5 Ways Tomorrow's Contact Center Will Deliver Value

By: Andrew Gilliam

Imagine what the world will be like after you've checked off every box on your customer experience to-do list. Pre-purchase anxiety no longer exists, thanks to careful messaging and word of mouth. Product issues are eliminated at their root-cause, before goods leave the factory. Service failures are anticipated, and recovery is automatic. Customer journeys are frictionless and fault-tolerant, because they were meticulously studied, optimized, and fortified. Contact centers played a vital role in bringing your organization to this paradise, but will they still relevant? Yes, more than ever!

This article explores the contribution of contact centers towards the end of an organization's customer experience journey. Their mission, methods, and role within a company will change dramatically, but important work will continue to happen in the contact center. These fives ways are just the beginning of how tomorrow's contact centers will continue to drive value.

Proactive Engagement
Today's contact center mission is painfully reactive. Customers experience a problem, and they call. Customers have a question, and they chat. Customers are overwhelmed, and they tweet at us. With so many customers to help, it's hard to imagine making more work for ourselves. In the future, that's exactly what we'll do. As companies perfect the customer journey, the problems, questions, and uncertainty that contact centers mitigate will disappear. Instead, they'll focus on a more noble purpose: engagement. Contact centers will be freed up for post-purchase check-ins and follow-ups that nurture relationships instead of repairing broken ones. Contact centers will always be the face of the organization they serve, but tomorrow's contact centers will be friends instead of repairmen.

Community Building
Online support communities are nothing new; they originally promised to reduce support costs by relying on customers to help each-other. Many companies have online forums, but most have become ghost-towns where pleas for help go to die. Ubiquiti Networks' community-driven success demonstrates the full potential of customer communities. They don't provide traditional phone or chat support for most of their enterprise networking products, which helps them to offer disruptively low prices. Instead, customers go to the online support forum for help, where they interact with other customers and senior Ubiquiti engineers (who actually built the products in question). Ubiquiti representatives also have a strong presence in third-party communities and on social media. They're not there to sell, Ubiquiti's existing customers take care of that.

As customer journeys are refined, root-causes are solved, and automation steps in, the mission of tomorrow's contact center will shift away from near-term resolutions to long-term relationship building. With their day job out of the way, contact center professionals will refocus their creativity and skills towards building strong customer communities.

Harnessing Unstructured Feedback
Through engagement and community building activities, there's no doubt that tomorrow's contact center professionals will be exposed to an abundance of feedback. The unstructured feedback gathered from these activities will prove to be some of the organization's most valuable knowledge, provided it's leveraged effectively. Capturing, structuring, and applying these lessons learned will largely fall on contact center leaders close to the front-line. Unlike traditional market research, companies will gain insight into how products actually perform in wild, uncontrolled environments.

Product Development
Contact center professionals have always had to be experts in the products, services, and markets they support. In the future, smart organizations will use the in-house expertise from their contact center to design, refine, and promote their products. Not only will the contact center be an invaluable test bed, but they'll be the inspiration for future product and service offerings. Front-line contact center employees are closest to market demand, they interact with it daily. Solutions generated in the contact center will be at the forefront of the product lineup.

Content Marketing
Content generation is currently relegated to a few artsy interns in the marketing department. It can be an effective way to share a message and build a reputation, but it's time consuming and won't always hit the mark with customers. Worse, it can come across as being too "on-message" or lacking in personality. As demand for content increases, tomorrow's contact centers will step up to the challenge with renewed passion. Contact center professionals often have untapped talents and creativity. Paired with their deep knowledge about customer needs and challenges, they'll create content faster and more effectively while making sure customers have a laugh along the way.

Andrew Gilliam is a passionate customer experience innovator and change agent. He’s developed new employee portals, created effective surveys, and built silo-busting escalation systems. Andrew’s background in Information Technology put him on the front-lines of customer service as an IT Support Center Analyst. His vision: deliver Amazing Customer Service and Technical Support™.

Learn more at andytg.com, follow @ndytg on Twitter, and connect on LinkedIn.

"Follow the Leader", Featuring Al Hopper

What are your thoughts on industry standards, with regards to contact center metrics?

Why do we use metrics? To determine our success at something. In sports we use metrics like yards gained, strike outs, or minutes played per quarter. Those metrics work because it's a standard measurement between teams and even eras.

