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In an ideal world, contact centers would run with clockwork predictability. Calls would come in with perfect regularity, one at a time, with no overlap, and omniscient agents would answer every inquiry quickly and accurately. The real world is a much more complicated place, with customers who have complex needs which rarely fit into just one or two neat categories. Of course, your customers have little sympathy for your travails. They expect a quality experience each and every time they reach out to your agents. Your challenge is to keep the complexities of your contact center from becoming a fragmented, disjointed collection of ringing phones, ensuring that each connection is a productive, satisfying one for both the customer and the agent.
Transforming the Operation
Running away from complexity is not an option. A simple contact center cannot meet the demands of a modern contact center to be efficient and consistent. Nor can a simple contact center successfully manage the multiple channels and blended inbound and outbound communications which are vital to good customer relations in a supremely connected world. And simple contact centers have no hope of evolving beyond its roots as a cost center into a strategic contributor to bottom-line value and an organizational model of excellence. These accomplishments require sophistication, and sophistication requires diversity, flexibility and a wide base of knowledge.
But complexity need not be complicated. The diverse needs of your customers and the demands of your company’s range of products and services can be brought under control to create a contact center that is both effective and optimized, without sacrificing the hard-earned trust of either customers or employees. Bell Canada Holdings is just one of many companies that has committed to transforming a fragmented, complicated operation into an optimized, multi-functional contact center, after recognizing the inefficiencies of functional silos.
Each center had selected its own operating platform and approach to workforce management, robbing the organization of consistency and uniformity. Like many companies in Bell Canada’s position, the costs and inefficiencies became intolerable, so Bell Canada committed to a long-term integration plan. Integrating fragmented call center operations into a sophisticated, modern contact center is necessary for any business that wants to understand the true impact of the customer relationship with the face of the organization. Through integration, it becomes possible to improve the way each and every agent can quickly and knowledgeably respond to any customer demand.
Callers expect three things from your organization—to be helped promptly, knowledgably, and passionately. Fail to deliver on these expectations and you risk sacrificing your entire brand image in your customers’ eyes. Therefore, it is imperative to keep complexity from sabotaging your ability to deliver a quality customer experience. Quality is meaningless without consistency, and a diverse contact center cannot deliver consistency without the ability to accurately assess the past and build operational forecasts for the future.
Workforce Management: The Cornerstone of a Successful Operation
Just as a tiny stone in the center of a pond can ripple all the way to the banks, minor scheduling inefficiencies can sink a contact center’s operational plan. A robust workforce management solution should be at the heart of the forecasting process, but it is equally important to ensure efficiency in the workforce management function itself. Bell Canada recognized that it had 50 workforce management staff scattered across 15 offices, each focused on different contact centers in stand-alone lines of business and each using a different set of planning tools. By better defining the workforce management role and introducing a uniform set of tools and procedures, Bell Canada transformed its workforce management jobs.
Rather than relying on manual labor and guesswork, Bell Canada’s workforce planners now have crucial, up-to-the-minute insight into the state of the company’s agent workforce and call demand, leading to more accurate plans and better intraday changes. By training to common tasks and shared goals, Bell Canada’s workforce specialists became capable of managing agent requirements outside their home centers as well as seeing and understanding the activities of their workforce management peers. This gave Bell Canada a unified customer service planning function for the first time in its history—a milestone in its contact center integration. Now Bell Canada’s professional planners can respond to peaks and valleys immediately, cutting reaction time from as much as four hours to no worse than a half-hour interval response. This enables Bell Canada to reallocate the agent pool exactly as customer demand requires.
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