Best Practices

What differentiates truly great organizations – and by extension, truly great call centers – from those that are just “okay”? How can an organization create tangible advantages that make the whole greater than the sum of the parts? How do you adapt and thrive in a fast-evolving networked economy? While there are many possible answers to these questions, an effective strategy clearly plays a key role.

Unfortunately, mention strategy, and many managers justifiably conjure up images of an overused business buzzword, the latest management trends or the last conference session they sat through with too much fluff and not enough substance. All the while, many organizations struggle to create viable, sustainable strategies. Many are currently working on their approach to customer relationship management or on redefining core businesses. Some are focusing on individual components of strategy, such as organization, resources or processes. And others are taking stock of what comes after mergers, industry restructurings or shifting budgets and priorities.

Developing effective strategy is not only possible, it’s a pervasive characteristic of organizations that create sustainable customer loyalty and marketplace value. Still, many organizations are grappling with fast-changing markets and technologies, and struggle to leverage the “pieces and parts” into a sustainable business advantage. Somewhere between strategy and tactics, the vision too often gets lost – or at least diluted -- in operational realities. That seems to be especially true in developing cohesive, customer contact solutions.

What’s needed is a mechanism for extending corporate strategy into tangible, realistic applications. In the call center realm, strategy is embodied in what is often termed a “customer access strategy,” which is a framework – a set of standards, guidelines and processes – defining the means by which customers are connected with resources capable of delivering the desired information and services. The customer access strategy is an extension of corporate strategy and often, in turn, also helps to shape corporate strategy. When approached with the right commitment and buy-in, a customer access strategy is a powerful tool for unleashing the potential of the call center.

The need for a cohesive customer access strategy is clear. Multiple access methods are evolving. As services evolve, they become far more complicated from both the customer’s and organization’s perspectives, and as multiple technology “owners” exist, telling customers the same story is an important concern. Caller tolerance is evolving rapidly, and customers are growing increasingly savvier and well informed. And being “easy to do business with” is of paramount importance.

Developing a customer access strategy has broader implications than may first meet the eye. By nature, it positions the call center as the communications hub of the organization, and customer loyalty as the primary objective. It is an effort that will touch virtually every business unit, so it must be supported by top-level management. In fact, top management must be actively involved, along with any organization accessible to customers, all technology and process owners responsible for customer services and customers (ask them how they want to be served!).

A Customer Access Strategy Addresses These Business Processes:

Customer profiles

Customer communication

Contact types

Access channels

Routing and distribution

Service level objectives

Required resources

Organization and processes

Capturing customer date

Technology architecture

Investment guidelines

Framework for deploying new services

As with corporate strategy, a customer access strategy can take many different forms. And, as with corporate strategy, there is a lot of confusing and conflicting advice on how to best approach the process of developing a customer access strategy and the form it should take. But the most sustainable strategies cover, in one form or another, 12 key business processes:

Developing customer profiles is, by necessity, a first step. Who are your customers and prospective customers; what do they want and need; and how can you best service those needs? While a strategy document generally doesn’t go into individual detail, it should define specific customer types and their evolving expectations.

Customer communications broadly describes how the organization plans to communicate with customers and establishes guidelines for developing those messages and ensuring that the organization is in sync (e.g., that the call center is properly informed of marketing campaigns).

Defining contact types anticipates the types of interactions with customers. General categories include such things as placing orders, changing orders, checking account status, problem resolution, etc., but most organizations wisely break these categories into more detail.

Identifying access channels is where strategy really begins to hit home for call centers. All channels of contact should be itemized: telephone, Web, fax, e-mail, IVR, kiosk, handhelds, face-to-face service, postal mail and anything else that comes along, plus corresponding telephone numbers, Web URLs, email addresses, fax numbers, postal addresses, etc.

Routing and distribution plans naturally follow. How – by customer, type of contact and access channel – is each contact going to be routed and distributed? (While these terms have inbound connotations this also applies to outbound; e.g., when the organization originates the contacts, through which agent group or system will the contact be made?).

Next, service level objectives, which in application includes both service level and response time objectives, are agreed to and specified.

Defining required resources takes strategy from the realm of “getting the customer’s contact to the right place at the right time” into the realm of “doing the right thing.” What resources, including people, technologies and databases, are required to provide callers with the information and assistance they need? This aspect of strategy will help guide hiring, training, technology deployment, database development and many other operational considerations.

Outlining the organization and processes necessary to support customer access requirements runs the gamut, from specifying how many call centers you will have to defining agent groups, responsibilities and planning requirements.

Capturing customer data identifies the methods used for capturing information on each customer interaction, and defining how that data will, in turn, be used to strengthen customer profiles, identify trends and improve products and services.

Finally, the strategy document should establish agreed-upon technology architecture, (corporate standards and technology migration plans), investment guidelines (priorities and plans for operational and capital expenditures) and a framework for deploying new services (timeframes and approaches for expanding customer contact services).

Clearly, developing a sound customer access strategy is not something you throw together during a weekend retreat. It takes leadership, persistence, participation from across the organization, and a lot of collaboration and cooperation.

Each of the 12 processes addressed by the customer access strategy are interrelated, and when you focus on one, you will inherently be impacting and shaping others. And it’s not something that happens in a vacuum; call center strategy cannot develop independent of broader corporate strategy.

But the payoffs of developing a cohesive strategy are compelling. From a customer’s perspective, a good strategy will result in simplified access, consistent services, ease of use and a high degree of convenience and satisfaction. From the organization’s perspective, the benefits translate into lower overall costs, increased capacity, higher customer retention and a workable framework that guides ongoing developments.