Opportunity #2 – Breakdown the organizational silos that have found their way into your call routing strategy.

Once everyone is educated on the dynamic nature and the realities of the contact center, you’ll want to revisit your approach to providing customer support. Companies often get stuck in silos (products, divisions, activities, reporting relationships, etc.), and this is transferred into the contact center and the way customers are handled.

Begin by asking yourself a few questions: 

1)    Do you force customers to wait in specific silos for service when often times there are people available in other silos who can help?  

2)    Do you have an organization with multiple call centers that don’t all report to the same leader?

3)    Can your customers receive a different level of service depending on the reason (service, sales, technical, etc) or segment (business, consumer, partner, etc) of the call?

4)    Does your center dedicate more time and effort to making real-time adjustments than they dedicate to their forecasting activities?

5)    Do you spend more time coordinating internal changes to shared systems than you do implementing the change?

6)    Is there one executive that truly owns the entire customer experience…both on and off the organizational chart?

Companies that begin to look at their call routing strategy from a customer-centric vs. company-centric perspective normally find several holes in the way the customer is treated, differences in the way results are interpreted and gaps in who is really accountable.  This confusion helps adds fuel to the ever-present internal finger-pointing exercise that results in more internal initiatives to help reinforce the customer-centric strategy.   Unfortunately, these initiatives often end up addressing internal reporting, communication and organization chart issues, while the customer is still receiving the same “luck of the draw” experience.  Regardless of how your organization tackles these issues, you should start with the following approach – give every customer the same chance to get the same level of service, regardless of when or why they contact you. Ultimately you are one to them, and every contact is an opportunity to    overwhelm them with delight.

 

Impact:  If done correctly, you’ll immediately gain capacity to handle more calls with the same number of agents and dramatically reduce your queue times.  Don’t confuse this with moving skills or giving authority for other departments to have access to agents – both are signs of a flawed planning process.   This is a real-time balancing of customer needs with company service capability – and if you do it right, it doesn’t require any real-time changes.

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