Gower Handbook of Call and Contact Centre Management

Natalie Calvert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351932356
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Call centres and contact centres form an important and rapidly growing part of today's business world. They present a range of management challenges, from strategic decisions about how to develop a customer strategy, business planning, through to detailed considerations of staffing levels and appropriate technology. This new handbook, the first of its kind, provides a unique insight giving expert opinions on how to get the most out of your contact centre operations. Natalie Calvert, a specialist in the field, has brought together a team of 35 experienced practitioners who provide invaluable knowledge, share their experiences and draw on real-life examples to suggest practical solutions on a wide range of topics. This handbook is an indispensible guide and reference for call and contact centre managers, HR specialists and senior executives responsible for marketing, sales or customer services. The handbook is divided into six parts: I The business plan II The people factor III Contact centre technology IV Standards, processes, and outsourcing V Building profitable customer relationships VI The future.

PART I
The Business Plan

This section of the handbook examines the fundamental components of developing a call or contact centre:

• Vision and Strategy
• Putting the Customer at the Heart
• Financial Planning and Budgeting
• The Contact Centre Environment
• Case Study: Intelligent Finance

CHAPTER 1
Vision and Strategy

Rob Pike, Director of Telephony Operations, Royal Bank of Scotland

In this chapter we look at creating a vision and a strategy for your contact centre or a network of contact centres.

This chapter is not intended to be an in-depth guide to building a contact centre, but rather a checklist of the elements that should be considered, enriched with the benefit of hindsight and practical experience.

Engaging Teams and Support

Whether developing a plan for a new contact centre or looking to revisit plans for an existing operation, there are three key teams whose needs should be considered. If these resources are used correctly and the needs of the stakeholders really understood then a framework can be created for the delivery of an effective operation. Figure 1.1 outlines the three key teams and stakeholders in question. If you do not have a ‘large’ internal team you will still need to replicate the methodologies in this chapter to build a successful vision and business strategy.

While the process of developing a strategy is largely sequential, it is also to a degree an iterative process. It is appropriate to note that, wherever possible, those who are to implement the strategy and those who will ultimately manage the operation should participate in the strategy development.

Figure 1.1

Key stakeholders, shareholders and internal players © Natwest

In order to create a vision and strategy that are robust, consider the following key steps:

1. The ‘why’ question
2. Decide the vision and create the values
3. Goals and objectives: creating the operational plan
4. Measures and targets.

To understand what to build and how the vision and strategy will be used for maximum benefit, the ‘4D’ approach is often used:

1. Decide
2. Define
3. Develop
4. Deliver.

Figure 1.2

The ‘4D’ development cycle © Natwest

The ‘4D’ development cycle, depicted in Figure 1.2, illustrates this approach.

Having the wider team (strategy, change and operations) engaged at the Decide and Define stage is very important to the overall success of any project.

The vision and the strategy has to be owned. While it can and should be developed by the key players referred to above, as they should be close to the staff and customers’ needs, it must be owned by the CEO and other key business executives.

Gaining the buy-in of senior management will serve two key purposes. First, it is inevitable that there will be challenges in implementing the finally agreed proposal, be they budgetary, resource or customer related. Management buy-in enables these challenges to be effectively actioned. Second, senior sponsorship will ensure that other areas within the business see the change as an essential element for your business’s future, a point that will be useful during the implementation phase. Be prepared for critics who become much more vocal with the benefit of hindsight!

The ‘Why’ Question

It is likely that not everyone who has built a call centre or contact centre will be able to clearly articulate why he or she did so, what its objectives were and how they evaluate its success.

To start the development of the contact centre strategy it is important to answer the question ‘why are we doing this?’ which will strongly determine people, process and technical requirements. Sometimes I wonder how many have started with the answer and then worked backwards to the question!

There are essentially four possible objectives:

• Improve customer service
• Deliver greater customer choice (that is, open a new channel)
• Reduce operational costs (centralize operations, reduce operational overheads)
• Increase sales income (sales/cross sales through lead identification).

It would be easy to say, all of the above. If that is the case, analysis should be undertaken to understand the order of priority.

