{"id":354415,"date":"2020-11-19T14:35:59","date_gmt":"2020-11-19T22:35:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.genesys.com\/?post_type=blog&#038;p=354415"},"modified":"2020-11-23T14:36:33","modified_gmt":"2020-11-23T22:36:33","slug":"unify-operations-and-tech-for-a-superior-customer-experience","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/www.genesys.com\/en-sg\/blog\/post\/unify-operations-and-tech-for-a-superior-customer-experience","title":{"rendered":"Unify Operations and Tech for a Superior Customer Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wpb-content-wrapper\"><p>[vc_section full_width=&#8221;stretch_row&#8221;][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Guest Blog by Laura Sikorski<\/p>\n<p>Your policies, processes and technology (CRM system, contact centre, front-office and back-office applications) should help customers do business with you. Nothing during their customer journey should cause them confusion or frustration. Regardless of a customer\u2019s touchpoint, there shouldn\u2019t be a point of failure.<\/p>\n<p>Key operations areas within your contact centre are <a href=\"https:\/\/www.genesys.com\/en-sg\/capabilities\/forecasting-and-decisions\">forecasting and schedule<\/a> accuracy, service levels, quality assurance, employee satisfaction, and customer satisfaction. In this blog, we\u2019ll cover forecasting and schedule accuracy, service levels, and quality assurance. Because employee satisfaction so closely correlates to customer satisfaction, we\u2019ll cover those specifically in Part 2 of this series.<\/p>\n<p>A successful contact centre requires the following factors:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Ongoing communication and collaboration with all staff levels<\/li>\n<li>Applications that work<\/li>\n<li>Accurate information to your staff that\u2019s delivered on time, at the same time, and in the same format<\/li>\n<li>KPIs that are shared across your organisation<\/li>\n<li>A customer experience vision that demonstrates the contact centre\u2019s role<\/li>\n<li>Shared dashboards with all staff levels and senior management<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>And you accomplish this by thinking like a customer. <\/strong>Ask your customers what they want and what they expect you to do for them.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>What do they like?<\/li>\n<li>What do they dislike?<\/li>\n<li>Why do they go to your website?<\/li>\n<li>What do they purchase on eCommerce sites?<\/li>\n<li>Where\/what can you improve?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Doing this allows you to determine what your competition is doing, what other industries are doing and what internal stakeholders expect. Now, let\u2019s dive deeper into how to put key factors into place.<\/p>\n<h4><strong>Forecasting and Schedule Accuracy<\/strong><\/h4>\n<p>Resource planning, scheduling and budgeting are fundamental requirements for operating a successful contact centre. And these capabilities are provided in your contact centre software\u2019s workforce management (WFM) application.<\/p>\n<p>Forecasting interaction volumes, at least 18 months out, assists with budgetary requirements for staffing and equipment capacity. Knowing the direction your company is going for future products, media campaigns and perhaps acquisitions greatly affects your contact centre\u2019s abilities to operate to required SLAs.<\/p>\n<p>Daily, weekly and monthly reports are needed to detail \u201cActual vs. Forecasted Volume,\u201d and should include which activities affect the variance(s). Supervisors should address any anomalies they find, as these will influence projected scheduling and adherence levels.<\/p>\n<p>Be sure there are alerts when volumes reach outside the norm for the scheduled time periods and have \u201cgo-to\u201d plans on how to correct your staffing. If you operate several centres in different time zones, be sure your WFM and technology interaction routing systems can load-balance volumes.<\/p>\n<p>Schedule adherence software is generally provided within the workforce management suite. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.genesys.com\/blog\/post\/ai-automates-and-simplifies-contact-center-workforce-planning\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Creating work schedules to match your workforce and workload<\/a> with this automated program will assist you in checking if agents are in their seats and answering interactions. Supervisors in smaller centres accomplish this by walking the floor to see if agents are in their seats; however, the cost of this software has come down substantially.<\/p>\n<p>Some of you may think of this software as \u201cbig brother\u201d watching. It\u2019s not. It\u2019s helping your supervisors manage their teams rather than reviewing historical information and creating spreadsheet reports. Your agents will be the best they can be as quality analysts and supervisors can provide more training, coaching and staff development.<\/p>\n<h4><strong>Service Levels <\/strong><\/h4>\n<p>I cannot stress enough the importance of accessing real-time analytics and using speech analytics to manage your operation. Desktop dashboards for agents, supervisors and management, as well as work-floor wallboards and monitors, detail a set of statistics that measure performance and incoming interaction traffic in real-time, usually a 2-4 second update, and historical data using pre-determined time intervals.