Industry standards are the same; they allow business leaders to learn how well they are doing when compared to others. However, it is important to understand that not all industries are the same and require different weights on different metrics. Banks might not want to measure their Net Promoter Score against sporting goods stores. Or big box stores might not want to compare Same Store Sales with a coffee shop.

However, banks checking Customer Satisfaction against other banks makes much better sense. Bottom line, I like using industry standard metrics, as long as they make sense for the industry being measured, and they measure something that can tell us how we are really doing.

Al is an Army veteran who has over 20 years in Customer service. He spent 12 years working in the main contact center for a major international bank.

He has been nationally recognized as a thought leader in social media customer service and contact center management for his contributions online, and off, by ICMI, Huffington Post contributors, Microsoft, and Conversocial, among others.

Al is also a cohost of the weekly Twitter chat focused on all aspects of customer service, using the hashtag #CustServ.

Follow the Leader: LinkedIn | Twitter

Customer Experience is Driving the Need for Ethnographic Research to Understand Why Customers Do What They Do

By Darcy Bevelacqua

Customer Experience is Everywhere

From marketing to customer service to the boardroom, it’s recognized that personalized, efficient and engaging customer experience drives customer acquisition, brand loyalty and customer lifetime value (LTV).

The focus has shifted from knowing how the customer interacts with your brand to understanding the why behind their behavior so you can personalize their experience across channels, locations and time.

Understanding the Customer Journey

The customer journey is the entire end-to-end experience that a customer has with your brand. It is not a single touchpoint or interaction but the collection of interactions at all touchpoints over a period of time. We know that customer experience problems are most likely to occur across channels and the best way to understand them is a detailed understanding of the customer journey.

McKinsey found that companies that understand the end to end customer journey and provide a good experience along the entire journey can expect to increase customer satisfaction by 20%, improve sales by 15%, reduce churn and decrease service costs as much as 20%.

The best way to understand your customer journey is to “map “ the customer journey. The map is a visual way of representing the customer’s story from the point at which they first become aware of your product or service, through purchasing, use, and churn.

Ethnographic Research Helps Us Understand the Customer Journey

In order to understand the customer story, we rely on ethnographic research. Ethnography is the study of human behavior in real life environments. The researchers interact with the participants in their culture through observation and questions to learn more about them. The research provides a deeper understanding of the problem and its impact on the person and their environment.

A good researcher is essential in winning people’s trust and confidence so they can accurately immerse themselves into the lives of their target audience, and understand the why behind why people do what they do. This is important as you can only design a better solution if you actually understand the “problem” and the “tasks” that the person is trying to accomplish in the context of what it “means” to the individuals involved.

How Ethnography Works

Short ethnographic studies can be very useful for understanding the “customer journey” and customer experience. For example: in order to understand the way in which a consumer

purchases eyeglasses, an ethnographer might conduct an ethnographic study by working and interacting with the customers in a retail setting for a few days. The researcher will use participant observation, interviews and surveys to understand what the customer is trying to accomplish and how the current environment contributes to a good or bad customer experience.

Ethnographic research is used at the beginning of the customer journey mapping process in order to understand what the customer is trying to accomplish and how they feel about what they are experiencing. It is a key part of identifying the “moments of truth” and “pain points” associated with the customer journey.

The moments of truth are the places that the customer considers essential to the customer experience. These moments of truth can be positive or negative, but they are essential sets in building a lasting customer relationship and in building trust between the organization and the prospect. Pain points are the areas of the customer journey that are not going well and do not meet the customer’s expectations.

The researcher may take photographs or video of the environment and the customers when they are beginning to document the customer journey. For example, in the case of purchasing eyeglasses we observed women taking photos of each other. When we inquired what they were doing, they indicated they were far sighted and unable to see the new eyeglass frames in the mirrors provides by the retailer, without their current prescription glasses. As a researcher, this information was noted as a poor customer experience and one that needed to be added to our list of things to be solved.

In addition, when consumers first entered the retail store they didn’t know how to “look” for different eyeglass frames. Customers couldn’t distinguish the difference between men’s and woman’s glasses and they were nervous that they might select glasses that did not look attractive on themselves. As a researcher, we were able to uncover consumer’s feelings about glasses and how they reflected on the personal images they wanted to convey. This information would also be added to the list of things to be solved so future customers could easily find the eyeglasses that would enhance their personal image and were appropriate based on their sexual orientation.

