THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MAGAZINE ISSUE 1 • 2015
Contact centres: the new face of enterprise business Also in this issue: ❯❯ The power of outsourcing ❯❯ Workplace wellness strategies for call centre employees
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Workplace wellness
Strategies for call centre employees By Veronica Marsden
W
orkplace wellness programs are sustainable interventions in the workplace that inform, involve and inspire your employees to adopt and maintain behaviours that reduce health risks, improve quality of life, enhance personal effectiveness, and benefit the organization’s bottom line. According to Statistics Canada and the World Health Organization (WHO) 70 to 75 percent of health care costs are due to modifiable risk factors including smoking, poor nutrition, obesity and physical inactivity. With employees spending over 50 percent of their waking hours at work, employers have a significant opportunity to positively impact overall health including employee physical, emotional and social wellbeing. Fostering a culture of health and wellness is seen as a key strategy for enhancing employee engagement. It makes business sense that healthy, happy employees take fewer sick days, have more energy and are more engaged at work. Whether you have 50 employees or 5,000 employees, wellness programs can have a long-term impact on driving a healthy workplace culture and business success. There are unique challenges associated with developing a wellness strategy for call centre employees. Barriers such as inflexible work schedules and the inability to step away from call desks make it difficult to engage this group in wellness activities. The following steps are important to consider in developing an effective wellness strategy for call centre employees. Engage the employees in establishing the focus and direction of the program. Ask them what they are interested in and how they would like to participate in a workplace wellness program. This will ensure that programs are aligned with their needs and work schedules while fostering a sense of employee ownership. Form a wellness committee including strong representation from the call centre team to plan the program and ensure it stays on track. These program ambassadors should be encouraged to continually look for ways to engage fellow employees. Assessing employee health risks is also an important building block for success. Many Canadians do not get regular check-ups. Biometric screening is a valuable tool for getting a pulse on the health of your employees thereby helping to set program strategies. Also ensure that wellness interventions target employee health and organizational cost pressures. For a call centre program to be effective it is important to bring wellness to the employees in “baby steps” by focusing on one small habit at a time. For example spend time walking around the call centre catching employees between calls and encouraging them to take a mini stretch break at their desk. Another approach is to promote a “Healthy Habit of the Month” initiative whereby employees are encouraged and supported to make small changes on a regular basis such as eating healthy snacks and drinking more water. Distribute “desk drop” wellness flyers for employees who may have missed your visit so they still benefit from the information provided. Install a wellness board in the call centre that features Issue 1 • 2015
a wellness tip of the week or month. One week for example the tip might feature the sugar content in sweetened beverages and healthy alternatives. Make sure that the tip is topical, brief and colourful to capture people’s attention. Highlight ways employees can “sneak” exercise into their daily routine. Organize lunch time group walks, promote use of stairs, encourage employees to stand during calls and provide on-site yoga classes. Many organizations also support fitness by providing subsidized fitness memberships or negotiating group rates at a local gym. The most effective subsidies are ones that are flexible and allow employees to claim a variety of expenses such as dance lessons, home fitness equipment and community exercise classes. Whether you have an on-site cafeteria service, a lunch room with fridge and microwave or vending machines, there are a number of ways to promote good eating habits at work. For example we know that healthy eating starts with a good breakfast. An inexpensive and fun way to support healthy breakfast habits is to have the wellness committee whip up breakfast smoothies for employees to sample before they take their first call. Frozen berries, natural yogurt, unsweetened fruit juice and a little protein powder will have employees “talking breakfast” for days to come. Replace the weekly donut tradition with Fresh Fruit Fridays or designate a regular Healthy Snack Day where employees have the opportunity to sample healthy snacking alternatives such as trail mix, dried fruits and “good for you” bars. Offer healthy snacks at your next company meeting and change the way you celebrate special events and milestones at work. Substitute cake with a fruit and veggie tray. Wellness challenges organized at strategic times throughout the year are effective in keeping employees on track with their health goals. A ‘Winning @ Losing’ weight loss challenge in the New Year or a Holiday Health Campaign in December are ways to keep your program top of mind. Award points each time an employee practices a
