A few months back I was talking to a communications company and we got on the topic of support, specifically technical support of their customers. He had told me that he had recently fielded a call from the COO of the company who had promptly told him that they needed to find a way to divert some of their strategic planning dollars from revenue generation activities to anything that could help control costs. The executive team had been noticing a slow but steady increase to the overall costs to service their customers and while the COO was at an industry event, he was getting feedback that other execs were seeing the same things. The COO wanted to get out in front of this trend and wanted to do it fast.
This was just the first call that I got that lead to many conversations over the last 9 months where I learned from a number of other Customer Service execs that they too are being asked to find ways to slow the growth in costs in the tech support groups.
When I started to dig into these concerns with these folks, what we started to see was a pretty clear pattern for why costs were starting to increase more consistently than in the past. First, the complexity of the services and devices that companies are supporting for customers has increased 10 times in just the last two years. In particular, wireless companies are seeing an explosion in Smart Devices, in large part due to their own marketing and sales efforts, that are pushing customers into a world in which it is not just about voice calls anymore. In reality, companies are supporting small computers in peoples pockets and with that increase in complexity, a natural increase in calls will come to handle issues.
The second major reason why the costs are on the steady increase is that most major communications companies customer service groups are averaging around 70% turnover in their agent populations per year. This means that a majority of the people that are being hired in a year will not last a year. Couple this relative lack of experience with the more complex nature of calls that are coming in and you can start to see the train wreck awaiting. The result is one of two things, either you continue to send the complex calls to new or mid tier agents and the likelihood of First Call Resolution goes down or you end up employing more and more experienced agents that cost you more to hold on to and employ. Either way, the overall costs to serve the customer will be impacted in a negative way for the business.
What I am hearing more and more is that companies are looking for solutions by first figuring out the correct process for handling the more complex calls and then using software to "Institutionalize" the knowledge in the form of process flows. As I have started to dig into this more with leaders, what I have found is that there are two lessons learned that they have come away with consistently when attacking the problem in this way.
1. The software that you choose to enable the agents needs to be extraordinarily flexible for managers or business analysts to make changes on the fly to the flows. If Network Ops makes a change that will impact how the Whole Home DVR will be troubleshot, then the team in Call Center Ops needs to make sure that they can make the change to their software tool and push out immediately to their agents.
2. Leaders have to think about using flows and software that is truly dynamic in order to get the best adoption from your agents groups. It is not enough to offer an agent a step by step, linear process for getting a resolution to a problem. First of all, customers never take you through a step by step call so expecting an agent to use software that does this is flawed thinking. Second, as an agent gets more experienced over the course of time, they will be less likely to depend on the process flows to resolve issues which could negatively impact the business. So the solution is to find a software tool that will allow for a dynamic and free flow movement through issue resolution. The interface to the agents and the back end logic should be dynamic enough that and agent can move from step one to step seven without impacting the quality of the call, the process or the business's best interests.
To recap, What I Am Hearing Part 2 really is about service providers that are finding ways to reduce costs to serve in their ever more complex world. They are identifying the most frequent complex calls, mapping the best processes, employing dynamic software to empower agents and ensuring that the knowledge of the many is "Institutionalized"to minimize the impact of high attrition rates.
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