A significant element of any contact centre solution are “Statistics” and a varied range of tools for providing real-time, near real-time as well as historic reports. These are obviously designed with their core focus on helping the operational contact centre manage the delivery of ‘resources’ versus their customers ‘demand’.

The 3 main statistical elements delivered in typical contact centres are;

• The Wall Board – a place for real-time as well as near real time statistics – the performance of the contact centre versus current or near real-time demand
• The Supervisors desktop – a place for the team leader and supervisors to manage their teams adherence to Service Levels and Key Performance Indicators
• The Business Analysts – for historic reporting, business intelligence and analytics

We see these 3 mainstays being supported by new features in Genesys Interaction Workspace for example, that expose additional layers of statistics to each agent. These include;

• A statistics Widget – where key metrics can be published or even ‘pinned’ by the customer service representative
• A My Statistics TAB in their desktop application that shows how the team, or the entire Contact Centre is peforming (much like the historic wall board, but now they can be skill specific)
• A holistic Call Centre statistical view that expresses the performance of the contact centre as a whole

So, I’d argue, every single facet of the modern contact centre has lots of information about how how demand is being met by the resources available.  A new concept I’d like to discuss here is the concept of reversing the statistical role so that they can be used by customer to make decisions in real-time.  For example;

• Are there resources available to help me right now?
• If so, how can I reach that pool of resources?
• If there’s a delay, how long is it?
• Do I have alternative options?

In the Anana Mobile Application for Customer Service, which we based on the Genesys Customer Interaction Management Platform we have modelled the simple presentation of currently available agents by skill.  Study the picture carefully for a moment…

Which channel or media type would you pick?

Scenario A – You are in a rush, and your need to engage with customer services is very high priority. Which Channel would you pick?

Scenario B – You are less hurried, and have an important matter to engage about, but it could wait if it needed to.  Which Channel would you pick?

Scenario C – You have all the time in the world, and the matter to engage about is less than important. Which Channel would you pick?

I think the answers to these options could actually be quite profound.

In Scenario A I may opt for the phone, simply because in a rush, whilst running about with my mobile phone, I can actually talk and walk at the same time. I might not decide to phone though if I can NO agents available to help me.  This brings in all sorts of additional options, like “Publishing expected WAIT times”.

In Scenario B I would probably choose web-chat.  Why? Because I can type pretty fast and I can see that there are more Agents available there

In Scenario C I would probably pick the channel that is most convenient to my situation/device; but only if there were people there to help.  Even though I don’t mind waiting; once I’ve know what available I may start to take more notice of it.  I’d probably still choose to use email, or ask for a call-back.  If I was on Twitter or Facebook I may use those.  SMS may work too as there’s a lot of people available to help me!

Introduction

This post is a reflection on a Q&A conducted by Robert Bacal on the direction of Customer Service and where it is going this year. The original article is posted here. In the interests of healthy dialogue and debate on the themes raised in this article I couldn’t resist but countering them with our observations on the themes raised.

Question 1

Q: There’s been so much talk about how social media is changing customer service, and in particular a number of experts have suggested this will be the year of the customer — that customers will become way more powerful and that will result in much better customer service as companies realize the impact of poor service. What do you think?

Robert: First, I’ll say this. There are over 500 million Facebookers and similarly large totals of people on Twitter and LinkedIn. When you factor in what we’ve had for years, blogs, complaint sites and forums, and review sites like on amazon, what you have is way more than a year of  “social media” power. The outcome? Nothing. I see no numbers and no data to indicate that customer service has gotten better. In fact, the numbers suggest service is worse than before, something I’ve said over and over again.

