Customer service design, contact centre set up, purpose, strategy, operations, constant improvement

 

Customer Service and Contact Centres - Strategy To Implementation

The first thing to do when defining the role of the customer contact centre in your organisation is to clarify its key purpose.   Some organisations seem to see their contact centre as a support function that should run as cheaply as possible. In reality, it is one of the critical services that any organisation offers.  Its performance will strongly influence what customers think of your organisation and how often they want to do business with you in future. 

 

The starting point for the strategic planning must therefore be – what do our customers want from us and how do we want to develop our relationship with them?  We can help you to transform the performance of your operations using a four-step approach:

 

 

Purpose  -->	Strategy  -->	Operations  -->	Constant improvement
(what do we want to achieve?)	(how will we go about it?)	(how will we set up and resource the service?)	(how will we engage our people to improve it?)

 

We work with private and public sector organisations to place the contact centre at the heart of the decision making process and to position it at the forefront of the business.  Through delivering operational improvements to enhance the customer experience we move the focus from simple call handling to developing customer loyalty, building market share and driving additional revenue through multiple channels.

 

We also work with call centres to build service request and customer models that assist in accurately forecasting call volumes.   Improved accuracy of forecasts means that staffing levels are kept closer to a best practice level.  However, customers do not work to an organisation’s timetable so there is always an element of uncertainty.  Understanding and managing this variation is also key to maintaining service levels whilst striving to make costs as variable as the workload.   Services and campaigns can then be run more profitably whilst still maintaining the customer experience.

 

We have the experience in our team to effectively predict customer response rates to a range of advertising media including DRTV, mail shots, press advertising etc.  We can also use that experience to help you more effectively plan for telemarketing responses.  This can give a more accurate return on investment profile and then reduce cost of sale through improved contact rates.

 

We have led and contributed to a range of contact centre projects include:

 

• The migration of twelve European call centres into a centralised fully operational multi-lingual contact centre for a large utility organisation;

• Developed the call centre sales strategy for a large financial service organisation within FSA guidelines, resulting in additional £1.5M incremental revenue;

• Improved productivity for a large off-shore operation allowing them to increase call minutes from 3 million per annum to 33 million with only a 100% increase in headcount;

• Re-engineered an emergency response centre handling 30,000 calls per day to ensure that the Service Level of 80% answered was achieved within 20 seconds.  Prior to our arrival it had been 5%;

• Set up four contact centres from green field or brown field sites to deliver the business strategic and operational objectives within timeframe and budget.

 

 

When you are planning to set up a customer contact centre, we offer support for  the end-to-end planning, design, build and operation:

 

• Advice on the best location – including salary/employment surveys and research into government grants/funding;
• Strategic planning, service design, process development and publicity;
• Role development, profiling and recruitment of managers, agents and support staff;
• Transition planning and project management;
• Capacity and shift planning to ensure optimal performance from day one;
• Bespoke training for service, sales, account management and market research;
• Facilities management including the rental or purchase of accommodation, furniture etc;
• The purchasing or leasing of telephony and IT hardware, including installation;
• Interim operational management during set-up and in the early days of go live.

 

Depending upon the size and scale of your operation we can have you operational within weeks rather than months, with the potential to save a significant percentage of set up costs.

 

© Touchpoint Change Consulting Ltd, 2009.