|
Yes... You Can Control Costs and Improve Service! |
|
|
|
 Guest Blogger: Brad Cleveland, President, ICMI, and ACCE 2008 Speaker
This year’s ACCE conference comes at a particularly challenging and important juncture for those responsible for customer service and support operations: The same economic uncertainties prompting many organizations to cut costs are encouraging customers to shop around, explore options diligently, and – in ever-higher numbers – delve into user-generated feedback on companies, products and services. There has never been a more important time to provide customer services that are high-quality and cost-effective. And that takes know-how!
Cost-control efforts needn't entail coarse, across-the board cuts, mandated call times or forcing unwilling callers into automated systems. Too many organizations are seeing these kinds of efforts backfire in the form of new and/or hidden costs, frustrated employees and dissatisfied customers. A much better approach is to harness a few key principles, which can help to ensure that you are optimizing wisely, while equipping your customer contact center to sustain valuable services for the benefit of customers and the organization:
- Identify organizationwide opportunities. Rather than focus on cost-cutting in a departmental vacuum, look for ways to maximize cross-functional resources. For example, marketing managers may be willing to provide the call center with budget to capture and analyze information on consumer trends and expectations, when shown they can save money on target marketing. Similarly, maintaining effective after-sales services can provide valuable research and development input, leading to sustained market share, better sales and money-saving process improvements throughout the organization.
- Reassess your organization's customer access strategy. Before making any major change, it is essential that your internal management team agree on the services that the call center will continue to provide. Without this foundation, cost-cutting efforts are likely to head off in many unrelated directions, and may be at odds with your organization's larger customer service objectives. They also may have unintended consequences, as witnessed by organizations that have reduced services in one area only to have the workload multiply in others.
- Work to prevent contacts at the source. The cheapest contacts aren’t those that are automated, but those that never happen in the first place. Chances are, about 20 percent of call types account for something like 80 percent of the call load your center handles. In the context of your customer access strategy, explore options for preventing, handling or deferring a greater percentage of these contacts – versus trying to cut back across the board. The focus on a few select call types often leads to better results than trying to fix everything.
- Optimize staffing and schedules. Being even slightly understaffed will cause big problems in terms of low service levels, high agent occupancy and heavy telecom network usage. On the other hand, those increments producing a service level of 100% in Y seconds may indicate that you have far more agents than you need during those times of day. Getting workforce planning – forecasting, staffing and scheduling – tuned up for every increment of the day (e.g., each half-hour) is a sure path to better cost performance.
- Work on process and system improvements – now and forever. Errors and process inefficiencies are particularly troublesome in call centers – they consume valuable staff time, drive up network costs, and contribute to repeat calls. The good news is, even modest improvements to processes can yield dramatic results.
There are loads of sessions at ACCE on these and related subjects. For example, you’ll have opportunity to learn resource planning methods that really work, explore how organizations are improving processes and cutting waste, identify the latest call center tools and technologies, discover the metrics that drive the best operations, and gain new insight into what customers expect and how to best serve them in today’s economic environment, and much more.
I’m looking forward to seeing you there! |