Remember what Michael Porter says:

The notion underlying the concept of genetic strategies is that Competitive Advantage is at the heart of any strategy and achieving competitive advantage requires a firm to make a choice – if a firm is to attain a competitive advantage, it must make a choice about the type of competitive advantage it seeks to attain and the scope within which it will attain it.

Being ‘all things to all people’ is a recipe for strategic mediocrity and below average performance because it often means that a firm has no competitive advantage at all.

Michael E. Porter, Competitive Advantage, 1985

A good and very simple way to check the underlying purpose and viability of a high-level proposal for change is to write the letter that would be sent to your customers explaining what you are doing, why you are doing it and what it means for them.

Decide the Vision and Create the Values

Does the organization have a clear vision and set of values? Do staff understand these and buy into them?

On the assumption that it does, will contact centre plans fit with, and complement, what is already there? Develop the contact centre vision and values to give clarity of focus and to motivate and mobilize teams, but ensure they fit with other areas of the business.

If the objective is to reduce costs but one of the values is ‘to put the customer at the centre of everything we do’, then be clear how you communicate plans, not only to the customers but also to staff who may receive the message with a degree of cynicism.

When, in the case of large organizations, staff are spread far and wide, not just within contact centres but also in other channels, then having a clearly articulated vision and an understandable set of values will go a long way towards having all staff heading in the same direction.

If your business has not yet developed a vision or a set of values then the contact centre team you appointed to develop and build your contact centre strategy should have this high on their agenda. Ensure that they are aligned to the vision and values of the wider business, while personalizing goals for the centre.

It is important that the vision is short, simple and jargon free. An example might be:

We will recruit, develop and retain the best people so that together we consistently exceed our customers’ expectations.

Similarly, the values should be short, meaningful and easily identifiable by staff as supporting the overall strategy and objectives of your business.

Likewise, value statements should be jargon free and not include words that staff will find patronizing or embarrassing to use. The aim is to create identification with the vision and values within the team so that the statements gradually become a natural part of their vocabulary. They should be easy to remember. If your staff have to go to their desk to dig out a piece of paper then they will not work.

An example of a simple set of values might be:

We will achieve our vision by:

• being customer driven
• investing in our people so that they will look after our customers
• treating colleagues as we would wish to be treated ourselves.

Lower-level detail can then be developed to put actions beneath these values to bring them to life within the business and in so doing add real value.

Goals and Objectives: Creating the Operational Plan

Having agreed the vision and set of values to live by, together with why your organization needs to establish a contact centre and what products and services can be offered to your customers, it is now time to develop a more detailed operational plan.

The operational plan should be an organic document which sets out in some detail what you intend to do during the next period, usually 12 months. In other words, short to medium-term goals and objectives should be underpinned by a plan to show how you will achieve those objectives. An example of one entry might be:

We will reduce the number of complaints that reach the CEO by 50 per cent, to one complaint per one million customer calls by:

• increasing the number of agents qualified to level 3 from 60 per cent to 80 per cent
• increasing our mystery shopping scores for our core processes to 99 per cent
• creating a small pool of ‘super agents’ to whom all customer concerns/complaints are handed immediately for resolution
• ensuring the staff bonus scheme includes recognition for achieving this reduction.

To be effective, these goals need to be clear, logical and understandable but, above all, the staff need to know what they must do to achieve them and why that makes sense. To be really effective the goals need to be measurable and the targets which are set must be realistic but challenging.

The operational plan should take up several pages and detail a set of actions, the owners for those actions, and delivery milestones.

Measures and Targets

For key goals and objectives to be meaningful, they must be measurable. It is advisable to ensure that measures are manageable in number, say between 10 and 15.

It is often easier and more logical to organize your goals and objectives into a cluster based on the quadrants of a balanced business scorecard. For example:

If you find the right measures and targets in the first three quadrants, the fourth, the financial quadrant, will look after itself. That may be an oversimplification, but by investing in staff and process improvement, the financial benefits will flow naturally. Of course, all businesses have to operate within bugetary constraints; however, budgets should be driven by the plan and not th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• About the Editor
• PART I: The Business Plan
• PART II: The People Factor
• PART III: Contact Centre Technology
• PART IV: Standards, Processes and Outsourcing
• PART V: Building Profitable Customer Relationships
• PART VI: The Future
• Glossary
• Useful Addresses
• Index