looked at each other for a moment. Don’t all sandboxes have bottoms?

“Cindy thanks for telling me. Let me call Marketing and see what the story is.”

A bit of background

In the 90s I was VP, Contact Centre & Distribution Operations for a Los Angeles based direct marketing company that served the entire country.

Our Centre took orders from TV ads and catalogues for products including CDs, children’s toys, gardening tools and more. And our warehouses would ship most Customer orders – unless the product was to be shipped directly from the manufacturer.

We also handled all the Customer Service questions and issues. It was a big business and was growing year on year.

And Quality Assurance really mattered to us. Because it was an important measure of success that we earn repeat orders from Customers over time. And our Quality Assurance professionals helped us to do that.

The sandbox in question was an item in the Spring Gardening catalogue that had gone out to Customers across the US.

It was handmade in the UK and crafted from high quality wood.

But the best part was that it had a roll up/roll down wooden roof that not only protected the sand – it made the sandbox feel like a small castle for the kids.

It cost over US$1,000 (plus shipping) and due to its size, orders were shipped directly from the UK to the Customer in the US.

We didn’t have any sandboxes in our own stock. Which meant that unlike a lot of our other products, we had not seen one in real life.

So the mystery remained – why didn’t the sandbox have a bottom?

When good people follow bad Contact Centre process – a story

What Marketing told us

Our Marketing Team was great. And they got back to us quickly.

It seems that having a bottom in the sandbox was an ‘American’ thing. A Customer expectation built around hygiene and what American Customers were used to.

Whereas in the UK, sandboxes typically didn’t have bottoms in them. You simply poured the sand on top of the ground or whatever the surface was below where you placed the sandbox.

A simple cultural difference that resulted in a different set of expectations.

What we did

Well thanks to Cindy – and the weird call – we were on it.

About 29 sandboxes had been ordered with a 3 – 4 week delivery timeframe. Remember it was the 1990s – there was no such thing as Prime!

So that gave us the chance to contact all the Customers who had ordered the sandbox, explain the manufacturing aspect and allow the Customer to cancel the order – or keep the order with a discount applied – their choice.

And it worked. In fact most Customers decided to keep the sandbox. And they appreciated our proactivity.

What to look for when you hire a new Contact Centre Manager

We tend to underestimate the power of the Quality Assurance job role

In my training & consulting work I find that the Quality Assurance job role tends to be underestimated. By that I mean it’s used (and viewed) as a policing function for Agents. Low level and unpopular.

And that’s so sad. Because the potential value inherent in the Quality Assurance job role is tremendous.

In this story, Cindy acted as a ‘lighthouse’ for quality issues. Coming and telling me – and others – about weird calls was an important part of her job. Because Cindy innately understood that her job was about a lot more than checking if an Agent said the Customer’s name 3x.

She and her Team helped our Centre understand where we were with regard to Quality, where we wanted to go – and how to get there.

And I’ve told this story now for nearly 25 years because it had such a profound impact on me – both at the time and today.

Thank you Cindy.

And thank you for reading!

Daniel

[email protected]