Building the best Contact Centre

I am often engaged by leaders responsible for Contact Centres looking for a current state assessment, and insights into where they can improve. In 2023, I was privileged to judge the Contact Centre of the Year category in the Auscontact Association Awards alongside Kate Gorman from CSBA.

What the judging process reaffirmed for me, is that to be the best, you need to be delivering value for three key constituent groups:

1. Your employees
2. Your customers
3. Your stakeholders

The best Contact Centres have highly engaged employees, satisfied and loyal customers and are seen as offering strategic value within an organisation.

So how do you build the best Contact Centre?

If you are responsible for a Contact Centre or customer service team or operation, there are four areas where I specifically focus with each connected to vision and values. These areas provide a framework for success:

Building the best Contact Centre means focussing on people, process, technology and governance. Some will focus on one or two areas, but in doing so you are not delivering the best outcomes for your employees, your customers and your stakeholders.

From decades of practical experience, coupled with my consulting experience, the following is the framework for success.

Focus Area 1: People

When we are building the best Contact Centre, a focus on people is critical. This includes a focus on recruitment, onboarding, role and performance clarity, career pathways, managing physical and psychosocial risks, locations and work from home (WFH), rewards and recognition, engagement and culture.

That might seem like a lot to focus on, but each of these setup the foundations for engaged, happy and safe employees who will advocate for you and your organisation. A focus on locations helps manage physical risks, role and performance clarity contribute to reduced psychosocial risks and as Peter Drucker is often quoted as saying,

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast."

Don't forget that customer service is a people-business. Customers expect to interact with people, especially now with increased self-service, automation and the rise in AI, your people are your biggest asset in managing complex customer issues, building and maintaining customer relationships and driving sales, membership growth and loyalty.

Focus Area 2: Process

Trying to optimise and improve processes can be a graveyard for initiatives to improve customer outcomes. This is because the vast bulk of organisations are structured into functional siloes with disconnected performance measures, hindering a customer-centric approach to doing business.

In building the best Contact Centre, you need to create and optimise a range of processes, including resource and workforce planning (including surge planning), scheduling and rostering, quality assessment, coaching, and business continuity planning.

In larger Contact Centres, a key tip is also ensuring your workforce management processes align with your payroll, minimising the risk of employee underpayments.

Communication and change management is also critical as these processes keep your people informed, engaged and limit the risks of information overload.

To bring your customer-facing challenges together with back of house functions and tackle organisational siloes, this also means investing in processes for escalation management and workflows to ensure a seamless experience for both your employees and your customers.

Lastly, with the rise of AI and automation, you need to have processes to manage content, data and information. Some of the negative case studies that have found their way online demonstrate why a focus on content processes is so critical.

Key Focus Area 3: Technology

The difference between good and best is often based on the level of investment in technology, especially technology that empowers the best outcomes for employees, customers and stakeholders.

The technology needed to underpin the best Contact Centres includes omnichannel capabilities for voice, chat, email, and emerging channels like asynchronous chat; as well as IVR, CRM, business intelligence and analytics, knowledge management, workforce management and let's not forget automation and AI.

Investments in technology need to be prioritised and related to the size of your Contact Centre. I've seen Contact Centres prioritise investments in technology which provide only marginal benefits over solutions which would deliver significant ongoing improvements. The key is getting the best out of your technology investments.

That is easier said that done. Today's Contact Centre environment has hundreds of technology providers and options, with most now pushing AI solutions. Seeking assistance from technology advisers can help reduce the complexity and help find the right solutions for your needs.

If your Contact Centre is dealing with complex products, is highly regulated, or has complex customer needs, investing in knowledge management and AI capabilities that speed up accuracy of information, reduce handling time and deliver other benefits including reduced onboarding time will likely deliver bigger bang for buck than investments in other capabilities.

Technology can empower your ability to deliver, but again, if you fail to invest in improving processes and governance, you can't paper over those cracks.

Focus Area 4: Governance

The last piece of the puzzle is often minimised to focus purely on service levels, reporting and performance management.

Governance does includes those elements, but also needs to include collaboration, delegation and decision-making. These elements sit between role and performance clarity and your communication and change management processes.

When investing in technology, you need to have clear vendor management capabilities. In many organisations, stakeholder management capabilities are also required. Managing relationships requires focus and attention and can be overlooked.

Today's critical business risks regularly relate to Contact Centres, so it is important that you are prepared with operational and strategic risk plans. If your organisation suffers a cybersecurity breach or there is a natural disaster, are you prepared? This also relates back to surge planning.

Lastly, benchmarking is a vital part of continuous improvement. Benchmarking can come in various forms, including independent global benchmarking activities like we offer and deliver from Snapshotz, or entry into Award programs like those offered by Auscontact Association and CSIA.

Implementing a Contact Centre Success Framework

Very few leaders get the opportunity to build a new Contact Centre or customer service function from scratch, or get the opportunity with budget, time and resources to build the best of breed approach that this Framework seeks to offer.

The reality is that most Contact Centres grow and evolve over time, responding and reacting to different pressures and demands.

Building success comes from investing in a current state assessment, and building a roadmap for sustainable improvement. This framework offers an ability to signpost a future state and develop an implementation plan to work towards and achieve.

I help leaders responsible for Contact Centres with current state assessments, improvement roadmaps and implementation partnerships to go from good to great. These assessments are low-cost and high-value, offering leaders a return on investment within 6-12 months.

If you would like to explore an assessment against our Contact Centre Success Framework, email me today or book a time to discuss.

Who is Michael Clark?

Michael Clark is not the famous former cricketer! Michael is a veteran of the Contact Centre and CX Industry and was recognised in 2023 as one of the Top 100 Influencers in the Contact Centre Industry in APAC, and as one of Australia's Top 50 Small Business Leaders in 2022.

Michael is the co-founder and Principal Consultant at CXTT Consulting.