When Contact Center Data Doesn’t Tell You the Real Story
My client Jerry was both happy to see me and frustrated on a recent visit to his organization. As CEO of the company, he was anxious to understand how to evaluate what might be a serious customer attrition problem.
He already had significant targets to reduce customer interactions and wasn’t making much headway in his customer service goals.
Sure, the attrition numbers were a warning sign – but of what? Service issues? Product issues? Shipping problems? We were engaged to troubleshoot customer service, and he wanted to know if the center itself was the problem.
The short answer – Not exactly.
The longer answer – The fundamental service provided by the contact center was acceptable (if not brilliant), but “hinky data” was making things look much worse than they actually were.
“Hinky” might sound somewhat innocuous, but the real-and-present danger of such data confusion can lead your organization down a long, expensive, and ultimately mistaken road.
When Customer Service Data Goes “Hinky”
We wound up talking about what I meant by “hinky data” - leading to a gory conversation about sources of truth effectively hidden by 21st century data.
Is there any way for a small team of humans to get to the real truth faster than a quantitative time study of the organization?
Jerry was relieved that customer service was doing okay (and eager to know what to do better) but also understandably concerned: If we can’t trust the data, then how do we know what’s really going on?
We Have to Look at How Agents Actually USE the System
In this case, the CRM/ERP system used to run the business had been configured without deep knowledge of the call flow and desired customer experience.
As a result, the agents had to go through a lot of screens to get to the parts where they needed to input the customer order or any notes about customer feedback.
In sitting with agents for a day, I saw the same patterns – agents picked the default item in a field, or skipped any dropdown boxes that weren’t required. It’s a pattern my team and I have seen many times before.
When running the data, the Sales and Marketing team wasn’t aware that agents weren’t consistently populating certain fields, like “reason for the call”. Since the first item listed was “customer service issue,” the reporting was coming back with high numbers of calls for customer service issues, even though in reality most calls were routine orders and questions.
Can We Just Skip the Conversation About the Dropdown Boxes?
Traditional process design wisdom will tell you that we want to get these fields populated and organized in such a way that agents can easily follow with the call flow. In this case, Jerry was even more stuck because his call routing platform was rudimentary. As calls came in, there was not much information that could be used to identify the “reason for the call” effectively.
So how do Jerry and his team get at what’s really going on without spending weeks doing time studies?
We have to find a way to get around the dropdown boxes to understand what customers are actually saying.
Our team has had success working with clients to deliver three approaches to provide better insights into WHO is contacting the organization and HOW their calls are being resolved.
We focus on:
- A strong call management platform and intelligent menus that append data to identify who is calling and why
- Speech analytics
- A robust quality platform that lets you analyze all the calls to ultimately understand the agent's journey in supporting the customer's journey and how to best enable it
Understanding a caller and the reason for their call - from their interactions with the menu before being routed to an agent - is a key attribute of an effective call management platform.
If you don’t have a strong call management platform, this is an area for investment and becomes one of the most fundamental foundations for the overall customer journey.
Let’s focus here on the customer menu or IVR. The most important information is the caller’s identity and the reason they give for making the call. Instead of relying only on what the agent enters, we maximize the information we requested from the caller and match it to incremental input from the agent.
Using speech analytics and a robust quality platform means you can analyze your entire base of calls for overall themes, root cause and insights.
Most quality and speech platforms pitch the coaching applications. The real bang for your buck, however, is being able to analyze all the interactions to look for customer stress, consistent issues, and areas of opportunity.
Let’s Do Some Simple Math from The Old Days
Before the advent of AI, listening to a sample of 100 five-minute calls would require 1000 minutes of human effort, and still be a qualitative sample. The human costs just to do the listening and scoring are unmanageable.
AI driven platforms can evaluate the entire base of calls. Implementing these platforms is an amazing way to drive insight and knowledge quickly – and then take people and process actions to fix it.
It does take investment to train the technology and refine the analysis, but it’s worth it for a single source of truth: gaining insight into what the customer and agent really talked about. Now the most vital information can be aligned with the platform and systems data for accurate understanding of what’s working - and what's not.
The Newest Frontier is Decision Support for Customer Service Agents
It’s not always practical to create a slick new user interface or collapse multiple systems or processes. Decision support for agents allows a shortcut that layers in some elements of traditional process work - without trying to change everything in the underlying system.
Defining the key parts of an interaction and their place within the customer journey is elemental. By focusing on the moments that matter and looking for ways to empower agents to handle those moments as sensitively and effectively as possible, it’s essential to zero in on elements that are critical for agents:
- 1. How many different types of transactions are there?
- 2. How complex are the transactions and how much information is there to remember?
- 3. How much discretion does the agent have?
- 4. Is the agent able to handle the transaction on the spot?
This arena does require going deeper into systems and processes from the agent’s point of view to determine what information could be provided to make the agent’s job more effortless. This will be based on the dialogue that transpires during the call.
Instead of trying to fix every underlying detail, a strong decision support application and call flow can support the agent by “listening” to the call and offering suggestions, including reminding the agent about forgotten questions, directing the agent with a link to the right application or page, and reminding the agent when the process is taking too long.
While I always love to fix the underlying CRM/ERP system, I also love a good end-run to get to the solution. If I have the speech analytics to know who is calling and why, I have some “non-hinky” data to know how often certain kinds of calls happen and if my supporting technology is working to address the true reason for the call.
As you consider your own experiences with your organization, what communication and change challenges are you struggling with? Whether your team’s situation basic, hard, or ridiculously complex, solutions are out there.
If any of this resonates with you or your organization, take a moment to share this newsletter with your colleagues who may be struggling with similar challenges.
Blue Orbit Consulting guides you through methods that will transform your contact center’s operations into a world-class customer experience.
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I founded Blue Orbit Consulting in 2014 after running staff organizations in contact centers and building consulting practices in customer service, process improvement, complex program management, and channel operations. My approach – and my firm’s approach – is fundamentally pragmatic, and our clients often achieve benefits in excess of 10x their investment. We develop and deliver world-class customer interactions for our clients, whether it is troubleshooting and optimizing what they already have in place or creating strategic transformations to deliver outstanding customer interactions every time.