| Tutorial taken from Prosci's Planning and Design Toolkit |
| Tutorial taken from Prosci's Planning and Design Toolkit |
The Call Center Model: Module 2 of 7
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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:
This tutorial will provide definitions and considerations for each of these activities.
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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:
The three main benefits to your organization and employees are:
Well-crafted mission statements share some common features:
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.
Gathering basic demographic information is a good first step. Examples include:
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
You should have at least one or two key performance indicators (KPIs) in each of the following areas:
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.
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, and 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.
Coming next - module 3: contact center processes
The text of this tutorial comes from Prosci’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:
More information about Prosci’s Call Center Planning and Design – A blueprint for building a successful contact center.
Call Center Measurement Toolkit - Prosci’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.
Call Center Best Practices Report - Two hundred seventy-one organizations from 24 countries participated in Prosci’s benchmarking study on call center operations, management practices and technology. The study shares practical information about what is working (and what's not working) as call center managers seek to increase revenues, reduce costs and improve service quality.
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 (more information).
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