A recently published white paper urged the industry to build “high performance customer contact centers,” and offered three questions to enable managers to assess whether or not their centers would qualify as such. “Does your operation work in tandem with the rest of the enterprise on key operational and performance metrics such as cost controls and service quality?” “Are individual workers aware of clear performance goals aligned with business objectives, and do workers have timely and accurate access to their progress towards those goals?” “Is the flow of information into and out of the center controlled and channeled so that appropriate managers and analysts can interpret the raw data and use it to create specific prescriptions for change that improve performance?” A contact center that was recently shut down and its entire staff laid off could have answered all three questions affirmatively. They’re still just as unemployed as if the answers had been No.
Customers will always have questions about the products that they buy, both before and after the sale. Every complex tool inherently has a support burden; the user must make an investment in learning how to use it in order to gain the promised productivity benefits from the purchase. Most traditional software (and far too many SaaS ones, too) company senior managers, knowing this basic reality, ask themselves “how can we provide the answers to customer questions as cheaply as possible?” The question alone is very revealing, and those who consider themselves support professionals need to understand the meaning in it. A company that only talks about the importance of cutting costs in the contact center sees no real value in the support function; it’s an unfortunately necessary evil. When it can be gotten rid of; it will be. Nor does such a company truly consider its support employees to be professionals making a valued contribution. When they can be gotten rid of, or replaced by volunteer “community support;” they will be.
The questions asked by the white paper are not themselves inherently bad. The problem is that absent an appropriate vision, they inevitably lead in the wrong direction. Failing to look past the immediate performance and cost questions being asked by Senior Management to see what prompted them can be expensive. The price can include derailed careers and economic hardship for a lot of people — one of whom may be you. If cutting costs is the only acceptable answer, it’s likely that the wrong question is being asked. Shuttered centers and laid-off support staff members lie at the end of that road. If you don’t want your center and staff to be another example, it’s time to turn back and to rewrite the questions.
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The following project descriptions and case studies are drawn from real projects done over the years for various kinds of organizations facing some common problems. (The names of the companies, except for SkillSoft, have been changed; MB&A is committed to respecting the confidentiality of our clients.) Access to the full content of specific case studies is free, but requires subscriber members to be logged-in before reading. To become a subscriber, you’ll need to enter your name, company name and a valid e-mail address here.
Customer Contact Center Sector
Any significant work towards improving customer retention rates and overall sustainable profitability levels will necessarily involve the company’s customer contact center resources. The following examples show the range of expertise and experience that MB&A brings to its client engagements:
[Strategic Assessment.] VolterCo is a Fortune 500 electrical systems and components manufacturer. Over the years, the company had grown by acquisition to where it had over 27 different support centers across the USA and internationally. Retained to do a Current-State assessment and strategic recommendations study, MB&A drew up a plan for consolidating all of Level 1 support into a common location to be based upon a commercial grade call tracking system and assisted with the vendor/product selection process. The plan remained as an active document at the executive management level of the company for more than 3 years, and became the foundation for the company’s complete re-engineering of its support offerings. (Various eastern states, USA)
[Process Re-engineering of Customer Technical Support.] GoodSoft is a large financial software company. Faced with rising customer dissatisfaction over an existing service level state wherein approximately 60% of incoming calls were delayed for 4-5 minutes and the balance for as long as 12 minutes, the company retained MB&A to find a workable solution. After the re-engineering of the center’s organizational structure and process, the group was able to consistently pick up 99.9% of all incoming calls in less than 60 seconds with no increase in headcount. (Tampa, FL)
[Support Technology Design.] China-Electric. A provincial electric company had 16 regional sub-stations and a central headquarters. Each substation had a different data-set format for customer records, and the company wanted to be able to monitor and back-up all of them at the HQ center for disaster recovery purposes. MB&A consultants assisted with the research and preparation of the system requirements document and implementation project plan. (People’s Republic of China)
[Call Center Assessment.] MedClaim is a well-established physician-owned medical claims processing company. Concerned about the operation of its call center and the quality of service being provided to its member physicians and their patients in terms of accuracy and courtesy, MedClaim retained MB&A to do an assessment of the group. After confirming that Management’s concerns were well-founded, we recommended significant augmentation of the center’s support technology suite, soft-skills training for all reps and adoption of a new workflow and organizational design. California, USA.
[Support Technology Tool Design.] VirtualCSR: A major telephone manufacturer commissioned a web design firm to create a prototype artificial intelligence Virtual Customer Service Agent as an aspect of an overall support/service diversion strategy. The design firm retained MB&A to help design the service functionality for the agent and to assist with identifying and contracting with appropriate knowledgebase manufacturer partners. (Iceland; California, USA)
[Call Center Design.] Oregon Dept. of Corrections. After a state law was passed requiring all inmates of the correctional system to be put to work, the Corrections Department wanted a plan for potentially utilizing the inmates to staff a customer support/service outsourcing call center. MB&A was retained to research and design a written report and implementation project plan, and to present our findings and recommendations directly to members of the State Legislature. (Oregon, USA)
[Course Content Design.] SkillSoft is an online training company that wanted to create a web-based training program for customer service/support associates, supervisors, managers and executives. MB&A was brought in to provide subject matter expertise and course content, and to appear in video segments of the program. (Dublin, Ireland / Scottsdale, AZ / Redwood City, CA)
[Vendor/Product Selection for CRM Call-Tracker and Telephone ACD System.] Abselon, a major pipe and fittings manufacturer, had consolidated a number of regional centers into a central Support/Service Contact Center at its headquarters in rural Pennsylvania. Recognizing that their existing computer and phone infrastructure was insufficient to support the new center, Abselon retained MB&A to assess the operation, prepare the system requirements documentation, to identify potential product and vendor candidates and to manage the project through the RFP and demonstration phases. In the process, we helped Abselon to realize savings of over $750,000 USD. (Pennsylvania, USA)
[Assessment of Business-Partner Support Capabilities.] Responding to substantial levels of complaints from its business partners and allied consultants and demands for a separate, dedicated support team, TreeTop asked MB&A to do an assessment of the current support center’s capabilities. We found that creating a separate support center for the Business Partners & Consultants was not warranted because the desired increase in responsiveness could more easily be produced faster by optimizing the call-flow of the existing center. (Oregon, USA)
[Assessment of Support Department Scalability.] Clean-Mail is a hosted-solution provider for e-mail control functionality that was growing exceptionally fast. Concerned about the ability of their customer support group to stay ahead of the skyrocketing customer demand, the company asked MB&A to do a strategic assessment and future-state blueprint. The project Report recommended clarification of CM’s profits-realization strategy, redefinition of the product, restructuring the support organization and enhancement of the support technology resources. (California, USA)
[CRM Technology Product Design Review.] After building a Customer Interaction Management System, Challenger-CRM, a major offshore software manufacturer and provider of outsourced contact center services, wanted a deep level head-to-head comparison of the design, features and functionality of its new product against the leading industry competitors. MB&A was retained to design and manage the project through to presentation of a written Report and a satellite video conference session with Challenger-CRM’s executive and development teams. (California, USA; Bangalore, India)
Revised: November 3, 2011