Executing a CEM Strategy
There are a lot of challenges associated with organizational silos. Each depart-ment tends to do what’s best for the department rather than what’s best for the customer.
Jeffrey Henning
Hartford Life’s contact center managers play a critical role in driving CEM success across the organization. While managers track traditional productivity metrics — such as average speed of answer, service levels and handle times — to ensure that calls are being answered efficiently, they also routinely review after-call surveys, customer loyalty and customer retention data.
“We keep customer experience and voice of the customer very closely aligned, so there is always the loop going back to different touch points at different points in time to ensure that we’re doing the right things,” she explains. For instance, at the initial point of contact, customer segmentation plays a key role to ensure that customers are routed to the right person to handle their request, and that unnecessary call transfers are eliminated. FCR, considered to be a critical measure of the customer experience, is tracked at the rep level to create awareness among frontline staff of how to handle calls in a manner that doesn’t drive a subsequent contact.
To close the loop, the contact center’s productivity metrics and customer data is integrated into the employee coaching process.
“Coaching is like the blood in our veins,” says Denehy. “We put a pretty high expectation on coaching because, without it, no strategy is going to work. We make sure that our managers understand what the strategy is, and that they’re driving it every day with the frontline staff.”The goal for the contact centers’ frontline managers is to spend between 40% and 50% of their time coaching their staff.
The coaching sessions are not conducted in the traditional format, which typically consists of telling employees whether or not they met their performance standards for various criteria. Hartford Life’s coaching sessions are based on “employee self-discovery” — each rep gets to see how well they scored against their peers on various performance criteria, and then they have a conversation with their frontline manager on what they can do to improve.
“We engage employees in the conversation. We work with them in a collaborative manner to show them different ways to enhance their performance so that they can drive their own improvement. We have moved away from a coaching environment in which people are just told what to do.”The conversation with high per-formers — those who rank in the top quartile for a particular performance criteria — is about sharing best practices that can be transferred to other employees.
Driving Strategy to the Front Line
At PSCU Financial Services, FCR is also considered to be critical to high-quality interactions. The metric is derived from three primary sources, says Hughes.
1. Training. Does the representative have the proper training to service the call?
2. Technology. Does the rep have access to per-form the transaction functionally for the caller?
3. Call routing. Does the contact center have the appropriate skills-based routing in place to get the calls to the right rep who is best prepared to handle it?
The firm has developed its own technology for delivering real-time information to frontline reps to help them handle calls. As they advance through a conversation with a customer, it pro-vides continual prompts on how to respond to various requests. “The technology has provided a significant advantage in providing a quality experience,” Hughes says.
Another benefit is “having a nimble training group that works very closely with workforce management,” he says. As call volumes drop and agents become available, they’re moved off the phone for “cultural immersion training,” to help them gain a better understanding of specific clients’ needs — for instance, the client’s history, types of products it offers, and what differentiates it in the marketplace.
Naturally, technology and training would not be effective if employees are not motivated. Driving CEM objectives in the contact center requires an engaged front line. Recognition goes a long way toward getting employee buy-in and active participation, Hughes says. “Quality assurance programs often dwell on the negative — the areas to improve. But recognizing reps who create a quality experience endorses the direction that you want to go in as a company. It shows that your company is engaged in that activity and treats it with the highest importance. If you have an agent who has an uncommon interaction where they take a problem call, resolve it and then turn it into a positive experience for the customer — that needs to be recognized and spread across the organization.
