Call Center Model Tutorial Series

Centerserve is happy to offer our Planning and Design toolkit  at 10% off the list price during the Call Center Model Tutorial Series, click here to take advantage of the discounted price

The first step towards delivering world-class customer service in today’s environment is to separate the different components that contribute to a successful call center. Module 1 introduced the Contact Center Model, which breaks the call center into its five key components – Strategy, Processes, Technology, Human resources and Facilities. Modules 2-6 will examine each of these components separately. The final module, Module 7, will address the project planning and change management needed to make the most of your contact centers. Each component comes from Centerserve's Planning and Design Toolkit. The Call Center Model acts as a basis for ensuring cost effective, strategically aligned, world-class customer service. 

Strategy overview

Defining your call center strategy is a key starting point for developing a world-class contact center. The strategy establishes, at a high level, what you are doing and who you are doing it for. The major activities for developing your strategy are:   

• Write a contact center mission statement
• Know your customer
• Learn about the competition
• Develop a customer contact strategy
• Set contact center goals

• Document your strategy

This tutorial will provide definitions and considerations for each of these activities.

Write a contact center mission statement

Every contact center should have a mission statement. This consists of a few lines or a brief paragraph that describes the center and what it does. At a high level, some of the questions it answers include:

• What is our main function or purpose?
• How do we fit in with the overall business mission?
• What are our defining characteristics?
• How do we want to be recognized by our customers?
• What are our priorities?

The three main benefits to your organization and employees are:

• helps define and align strategies
• focuses discussions
• aids in decision making

Well-crafted mission statements share some common features:

• short and snappy
• easy to understand
• meaningful
• lasting

Know your customer

You cannot meet the needs of your customers if you don't know who they are. This may sound obvious, but a surprising number of contact centers do not have a good handle on their customers. Understanding exactly who your actual and target audiences are, their relationship with your organization, their likes, dislikes and expectations, will allow you to plan a contact center that successfully addresses those specific needs.

Customer information

Gathering basic demographic information is a good first step. Examples include:

• age
• sex
• marital status
• geographical location/time zone
• income range
• access to internet
• current usage of your products/ services
• warranty status

Customer relationships

Now that you know some general characteristics about your customers, the next step is to identify their relationship with your organization. Knowing the products or services that you provide to the customer can give you clues about the following:

• reason for calling/contact type
• complexity/call length
• up sell/cross sell opportunities
• level of customer service required and expected

Learn about the competition

As with most aspects of business, when planning a contact center you want to keep an eye on the competition. A good working knowledge of how they treat their customers will give insight into what your customers expect of you. But who is your competition? You can start by naming the top players in your vertical market, but that's only part of the answer. Your customers have relationships with a variety of businesses and will very likely compare their experience with your contact center to every other customer service experience they have ever had. So how do you figure out what the competition is doing? Benchmarking. Benchmarking is the process of examining the processes and performance of your competitors and non-competitors to learn key lessons that will help you perform better. You can purchase benchmarking reports or conduct your own benchmarking studies.

Once the benchmarking data has been gathered and summarized, review it with your team to discuss the key learnings. Decide what you need to do to provide the service your customers expect and to differentiate yourself from the competition. These decisions will impact your processes, technology and organizational design.

Develop a customer contact strategy

A customer contact strategy defines the desired customer experience and how the contact center fits within the organization's overall process of serving customers. The strategy acknowledges the "today" state and identifies the future state (usually 2 to 3 years out) that everyone in the organization is working towards.

A customer contact strategic plan is useful to:

• Define the overall role of the contact center.
• Align corporate strategies (e.g., technology, self-service, marketing, organization).
• Provide a blueprint for change.

The customer contact strategy is a high-level description of the call center that can be read by anyone in the organization to learn about the who you are, what you will be doing and how you (as a contact center) relate to the operation as a whole.

Set contact center goals

The first step toward implementing your customer contact strategy is to translate that strategy into meaningful and useful performance goals. You will need to define what success means to your organization - otherwise you won't know it when you get there. Is it happy customers? Lots of sales? First contact resolution?

Setting goals and measures, creating associated reports, analyzing data…all these things take time and money that you don't want to waste. The following guidelines will help you select the most important areas to measure.

What to measure

You should have at least one or two key performance indicators (KPIs) in each of the following areas:

1. Operational efficiency (focused on operational costs)
2. Operational productivity (if applicable for your center - focused on revenue generation)
3. Service quality and customer satisfaction (focused on customers' experience)
4. Employee satisfaction (focused on your most important resources)

Establishing goals and assessing performance is an ongoing process that defines how well the center is doing over time. Exactly what gets measured varies from center to center. It's based primarily on those big-picture objectives that you identified in the strategic plan.

Pulling it all together

Throughout this business strategy section you have:

• developed a mission statement
• learned about customer needs and expectations
• benchmarked the competition
• created a high-level customer contact strategy
• set performance measures and goals

Now it is time to pull all of these inputs together and document your overall strategy. This strategy document will serve as the guiding instrument for other elements of your call center including process changes, technology improvements and organizational changes.

Special discount for our tutorial guests only:

Get industry leading step-by-step tools and checklists to plan a world-class call center or evaluate a current call center- the Planning and Design Toolkit now at a discounted price. Click here to take advantage of the offer.  This offer will only be available during this tutorial series.

The text of this tutorial comes from Centerserve's Call Center Planning and Design toolkit. Developed by industry leaders in the Call Center field, Vanguard Communications and Prosci, the toolkit is the definitive guide for creating the best contact center possible for your organization.

The toolkit provides:

• a comprehensive planning checklist and design guidelines for successfully setting up a new call center or redesigning your existing call center
• the approach and tools to help you create a contact center strategy and manage the implementation effectively

More information about Centerserve's Call Center Planning and Design – A blueprint for building a successful contact center.

Related Resources

Call Center Measurement Toolkit - Centerserve's Call Center Measurement Toolkit is an indispensable tool that will teach you how to assess and improve the performance of your call center. By providing common definitions of terms and a complete overview of performance measures for contact centers, the toolkit will promote your understanding of the functions and procedures that will enhance your call center performance and boost its efficiency.

2007 Call Center Best Practices Report - Find out what's working and what is not working from contact center managers world-wide. Managers and consultants share best practices and solutions for operations and management of call centers.

Call Center Planning and Design Toolkit - A comprehensive guide to call center strategy, planning and design; an excellent resource for new contact center start-ups, existing call center improvement and future planning with detailed templates and planning roadmaps. Centerserve is happy to offer our Planning and Design toolkit  at 10% off the list price during the Call Center Model Tutorial Series, click here to take advantage of the discounted price

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