Dig deep: it’s more than just cutting costs

Outsourcers, with skills gained from multiple clients, should be ideally placed to help you deliver real improvements, says Simon Foot, of Verint Consulting.  But make sure they pay attention to your longer-term objectives

EARLIER in my career when I was managing a flagship customer contact outsourcing project for a large company, it gradually dawned on me that both parties had conflicting commercial agendas.

We were convinced we were working with a partner that would focus on driving innovation and helping us to do things differently.  However, our supplier seemed set on just stripping cost out of the underlying customer service processes and was far less interested in our transformation agenda.
I suspect that I wasn’t the first outsourcing customer to feel this way, and probably won’t be the last.  As a client, I always wanted my outsourcer to demonstrate and deliver innovative solutions; whereas outsourcers are inevitably focused on cutting costs and accelerating their time to payback.

But does it always have to be this way?

Outsourcing projects often go wrong because there’s too much focus on the day-to-day operational concerns and less focus on a business’ longer-term outsourcing objectives.  Clearly, it makes sense to focus on what Ventana Research refers to as operational insight – understanding and improving operational performance, ensuring that voice and data systems are performing to their agreed SLAs, and matching the right call centre agent profiles to expected inbound and outbound call patterns.

There is a range of established processes and excellent tools that can help here, and it’s incumbent on outsourcers to manage the operational element as effectively as possible so that both sides can benefit from efficiencies.

Nothing can reveal more about the day-to-day reality of your business than the voice of your customers

While the bottom line is always going to be important for both, the reality is that basic customer contact housekeeping is never really going to deliver the kind of overall levels of performance improvements that can secure a contract renewal – and keep their customer happy.  So what’s an outsourcer to do?

Once the outsourced contact centre operation is running efficiently -- handling the right number of calls, delivering the desired average call handling time and achieving optimum agent occupancy -- the next focus should be on how well agents are actually handling interactions.

Where outsourcers can really start to deliver value is in implementing approaches that actually start to impact the outcome of calls. With best practice expertise secured from multiple customer service engagements, outsourcers should be ideally placed to help you deliver real improvements in key areas such as first contact resolution, sales volumes and how to achieve the highest value and expected outcomes from a range of different interactions.
It also makes sense for outsourcers to concentrate on developing agent quality, not just through techniques such as quality monitoring but also by adopting a programme of training and coaching to ensure that optimum outcomes can be achieved right across the agent population.  With potentially hundreds of agents engaged on major outsourcing contracts, even percentage point improvements in performance can lead to significant bottom line benefits.
 

Looking beneath the surface Outsourcers can also play a key role in helping those they work for unlock some of the value that’s invariably hidden away.  Retrieving this customer intelligence can, however, prove complex.  That’s where the expertise of best practice outsourcers can prove invaluable, by integrating findings from operational reporting, agent feedback, customer surveys, comments on social networks and the latest analytics techniques.

Nothing can reveal more about the day-to-day reality of your business than the voice of your customers.  Historically, this valuable content has been effectively locked away with the sheer volume of recordings, or a lack of technology which makes them impractical to review and analyse.
Many outsourcers, however, are developing expertise in the latest desktop and speech analytics capabilities.  They can uncover answers (or the information that can lead to those answers) to the questions that could be keeping you awake at night:

“What are my customers most concerned about?”

“Which of our processes are broken?”

“What are our next competitive threats/opportunities?”

Of course, it’s not practical for outsourcers to play back tens of thousands of recordings to understand why customers are calling, and to identify just what are the specific agent behaviours that lead to desired business outcomes. That’s where technologies such as speech analytics can play such a pivotal role in helping to separate intelligence from call content. It can also prove a significant differentiator for an outsourcing partner – effectively giving them the inside track on their customer’s real time business issues and opening up the opportunity to work together to identify and deliver solutions.

Pinpointing trends and opportunities  Speech analytics, particularly, can help pinpoint trends and opportunities, identify strengths and weaknesses in core business processes and product offerings and provide a much clearer understanding of just how your offerings are perceived.

By identifying broken processes or ones that need strengthening, and ‘surfacing’ a range of insights that could help their client secure significant benefits for customers, outsourcers can move to distinguish themselves from competitors who are only able to focus on traditional process improvements – and who can only offer incremental savings.

Identifying sustainable performance improvements In highly competitive markets such as telecommunications speech analytics can play a key role in helping outsourcers to identify the root causes repeat calls.
Speech analytics can also provide outsourcers with a powerful real time analytics tool for testing customer service strategies and validating changes to policies and processes.  Because the latest solutions can now categorise calls based on exactly how customers express themselves, they can go beyond merely locating keywords and phrases to automatically reveal critical phrases that wouldn’t otherwise have been spotted. Today’s best practice solutions can also extract the correct customer intent from calls and, through categorisation, help turn previously unstructured data into more actionable intelligence.
This can give outsourcers a real competitive advantage, especially in fast-moving market such as telecoms, utilities and retail, where even the most subtle changes in customer conversations can provide an indicator of upcoming shifts in consumer demand.  Imagine, as a marketer, having access to details of the precise issues that customers are having with a recent promotional offer.  Identifying problems early helps marketers to make fixes and adjustments during a campaign, rather than waiting until its conclusion, long after any potential benefits could be realised.  If you’re getting that kind of insight from your outsourcing partner, then they quickly move from being a commodity service provider to become an essential part of an organisation’s customer service leadership team.

PROFILE

Simon Foot joined Verint Consulting as head of performance optimisation after six years at the BBC where he was responsible for the overall customer experience of some 60m TV licensing customers. He is now Verint Consulting’s director of consulting and training. Simon.foot@verint.com