It's
the experience, stupid
-
Evaluating
your contact centre isn't just a numbers game anymore.
Article
by Dan Carpenter, Technology Director, Eyretel Inc. dan.carpenter@eyretel-usa.com
Dilbert pokes fun at Call Center Metrics.
This
past Sunday morning I was relaxing with the four inch thick Boston
Globe in my lap, a cup of coffee on the table next to me and work was the
farthest thing from my mind until, ironically, I got to the comics.
The opening frame for Dilbert was a call center manager berating an agent
for his longer than average call handle times.
"You better improve your stats or you're out of here," she
warns. Of course the next caller he
handles is Dilbert and the stat-focused agent is anything but helpful.
We've all spoken to these metrics driven droids.
It made for good Sunday comic strip humour until I thought about it some
more.
The
fact that a nationally syndicated comic strip not only articulated a fundamental
flaw in contact center management but also that Scott Adams knows that people
will GET IT is a salient message to any business that has a contact center.
If
you are responsible for a contact center in some way and you judge the success
or failure of your center by metrics alone you might want to skip this
paragraph. Or, if you’re an outright metrics-junkie just stop reading
because as hard as this may be for you to accept, it's not about the numbers
anymore - it's about the experience.
From Call Factory to Experience Producer.
Your
customers are savvier than ever. They
have experienced the best & worse contact centers and, as the Dilbert strip
points out, they even understand the business practices behind your center. They are painfully and personally aware that their concept of
a good contact center is not necessarily in line with management’s philosophy.
Do you realize that the very metrics that are being used to judge the
center may in fact be driving customers away?
It is a classic catch 22 but before we go any further let’s be clear on
this fact: Metrics undoubtedly play an important role in contact center
management but they are not the panacea. They
can’t change your customer’s perception of your center.
You might answer the phone very fast, talk very little and move on
quickly to the next call but what does the customer think about their
experience? Efficiency does not directly translate to effectiveness.
It
is human nature to want to understand things.
We want to apply logic to them. To
boil them down to easily understandable, formulaic transactions.
A + B = C. I kick you, you
scream, right? We’ve learned this
since birth. It is a philosophy
that has been embedded deep within our psyche but when it comes to higher level
business or personal relationships it’s not that easy.
Life is not an A + B = C event. It’s
dynamic, it’s spontaneous, it’s beautiful in it’s diversity and it’s
vastly more complex than any metric we could ever monitor.
Whenever
human interactions are involved, numbers, formulas and metrics are more
frequently being recognized for what they truly are – baseline tools for
creating a rudimentary understanding of the relationship that are, unless they
represent the simplest of relationships, inherently flawed and at best should be
used for procedural analysis.
California
State Universities are going to be eliminating the SATs as criteria for
admission. Some Ivy League schools
readily admit to not placing much weight or even completely disregarding these
same tests. They feel that the test
offers little insight into the ultimate quality and success of a student.
Numbers alone can’t accurately quantify the individual.( Ed note -
for many years Oxford & Cambridge Universities have used own entry level
test 'The Oxbridge' and personal interviews to replace standard A level exam
scores for applicants- to ensure relevance & potential of applicants).
A
few years ago Congress was reviewing it's funding of the arts because there was
an uproar over an offensive, government funded exhibit.
The question "What is pornography?" was posed and after much
debate, the final response was "I know it when I see it." Clearly some things are too difficult to define explicitly
but that doesn’t mean they should be ignored or stuffed into a nonsensical
formula. Instead, we need to
appreciate the dynamics that effect the interpretation.
Why do you think that image is pornographic and I don’t?
Sometimes
you can not apply hard & fast rules - you have to look at the intangibles;
the fuzzy nuances that are open to interpretation yet that greatly impact the
perceived context. This is how your
customers evaluate your contact center. They
don’t care about the metrics, all they care about is the interaction, and that
interaction isn’t a specific thing. It
is a series of events that occur during a specific contact and, depending on the
business, over time.
I
can hear the contact center managers who are reading this column now, “Another
writer telling me what I’m doing wrong, why I’m doomed for failure by doing
what I’ve always done.” You’ve
heard it all before. Things
aren’t so bad and, most likely they’re probably pretty good.
And you’re right. I
don’t understand the details of your specific business but at the fundamental
level, what I’m really telling you is that, to paraphrase a true genius,
“the times they are a changing and you better start swimming or you’ll sink
like a stone”.