Our View: We see Enterprises rapidly beginning the process of Social-Engagement. It starts naturally with their Marketing Teams engaging by BROADCAST of corporate value’s, offers, coupons, incentives and other ‘news’ on their own ‘instances or presence’ on each of the popular Social Media sites. This has evolved rapidly in this year to the actual physical marriage of Social Strategy as a marketing theme; into one where Social Media Interactions are being brought into Customer Operations and are being deployed on the front line.  Throughout this year we have conducted many workshops and discovery sessions with known brands (some global) who have keenly embraced the concept of Social-Engagement in the Enterprise Contact Centre. Our sales lifecycle on the realisation of these projects is weeks. Now, in markets where the deployment of Customer Care Solutions takes between 12 and 18 months these timeframes are unprecendented.  We now have Social Engagement customers active in projects in Europe and in Africa.  Our response to the comment “no data to indicate that customer service has gotten better” is we should be less quick to apportion the quality of customer service to the media or mode of interaction.  It matters not whether or not a customer decides to engage via SMS, Voice, eMail, Web-Chat or via new channels like Twitter and Facebook. The channel is arbitrary.  We agree however that the market is ‘young’ and it is a new paradigm. It will be a while before we see mature Customer Services Process and Policy and associated ‘measurement’ really proving out the case for Social Engagement.  One thing we are sure of though is social-media is here to stay.  The form of interaction or popularity of each social engine may change; but not the customers own willingness to use these channels to communicate with their peers and providers.

Question 2

Q: Could you clarify that last bit?

Robert: When you add additional customer service channels and you don’t put resources in (at a high cost) to staff them, what happens is that you spread your customer service resource THINNER. Thus in general service gets worse. It’s really simple. Companies aren’t willing to add to costs.

Our View: The answer is actually missing the key point!  If an Enterprise adds a channel of communication for Customer Operations and the traffic goes UP then it is a sure validation that they HAVE NOT BEEN LISTENING on that channel and are missing valuable opportunities to engage with the customer in the first place.  The answer poised is actually suggesting if we turn off all the channels we listen on to our customers we can reduce our costs by pretending that we don’t have much traffic!  This is a disasterous viewpoint!  Our view is that their is a BUBBLE of continual activity about any companies products, services or brand.  Imagine an inflated childs balloon.  This balloon represents all the traffic for the Enterprise Contact Centre with its existing channels.  One could somewhat argue that by allowing customers to engage with new or alternative channels that they will not make the same request twice by another channel.  The anology; Squeeze the balloon at one end (by constricting a channel, say eMail) and the voice traffic WILL GO UP; in other words the total volume of ‘interactions’ remains the same, but the means of communication will change.  The Anana view is that the Enterprise MUST BE LISTENING and engaging using the channels and media that its own customers prefer. Otherwise, the simple result is missed opportunities to INTERACT, to provide service, to excel in the customer experience.  If you are not listening you are doing no better than an Ostrich that puts ‘its head in the sand’ and pretends that the Lion standing behind it can no longer see it; as quite reasonably the Ostrich can no longer see the Lion!  At the end of the day their is a cost to serving customers.  The correct line of argument is that the right balance needs to be found between what SPEND will create which EXPERIENCE for the customer!  Spending frugally on telephony and customer service representatives will save money; but result in long wait-times for the callers.  Plain and simple!  Net result; loss of sales, poor customer experience, eroded loyalty, churn and migration to your competitor. So, back to the balloon analogy.  Your balloon needs to be big enough to offer the appropriate SERVICE LEVELS to all customers; irrespective of mode of communication. Period.

Question 3

Q: What about the claims of customer empowerment?

Robert: It’s bunk. The whole line of reasoning is based on a number of superficial assumptions that don’t hold true. For example, people are assuming that now that customers can express themselves in social media, that this will cause changes. Having an opinion, and sharing it online don’t mean anyone reads it, or is influenced by it. The result is that it appears there’s influence and power but there isn’t.

Our View: This is an incredibly dangerous viewpoint!  Suggesting that customers have no power to cause change is simply INCORRECT. Consider @DaveCarroll and his own story here - According to analysis conducted by the BBC this piece of social ‘commentary’ cost United Airlines $180 Million US Dollars!  (and that was only the effect on stock-price!).  I will ask Dave Carroll himself to respond to this one!  If I was an Enterprise and I heard the view from anyone that “Customer Empowerment” was Bunk then I would be very very concerned!