<\/p>\n<p>My display recommendations are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Service level<\/li>\n<li>Calls in queue by queue<\/li>\n<li>Longest waiting call in each queue<\/li>\n<li>Total calls answered in each queue<\/li>\n<li>Total calls abandoned in each queue<\/li>\n<li>Average speed of answer in each queue<\/li>\n<li>Agent status by name and on what queue<\/li>\n<li>Team and agent performance statistics<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This information lets you know \u2014 at-a-glance \u2014 the pulse of your contact centre, agent actions and where immediate staffing adjustments are required. Keep in mind: Agents want to know how they\u2019re doing; desktop dashboards for them are paramount.<\/p>\n<p>The report feature in your contact centre software monitors and records all performance activity the system generates. It then converts the data into concise, readable database files. These assist in forecasting staff workload and scheduling, and they can be created in a graphical or tabular format.<\/p>\n<p>These packages, based on the vendor, generally provide \u201ccanned\u201d standard reports for measuring daily, weekly, monthly and annual activity at various time intervals.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cCustom\u201d reporting lets supervisors or administrators create customised reports for measuring data-specific SLAs.<\/p>\n<p>Contact centres measure:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Service (average speed of answer, abandon rates, +)<\/li>\n<li>Quality (first-contact resolution, skill levels, +)<\/li>\n<li>Efficiency (average handle time, after-call work, +)<\/li>\n<li>Profitability (cost per call, conversion rates, +)<\/li>\n<li>Employee (turnover, satisfaction, +)<\/li>\n<li>Customer satisfaction (surveys, focus groups, +)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>However, how did your company decide on which metrics were the right ones for management? And, more importantly, what does management do with the information? Consider implementing a taskforce with appropriate staff to review all current reports \u2014 and think about what you want management to know about your contact centre.<\/p>\n<h4><strong>Quality Assurance<\/strong><\/h4>\n<p>The quality management feature in your contact centre software delivers a data warehouse full of actionable insights in the form of reports and analytics. Determining what your staff needs to do their jobs, the services your customers expect and deserve, technology improvements, and buying trends that affect customer behaviour all are end products of analytics.<\/p>\n<p>The advent of speech analytics for recorded and live calls is one of the best technology enhancements in recent years. It enables you to tell how angry or happy customers are with your agents and your company. And you can barge in on the call, when necessary if you\u2019re silently monitoring.<\/p>\n<p>Establishing keywords and phrases in the speech analytics settings helps you determine how well your agents are engaging and responding to customer needs. The tone of agent and customer voices allow you to hear and watch the flow of the interaction. You can dissect a call and its attributes to see the strengths and weaknesses of your training programs \u2014 and where more coaching is required.<\/p>\n<h4><strong>Silent and Real-Time Monitoring<\/strong><\/h4>\n<p>Your agents&#8217; daily performance is equally as important as listening and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.genesys.com\/blog\/post\/support-compliance-in-your-contact-center-with-interaction-recording\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">evaluating recorded interactions<\/a>. Silent or real-time monitoring lets you barge in or instant message corrections or kudos to your agents, when necessary. This type of monitoring let you hear customer issues that might be occurring, such as delivery problems, trouble getting through to you on telephone numbers or a website outage. This heads-up enables you to alert the appropriate departments and resolve issues quickly \u2014 before they become critical and affect call volume and staffing.<\/p>\n<p>Additionally, you can hear firsthand from your customers and can barge in to immediately thank them for their feedback or praise agents on how they handled an interaction.<\/p>\n<p>A quality review of recorded interactions with your agents improves their performance, which results in outstanding customer experiences. However, it\u2019s also beneficial to use the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.genesys.com\/blog\/post\/improve-agent-efficiency-with-multi-monitor-screen-recording\">screen capture<\/a> that\u2019s offered, albeit sometimes at an additional cost, from your contact centre software vendors. This feature lets you see the effectiveness of all the applications your agents use.