healthy behaviour and provide draw prizes for reaching preset goals. Pedometer challenges are a popular way to encourage walking. To keep employees engaged and on track throughout the challenge hold weekly random prize draws for participants who are regularly documenting their progress. There are various ways to promote work/life balance and relaxation at work. Consider designing unused space as a Quiet Room where employees can take a mini nap, practice their faith or meditate. Encourage your employees to set realistic wellness goals and celebrate each small win. Share their success stories by posting them on your intranet site and the call centre bulletin board. Feature healthy role models in the company cafeteria. By catching employees doing something “well”, everyone wins! To run your program cost effectively tap into resources that may be available free of charge from your external partners including benefit and EAP providers. Creating a healthy workplace culture is more than a menu of programs and services. It is about creating spaces, norms and traditions in your organization that revolve around health and overall wellbeing. It is not something you push on people and it doesn’t happen overnight. Wellness has become “the right thing to do”, like providing benefits, even though you can’t always put a dollar figure to the Return on Investment, by keeping wellness program initiatives simple but ever present you send the message that “the company cares about you.” Tri Fit is a well-established provider of workplace health and fitness solutions. Building on a proven “better health, better performance” business philosophy, we provide a broad range of services for forward-looking companies and organizations. Since 1978 we have teamed with clients to engage employees and improve productivity through enhanced personal and organizational health. Our goal is always to make a lasting and beneficial difference in their workplace culture. For more information visit www.trifit.com
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Contact centres: the new face of enterprise business
Do advances in technology spell doom for traditional agents?
Cover story
By Guillaume Seynhaeve
T
he eloquently named “cost center” is officially a thing of the past. In fact, with organizations squarely focusing all their attention on how to deliver an exceptional customer experience, contact centers are quickly becoming the new face of enterprise businesses. Technologically enhanced. Analytically intelligent. And in some cases, self-sufficient, today’s modern communication hubs have come a very long way from the age of the switchboard. But as advancements in technology continue to evolve to meet the increasing demands of today’s consumers, does it spell doom for the average contact center agent?
The trends By 2020, customer experience is expected to overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator with customers citing speed, first call resolution, transparency, and friendliness as crucial to any successful interaction. And while such trends would suggest an increasing reliance on contact center agents to deliver all-the-above, many consumers are in fact turning to self-service to satisfy their needs and requirements. In fact, sixty-seven percent of consumers prefer self-service over speaking to a live representative and an astounding eighty-five percent are expected to single-handedly manage the relationship with an enterprise without the need for human interaction by the end of the decade. In short, the modern consumer is increasingly becoming self-sufficient. But although such data would suggest the gradual disappearance of contact center agents, a deeper dive will quickly suggest it’s not a matter of extinction but rather evolution that is at hand. Consider the following: • 65% of self-service interactions currently escalate beyond the web to an agent. • 40% of customers will contact a call center after they fail to address their needs via self-service channels. • Despite the rapid growth of customer service tools, 79% of consumers would prefer to contact a customer service agent by phone. • Live assistance has the highest customer satisfaction rating.
Self-service’s Achilles Heel While self-service is more efficient, convenient, and economical for both businesses and the consumers they serve, it is incapable of offering the most important element to a successful customer experience – a relationship. And with seventy percent of the buying experience contingent on how a customer feels they are being treated, the merits of maintaining a live Issue 1 • 2015
contact center workforce become quickly evident. In fact, while selfservice would appear to be well poised to overtake the role of the traditional contact center agent, the reality remains it lacks the technological ability to do so and consumers would likely dislike it. While there is certainly a time and place for do-yourself tools, the clear opportunity for competitive differentiation, as it relates to customer experience, lies in the instances where self-servicing platforms lack the ability to deliver. And it is precisely those moments a consumer is likely to remember and base their future loyalties on.