Question 4 – 6 are less argued so are not addressed in this response with the exception of “to have an impact requires collective effort by a large number of people”. Our view is that @DaveCarroll had a huge impact. He did this on his own; with limited support only from his immediate family. Social Media does not require the MASSED movement for change to happen.  The actions of a single VOICE (of a customer) with the appropriate message, and that little mix of the x-factor in their comment, concern or observation (like Dave’s Song) for that to become adopted by the MASSES; this is the viral nature of CROWD behaviour.  No one can forecast huge POSITIVE or NEGATIVE sentiment about anything or any subject in Social Media. Every time I post a tweet I wonder, like winning the lottery, if this TWEET is going to go viral?  Have I found the right mix of timing, sentiment, wording and CONTENT to trigger a revolution?  Maybe!  For my Enterprise customers I focus on making sure that they understand this RISK and the associated OPPORTUNITY. An opportunity to engage in Customer Operations with any customer in a service type of scenario is media agnostic.  So, my main message; start listening, start engaging, and do not do the Ostrich!

The Customer Effort Score explained

Please see our earlier posts on the similar theme to the details of the formally published Customer Effort Score. This post serves to explore the Customer Effort Score from the view of a Customer Contact Centre Solutions provider; and to explain, more in laymans terms what the Customer Effort Score means, and how it may apply in our typical day to day experiences.  Better still, it provides direct examples of how to reduce your Customer Effort Score!

The bottom line of Customer Effort Scoring is to “Make it Easy” .  What is it?  Anything of course! Any interaction?  Any attempt of your customer to engage with you should be EASY in any channel, or any media, say, the Web with self-service or by making a phone call into customer services.  Both experiences need to be easy to do, and get the customer to the right information at the right time without effort.  Customer Effort Score philosophy strongly suggests (and has the statistics to prove it) that the easier you make your customers effort (the lower the score) the less likely they are to be disloyal (move or swap their buying power to your competitor).  These are some of the key and rather sobering metrics discovered by the Harvard Business Review team in their study;

• 56% of people report having to re-explain an issue erodes their loyalty
• 57% of people report having to switch from the web to the phone as eroding their loyalty
• 59% of people report having to expend moderate to high effort to resolve an issue erodes their loyalty
• 59% of people report being transferred during interactions with the Call Centre as eroding their loyalty
• 62% of people report having to repeatedly contact the company concerned to resolve an issue as eroding their loyalty

Even though I integrate and sell solutions to deal with these key issues I still personally go through at least 1 or 2 of the above findings every time I contact or attempt to contact a supplier to my family.  Loyalty to me is my stickiness to the organization I have a relationship with.  If the relationship is EASY and I don’t have to jump through hoops to do anything ‘difficult or requiring effort’ then of course, I’m far less likely to migrate my allegiance to someone elses product or service.

Customer Effort Score is a simple scale of 1 through 5 with 1 representing lowest effort and 5 representing highest effort.  The lower the measured Customer Effort (as a score) the less likely the customer is to break their loyalty to your product or brand.

The Harvard Business Review team found 5 key drivers to reducing Customer Effort.  I will paraphrase and simplify them for you next.

