Digital transformation has enabled offering better customer service at a lower cost. Channels with high labor intensity like contact centers have become primary targets for cost cutting. Is that universally smart?
Do contact centers have a role in today’s digital world? With so many tools at the fingertips of customers does anyone need to talk to a human agent? Is the role of the modern contact center nothing more than using bots, speech recognition, AI, and limited human-assisted calls and chats to reduce its cost?
Our position is: NO!
Contact centers must not serve a monolithic approach of “do the least you must in the cheapest way you can”. Instead, their mission should be to “listen!”.
Why should you “listen”?
There are three distinct reasons to listen:
Identify Systemic Root Causes. The scientific study of calls, coupled with classic root cause analysis tools, can identify systemic problems in the various channels (physical, remote, digital, etc.), in product design, in policies & procedures, in back office operations, etc. In turn, this allows management to address these root causes and thus systematically resolve pain points before they re-occur. It reduces cost-to-serve not only in the contact center but across the entire organization, while simultaneously increasing customer loyalty.
Identify segment-of-1 problems and/or opportunities and act on them. If for example a premier customer is unhappy and the source of their dissatisfaction is not resolved on the call, an analytically-driven organization should identify the situation and escalate it to a premier call-back service that will ensure this premier customer’s NPS goes up and not down.
Coach Agents. Training alone is never enough. Call center agents can be the most consistent and well-performing front line staff because their work allows continuous coaching thanks to the ability to record and analyze their customer interactions.
How should “listening” be done?
It should not be done in massive volumes. Wrap codes and common word tracking by speech analytics is of low quality and by nature superficial. Listening should be done at a deep level with “listening laboratories”. These labs should be staffed by agents who follow special dynamic hypothesis testing scripts that progressively dig deeper to locate the root cause of each problem.
What should be “listened” at?
Inbound calls and chat sessions in all queues. Larger volume queues should be prioritized, as should queues that are hypothesized to have larger opportunity and/or are farther from benchmark performance, as well as key customer segments e.g., premier, small business, new customers, and calls pertaining to products or channels of interest.
Who should “listen”?
Regular agents. Listening labs need not be staffed by specially qualified agents. Minimal training is required for regular agents to perform their duties in the lab.
What is the cost of “listening”? The ROI?
The cost is minimal and equivalent to a very small staff complement that will operate at roughly half the benchmark efficiency as a result of the longer inquisitive interactions. Yet the ROI will be higher than most projects. Even with the cost of external consultants in the early stages, Year 1 ROIs are 1000-2000% and lifetime ROIs can exceed 10000%, on cost-cutting alone driven by lower call volumes once root causes have been resolved. Adding the impact of (a) higher NPS and the benefits on retention, cross-sell, positive word of mouth, plus (b) opportunities to streamline company-wide operations, policies, procedures, and products, in all channels, propel ROIs to extraordinary high levels.
Case Study
For a top-4 bank in its country, in a 10-week initial diagnostic coupled with a listening laboratory environment, Delos Advisors identified opportunities to reduce call volumes (measured in human-assisted call minutes) by almost 50%. Within a year of the project, operating expenses of the call center were reduced by 30% (driven by a reduction in headcount) with more initiatives under implementation which should further reduce that cost. Project ROI was 1200% in Year 1 alone. Furthermore, the call center improved its SLA performance despite the drastic reduction in the number of call center agents.
In summary, contact centers should not be driven to extinction nor become fully automated factories. Instead, they should be deployed strategically in a way to reduce expenses (not just in the call center but across the organization), improve customer satisfaction with the resultant increase in sales and retention, and create a strategic competitive advantage.
Delos Advisors has the tools to help management teams quickly navigate this strategic transformation and benefit from the tactical benefits within months.
In a future white paper, we will broach the harder topic of “listening” in branches and other physical environments. It can be even more powerful and we have tested and proven solutions to offer.