Tomorrow’s agent As with any form of evolution, changes in the underlying environment are what dictate the future trends and characteristics needed to survive. In the specific case of contact centers and their respective agents, the increasing demands and expectations of today’s modern consumer emphasize the need for each representative to be far more informed, trained, technologically-savy, nimble, and personable. After all, while the growing adoption of self-service may have diminished the number of customer interactions a contact center may be exposed to, the complexity of the issues agents are expected to resolve have not. In fact, they have increased and represent the rare but crucial opportunities enterprises have to demonstrate to consumers that their business matters. Of course, any agent success, especially in today’s digital age, is contingent on having the data and solutions needed to perform. Case in point, among the primary reasons contact center agents fail to meet customer expectations is the inability to gain access to relevant customer details when it matters most – at the time of the interaction. But assuming an agent is provided the
proper multichannel tools, customer data access, performance metrics, and training, the odds of success are favorable. In short, tomorrow’s agents will need to work smarter, not harder, and will very likely represent a smaller team of specialized customer experience advocates rather than the massive army of customer reps most still envision.
Summary The contact center agent is not due for extinction anytime soon. Despite the advancements in selfservice tools, the importance of the customer experience has enhanced the value of individual agents, not diminished it. And while consumers may want to control the customer experience, the fact remains, any successful consumer relationship is predicated on the existence of the human component. The agent of tomorrow, as a result, is still very much alive although the demands of today’s consumer will require he or she to be more responsible and capable of addressing all the needs of the customer. In other words, a successful agent will need to be the support team, the account executive, the billing department, and much more with likely fewer team members to rely on. In short, the agent of tomorrow will likely exist in fewer numbers but will be far more valuable to the enterprise and far more useful to the consumer. Guillaume Seynhaeve is the Marketing Director at 3CLogic with over 10 years experience in sales and customer service. 3CLogic is a leading provider of cloud-based contact center solutions. Offering next-generation multichannel communications, business intelligence, dynamic scripting, as well as seamless third-party integrations, we built our products to meet today’s needs and tomorrow’s challenges. For more information visit www.3clogic.com SOURCES: Customers 2020 Report, Steven Van Belleghem: The Self-Service Economy, Zendesk
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Outsourcing
The power of outsourcing Part two of a series on challenges facing the Canadian contact centre industry By Amy Bostock
T
here are three traditional reasons to outsource says Don Moffatt, Chief Executive Officer at Millennium1 Solutions. “The first reason is to gain the ability to ramp up and ramp down, to manage variability in call volume in a cost effective manner. The second reason people typically outsource is to benchmark their own internal capabilities. I previously managed large, in-house operations for banks and telcos, and always wanted to keep my own people honest – outsourcing for benchmarking is a way to do that. The third reason – or benefit in this case - is that none of us have a monopoly on all the good ideas. An outsourcer is in a unique position to share best practices given they typically deal with multiple other clients, with learnings that add value across many industries. This unique ability to share insights and best practices can create a compelling use case for third-party outsourcers. As a third-party provider, if I’m truly adding value, I’m sharing. Not proprietary information, but industry best practices to help each client that has bought my services succeed.” In terms of the landscape in Canada, Moffatt says that it’s crowded with many players in the space with the 6 | contact management
dollar being a significant factor in outsourcing decisions. “There has been some contraction in the space over the last number of years. Some of it driven by the dollar, in that some U.S. business flowed into Canada when we had a 60-cent to 70-cent dollar. There were tangible labour benefits in coming here that dissipated as the dollar approached parity resulting in some repatriation. Some choose offshoring as an alternative, but there are risks and sensitivities around experiential delivery and local nuances that can be more challenging to guarantee offshore warranting careful consideration and needs assessment.”