1. Don’t just focus on immediate call resolution or issue but put some time into dealing with the next one before it happens.The biggest cause of excessive customer effort is any requirement of the caller to call back.  Companies have learned to convince themselves that solid metrics in First Call Resolution (FCR) is the key.  It is not.  The aim to reduce the customer effort is to stop them having to phone back at all; especially if it has any bearing to the reasons that they are calling you now!  22% of repeat calls into the contact centre are directly related to the issues that prompted the original interaction; even if the company concerned closed the case as resolved the first time around.
2. Train and allow your Customer Service Represenative to deal with the emotional side of customer contacts.24% of repeat calls in the HBR study showed a clear emotional disconnect between customers and the Customer Service Representative. In other words, 1 in every 4 callers completes the planned transaction UNHAPPY, yet the Customer Service Representative closes the case as ‘resolved’.  With basic training and instruction anyone can be taught to eliminate this disconnect and reduce repeat calls
3. Get rid of channel switchingHave you ever heard your call centre management team saying something along the lines of “Wouldn’t it be great if we could get more of our customers to do this on the website instead of phoning us?”  I must have heard this hundreds of times from our customers when we are deploying Interative Voice Response at the ‘front-door’ or working hard on process engineering in the workflow and processes in the call centre.  I’m still astounded that our clients look at us in a bemused fashion to lend them some support with the question.  They are actually suggesting that their own customers are stupid!  I’m really happy to see that the Customer Effort Score article says it plain and simply; 57% of inbound calls came from your customers who have ALREADY BEEN ON THE WEBSITE!!  Cross Channel Interaction Management is NOT difficult, and it is not something that requires huge spending on technology or upgrades to make it happen.  Investing in a profusion of self-service channels is not necessarily the answer either!  Interactive Voice Response, Websites, e-mail, web-chat, online support communities like Forums, social media such as Facebook and Twitter.  I bet you are lighting them all up already; with an assumption that all of these as a whole will reduce the telephony traffic into the call centre.  They won’t!  Why?  Your technically unsophisticated customers when left to their own devices may try out all these channels; expend a lot of energy, become frustrated, bounce between a couple of the channels (without continuity) and then in despair pick up the phone in the end.  One of the things I really admire in the Genesys Cross Channel Communications capability; married with the Conversation Manager capability that unifies, concentrates and exposes Interactions with your customers across channels.  That way, if your customer gets half way through a transaction in self-service, but then picks up the phone you can immediately suggest meaningful ways of continuing the activity where it was left of.  It is subtle; but it is POWERFUL.  Beware your customers vent their frustration or ‘high-effort’ on social media channels! (See my earlier thoughts on the real impact of negative social sentiment in other posts for details)
4. Use surveys and feedback from really unhappy customers and focus on reducing effort.Do not focus on satisfaction (or lack thereof) surveys that simply try and determine “how nice the CSR was?”, or “Did we serve you well? Please score from 1 to 5 how we performed”…  Find out what the effort score was!  Why was it hard for this customer?  Are their issues service or product related, or are they related to the effort (the hoops they need to jump through) to get something done.  Also, you can pro-actively look to find customers that are ‘struggling’.  A simple example is “If you see a customer on your web site, that has clicked on more than 5 pages, or has spent more than 90 seconds in a group of pages that are linked by theme (say, a knowledge base or FAQ) then reach out to them.  Offer a web-chat or a co-browse and help them.  It is obvious that they are looking for something and not finding it.  In retail environments, good sales reps can spot a customer that is not ‘just browsing’ from 200 yards away; and they time very carefully their initial approach to lend assistance.  Just because the web-site is a self-service channel it doesn’t mean it cannot be partially or wholly supported with agents or Customer Service Representatives.  There is evidence in the HBR original article that effective use of co-browse and web-chat from the contact centre reduced calls by 8%
5. Allow and enable your front office to reduce the customers effortStop valuing the Customer Service Representative Average Call Handling Time (ACHT)! (One example of many ways that metrics and performance management make the CSR do a BAD job!).  Do not value speed over quality.  Statistics and Analytics are key in driving operational awareness of what is happening in the contact centre; but should not be used as weapons to drive for efficiency, efficiency, efficiency.  Targetting and measuring performance of CSR’s in 10ths of seconds is great for a spreadsheet exercise; but challenging them, paying them, incenting them, pressuring them to achieve FIRST CALL RESOLUTION in the SHORTEST TIME is self-defeating.  What is a better productivity measure?  How many customers you are losing? Or how many calls you are dealing with in under 93 seconds?  HBR strongly suggests that the call centre REMOVE the productivity “Governors” that get in the way or contradict making your customers experience easier!  An unnamed Australian Telecommunications network was brave enough to remove ALL productivity metrics from its front-office performance scorecards.  Average Call Handling Time did increase, marginally, but repeat calls into the Call Centre reduced by 58%.  Today, that company evaluates its Customer Service Representatives on the basis of very short, and person to person interviews with the customer; asking them directly whether or not the service they received met their needs.   Some companies take this recommendation to high levels; for example, Nedbank in South Africa offered its clients an “AskOnce” promise; guaranteeing that the Customer Service Representative who picks up the phone will OWN that customers issue from start to finish.  I don’t know about you but I like the sound of that as a consumer! 