Advantages of Ethnography

One of the main advantages associated with ethnographic research is that ethnography can help identify and analyze unexpected issues. When conducting other types of studies, which are not based on observation or interaction, you can miss unexpected issues. This can happen either because questions are not asked, or respondents neglect to mention something. An ethnographic researcher’s on-site presence helps mitigate this risk because the issues will (hopefully) become directly apparent to the researcher.

Ethnography’s other main benefit is generally considered to be its ability to deliver a detailed and faithful representation of users’ behaviors and attitudes. Because of its subjective nature, an ethnographic study (with a skilled researcher) can be very useful in uncovering and analyzing relevant user attitudes and emotions.

Disadvantages of Ethnography

One of the main criticisms levelled at ethnographic studies is the amount of time they take to conduct. Because of its richer output, an ethnographic study will tend to take longer to generate and analyze its data than a standard survey. It is also possible that subjects may not act naturally during a short study. We control for this by repeating the observations in multiple locations with different researchers to try to eliminate as much bias as possible.

Conclusion

Ethnographic research is a valuable tool to really understand why customers do what they do. Good research will help you uncover new needs and help you identify how you improve the customer journey. The customer’s emotions and what they are trying to accomplish can be noted at each touchpoint on your journey map in order to help you “optimize” the customer journey to eliminate the pain points and deliver a better overall customer experience.

Darcy Bevelacqua is a Customer Experience and CRM Strategist. She is currently the CEO of Success Works CX, a leading customer experience consulting company with a staff of experts in market research, personal development, campaign planning, marketing strategy, competitive analysis, journey mapping and design thinking.

Darcy has a BA in Psychology from Hood College and a Master’s in Organizational Design from the New School for Social Research. She also has advanced work in Gamification (Univ of PA), Design Thinking and Innovation (UVA), as well as Human Centered Design (UCA-San Diego). Darcy lives in upstate NY in the summer and in Sarasota, FL in the winter. She loves warm weather and sunlight.

Connect: LinkedIn | Twitter | Email 

3 Reasons why Innovating and Re-tooling your Contact Center now is an absolute must

By Michele Crocker

I had the opportunity to be a speaker at SOCAP's (Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals) annual conference in San Diego. The theme of the event was the "speed of innovation". One thing really stuck in my mind after leaving this conference - "The value of innovation melts away the longer we wait".


As customer support leaders we must innovate and retool our contact centers in order to provide effortless, seamless employee and customer experiences. Today, we have the biggest pallet of technology so the key question is what innovative idea can you implement to improve your customer experience? Don't wait to invest in in your customer support operation... it's too late when you are losing. Re-tool your people, processes, technology and metrics to improve your customer relationships.

3 Reasons to Innovate and Re-Tool your Customer Contact Center Now....

1. Our customer are ahead of us- Your customers are using the latest technologies everyday and we need to have conversations with them on the device, channel and time of day of their choice. - Digital personal assistants such as Alexa and Siri using conversational AI. What will your customer care support look like from these devices? How will you give them a seamless and frictionless customer experience across all channels?
2. Disconnect on how to engage employees- overall employee engagement overall is low in contact centers and attrition is the number one problem facing contact center leaders, According to a recent Gallup survey only 51% of employees are engaged. There is a new workforce today...the Millennial's and by 2025 they will make up 75% of the US workforce. We must take a different leadership approach to the millennial mindset and what matters most to them. Throw away those old fashioned "call center metrics" and start looking at ways to measure engagement, loyalty and a sense of belonging. How do you blend the digital employee with the human employee?
3. Timing- this is everything.... the problem today is that technology and people are changing at such a rapid speed, I have personally seem more changes impacting contact centers in the last 5 years compared to the total 25 years of working in contact centers. Don't wait to invest in your contact center, when you are losing it's too late.

Good News....The value of innovating and re-tooling your contact center is tremendous:

• Cloud Computing provides rapid scaling and seamless customer experiences with wider reach
• Blending digital employee with the human employee helps to lower costs, improve customer experience and employee morale
• Changing people processes that enables you to attract, develop and retain top talent will provide a huge "lift off"

So, final question.... what stops you from being innovative and re-tooling your contact center? Please reach out to me, I would love to help!