<\/p>\n<p>For example, you can see:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>How staff enters data from caller answers<\/li>\n<li>If the data entry is in sync with the script sequence of obtaining caller information<\/li>\n<li>If there\u2019s sufficient space for interaction notes<\/li>\n<li>How time was used in wrap-up sessions, especially detailing the disposition of the interaction<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Screen capture lets you expand the quality portion of your agent performance evaluation \u2014 typing, listening, speaking, and reading skills \u2014 to determine what additional coaching and training is required. You can also determine what enhancements should be made to the applications.<\/p>\n<p>As you can see, it\u2019s critical that operations and technology work together in the contact centre to deliver superior customer experiences. In Part 2 of this blog, we\u2019ll look at how a focus on employee experience and performance tools can directly correlate to the customer experience[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][\/vc_section]<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[vc_section full_width=&#8221;stretch_row&#8221;][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Guest Blog by Laura Sikorski Your policies, processes and technology (CRM system, contact centre, front-office and back-office applications) should help customers do business with you. Nothing during their customer journey should cause them confusion or frustration. Regardless of a customer\u2019s touchpoint, there shouldn\u2019t be a point of failure. Key operations areas within your contact [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":806,"featured_media":348557,"template":"","tax_priority":[],"tax_blogtype":[17756],"tax_blogcategory":[13117,17554],"tax_contenttheme":[],"tax_bundle":[],"tax_contenttheme2":[],"tax_capability_sitewide":[],"tax_products_programs":[],"tax_buying_job":[],"tax_buyer_persona":[],"tax_sector":[],"tax_segment":[],"class_list":["post-354415","blog","type-blog","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tax_blogtype-genesys-en-sg","tax_blogcategory-cloud-en-sg","tax_blogcategory-workforce-engagement-en-sg"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genesys.com\/en-sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blog\/354415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genesys.com\/en-sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blog"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genesys.com\/en-sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/blog"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genesys.com\/en-sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/806"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.genesys.com\/en-sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blog\/354415\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":354417,"href":"https:\/\/www.genesys.com\/en-sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blog\/354415\/revisions\/354417"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genesys.com\/en-sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/348557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.genesys.com\/en-sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=354415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"tax_priority","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genesys.com\/en-sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tax_priority?post=354415"},{"taxonomy":"tax_blogtype","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genesys.com\/en-sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tax_blogtype?post=354415"},{"taxonomy":"tax_blogcategory","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genesys.com\/en-sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tax_blogcategory?post=354415"},{"taxonomy":"tax_contenttheme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genesys.com\/en-sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tax_contenttheme?post=354415"},{"taxonomy":"tax_bundle","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genesys.com\/en-sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tax_bundle?post=354415"},{"taxonomy":"tax_contenttheme2","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genesys.com\/en-sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tax_contenttheme2?post=354415"},{"taxonomy":"tax_capability_sitewide","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genesys.com\/en-sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tax_capability_sitewide?post=354415"},{"taxonomy":"tax_products_programs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genesys.com\/en-sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tax_products_programs?post=354415"},{"taxonomy":"tax_buying_job","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genesys.com\/en-sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tax_buying_job?post=354415"},{"taxonomy":"tax_buyer_persona","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genesys.com\/en-sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tax_buyer_persona?post=354415"},{"taxonomy":"tax_sector","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genesys.com\/en-sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tax_sector?post=354415"},{"taxonomy":"tax_segment","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.genesys.com\/en-sg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tax_segment?post=354415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}