| Tutorial taken from Prosci's Call Center Planning and Design Toolkit
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| Tutorial taken from Prosci's Call Center Planning and Design Toolkit
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Guidelines for creating a contact center strategyThis tutorial provides an outline for a contact center strategy and tips for preparing this strategy for your call center.A customer contact strategy defines the desired customer experience and how the contact center fits within the organization's overall process of serving customers. If you do not have a customer contact strategy, now is a good time to prepare one for your center. This tutorial will help you get started. If you already have a contact strategy, it should be updated annually. Use this tutorial to compare your strategy framework and contents.
Topics that should be addressed in your strategic plan are:
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 who you are, what you will be doing and how to relate to the operation as a whole.
Four viewpoints that must be consideredFour key viewpoints must be considered in any strategic plan: the customer, customer service representatives, the call center managers and the organization. By responding to the questions and concerns on the following worksheet, you will begin to understand each viewpoint and be on your way to defining a customer contact strategy.
Learning about your competitionAs with most aspects of business, when developing a strategy you want to keep an eye on the competition. A good working knowledge of how they treat their customers will give some 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 gives you and your team a snapshot of a variety of contact centers and helps you to gauge how your center measures up. It allows you to set up your center based on what works for others. There are two ways to get benchmarking information: 1) your team can gather its own data, or 2) you can purchase the data. We recommend both approaches. You can purchase benchmarking reports to learn not only about performance measures, but also best practices in call center management and the use of technology. You should also gather your own data. Gathering your own dataGathering data on your own can be an effective way to understand your competition. The steps involved are:
It is a good idea to call each organization on your list more than once, varying the times (peak and off peak perhaps) and reasons for calling (sales, service, general inquiry) to get a better sample.
Documenting customer requirements (learning about your customers)You cannot develop a strategy to 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: age, sex, marital status, geographical location/time zone, income range, access to internet, current usage of your products/ services, and warranty status. This information can be found hiding in a number of places (e.g., corporate databases, forms/applications, customer surveys). It might take a bit of digging to find, but it is well worth the effort. You do not want to staff your center for extended business hours only to find your average customer is retired and could call weekdays between 9 and 5. Understanding demographics will help you make the right decisions. Customer relationshipsNow 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:
A financial institution, for example, may find that 75% of their customers have only one checking account. For planning purposes then, you may assume that the average call will be regarding a single product (a checking account) and that customers will not have a great need to transfer funds between accounts. However, the up sell/cross sell opportunities are significant. Customer relationships provide valuable information that will help you define the functions and characteristics of your center.How do you find out about your customers likes and dislikes or what they expect from your organization? Ask them! Focus groups and customer surveys are two methods for getting the scoop directly from the source.
The process for creating your strategic planThe steps in creating a strategic plan require gathering data and then developing the strategy.
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This tutorial is drawn from Prosci's Call Center Planning and Design Toolkit.
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Resources for strategy developmentCall Center Planning
and Design Toolkit 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.
Other Call Center Management Resources Bookstore
Other resources:Call center bookstore and reference library
Send questions to
callcenters@prosci.com About Prosci.
Prosci is a registered trademark.
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