Editors note: This article was originally posted on LinkedIn.

Michele Crocker has the proven expertise to improve the customer experience and significantly reduce costs at the same time. She helps organizations to generate an effortless, rewarding customer experience, dramatically lower the cost per call, improve retention, grow sales and attract higher talent. Michele has over twenty years of "hands on" and strategic leadership roles within multiple Fortune 500 companies.

Connect with Michele on LinkedIn.

1-2-3 Engagement is the Key

By Sean Hawkins

If you want your staff to be engaged, they must first be involved! I constantly seek opportunities to allow people to work and grow in areas other than their current role. We often talk about removing silos between departments, yet many employees remain siloed in their roles. That should not be the case.

1. Get them involved

On a daily basis, I am given a suggestion of some sort. In times past, I would dedicate time to act on the feedback. I soon realized I was spending a considerable amount of time doing this. Instead, I found it helpful to both myself and staff, to include them in the process. After all, if they an idea, they likely had thoughts on implementation. These "projects" have become quite successful over the years. In fact, they have been helpful in shaping (and changing) my opinion on things, that I once was reluctant to entertain.

Being inclusive allows the team member an opportunity to develop new skills, provides more exposure, and it leads to new opportunities for them. In addition to suggestions, pilot programs, and process improvements can be projects that your team can assist on.

Involve staff when establishing processes or procedures that directly impact them. Doing so shows them you respect their opinions, and it also ensures that you get all the input possible in your decision-making process. More so, it's an easy way to ensure adoption, buy-in, and success. 

Those doing the work, are often the one's to identify the best solutions for improvement. In areas where they are the subject matter expert, they know what works. It makes sense to include them!

2. Provide meaningful feedback

One of the best ways to keep employees engaged is through feedback. In its most literal sense, feedback means to give food back. Feedback then, is the process and act of providing, or giving nourishment. Doing so fosters growth, good health and wellness. These are important to each of us, and most often these are the things we seek most in life. However we fail to take this approach in the workforce.

Most often, employee feedback occurs when someone hasn’t performed well or it is time for their annual performance review. Feedback, in the context of our conversation supplements development. It is aligned with professional growth and should take on the form of mentorship or an advisory role.

I like to utilize my 1-on-1 or monthly feedback sessions with staff as an engagement opportunity. In addition to discussing matters related performance and addressing any concerns they may have, I incorporate feedback. Benefits of feedback:

• Increases self-awareness
• Provides a balanced view
• Leverages Strengths
• Uncovers Blind spots
• Develops skills

Once feedback is incorporated, reinforce it by rewarding employees.


3. Acknowledgment

Everyone has different motivators. Therefore, acknowledgment must come in a variety of flavors. Make it personal!

Some individuals will view acknowledgment as superficial and inauthentic, if it personal. As a result, they may respond with skepticism, cynicism and sarcasm. Employees want to see something more substantive, such as individual attention or quality time with their boss and/or colleagues, acts of service that make their jobs easier (offering to pitch in on a project or do a favor), tangible gifts or bonuses, or physical touch in the form of high-fives, fist bumps or handshakes, depending on the company culture.

The point is this; true acknowledgment touches the core of the person, by understanding their needs and making a valid attempt at meeting them! And that is what engagement all about.

I have over 15 years of progressive call center leadership and experience in the public, private and government sectors.

I have led or consulted contact centers of various sizes across numerous industries. Additionally, I’ve implemented new technology and products, while maintaining award-winning contact centers.

Connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Keys to Contact Center Consistency and Compliance

By Mike Aoki

I recently had a conversation with Brad Sellors, Managing Director at InfiniteKM, regarding knowledge management systems (KMS), consistency and compliance. Here are our questions and answers. Note, Brad’s responses have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Why is the issue of compliance important for contact centers? Contact centers need to provide accurate information to their customers. That is especially true for industries such as banking and insurance, which are heavily regulated. Contact center Agents need the most accurate and up to date information. Otherwise, a lot of damage - to the company and the client - can be caused by Agents who misread or omit important information when responding to clients.

How can a knowledge management system help Agents be compliant? Being able to quickly search for the right knowledge article equips Agents with the right answers. To maintain that informational accuracy, you should also set up an authorization/review process so, key documents are routinely reviewed by the right stakeholders.

