Health Check for Customer Service Organizations

Sabio's Consultancy Practice has expanded its Sabio Insight performance analytics framework to help organizations benchmark their customer service and contact centre operations against the evolving demands of today's 'always on', multi-channel, social networked customers.

The Sabio Insight framework enables businesses to carry out an operational health check on their existing customer contact activities.

They can then see how they match up against current industry best practice.

Areas covered include: Contact Data Acquisition, Challenging Demand, Applying Automation, Measuring Accessibility and Resource Optimisation and Measuring Efficiency.

Stuart Dorman, Head of Consulting at Sabio, said:

"In addition to traditional demands such as increasing productivity and reducing costs, today's customer service teams have to consider customers on Facebook and Twitter, make sure their operations are fully-optimised for mobile access and delivery, and also that their customers receive a consistently high quality service regardless of the channel they're using. These additional pressures mean that it's increasingly important for organizations to ensure that their core contact centre operations are performing well from initial contact acquisition right through to ongoing analytics and measurement.

"Optimising contact centre performance will also free up resources to reach out to customers on social networks, and develop the Smartphone apps to support mobile access to core service processes," continued Stuart. "We've developed our Sabio Insight approach to provide organizations with a more meaningful assessment of their different customer contact activities. That's why we've looked in depth at how organizations gather their contact data, the work they're doing to challenge demand, and areas where automation can be applied. In addition, we also consider key factors such as how accessible contact operations are, how resources are managed, and how efficiently operations are running."

Sabio Insight provides a structured framework for continuous performance improvement, and the process is focused on giving organizations new insight into the accessibility of contact operations, their management of resources, and the overall efficiency of end-to-end customer service operations.

According to Stuart Dorman:

"Using our latest analytics framework templates we're finding that it's those organizations that work to improve their operations across multiple Insight sectors that end up with the most effective customer service operations.

"There's real value to be unlocked by concentrating on the links between the different Sabio Insight sectors, and working to optimise those processes that work across them. For example, it's great to optimise your resources and staffing to meet your expected demand levels, but if you're not challenging demand then this could be the wrong area to focus on. By fixing broken processes and automating where appropriate, you can effectively challenge demand before you start actively forecasting and scheduling. Sabio Insight is all about highlighting these kind of issues," he added.

"Similarly we're starting to see how smart mobile apps are connecting customers directly to services they need within organizations - that's going to have a significant longer-term impact on IVR processes and agent resourcing."

The six main sectors addressed by Sabio Insight are:

1) Contact Data Acquisition

What are your customers saying about your products and services? What data is required to help you change and how do you acquire it? The foundation of major change in any contact centre operation is to alter what you measure. Businesses need to migrate away from the traditional contact centre metrics - average summary data does not provide the insight required to move an operation forward

2) Challenge Demand

 Why are your customers contacting you? Can you offer them a better service by reducing their need to contact you? Understanding why people are contacting you is key to providing better service and managing your demand effectively

3) Apply Automation

Are your customers able to help themselves? Where does automation sit in your customer contact strategy? Successful automation must be easy to use and appropriate for the customer task. Well-designed automation provides your customers with choice and flexibility and frees up your staff to deal with those tasks that require the human touch!

4) Measure Accessibility

 How easy are you to do business with? A modern business needs to be easily accessible to its customers through a multitude of channels including phone, email, web chat, SMS and social media. Your customer thinks of your organization as a single entity. They expect to be able to communicate about the same issue across a number of different channels and they expect to receive a consistent service, regardless of which channel they chose

5) Resource Optimisation

 Are your resources deployed effectively? Are your employees given the training and support required to continually develop and to 'wow' your customers? Optimising your business takes a clear understanding of your contact demand and the human resources required to handle it. The most successful organizations are continuously developing their staff and optimising their resources to meet the ever increasing demand of customers

6) Operational Efficiency

Are you able to accurately route contacts to the correct people? Are your desktop applications helping your agents to be more productive and more customer centric? With the pressure to reduce costs and deliver a superior customer experience, your business needs to focus on driving interaction quality and efficiency. Measuring 'In Flight' performance is hard; continuously improving it is even harder.

Sabio Insight features an integrated series of benchmarking exercises to enable contact centre management to assess performance across their entire operation. Using innovative spider diagram techniques provides organizations with immediate visual awareness of their current contact centre performance.

This helps to establish the clear links between different operational functions, offering a structured framework for continuous performance improvement. Operators are then able to focus on the people, process and technology areas that will most benefit from attention during the next 12 months and beyond.  

About Sabio

Sabio is a specialist contact centre and unified communications systems integrator focused on delivering exceptional customer contact strategies and solutions based on best-of-breed technologies from leading organizations such as Avaya, Nuance and Verint. Info: www.sabio.co.uk.

 

 

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