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Integration of Incident and Problem handling
The final essential ingredient of Contact Center management is measurement and reporting. Here is where many Contact Centers get it very wrong. We all know that old cliché of “you get what you measure,” so deciding what to measure is critical to achieving the results you want to achieve. It’s important to define “efficiency” in light of “customer satisfaction.” Good customer service cannot be provided if the agent has a target of getting off the call within thirty seconds. It’s noteworthy that when managers used to take on the agent role (during strikes or work stoppages as they were more euphemistically termed), customer satisfaction with the fill-in operators went up. Even though the managers were undoubtedly slower and less adept at handling calls, customers appreciated the longer call times which allowed real human conversation.
Similarly, tightly regimented staff can only chafe under excessive restrictions, causing a dissatisfaction that customers can clearly hear in voices, and feel in poor service. The vicious cycle of regimentation, dissatisfaction, poor customer service can be broken by ensuring that performance is aligned with corporate service objectives and supported by efficient measures made possible by the new generation of tools.
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"Good customer service cannot be provided if the agent has a target of getting off the call within thirty seconds. "
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When Contact Center supervisors have much more information available, they need not resort to extreme regimentation. They now know not just who is on a call and for how long, but also who the customer is, what type of question or complaint caused the customer to call. They know which applications the agent is using to solve the problem. They have reams of statistics that show the agent’s track record in solving these types of calls. In short, they can help ensure good customer service, not just that agents keep taking lots of calls. Aligning rewards with the customer service objectives is also made easier with the knowledge the metrics can supply. Used with thought, very positive feedback loops can be created – happy agents, happy customers!
It is important to note that as the routine requests are further automated by web portal self serve, the remaining queries that will come to the Contact Center will be those that are complex, troublesome or otherwise beyond the customer’s ability to complete on their own. This makes it critical to have the right people, with the right skills, tools and incentives to meet the higher bar demanded by this subset of customers.
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A tight unification of Contact Control (CC) and Customer Interaction Management (CIM) can result in the generation of end-to-end reporting on customer interaction. What results is an audible system well in line with SOX initiatives. This represents a fundamental change in the “hand off” model which is prevalent in today’s Contact Centers and in telecommunications Contact Center to NOC interactions. CIM systems are a bridge between Contact Control and CRM systems. CIM systems are built from a fusion of the best features of telecom Trouble Management systems and help desk systems. Either can be used as a starting point in generating a CIM solution. However, the most important piece is the tight integration of CC and CIM. Instead of a simple screen pop of the call to a ticket screen, there need to be many hand offs from the efficient routing of the soft ACD queue to the action and data capture of the CIM and back again. The CC controls how the customer is contacted and the CIM orchestrates the contact and data.
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We interviewed Melody Ayres, a contact center specialist who has put in contact centers all over the world. Her advice? “By better management of the agents, the overall interaction with the customer will be improved, as they can be coached and become more accurate and more efficient in contact handling. That is, the better the center is managed the more efficiently the customer contacts can be handled, better quality of interaction. Any time you can improve the agent performance the customer will benefit.” (Melody Aires, Call Center Specialist)
Close integration of Contact Centers and Incident Management systems as we’ve described earlier is one example of better tools. This enables real knowledge of the interior interaction cycle without intrusive methods. It also enables the proposed fusion of IT SM help desk procedural models inside the technology of the Contact Center. This fusion is represented in the figure of the
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