How can you ensure Agents actually understand the information? You can create online quizzes to test for understanding. So when an Agent arrives for their shift, they can review new information updates, pass the quiz and help their customers. This can all be done via the knowledge management platform.

How can you measure and track compliance? Some knowledge management systems can track who is clicking on daily compliance updates. For example, Agents can track what they previously reviewed to see if they missed any updates while on vacation. Team Leaders can track which Agents still need to review daily updates, while Managers can track which Team Leader groups are up to date. You can even make it mandatory for employees to review certain information on a monthly, quarterly or annual basis so, your organization stays in compliance with external regulations.

How does this help a company operating in a highly regulated industry? Depending upon the jurisdiction, auditors and regulators may require proof that Agents are familiar with the applicable rules. Some knowledge management systems produce reports showing which Agents have reviewed the information and passed the quiz.

We have talked about compliance. Now, how does this ensure consistency? Think of a manufacturer who sells through franchised dealerships. A common challenge is having dealer staff giving different answers than head office Agents. Now imagine both head office and dealers have access to the same knowledge database. So, they both give consistent answers to educate their customers. On top of that, knowledge articles can be tagged for different job types. So, a dealer salesperson can read an article on the customer benefits of an accessory product. Meanwhile, their dealer service technician can see how to install it for the customer. To build on that, each dealer - as well as head office - have their own reporting tools. So, they can track which dealerships review updates and which ones do not. Dealers can see which of their employees are up to date and which ones need a reminder. That ensures consistency.

Can customers access this knowledge database for consistent answers? If a knowledge management system allows you to control access to information by job type, you can also use this system to share certain answers with customers. For example, if a customer searches your website for “extended warranty” information, they get a description of how it works and what it covers. On the other hand, if a contact center Agent searches for “extended warranty”, their search also brings up how to process a customer’s warranty claim. Being able to tag knowledge articles by job type saves you the cost of designing a separate database for customer accessible information.

Mike Aoki is the President of Reflective Keynotes Inc., a Canadian training company that helps contact centers improve their sales and customer retention results. A call center expert, Mike serves on the Advisory Council of the Greater Toronto Area Contact Center association, and was Master of Ceremonies for their 2012-2014 and 2016 Annual Conferences. He was also chosen as one of the “Top 50 Customer Service Thought Leaders on Twitter” for 2014, 2015 and 2016.

Web site | Twitter | LinkedIn

Welcome to the Contact Center

By Sean Hawkins

This is an exciting time to be in the contact center! Each day brings new challenges to overcome, new technology to learn, and new innovations to set you apart from your competitor. The call center of old, is vastly different than today's contact center.

These changes provide opportunity for staff to learn new skills, grow, and advance. New insights are discovered, and new methods of service delivery are implemented, all of which have elevated the importance of the contact center to overall growth and profitability of the modern business.

Perceptions about the contact center
Ask the average person, and they are likely to have a negative opinion of the contact center. While some of this may be well deserved, most are based on a few bad experiences, or a stereotype from times past. Sadly, that stereotype often suggests the support staff is less educated, entry level, and unfriendly.

I also believe there is lack of understanding which helps drives this unflattering perception. Very few are aware of the people, infrastructure, strategy, and technology involved to build a high performing center. I must confess, my own family and friends have a flawed opinion of what I do.

Thanks to social media, the industry is in the spotlight. At times, it does not garner acclaim from the masses. Are there failures? Yes! Are there embarrassments? Yes! However, we are discovering people are becoming fan's of great service and experiences, to the point it has become a differentiator when the evaluate competing brands.

Managing a call center is anything but easy. You’re tasked with providing superior service while juggling a number of business priorities. From adhering to pre-set business metrics and key performance indicators, to servicing customers across multiple channels, each priority adds to the complexity that inherent in contact centers.

Internally, our perception of the center is different from the public’s perception. Yet, it is their perception that matters. We must analyze their feedback and see what improvements should be made, to ensure we are providing a better experience. With CSAT, NPS and other satisfaction KPI's, we can gauge our performance based on the customer's perception. We also can use it to improve through training and development and begin to change those perceptions in a positive way.


