Driving Exceptional Call Center Experiences

Welcome to another Prime TSR podcast. I have two very special guests that I'm hosting today. Tim Stone, a Principal at Prime TSR, and Chris Jonsson, a Solution Architect at Prime TSR. And today, we're talking about customer experiences for contact centers. So welcome to the podcast. Thank you for joining us. I want to start with a question for both of you. Regarding customer experiences, what are the steps to optimize a call center for a great customer experience? At a high level, what steps would you take to ensure that you're building a great customer experience for a contact center?

I would start with what the business wants; what kind of experience does the company want to provide with its customers? And then begin layering the technology to achieve those steps. If you approach it from the technology side, you tend to say, well, we have this feature. We can have this call tree; we can do this. Great, and this is great, wonderful, but that doesn't necessarily provide the interaction that the business wants for its customers. We had a previous client in the hospice industry, and they always wanted a live person feature. They were in a bad spot in their life and always wanted a live operator. So, we had to build the system so that if someone didn't pick up the call quickly, it went to a third party; they're able to pick it up and then relay the message back. To most people, that's inefficient. That means people are taking a message, whatever. Still, it gives them the live person context, someone answering the phone to be sympathetic to you. You have to start with that business, the experience you want, and layer the technology after that.

That's great, and Chris, any thoughts on that?

Yeah. I can clearly agree with Tim on that. Don't solution before you gather the requirements is really the guidance there, and meeting with the business and ensuring that you're meeting business goals is critical. But then that's path one. The secondary path would be looking at it from the customer experience in terms of the caller flow. The experiences they will go through. You've got this merger, if you will, of business goals and that customer experience, and looking at it from both vantage points.

This probably should have been my first question, but when it comes to good customer experience for a contact center, are there any examples that come to mind? And it could be a recent experience that you had with a contact center that just made it a great experience.

I think the funny thing is that when most people think of contact centers or call centers, everyone remembers the bad experiences where you're just screaming at the operator, operator at the phone, or you're like, "Pay my bill" or whatever voice prompt you're trying to interact with. The good ones are always the fastest to answer, and that the person who answers the phone can solve my problem because the only thing you hate is being transferred. So, getting back to those requirements, are you routing correctly based on skills? Is the person answering the phone helping with what the business wants? But I'm willing to wait if the person that picks up the phone can solve my problem, and pleasant music along the way always helps too.

Something soothing, yes.

What's funny is that someone told me, "If you have long wait times", he said, "The trick to getting through for some of these bigger companies is to choose the 'I speak Spanish option', because it gets routed to a Spanish operator who is most likely bilingual". So, if you're ever stuck on a line, that might be the best approach. But I do like that point, which is the reality that gives me the person who knows the answer and gives me that person through the quickest route.

That definitely is the biggest piece. Skill-based routing is critical in setting up your cues, but that also affects the customer experience in terms of the caller coming in. But you also have to think about the people who are on the other end of that, managing those call queues and distributing the workload. Suppose they have a good gauge on how busy a queue is. In that case, they're more dynamically able to divert the workflow to get quicker resolutions. But skill-based routing is really important. You don't want to get somebody whose job it is to reset passwords, fielding a call that's outside of their wheelhouse. Because then you have transfers, which may be inevitable to some extent depending on the issue, but to the best of your ability, you have to categorize and get the proper resource, the best success you're going to have.

I like that. We've covered what makes a great customer experience for a contact center. Talking about the technologies and features, more like modern technologies and features that are available to maximize these patient experiences, what can someone use or their company use to help facilitate these experiences that maybe weren't available five or ten years ago?

I always like to chat when I interact because then I can continue with other manned or conference calls that I have going on. Email, I think, is probably the oldest. Well, I suppose the call is the oldest, but email is the one we've all dealt with and disliked perhaps the most because you get some of the generic answers. But then you've got chat; you've got AI-powered robotic answers, you've got calls, you've got AI-driven voice responses in interactions, and you can do a video — all driven again, on the business requirement. What kind of experience does the business want to do, and how many channels do they want to explore? You can do chat built into the app; you can do chat built into Facebook; you can do chat on your phone. You can do it all of the different ways. How does the business want to absorb that? I think the bigger problem is the people behind the scenes. If you're going to do chat, how are you going to design your agents so that they can maximize their effectiveness? I've gone to several call centers, and I've talked people out of workflows where, well, I'm going to be a phone operator, and I'll chat on the side, and now, you're trying to force your contact center, just like… It doesn't go well. Work with one or the other. So, building the experience you want, there's all the technology in the world these days.

I think that as you build in a feature set and ask and complicate your delivery, as it related to what you're trying to deliver on queue management and attention and focus of the pool of resources that you have responding to your different mechanisms is important. AI is nice because that's all machine-based, and you can program your way around it. But at the end of the day, where you need that user interaction, you really have got to be conscious of how that flows into your cues. Those who are live bodies answering phones need to have that credit, if you will, for also taking chat requests. Again, you also want to ensure that you've got people's focus and attention. They're not multitasking trying to manage multiple things. So really, how you deliver that all in terms of what you offer, how you streamline it in terms of a single pane of glass interfacing with the agents is important for the successful delivery, end to end.

I like that. A question I have, it seems like, especially with the cloud and some other ways to make this technology better; it doesn't seem like technology is an issue now when creating these contact centers. It looks almost the exact opposite: there's a lot of technology available to make many of these smaller things happen. So, if you're a company considering a contact center, it's 2020, what are the technical considerations you have when creating a new contact center or transferring from an older system to something? What technology considerations are in play when either choosing or configuring a contact center?

Well, I think with the pandemic, I think it shuffled everybody's cards. Most people weren't planning for their contact center employees to be working from home. They based all of their fancy call centers around being in an office, sitting in your cube, putting your headset on, and doing your work, and they quickly had to refocus, can people work remotely? Is their environment at home working for them? How am I going to pass the baton to them? It really comes down to how people are going to perform their work. You're right; technology is not a limitation. It's how are your people going to work? And the move, the pandemic changed everything for call center employees.

I would say support and supportability are leading that piece in terms of handling that. You've got all kinds of different available technologies. You are out there, but are you taking on the support individually at the end of the day? Are you relying on somebody else? What's that experience should your caller need help? And that funnels into interoperability in terms of how many different things are you bringing into this ecosystem? And what complexity are you introducing based on these choices? Again, technology is available all around us, but getting everything streamlined and working together is really where the magic happens.

It seems like it's cloud-based; you can create a contact center in five minutes. A lot of it is process-driven. It looks like the reasons to go fully custom for a contact center are basically zero unless I'm reading this wrong.

It depends on what you're trying to do.

And rarely do people start with a blank piece of paper. They've got a phone system; they're trying to add chat to it, and then back to the pandemic thing. You send everybody home. You've got an existing on-prem system; what can we migrate? Will something new stand in AWS quickly? We already have our workflows; we already have our business engine. We know that our call tree has X branches and that it fits in the model. Well, let's do that and deploy it quickly and bridge the ... however, there's a problem. I can also see it in a DR situation or rapid expansion, or any major business shift that you couldn't adapt to on-prem. But most people over-complicate call centers until you get to the big retailer type of call centers. You don't need it to be that complex. You don't need to over fancify. Such a solution like AWS Connect is great because you can stamp it out and quickly get your people connected and move on from there to solve your other business problems.

I love that, and the follow-up question is that many things can happen behind the scenes of a contact center. All a customer sees is obviously the agent they're chatting with or talking to. Still, many things can happen behind the scenes. Some of these technology integrations empower the agent to give you the right information. Tell me more about, I guess, the backend or integrations you can have with some of these contact centers that would be useful for companies starting their customer contact center journey.

You want to be able to pull as much information and make the contact center people efficient. So, if you're tapping into your sales-related system, your CRM-related system, if they have like to Chris's earlier point with password resets, if they need a bucket where they can go to and run these scripts, to have those integrated. A person calls in on a specific cell phone number. They're able to look at the screen and validate the user either from the cell phone or from a simple question, push a button, and have it happen. The more things that are at the contact center's person's fingertips, the better. Anything that they don't have to go and log in separately to or go to another screen to look something up makes it easier. And some of that can come down to their workstations. Two monitors, a nice headset, a good… where you can make them more efficient, and thinking that their interaction can be beneficial as you're building out.

Any thoughts on that, Chris?

Yeah. I think to help streamline, the more you know, the better you can resolve issues as quickly as possible. Suppose you had somebody's cell phone number, and you were able to identify that patient, so you know who the individual is when you're answering that call in a healthcare scenario. That also helps to provide some of that customer experience value add, which is nice. And people feel like, well, at least this person is genuinely trying to help me. Or suppose you're trying to plug into a ticketing system, having information pre-populated, so it's less for the agent to type. In that case, they can capture the notes and things, and with that nature, which just helps the overall reporting from performance metrics.

Is there anything else that I didn't cover that you think is worth talking about?

I think there are some conversations. Maybe we'd love some questions on the reporting side of things because managing a….

Ah, great.

... call center is also an important thing. When you're managing a contact center, you can get lost in the reporting details. Oh, so-and-so did this, oh, this person did that. But the flip side is resolution time; who spends the most time on the call, who spends the most time on a wrap-up. Those are also important qualities to trend over time. I never like to design those types of systems where you're doing it for curative reasons, but more for education. How do I improve my system, so more information is at my call center people's fingertips to provide better things? And again, building those prompts so that you know what to look for and how to look for and how to train them so that your call center managers know how to use the technology effectively.

I like that because it's almost based on your first answer; how you design the system will inform how you report on the system. Because how you report is basically, they should tie back to how you designed it.

Right.

If you configure it so that there's the most skilled person answering the phone call properly because of our skill-based routing, then that's what we should be reporting on. So, I like that.

And the integrity of the data too. The more information you collect, the more robust and advanced your features can become for revision. Just because you make it for version one doesn't mean that it's static, and you set it and forget it. It's an evolving ecosystem that needs care and feeding and coming up with that life-cycle capability and what that would look like for continuing iterations of progress. How do we move this forward? We delivered a good result; we're happy with it. We want to move on to a live version two, and how do we improve upon that? What do we know to help us get there?

I think that's a really important point, is continuously evolving, because as you put it out to your customers, they will teach you things you didn't know.

Right.

You want to be able to adapt your business and workflows to that. Don't set it and forget it.

Well, the last question triggered something, and if you don't have a good answer to that, that's fine too. But are there any common mistakes that companies make when they're implementing a call center? Like things that they figured out too late, or they just set the project up wrong? Are there any common mistakes that they make?

Usually, I've seen that they don't spend enough time training the call center managers on the reporting capabilities, call barge, or monitoring the call center people to use the tools effectively. All of these systems have these tools. They don't seem to try to help these people with those. I've run into that a lot.

From start to finish, I would say probably on the QA side for what the customer is experiencing as they flow through the system, and at the same time, what the agents and what your support resources are experiencing, and how they work with the platform. So really looking at it from both sides to make sure you're delivering something good for everyone.

I like that because what you are basically saying is that how you design the system is important. How you report the system is probably as equally important because that's where the improvement happens, and if we set it up where we know there might be some mistakes upfront or some improvements, we use this reporting to make sure we make those improvements. And that's how we get better instead of just reporting on it and not taking action. So, there's a basis of how we're informing the actions that we need to take.

Really, there's going to be lessons learned, and being able to incorporate those lessons and come up with the next version is helpful for everyone, for your customers, for the agents involved, because at the end of the day, you need to deliver on your results.

Right.

So, you need to be able to step forward and get something over the line. But then you also have to understand, what's my life cycle? How will I improve upon this on the next round, and what's that cadence going to look like? What modularity capabilities do I have? Can I make incremental changes at various places in the platform that are not impactful? And how does that all come together?