How to create a Contact Centre strategy

CONTACT CENTRE GUIDE BLOG: 2/9
MyCustomer.com recently published ‘The Contact Centre Guide’ which was sponsored by Business Systems. For those short on time, we created a series of blogs covering the highlights from each chapter.

Please find the 2nd in the series below.

A big topic which can by no means be covered off in a single blog post, but we can offer some quick short, sharp insights to consider when creating or reviewing your contact centre strategy. There’s really three main areas to focus on, your customer, your capabilities and then simply getting on with it and building the strategy.

CUSTOMERS: PUTTING THEM AT THE HEART OF YOUR CONTACT CENTRE STRATEGY
It’s an obvious one, but when did you last profile who your customers are and what outcomes they hope to achieve when contacting you? Are the answers still the same as they were a year ago? You really need to take the time to identify and segment them so that you can get better insight on how they like to interact with you.

Are they digital natives having never know a world without internet or instant information at their fingertips, if so chances are they’ll appreciate a social media centric strategy or even a community approach where they themselves generate and share answers to problems.

Once you get to the heart of who they are and why they are contacting you, you can get an idea of the customer journey they take, mapping different scenarios. You can then segregate the simpler, repetitive enquiries, which can be handled perhaps by self-service technology versus the more complex interaction requiring higher skilled agent input.

CAPABILITIES: ASSESSING WHETHER YOUR CURRENT OPERATION IS FIT FOR PURPOSE
This leads us neatly onto evaluating your own capabilities as they currently stand. You know your customers, you know why they are getting in touch with you and how, so what infrastructure do you have in place to address this? What technology have you implemented, is it fulfilling the needs of the customer at each step of the journey?
Is your technical support team geared up to help you get the most out of the technology?

By evaluating the state of your existing architecture you get an accurate picture of the gap between what your contact centre currently provides and what the customer demands. Once you have done this you get a clear indication of where investment is required and whether your existing structure in place is already fit for purpose with a bit of finessing or whether you need to consider replacing it.

It’s also worth benchmarking against competitors and identifying whether you feel you’re delivering better service than them, if not, why not?

BUILDING YOUR CONTACT CENTRE STRATEGY
Once you’ve got a handle on your customers and capabilities, you can then start thinking about the goals you want to achieve and the steps required to meet them.

There needs to be some dissemination of this throughout the organisation so that everyone is working in line with each other. A budget should be developed so you know where best to invest your money. Typically a large portion of this may be earmarked for technology and you need to look back at your audience to understand which technologies might best satisfy their needs both today and in the future alongside your own business objectives. Considerations in this area may look at how you can effectively mix legacy equipment and new technology.

Another important point to note before considering opening up new channels of communications is what are you doing to address the problems first on your existing channels? This could save a lot of heartache further down the line and better improve the rate of adoption and success of your new contact channel.

Finally once your strategy is rolled out, plan in time to test it, monitor it and analyse it so you can identify any problems straight away and be responsive to changes in market dynamics.

A final thought to leave you with courtesy of Jonathan Collard, commercial director at Tripudio Telecom. “Just remember humans still like to talk to ensure enquires are 100% resolved, so telephony based support is by no means dead.”
Read the ‘Contact Centre Guide Blog 1/9 – The changing contact centre – and what you can do about it’ here.