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Projecting Quality To All Areas Of The Organisation |
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 Customer contact centres play a key role at the heart of most major organisations' customer service strategies, and those businesses that are focused on optimising their customer interactions find that it can make a real difference to performance and turnover.
Studies show that by investing training and coaching time, even in small amounts, this helps improve contact centre performance and produces significant results for instance, even a one per cent increase in first call resolution can drive up customer satisfaction by as much as six per cent. Similarly basic training or coaching can help contact centre agents cut the cost of their average customer contact.
The idea to extend quality monitoring from the contact centre to other areas of the business, evolved from working practices. Clients, after evaluating their current practices and improving them within the contact centre then realised that there were quite a few similarities between the contact centre and the back office operation. In the contact centre, agents are evaluated based on how many calls they handle per hour, while in the back office, agents were judged by how many entries they made per hour. Both are production environments. However, the biggest driver for extending quality outside of the contact centre was the realisation that errors being made in other parts of the organisation, such as the back office, were the catalyst driving calls into a company's contact centre! One Call Centre Manager conducted a study and determined that the top three call types, based on volume, were the result of errors taking place in the back office.
It is therefore important to ensure that performance is regulated and optimised throughout the entire company, to create optimum performance that is consistently experienced.
Let us first define what performance optimisation is:-
Performance optimisation is a way to enhance the effectiveness of agent performance, as well as the resources in the call centre, that meets with strategic goals.
Performance optimisation benefits the entire organisation through a total approach to the business. Collaboration between departments is a key ingredient to making this possible. For example, more valuable information flows through the contact centre in one day than any other part of the organisation. This information needs to be shared with other departments, such as marketing, product development and finance, as well as with executives. It's this type of collaboration and information/intelligence sharing that supports the proactive approach critical to a successful performance optimisation drive.
The biggest area of opportunity to impact change, for most companies, is the back office operation. This can include order entry, where payments are applied, establishing new accounts/updating existing ones, and facilitating product fulfilment and shipping. Most organisations under-estimate the impact that their back-office functions can have on customer service and satisfaction. When companies actually drill down to identify the underlying reasons why customers call their contact centres, they often find that it's a break down in back-office processes that are forcing their customers to call. It could be a shipping delay that's caused the customer to ring for a status check, it could be data entry errors that drive the customer to call to make a correction, or it might be a simple billing mistake that drives the call.
In order to ensure business efficiency, it is essential there be a member of staff dedicated to managing business performance across all departments.
There are several tools available that help companies measure true business performance. Some are technological, and some are process-driven in nature. Technology tools include:
* Quality monitoring (Qe2)
* Analysis (wrap up manager)
* E-Learning
* Voice Recording
From the process side, practices such as Six Sigma, ISO 9000 and FASTER (practiced within the financial sector) are important. All are structured, data-driven approach and methodology for eliminating defects in any process -from manufacturing to transactional and from product to service. A profound process followed within most of these quality improvement processes concentrates on The customer , not the organisation, who determines what's important and what should be measured. This helps companies devote their money and resources to the correct focus areas.
It is impossible to achieve performance optimisation if you are not listening to your customers and addressing the things they tell you are the most important.
In summary:
* Performance Optimisation needs to be practiced throughout the entire organisation.
* All departments need to be monitored and continually improved, based on Customer's needs and wants, learnt only through listening and sharing information.
* Collaboration needs to occur throughout the organisation for maximum effect.
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