The
Need for Customer Experience Management.
The
difference between your company & your competitors is narrowing rapidly, if
it hasn't completely disappeared already. How
are you going to attract new customers? How
are you going to keep them coming back for more?
The practices that will make your organization successful in this
millennium will not be driven by metrics. A
small change in the percentage of your customer churn can make a dramatic impact
on your bottom line. How can you
increase your customer loyalty? Product and price can’t carry you anymore.
Customers can scan dozens of websites with the click of a mouse for the
best price. How do you get them to
always come to you first? How do
you make them want to do business with you?
What
you need to do is start listening to your customers.
Feel their pain, feel their joy, understand what they experience when
they touch your center. Numbers
can’t help you qualify that. They
will help you tune up the systems and optimize your agents but they won’t tell
you what your customer thought of the interaction.
The numbers are the equivalent of feeding starving people.
It’s a band-aid that provides short-term gains but in order to solve
the underlying issues you need to, in the case of the starving, teach them how
to farm or fish effectively and in your contact center you need tools that allow
you to perform complex analysis of the customer’s entire experience.
You need Customer Experience Management (CEM).
CEM
is a methodology that allows for the consolidation, representation and analysis
of all of your contact center data from the IVR system, to the actual agent to
customer conversation and all the other systems the customer touches in between
as they traverse your environment and enterprise.
Mining this data can provide a clear understanding of how your customers
perceive your organization which in turn can be used to segment and tailor your
systems and staff around your customer’s expectations.
The
difficulty is in trying to tie together all of the information generated by the
disparate contact center systems. It
can easily become an overwhelming task and as call centers become multi-media
contact centers the task becomes even more difficult.
Each system has its own database, its own format, its own purpose and
concept of what is important to your business.
In order to understand the experience of the customer you need to be able
to make sense of this morass of data, and if you run multiple centers the
difficulties increase exponentially. Then
you’re also dealing with different platform vendors, different configurations,
different revisions and so on.
Winning Customers depends on the consistence of the experience.
Let’s
take a look at a practical, non-technology-oriented example of CEM - an example
of CEM in practice before CEM became a term.
Southwest Airlines offers cut rate fares, not the most convenient
airports, older planes and much lower level of services than the other airlines
and yet they consistently top the list of best airlines for customer service. They’re growing fast and are profitable.
How can this be? They move a lot of people; they do it fast and efficiently.
Their metrics are good. But
more importantly they do it with panache, with style and confidence and they
understand that it’s not about the minutia of “do I get a specific seat”
or “are you serving Chicken Cordon Bleu” - it’s about the experience.
They make it fun. Their
employees have personalities and that’s a good thing - something that can’t
be measured by a metric. If you
talk to Southwest frequent flyers they are generally rabid fans of the airline.
Southwest owns these people in a way that any company should envy. ( ed
note : 1976 Ford Motor commissioned a survey of Ford owners "Would they buy
a Ford again".. 63% said "depends on how you treat us when we need
help with out current Ford"; first time importance of 'experience'
documented).
Now
I’m going to ask you to take a step back, put down the reports, exit Excel
& think about your contact center from your customer's point of view.
What do they think of it? Is
it world-class? Do you want it to
be? Can you see the value in going
above and beyond the metrics and looking at the experience? These are questions you need to answer before you embark on a
quest for CEM. It’s not easy and it certainly involves breaking with tradition
and rethinking how you evaluate the success of your contact centers.
But,
it will be worth it because in the end, a successful contact center will be one
that provides the best overall experience and, by definition, that can't be
driven by numbers alone. It will
also be one that recognizes the hard-to-quantify realities surrounding human
interactions. You need to own the
customer spiritually - at a different level than in the past and you need new
tools and ideas on which to base your contact center effectiveness and
efficiency.
So the next time someone asks you “What makes a world-class contact center?” What are you going to say? Hopefully, it’ll be something like, “It’s hard to say because they all have their own unique business issues but I definitely know one when I see one.”
(Ed note : My personal definition of World Class Call Centre is the 90-90 rule : 90% of all calls answered within 20 seconds by a person & 90% of all calls resolved and handled at entry point).
Contact
to Dan Carpenter dan.carpenter@eyretel-usa.com
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