Technology-Enabled Service Excellence

Take a tour of high performance tools that can put you on the path to consistent service excellence.

Your customers want the right information and issue resolution, no matter who takes their calls. You want to boost customer loyalty through the service you provide. Everyone wants a consistent standard of care to streamline communication and reduce interaction time, delivering better service to the customer and lowering costs to the company. And if you have compliance requirements for your contacts, you most certainly want to avoid regulatory fees by ensuring the right things happen on each call.

Sound like a tall order to meet all these wants? It can be if your most powerful “tools” are process design, classroom training and coaching. If that is the case, the road to consistent service excellence can seem mighty winding and awfully long. You need some high-performance capabilities to give you a better vehicle to navigate this road.

Though it’s not a substitute for well-defined processes and well-executed staff development, technology is the great enabler of consistent service excellence. It helps you present standard messages at agent desktops, identify opportunities for process improvement and training, monitor and reinforce adherence, and close the loop with customers to get their perspective on the messages they receive (see Figure 1). Climb aboard our technology tour to see if your journey might get a whole lot easier.

Standardize the Message

Defining standard messages and making them available to agents and customers is the first stop on the road to consistent communication. Consider whether scripting applications, customer relationship management (CRM) or knowledge management (KM) systems can give you a performance edge.

According to research group Contact Babel, 62% of organizations use scripting applications to standardize customer communication. For health care, financial services, utilities and other regulated industries, scripts help agents stick to the letter of the law when collecting customer data and providing information. Where very specific language is required, “smart” scripts may trigger prerecorded messages, during the workflow or at the end of the call, often delivered via IVR.

For others, scripting provides an efficient means to complete a prescribed transaction — for an opinion poll, an 800-number order or a product recall. The context governs whether the script is a guidepost for dialog or a rigid, word-for-word agenda. In either case, scripts get the best result when CSRs learn to deliver their “lines” in a natural, conversational tone.

If you support a diverse customer base that interacts with multiple touchpoints within your organization, you’ll need a bigger engine on the drive to consistent excellence. A CRM system and the associated processes can help all of your employees speak with one voice as they interact with customers. Contact history can equip agents to pick up conversations where their predecessors left off, eliminating the need for customers to repeat their issues or inquiries.

You can incorporate scripts into workflows to speed transaction processing and point to opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling based on customer profiles. Workflows can also require agents to confirm message delivery, reinforcing the company’s focus on consistency, thoroughness and compliance.

If your agents deal with a broad spectrum of customer queries for which multiple resources house the answers, consider KM systems and processes. This technology uses sophisticated search algorithms to mine existing databases, data directories, CRM systems, intranet sites and other Web resources to provide responses to natural language inquiries.

Its capacity to provide standard responses to frequently asked questions (FAQs) enhances agent interactions with customers while also enabling self-service. Scripted answers can offer alternatives or suggest additional content. And KM creates the opportunity for frontline CSRs to add to the knowledge base as they resolve issues.

Identify Opportunities for Improvement

At our second stop, we pick up tools to make sure CSRs stay on a consistent track to service excellence and optimized interactions. Quality monitoring (QM) and speech analytics (SA) can track message and service consistency across the organization and identify opportunities to elevate performance. A desktop analysis tool can identify where processes or training are not “sticking” and staff are not using systems to the best effect.

A well-designed QM system records a statistically relevant, diverse selection of calls across all CSRs. Using a standardized, automated tool, QA staff or supervisors can determine whether the CSRs are delivering accurate and consistent information. QM summary reports and trend analyses pinpoint systematic errors, inefficiencies and missteps that can needlessly and negatively impact the customer experience. Drilling down on individual scores allows you to target individual improvement. QM is a quantum improvement over side-by-side monitoring, but it remains a labor-intensive process.

Speech analytics is the latest “hot rod” to hit the tracks. It “mines” recorded conversations to spot key words and phrases and assess the conversation to identify the topics discussed, the characteristics of the speakers, the tone of the interaction, and the non-speech elements (e.g., noise, silence). It holds the promise of analyzing a broad spectrum of calls to surface inconsistencies, inefficiencies and other service-affecting disorders, enabling automation of broad and deep analysis without the corresponding labor demand.

A desktop analysis tool can capture information about where agents are spending time, and which screens they are using and not using. The data from such a tool helps the center assess whether training is working, systems need tuning or processes need refining. It can also help identify the outliers, who can then receive the additional coaching they need to get on track.

Reinforce Consistent Communication

If the first two stops identify some unwanted detours, our next stop cleans them up. Quality monitoring, eLearning and workforce management (WFM) work together to deliver targeted training for identified performance gaps and to reinforce the center’s focus on consistently delivering excellent service.

The reporting and analytics applications associated with QM allow organizations to track quality scores for the agent and the team. Displaying balanced scorecards including quality scores (or specific scores on certain quality components) on the agent desktop reinforces quality interactions. Targeting a few quality key performance indicators (KPIs) to display on the balanced scorecard emphasizes to the agents those elements of a quality interaction that are especially important to focus on when interacting with customers.

QM can integrate with eLearning applications to deliver customized lessons based on each agent’s quality scores. For instance, if an agent scores low on message compliance, the eLearning application can provide the appropriate lesson at the agent’s desk and track completion. Other agents will have different modules listed as their required training based on their quality scores.

Integrate eLearning with a WFM application to deliver training modules during low volume periods. The WFM administrator does not have to schedule ad hoc sessions nor place overall service levels and adherence in jeopardy. Agents receive the right training based on identified gaps at the right time based on volume projections and service level.

Listen to Customers

You can’t finish the tour without asking your customers if they’ve enjoyed the ride. Technology enables you to find out if your customers think they got what they needed — resolution of their need with the type of service they expected.

Voice of the customer (VOC) applications are gaining momentum in the contact center. Five years ago, VOC surveys were occasional and general tools for marketing or corporate communication. The results focused on the overall perception of the company and the reflection on the center got lost in the feedback on price, products and other issues. In their 2008 US Contact Center Operational Review, ContactBabel reports that 72% of contact centers take advantage of VOC surveys.

Contact centers use IVR applications to obtain immediate feedback tied to the specific agent and interaction. These surveys focus on customer satisfaction and quality of the interaction. Email surveys are becoming more common as the simplest way of obtaining an unbiased random sample with minimal integration costs. These surveys are most effective when sent within minutes of the call or email response.

The customer view of communication effectiveness can combine with the internal performance measures for a 360-degree view. Synchronizing the customer perception and the organization’s assumptions about efficient, accurate communication, allows companies to improve their standardization, identification and reinforcement of high-quality, consistent interactions.

Plot Your Map to Consistent Service Excellence

Success in consistently and effectively servicing customers requires an integrated approach of people, processes and technology. Technology is the enabler that standardizes the messages, identifies gaps, reinforces success and enables a company to listen to their customers. Success depends on a combination of processes with technology — using the technology with a goal of ensuring consistent messages and service to your customers. The “best” companies will carefully evaluate their gaps and identify their hurdles to delivering consistently excellent service.

Brian Hinton is a Senior Consultant at Strategic Contact.

Lori Fraser is a Consultant at Strategic Contact.

– Reprinted with permission from Contact Center Pipeline, www.contactcenterpipeline.com