Changing the narrative
Allow me to quote my friend Sarah Stealey Reed. “I think customer service and contact center management should be taught in college. People have such a misconception that this job is easy. But, if it were easy, you’d ALWAYS get good customer service, right?  The truth is, that all of us ‘fall into’ contact centers and no one actually chooses this as their career. And that’s a shame. This is such a dynamic and exciting industry and brilliant people bypass it because they don’t know what it’s about, don’t appreciate the complexities that we manage, or realize that this is an exceptionally rewarding career. Why not teach them?”

Each year, I review job descriptions and qualifications for each job. I do this to ensure they are receiving the training necessary to perform their job at the highest level. If they aren't, as Sarah says, I have to "teach them!"

Many years ago when I started in this industry, most considered customer support roles as entry level positions. Still today, I must remind people not to refer to contact center roles as entry level. Times have changed! Customer service has a huge impact on the success of a company. Therefore, the workforce must match the impact. A highly skilled (EQ and IQ) team will improve every facet of the customer's experience.


The people
I would be willing to match the skills and education of support staff with those in other departments of an organization. In fact, I would dare say those in the contact center match or exceed that of the others. Here are just a few of the many skills sets one will find in the contact center:

• IT Skills
• People Skills
• Risk Management
• Communication
• Time Management
• Problem Solving
• Decision Making
• Negotiation
• Leadership
• Change Management

So much for the less educated, entry level misconception.

Beyond the front lines

Sadly, many people agents in the contact centers aren’t aware of, or developed by leadership for the many possibilities that are available to them. Many will lose hope of advancement, and fall into a state of apathy and lethargy. Performance suffers; attrition increases and frustration will set in because they are not exposed to growth and opportunities.

This is where leadership comes into play. There is a wonderful quote that says “being a leader is not about you. It’s about the people that are on your team and how can help them be successful”.  Leaders must develop staff in the many disciplines of the contact center.

While individual job titles may be specific to a company, there are several categories that are common regardless of company. Some of them are:

• Leadership/Management
• Operations
• Quality Assurance
• Analytics
• Work Force Management
• Learning & Development

Again, so much for the less educated, entry level misconception. 

Contact centers are complex, as many specialized teams and roles are being created to better serve customers, and create competitive advantage. As it does, many are choosing to remain in the contact and advance their careers. Some are choosing to make it a career. We've come a long way!

I have over 15 years of progressive call center leadership and experience in the public, private and government sectors.

I have led or consulted contact centers of various sizes across numerous industries. Additionally, I’ve implemented new technology and products, while maintaining award-winning contact centers.

Connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Adventures in Speech Analytics- Part III

By Diana Aviles

Here we are… Part III is finally here! Where we last left off, I discussed how queries are a major aspect of Speech Analytics.  I also mentioned the importance of establishing a business need for queries; but what happens if there is not a strong enough business need to build a query for a particular topic? Well, the good news is that you are not out of luck and that leads us to part three of “Adventures in Speech Analytics”- Ad Hoc searches.

A friendly guide to ad hoc searches

An ad hoc search is a customized search you can perform within the SA tool.  It is the most common method end users interact with in the tool.  Ad Hoc searches are one of the most exciting parts of speech analytics because it allows the user to have access to deep dive into customer-agent interactions.  Similar to query building, there is a bit of strategy and patience required in order to get the best results.

I have been fortunate to be involved with speech analytics in some aspect since the very beginning of my call center career.  The one thing I often hear from other professionals is that they find ad hoc searches difficult.  I have compiled a few tips and suggestions for how you can have a positive ad hoc search experience!

I’m going to provide an example of a “tricky” type of ad hoc search situation.  Let’s say someone reaches out to you about a new pilot program they have in the Chicago call center that has agents attempting to collect a one-time charge (OTC) from customers for home security equipment upfront prior to service installation.  The ultimate goal is to help agents better ensure a sale and reduce breakage of commission.  That is where you get involved- as this person wants you to provide a weekly report of how many agents are mentioning that customers must pay for their equipment upfront.  Piece of cake, right?  Well, the thing is there are many different OTC’s going on within the organization such as installation fees and late fees.  Since this report is specific to security equipment you are probably asking yourself how the heck am I supposed to sort through hundreds of calls to find Prince Charming?

