How to Cut Costs and Improve Quality

In a recent survey on customer service carried out by the CCA Research Institute, respondents said their greatest challenges were improving quality and reducing cost to serve.

 

 

You don’t have to be Einstein to work out that those two goals appear to be contradictory. But are they? Is it possible that customers’ changing expectations actually align with both goals?

The same survey also asked: How do you think your business model will adapt to meet changing customer demands? Here are the top responses:

• Increased use of self-service and automation.
• More skilled, knowledgeable workers.
• Clear, single view of the customer.

 

 

Could these be the answers we need? Let’s dig in and see.

 

What do we mean by quality?

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According to a 2013 IPSOS Mori poll, customers’ most important concerns were:

• The person who answers the phone handles the whole of my call.
• They treat me as a valued customer.
• They answer the phone quickly.
• They are familiar with my previous dealings with them.

 

 

What do we mean by reducing cost to serve?

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The major cost of providing customer service is still human resources. We can therefore look at reducing:

• Total (FTE) staff numbers.
• Average agent training time.
• Average Handling Time (AHT).
• Call volumes.

 

A trend in customer behaviour we can leverage

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The move of simple “commodity type” transactions to self-service is that rarest of things; a confluence of both business and consumer preferences. Could it be the key to solving our conundrum?

On the downside it suggests that the transactions the voice channel needs to resolve are going to be more complex, or more emotional in nature.  Quite naturally they take longer – but do they have to?

 

Meeting quality and cost objectives

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We can see that if we reduce AHT we also improve quality, because customers want their queries handled quickly without being passed around.

But reducing AHT does not go far enough. What we’re actually interested in is reducing Total Traffic Time (TTT) – which means reducing AHT and call volumes. As long as this is done in the right way it can actually align with customer expectations, enabling us to meet our quality and cost-cutting goals!

The tools you need to do it are the three identified in the CCA’s survey, plus one more:

• Skilled and knowledgeable agents allow you to meet three of the quality objectives: agents can handle a wider range of queries, which means you improve First Call Resolution (FCR); the agent is more likely to treat the customer better; and the phone is likely to get answered quicker because you haven’t split your agents into call groups.
• The more customer issues you can handle with your website, the fewer routine calls you need to answer – and as we will also see, the use of Knowledge for self-service and in the contact centre mutually reinforce one another.
• To improve FCR and shorten calls it is vital that your agents can view the whole customer journey, including transactions.
• Finally, you need to perform root cause analysis using Management Information (MI) to discover where your service issues are, then fix them or move them to self-service to strip out huge volumes of calls.

Surely this has the knock-on effect of increasing some costs? For example won’t agents take longer to train? Won’t expensive new IT investments be needed? Not if you provide your agents with the right tools!

 

1. Make all your agents skilled and knowledgeable

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Much of the work an agent performs involves following processes, which may require the use of several IT systems. Simplifying this and providing guidance by using workflows allows all agents to perform to the same level as your best ones, even with vastly reduced training.

In the Infinity Desktop – which integrates with your telephony and back-office systems – workflows prompt agents through calls and also pull together in one simple User Interface everything an agent needs, such as customer information and data entry fields from multiple back-end systems. The results are:

• The customer’s query is resolved faster because the agent doesn’t need to remember processes, or open and interact with multiple applications.
• The customer feels better treated (remember their number two concern?) because the agent is able to focus more on their soft skills, like listening and building rapport.
• It makes it far easier for agents to handle multiple call types, so there is less need to transfer customers between departments.

In addition, the Infinity Desktop uses the Transversal Prescience™ Knowledge Base, which becomes context-sensitive when embedded in a workflow. So when an agent needs to know something – say the details of an insurance policy – the workflow can ensure the appropriate knowledge article is already on screen, or only a click or a keyword search away. This dramatically cuts down the 20% to 80% of an average call agents spend searching for information.

 

Workflow, Knowledge and Apps on one-screen

 

2. Let customers self-serve

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The Transversal Prescience™ platform is also a fully-fledged web self-service solution. Integrating it with your website has been shown to reduce call volumes by as much as 20%.

The true power of the system becomes apparent when you use it in your contact centre as well. Agents and customers access essentially the same Knowledge content, which ensures consistency. In addition both are able to rate content and suggest additions, which keeps information up-to-date, enriches it and guards against knowledge loss from agent turnover.

Self-service using IVR and speech recognition can help automate up to 90% of voice interactions, and deliver cost savings of hundreds of thousands per year. The storm platform provided by Infinity CCS is capable of handling huge volumes of calls to shield the contact centre from repetitive, routine or emergency-related enquiries. Several of the ‘big six’ energy companies use storm’s IVR and SMS facilities in this way to automate requests for information about power outages.

When integrated with your Knowledge Base, storm is able to use speech recognition to allow customers to naturally search for information. And when integrated with your back office systems it can even process complex orders with no need for human intervention. One large retailer, for example, was able to automate 90% of its order enquiries.

 

3. Pull data from different silos and systems into one view

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A problem for over 50% of contact centres is that customer information is kept in different data silos or on different systems, which can make it impossible or time consuming (opening multiple applications) for agents to deal with different types of queries. Calls can also be unnecessarily lengthened when customers have to repeat information the company already knows.

 

 

The Infinity Desktop can be integrated with back-end systems such as your customer database, billing system, ERP and CRM system. Whatever information you want to display from those systems can be presented to agents in a simple workflow. And vice-versa, the agent can write to those systems.

 

4. Use MI to cut down calls

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As agents are only interacting with one application – the Infinity Desktop – you can have a single view of performance broken down by outcome codes and whatever information is collected during calls and wrap. Prescience™ also gives you a clear overview of customer interactions via self-service. While obviously useful from a QA perspective, it also allows you to easily spot issues that repeatedly crop up so that you can correct them or move them to self-service.

 

Result: cost and quality goals met

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What seemed like contradictory problems actually have the same solutions. The key is to reduce Total Traffic Time (TTT) in a way that aligns with customers’ changing demands. Applications such as the Infinity Desktop and the Transversal Prescience™ Knowledge platform enable you to use your existing IT infrastructure to do this cost-effectively.