The age of the talent paradox A recent report by HfS Research identified a paradox when it comes to
the contact centre’s approach to talent. “Even as outsourcing moves from the back office to the middle and front offices, where value creation is paramount, and even though governance executives declare they want to achieve more than just cost reduction, they are not making the investments at the key leverage points in value creation—the people,” cites the report titled “Is Good Enough Really Good Enough? The Great Talent Paradox in Outsourcing” The report is based on 282 surveys of major enterprises who are engaged in outsourcing, as well as conversations with buyers and providers. The report concludes that governance leaders need to ‘shift their focus toward the development of their own staff and ensure they are engaging on an equal basis with Issue 1 • 2015
Outsourcing the capable talent presented by their outsourcing service providers. Moreover, providers must raise their game in talent development to meet their clients’ expectations’. “This report is the first piece of tangible evidence I’ve seen in some time related to the valuable talent available via outsourcing and those companies that truly differentiate via their talent,” says Mike Morrison, VP Sales for Millennium1 Solutions. It delves into why today’s leading enterprises are stuck in this ‘talent paradox’ where they are simultaneously affirming the importance of people, but failing to provide the support and resources needed to use talent as a competitive advantage. A realization, says Morrison, which helped Millennium1 Solutions build their positioning in the Canadian market. “This becomes especially important given that we have a large domestic presence and often compete against companies proposing offshore servicing options or service locations where we don’t have facilities. The study provided a glimpse into the key challenges in the outsourcing space while also underscoring talent and insights as differentiators.”
Managing the disconnect “One interesting observation is around the time and effort some outsourcing clients spend vetting the talent that answers the phone,” says Morrison. “Often buyers are highly engaged in the hiring process and they appreciate the significant rigor applied to training and induction programs. We’re jointly focused on ensuring our hires meet the needs of our clients. In addition, many buyers
have contractual agreements around addressing non-performing agents. For me, this is one key disconnect in terms of the study findings, as this focus around the very talent charged with managing the business is not always the case for some outsourcing customers. Frontline talent is an important opportunity area for outsourcers, in terms of both differentiating and performing, yet in some cases, there is a tendency to spend a disproportionate amount of time vetting providers for their frontline teams versus the value of their leadership, expertise, and governance.” So why the disconnect? Are buying organizations assuming that those frontline people, the contact centre agents, are the ones that are most worthy of their examination? According to Morrison, there are a couple of reasons for the disconnect. “I do think that clients believe that these are the frontline people that touch their customers, so they’re prioritizing this vetting to ensure their brands are protected. The direct connection to the customer drives some of this behaviour.
“Secondly, generally the people that buy outsourcing services (in many cases operators and procurement teams) often understand tactical call centre operations and focus there given it is the function being outsourced. Proper distribution between vetting focus on frontline agents along with the strategic leadership and governance plans the provider offers can make a large difference to the resulting delivery of services.”
Selling the right product to the right person In some cases when it comes to selling outsourcing services, Morrison says, the value of insights delivery can vary depending on the buyer’s level in their own organization. “Buyers don’t always have their CEO or other executives sitting on the other side of the table when making outsourcing decisions, which can lead to operationally-focused discussions and decisions rather than strategic or value-added enhancements. Outsourcers need to ensure they are positioning leadership strength in
2 Great
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Outsourcing business well, look for efficiencies and improvements in my operation, but ultimately, I want your expertise and insights to help my business run better. Even if that means moving to an entirely different way of running my business’. “The challenge for outsourcing companies operating domestically is to find those top-tier buyers. It’s important to recognize that you may have a more challenging time competing with the first two buyer types because, at least to some extent, they’re buying on price (and some process improvements). Outsourcers can really differentiate themselves with the buyer group that is looking for something more.” So where do most Canadian organizations sit in the buying tier? Morrison feels that there is a large percentage that still fall under the cost buyer umbrella. “The work that has gone offshore has a clear cost implication in the decision-making process. Nobody went offshore and said I don’t care about the cost; I’m going offshore for a better customer experience. Balance is