Take a deep breath and let’s start nice and slow

• Set up your search parameters - You are going to be running this search only for one site (Chicago) so focus your energy on just that location where you know these calls are hiding.
• Queries, Queries, Queries - Remember queries are designed to be your partners in business! Sometimes it’s helpful to take a quick look at your query database to see if you have an existing relevant query or two in the system to run concurrently with your search.  Most organizations will have queries developed around the core lines of business they offer.  In this case, you may find a few different home security related queries that have a core of the logic you are looking for.  This is going to help further vet out your search by focusing on security based mentions in customer-agent interactions.
• Use your words - Oftentimes it’s helpful to request guidelines and scripting that was provided to the agents so that you can formulate your searches based on what the agent was instructed to say.  Keep in mind that sometimes this is not always the best approach as oftentimes keeping things simple and searching for common sense dialogue is most effective.  There is going to be a lot of trial and error here so be patient and stay optimistic.  You will surely find that Prince Charming of search terms.
• Validation - This was mentioned in the last article regarding query building and it is still relevant when you are only performing ad hoc searches.  You want to make sure that your confidence rating of your search and data is in an acceptable range.  You found the “Keep it Simple Sweetie” approach of the term “Pay your equipment upfront”, when searched within the few home security queries, yielded a 92% confidence rating. Great going!
• Smile and bask in the satisfaction - You are now confident that you are able to identify how many equipment OTC mentions have been made on a weekly basis.  You are now contributing to a larger picture of being able to help your organization see the correlation of collecting equipment fees up front with reducing the number of home security order cancellations.

With patience and practice you will become more comfortable with providing valuable data based on ad hoc searches.  I also recommend that you reach out to your speech analytics program manager, or if you are extra lucky to a query builder, if you ever find yourself in a difficult situation.  Sometimes there are methods and approaches that these individuals may be able to recommend to help you out of a tough spot.

Operations Manager, Speech Analytics 

With more than 4 years of Quality Assurance experience in a call center environment, Diana's objective is to simultaneously promote and educate the world of Speech Analytics with a human touch; one which further emphasizes the importance of First Call Resolution, and overall customer experience.

Follow Diana on LinkedIn.

Improve Your Contact Center Through Agent Training and Development

By Sean Hawkins

Organizations that understand the true value of professional development, culture, innovation, and creativity, also recognize the value of continuously educating their employee base. These organizations are the ones that will be better positioned to adapt to the rapidly changing demands of today’s work environment.  Incorporating professional development within the overall corporate strategy, with so many competing interests and tight budgets, is a challenge. But it should be done! Those companies who value employee development all have a few things in common:

1. Commitment
2. Resources
3. Encouragement
   

These are the foundation for employee development. Without them, there is no development! How then does a well trained contact center impact customer experience? Well, the obvious answer that comes to mind is swift, accurate resolution. But that is only the tip of the iceberg.

Higher First Contact Resolution
When your staff is well trained, they can provide resolution (when possible) on the first interaction. While there are occasions when FCR cannot be attained, this should not be due to a lack of knowledge and understanding on the part of the agent. Let's face it, FCR has benefits that far surpass the satisfaction of your customer. There is a cost associated it!

Improved quality and performance
When staff are trained on a continual basis, they move the needle on quality and performance metrics such as CSAT, QA, NPS,QA. These can indicate customer loyalty, as well as their likelihood to be repeat customers. 

Better customer insight
Chances are your staff can easily place a customer's name to a persona. They are aware of the difficult customer, the understanding customer, and so on. With the right training, they can easily apply the best method of communication to those customers. When staff understands their impact on the customer's journey and experience, and the value their interactions have on strengthening the relationship with the brand, they will become stake holders. At this point, they are a wealth of knowledge and information concerning the habits and attitudes of customers. 

Improved morale
Why is training and development important? Two primary reasons are the creation of a talented workforce, and agent loyalty. On the other hand, numerous studies have shown employees who are not receiving consistent training and development are not happy or efficient. They impact customer churn, reduce morale, and cost more money and time over the life of employment. So, for many reasons employee development is important.

I have over 15 years of progressive call center leadership and experience in the public, private and government sectors.

I have led or consulted contact centers of various sizes across numerous industries. Additionally, I’ve implemented new technology and products, while maintaining award-winning contact centers.

Connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter.