The Contact center planning and management process includes the nine critical steps that your center should be following in order to be properly staffed, scheduled, forecasted and prepared for just about anything.
These nine steps encapsulate the basics for making sure that your center’s service level objectives are suited to your organization’s needs – and that your right resources are in place to make this happen.
The effortless customer experience has been the guiding mantra in customer service for the last decade.
Yet, to meet rising expectations, companies are realizing that their biggest hurdle isn't the customer experience (CX) - it's the agent experience.
So what's holding companies back from providing an effortless agent experience? They spent more time dealing with legacy systems and outdated technology than actually listening to their customers. In an effort to improve our CX, you must overlooked your crucial folks who differentiate your business from your competitors. Sound familiar?
Provide Your Agents with the Technology and the Tools
Often, contact centers agents work with legacy systems that are too rigid to evolve with changing customer expectations. Take a moment to rethink your technology stack, with the user in mind.
Provide Your Agents with a Great Work Environment
It's nearly impossible to deliver outstanding customer service if youragents don't genuinely love their jobs. Infuse your contact center with brand culture, but don't forget to let your agents' individuality to shine through.
Every employee in the organization should have a customer experience metric on their performance scorecard, specific to their area of responsibility. This approach ensures that employees understand that improving the customer experience is “everyone’s responsibility.”
Furthermore, setting an overall corporate goal, such as a customer loyalty score or index, reinforces the message that employees must all work together to ensure an improvement in the end-to-end customer experience.
Setting targets is one of the trickiest parts of the process associated with linking customer experience metrics to compensation; it is a balance between art and science.
For those employees who are average performers, it is better to lean toward the upside and focus on the positive aspects of customer experience improvements rather than to risk demotivating employees with targets that they don’t believe they can achieve
To set credible, actionable and achievable targets, consider the following:
► The target must be set outside the margin of error to prevent rewarding employees for a simple random sampling error in the survey results.
► Consider the “end goal” or benchmark performance that you want the organization to ultimately achieve across all customer experience interactions.
► Determine what percentage improvement is expected to close the gap (e.g., 15%) between current performance and benchmark standards.
► Use a 1 decimal convention for reporting and target setting to prevent employees from focusing on minute changes in the actual numbers.
► Ideally, use one full year’s worth of data to establish the baseline before setting the target.
► Establish a standard (e.g., 8.5 out of 10) when improvements are not required, but rather target performance is set simply to maintain current performance.
Is your coaching effective? If yes, the next time you listen to your outbound telemarketing sales rep, you will hear the changes in their calls. If not, you will have to coach on that issue again. If you find yourself conducting repeated coaching with the same reps with the same issues, then a key question to ask may be, “are you a good coach?”
Here are some easy ways to implement suggestions that are guaranteed to improve the quality of your coaching with your team.
Be Positive!
When thinking back to coaches you have come in contact with over the years or coaches you see in professional sports, you probably have a positive connotation. The good coaches inspire a team and individuals to work or play to their potential. Good coaches are positive!
Coaching for Quality
Have some calls at the ready to play for the sales rep with the area of opportunity you want them to improve on. See if they can spot what needs to be improved on. When they can spot it, it’s half the battle. If they are not able to spot it, we need to ask, how could that be done a little differently?
Be prepared to play another outbound telemarketing sales rep’s call displaying the area of opportunity done correctly. People learn differently so be prepared. Maybe they can pick up the new technique off the call but maybe they are visual learners and need to “See” the scripting. Others may need additional training. Determine how they learn and get them what they need.
Inspect what you Expect!
The best way to get good at something is to practice it. Make sure you role play and the outbound telemarketing rep can demonstrate what is needed before you expect them to be good at it. Then, when you hear the area of opportunity actually improved upon, let them know it! It can be a long day on the phones out there in the call center world. Be sure to dole out the “Atta boy’s” and ”Way to go” when they get it right! Everyone needs to hear the positive reinforcement. It also helps to get the front line rep’s buy in the next time coaching is in order.
Effective Coaching Affects Tenure
A good coach that’s effective not only sees improved performance, but helps to reduce turnover. In the outbound telemarketing world, that is a must! When you get it right, an employee will be loyal and work hard. They will recognize they are part of a team and strive to meet goals and make the appropriate changes. This ensure success and everyone wants to be successful!