key for decision makers as governance, improvements, and strategic insights are worthy of consideration in the overall cost assessment.” Presented by: Fasten your seatbelts. Roll up your It comes back to shirtsleeves. And prepare yourself for and understanding your buyer an information packed day. and their organizational Exclusive Sponsor: goals. “Engaging the C-level executives in this decision Bring Y Team our making can make a large Includ ! Work es FREE b o o difference to the direction k of Tips, T & Secactics rets chosen. They’re involved in the decision about whether or not to outsource, but continuing to engage them through the partner How to Make the Mobile Future Work for You selection can lead to a different focus and outcome April 2, 2015 related to the ultimate Twenty Toronto Street partner selection.” Conference Centre What is going to have to happen in the Canadian landscape to encourage In a world of rapidly changing retail channels, more buyers to move fragmenting technologies, new payments systems, into that coveted top tier, ecommerce developments, the rise of consumer recognizing that there will acceptance of emerging systems, and the power of always be customers that social media, how do you ensure that your organization will never get there? is driven by facts rather than gut feel in regards to “There will always be mobile payments? How do you leverage mobility in work-types that have a general, to improve your business results? natural and appropriate fit in the lower tiers. LowFind out more or sign up at www.paymentsbusiness.ca complexity work types and basic call types may
addition to call centre operations strength, and sharing their depth of capabilities with the most senior levels of the buyer’s organization to truly differentiate. Encouraging a focus on the strategic components of an outsourced partnership can be a game changer in the sales process.” Generally we see three types of buyers, says Morrison. The first type is a cost buyer who will simply buy on price. According to the HfS Research report, the question for cost buyers is ‘can I save money without having any kind of a major brand disaster?’ “This buyer is typically less focused on improving experience, they’re more focused on can I do this cheaper without terrible results?” The next buyer type is looking for balance. These midtier buyers are looking to save money but also want to see process improvement. “These are the buyers who are looking at our industry and recognizing the experience of operating call centres for 50 or 60 different clients has value, so there must be best practices and learnings that can gain from partnering with third party providers.” These are buyers who are going to dig in and seek strategic insights that they can use to either improve a process, improve the way that a customer is managed or deploy a new piece of technology. These are not necessarily the “execution-in-the-trenches” people, but rather, as the study describes, the people that are charged with overall relationship governance. The third buyer type, or top-tier, is the buyer that requires strategic insights as an expectation of the outsourcing engagement, says Morrison. ‘Manage my
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8 | contact management
not be suited for more strategic selling approaches. As Canadian outsourcers, we have to take a look at how we assess the needs of our customers and identify which tier they are best suited for. I think it’s an open conversation that we have with the customer; if you just want seats, and you’re looking for the best price you can possibly get, there are probably 50 companies that can take care of you. So, let’s park that for a minute. Let’s assume that we can deliver that as well, but let’s shift the discussion and start talking about where we can add value beyond simply servicing your calls. That is where we help our marketplace evolve because we’re not differentiated until we get to that conversation.” That’s when, he says, you start to talk about business insights and analytics, and how to drive improvements through data and learning. “It’s thinking beyond what they’re asking for, and using the experience that we have in this business to drive evolution. I think there is a tremendous opportunity for the BPO space to start to take on that kind of a model.” Back to the disconnect in the study related to hiring; “You can’t always go out and hire top of market talent based on the way contracts are structured,” he says, “you try to hire what your pricing and service delivery models can afford bearing in mind your client has budget constraints as well. If you hire the people you really want, then you will likely have to charge clients at a price they don’t want to pay. This is where gain-share models really come in to play. In these models, if I know I’m incented for delivering additional business improvements beyond the baseline services, then it’s on me to deliver and there’s a recognition and reward for those efforts. This is our approach and we’ve actively invested in building around our insights and analytics team, knowing that, if we can deliver that incremental value to our customers, we’re going to share that cost savings and both parties will benefit and grow.” Coming in May - in the next instalment in our series on challenges facing the Canadian contact centre market we look at the changing role of technology and the rise of the multi-channel agent.
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