My personal summary is quite simple really.  Make it easy.  If things are easy to do then they will have a positive impact.  Also, instead of trying to thing about the ‘corporate or enterprise’ Customer Interaction Management strategy; think about yourself.  What do you like and dislike in your daily life about dealing with the companies that supply goods and services to you?  Learn from what you like, and don’t make the same mistakes by adopting the same strategies against the things you don’t like!  For me, looking at Customer Effort Score is a Game Changer, and as a strategy for Contact Centre and Customer Engagement measurement it will have a wide and very relevant adoption in keeping with Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Scoring (NPS).  I think CES, the Customer Effort Score is here to stay.  One thing for sure, Anana embraces the philosophy head-on and it forms a large element of all our contact centre solution engagements.  We like it; it makes sense, and we believe in it.  The really cool thing that resonates; is that the paradigm of CES is directly aligned with the capabilities and features of the Genesys Call Centre Solution.  We have put a lot of effort into exposing the reduction in CES by showing how Genesys can help achieve these aims in our Briefing Centre.  If you want to see it in action at any time then just let me know; we’d be delighted to show you how!

We had the pleasure of hosting a large scale demonstration and briefing of the Genesys 8 Customer Interaction Management Platform to approximately 35 delegates yesterday. A very hectic, busy, noisy and fun day indeed.  The briefing featured a full review of;

• Genesys Inbound Voice on SIP Server with IP endpoints
• Skills Group – Customer Care, Sales, Accounts & Billing and Customer Support CSR skill teams
• Genesys chat – live customer service Chat Interaction Management (Genesys Web Chat)
• Genesys Agent to Agent instant messaging (IM)
• Genesys Email Interaction

We had intended to demonstrate a range of contact centre scenario’s, but by the time we’d described how a call is placed into the call centre with all of the interactions between the SIP Server, Universal Routing Server (URS), Statistics Server (Stat Server) and the new Genesys Media Server (Stream Manager replacement) to do something simple like play an announcment which is time sensitive, e.g. Good Morning, Good Afternoon etc, we found the briefing taking its own direction; driven by active and engaged interaction with our client who immediately bombarded our team with hundreds of questions, immediately trying out what had just been learned and explored.

It was powerfully effectve to show and explore how Genesys CCPulse, Stat-Server, Infomart and Genesys Advisor alongside statistics and performance tools inherent to the Genesys Agent Desktop (GAD) and Interaction Workspace all worked together to provide a total and complete view of operational performance.  Especially impressive was making changes to routing, skills and queues (applications) in real-time and observing the impact immediately on how the call centre performed.

I think the client especially enjoyed seeing the ultimate change in the modern call centre.  They are, after all, typically associated with the engaged and deliberate management of inbound telephone calls and outbound telephone calls.  What is newer, is embracing any media or any inbound channel with the vehemence and rigour of telephones; but now applied to instant messaging, email, web-chat and voice, not as conversations, but as interactions!  It suddenly became clear to most why Genesys calls this the “Customer Interaction Management Platform” because it is all about managing Interactions; not just telephone conversations!

We also had a breakout discovering Alcatel-Lucent Unified Communications Suite, MyTeamwork and the brand new IC Phone!  Very cool stuff!

One of the largest considerations for our Anana Briefing Centre is modelling and replicating traffic scenario’s in actual call center environments. With 2000 Genesys agent positions, across all lines of multimedia, multichannel, eServices we have a complex modelling problem at hand. Remember, those channels are inbound voice, outbound voice, inbound email, outbound email, inbound SMS, outbound SMS, agent-to-agent chat, agent-to-supervisor chat, transfers of all channels, web chat, web co-browse, email…..the list seems endless.

How will Anana model actual traffic patterns and scenario’s for the operational call-centre?

We propose using 3 tools to model inbound traffic to the call centre;

1. Anana Agent Telephony Desktop (BOT)
2. SIP-P
3. Cyara Solutions

Cyara Solutions is teaming with Anana with a slight twist to the usual value proposition in testing and monitoring the Genesys Call Center Software Framework into one with us holistically targetted to SIMULATION of call center traffic. 

