The Modern Contact Center Newsletter #1

Hi everyone, welcome to the first Modern Contact Center Newsletter, a quick read packed with practical useful tips and insights to help transform the efficiencies and effectiveness of our mission critical operations. This week, I am starting with the end in mind- "what outcomes are CEO's looking for from their contact center operations?" Pretty much every CEO I meet and work with is looking to achieve these four goals in 2024:

1. Lower operating costs
2. Increase sales
3. Improve the employee and customer experience
4. "Please just let me go one day without someone trying to sell me an AI solution"

As Contact Centers leaders we often get sucked into the urgent things instead of doing the important stuff. So if you haven't developed your contact center strategic plan to deliver these goals, start by blocking time in your calendar now and gathering your smartest people, we still have three more quarters in 2024!

During the next few weeks develop your contact center strategy which includes - mission, strategic goals and planned actions on how you will realize the outcomes. I use a simple one page strategy tree as a great roadmap/compass. Assess your operational performance - people, processes, technology and metrics and develop a gap analysis. This will illuminate improvement opportunities to streamline and automate. Your team meetings should include progress reviews and your frontline leadership KPI's/OKR's should be based on performance for each goal. Here are just a few key questions when assessing where you are today

People- Is my organization design set up for success? Do we have the frontline leadership talent to lead a high performing team? Have we set our Supervisors up for success by training them to be effective leaders? What is the span of control? Do agents like working here? How effective is my training, onboarding, nesting and ongoing development plans? Are my Supervisors coaching and leading agents or are they super doers? Why do people leave?

Processes- Do your processes support a customer focused culture? How often do you improve your processes? Do you have documented SOP's or do you rely on tribal knowledge? Do we engage our frontline agents in process improvement initiatives? How do you foster a culture of continuous improvement?

Technology- Do you have a contact center technology strategy? Is your technology aligned with your people and processes? Are you leveraging automation to streamline the CX and deflect calls? Are you using AI as a knowledge management tool to help your agents? How are you using technology to improve the agent desktop experience? Is AI replacing boring repetitive tasks from your agents, freeing them to provide value added customer relationship and sales calls. Do you provide omni channel service?

Metrics- Do you make data driven decisions using AI call analytics to increase quality and agent performance? Do you have a balanced scorecard of metrics that includes financial, people, CX and operational metrics? Only 2-3 key levers for each metric category?

I hope I have inspired fellow Contact Center Leaders to develop a strategic plan to deliver on their CEO goals. If you would like a copy template of a one page contact center strategy tree, please reach out to me [email protected]

Good luck and remember our contact center strategy must be aligned with our company goals!