By linking the Cyara solution with the custom Bot and SIP-P test capabilities at Anana we are able to light up all 2000 agent positions with real-time, actual load, and representative traffic for a wide range of industry verticals.  Cyara is working closely with Anana to express the capability fully within the Anana Briefing Centre.  The Genesys Framework and Customer Interaction Management Platform is SIP Server based, and we’re running 1996 seats as ‘simulated’ Genesys agent positions, and the remaining 4 positions are physical positions in the call centre suite.  Paul Pearson, our Platform Practice Lead is busy creating models of traffic and interactions across all channels and media, and exporting configurations for each; so that Anana can reset the call centre back to a default operational state; and then quickly reset again to, say, the operational needs of an airline call centre, a banking call centre, a retail sales call centre, a Government Call Centre or any other required situation.

Traffic and Load Testing

We are commonly requested to conduct large scale / operational load and peformance tests of the Genesys solution. We conducted one recently using a combination of the Anana Bot’s and SIP-P scripting, taking one of the largest Genesys installations in the UK from its baseline required 6 CAPS (Call Attempts per Second) to over 20!  Load testing of planned configurations will be an important compenent in the Briefing Centres’ tasking; I can see that happening already!

Self and Assisted Service Modelling

We’ll be modelling transactions on the common inbound channels in both self-service and assisted service scenario’s. For example, an inbound call to the call center will be simulated by our tools on the Genesys Voice Platform (GVP) using our modelling tools, to interact in real time with the self-service dialogue, then returning that call instance to the Genesys Routing Engine (URS) to select an agent based on location, skill and availability. There’s a good chance that the call is forwarded to an agent in the dummy-pool, but even there, the call will be simulated in the interaction with assisted-service, by modelling key-strokes, inputs, screen-pop, CTI, interactions and delays associated with all the facets of call presentation to the agent; and his or her subsequent interactions with the caller. We’ll even model post call wrap-up, and other administrative tasks that stop that customer service representative becoming ready again in the pool of targets for the next call.

As you can see, all this traffic will build real-time as well as historic reports; allowing Anana to help its clients understand actual “What if?” scenario’s in managing and testing operational changes in real time. For example;

1. What happens to my service levels if I add web chat to a pool of agents handling inbound voice?
2. If I increase the amount of traffic going to self-service what is the impact on my workforce management strategy?
3. If I change my business rules for when should my routing strategy push calls to my outsourcer what is the impact on my own call centers performance?
4. What is the impact on my customer service representatives of adding co-browse, web chat and email to inbound and outbound voice?
5. I’d like to test without pressure what my customer service representatives think about migrating from Genesys Agent Desktop to the new Genesys Interaction Workspace
6. We are adding new “applications” (In Genesys terms these are queues) to my contact centre. How do I add these new application to Genesys Advisor and set the appropriate Key Performance Indicators? (KPI’s)
7. We are thinking about adding Conversation Manager (UCS – Universal Contact Server) so we can offer the intelligent Customer Front Door (iCFD) to GVP applications; and share the Conversation Manager capability with the Web Server so that a failed transaction in self-service on the Web Site can be offered from the point it was left at on the IVR when the caller next phones in. How is that done?
8. I’m thinking of using Network SIP Server as well as SIP server alongside my Alcatel-Lucent OmniPCX Enterprise edition? Can I test the high availability and fail-over scenario’s? How can I ensure calls will always make it to my agents?
9. I would like to run my call center on SIP server only without an ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) or PBX (Private Branch Exchange). I want to see what happens when a SIP server failure occurs? What is the customer experience and impact of a failure of one of the SIP Servers under full call center loading?

This could be a very extensive list of scenario’s!  Our new Briefing Centre is getting its first large scale use this coming Wednesday and we’ve been rallying like ants to get the final bits ready.

If you have a particular call center scenario that you are interested in testing or modelling then please don’t hesitate to give us a call. We’d be delighted to help you explore the capabilities.