The features of Australia's top performing contact centres

A quick look at some of last year's Contact Centre of the Year and Customer Service Institute of Australia award recipients confirms that customer service success is not an accident. Many of the winners share attitudes to strategy, technology and have adopted similar customer service practices. For any customer service focused organisation trying to cement its place in the market, a good place to start is by understanding the defining characteristics of Australia's top performing contact centres.

The way organisations do business with consumers has changed forever, thanks to the consumer power economy. Gone are the days when consumers could be captured, segmented, branded and tagged. In case you've somehow missed the signs, we've embarked upon a new economy, where consumers have equal or more power in their relationship.

Social media, online and mobile applications, and transparency of relationships are the facilitators of this new economy. They are the tools that have given consumers a taste for options, mobility, agility and flexibility. They have enabled the consumer to tap into the reassurance of their peers before committing their dollar or when seeking help from an organisation. What's more, growing familiarity with technology has helped to make consumers aware of the value of their personal data, and have led to individuals demanding the right to manage and maintain their own profiles. This has made the last few years a bit of a shock for most organisations and for their contact centres, which remain at the front line for dealing with these newly empowered, far more demanding consumers.

Yet, while some contact centres are struggling to adapt to the new business environment, others – such as CommInsure, National Australia Bank, Telstra, American Express and HP Enterprise Services -- have leaped at the opportunity to redefine and reinvigorate their consumer relationships. These are just some the organisations that have shifted up a gear to make the most of every opportunity, and whose commitment to outstanding customer experience has been publicly recognised and awarded during the last 12 months.

The foundation stone: strategy

When you take a look at the workings of Australia's most successful contact centres, one factor stands out. The contact centre doesn't exist in isolation and therefore, the contact centre strategy is invariably part of an enterprise customer service strategy.

You can't run a contact centre without people

Most contact centres agree that the way human resources is managed is crucial to the quality of customer experiece. When contact centre HR is seen as part of the customer service strategy, it has the ability to influence and improve an organisation's performance in the key areas of customer satisfaction, productivity, employee engagement and revenue generation.

But it's not enough simply to attract the right people or to maintain appropriate staffing levels. To retain staff, great contact centres lead in the adoption of flexible work arrangements. Most operate on the assumption that flexibility and salary are more important to staff than career planning, training or social activities. It's an approach that appears to be delivering dividends for the business.

That's not to say training isn't important. To enhance the customer experience, leading contact centres invest in the region of 10 to 15 days of agent training per annum. They also maintain an ongoing program of quality monitoring.

When it comes to workforce planning, common practices include forecasting at a 15 to 30 minute interval level, the use of actual rather than target shrinkage figures to calculate staffing requirements, and high levels of interdepartmental communication and planning.

Build in options

One effect of changing consumer habits has been a dramatic expansion in the number of communication channels used to engage contact centres. People still want the ability to engage with their suppliers face-to-face, by voice or correspondence, but now they also expect to be able to interact online, using mobile apps or more recently, with video.

Each of these channels may entail numerous options. If the consumer decides on a face-to-face visit, it could mean a trip to a store or a kiosk. Voice contact can range from a telephone call with a live attendant, to dealing with an interactive voice response system or simply leaving a message. Online options include web self-service, web chat, instant messaging, remote assist or co-browsing, and the list goes on.

It's hard to implement and manage them all, so which ones should you invest in and which ones aren't essential? The best contact centres usually offer at least five channels, if not more. The most frequently offered ones include: social networks, remote assist, online forums, web chat, click to call, and mobile device apps.

Know the business, now and into the future

Great customer service organisations are more likely have a strong analytics strategy in place. They use software to assist Finance and Employee Engagement management. They plan for future requirements and are willing to invest in technology to help them get to where they want to be.

The “must have” traits

Over and above the business processes and practices, there are a few common organisational traits that seem to be deeply embedded in the psyche of award-winning contact centres. All display purposeful leadership, engaged employees, compelling brand values and a culture of customer connectedness throughout the organisation.

The contact centre industry is in a state of transition. All players will take time to adapt to the new tools, rules and channels for consumer engagement. As you identify what's best for your organisation, look for inspiration to the contact centre leaders. Read as much as you can, and talk to your peers about what works – and doesn't work – for them. Then plan and budget. Above all, never lose sight of the business fundamentals that align your management, employees, products and customers.

These days an organisation must have information if it wants to improve customer experience. It needs feedback from customers and it needs internal, operational information if management is to fully understand how service delivery affects the customer experience, performance and future behaviour.

Finding raw data to work with shouldn't be a problem. These days there is a proliferation of customer experience channels generating vast amounts of data. Every call to the contact centre, every service request, every visitor to your website and every time a product is shipped contributes to the store of available data. The difficult part is bringing all this data together in a way that facilitates analysis. This is where Big Data comes in.

Big Data is a relatively new concept and there are many definitions, but how we describe it is this: Big Data analytics is the process of examining large amounts (volume) of data of a variety of types (big data) to uncover hidden patterns, unknown correlations and other useful information. Used in real time, (velocity) such information can provide competitive advantages over rival organisations and result in significantly improved customer experience leading to increased revenue.

Perhaps the simplest way to think of it is data mining on steroids. It occurs at a massive scale, peering into the data accumulated across every arm of the organisation. Big Data analytics combines data from customer relationship management databases, contact centres, web site visits, service systems and more to enable analyses in ways previously thought impossible.

The potential rewards from tapping into all of this data are substantial. For example, within months of the Commonwealth Bank beginning to search its Big Data for patterns relating to fraud and financial crime, the organisation had improved its ability to identify cheque and Internet fraud, increased fraud detection efficiency, and significantly improved its reduced fraud loss-to-turnover ratios.

At eBay, Big Data is used to improve the experiences of around 180 million active users by optimising searches to deliver more relevant results. It identifies commonly requested features to help narrow the results, and caters for commonly misspelled words.

In the US, the department store chain, Target, uses Big Data to reach specific customer segments with special offers and promotions. (Mind you, sending coupons for baby and pregnancy-related goods to a teenage girl before she'd had a chance to inform her parents of the impending bundle of joy may not have been such a good idea!).

There are some basic requirements.

If you plan to embark on a Big Data strategy you will need to have people with both mathematical modelling and computer science capabilities. And these people are hard to find. You will also need to assemble a cross-functional team which can have access to the right data. This may involve navigating a way through departmental silos.

The other key requirement is a knowledge of the technologies involved. You will hear a lot about Hadoop, Cassandra, Apache, Teradata, SAS and many others you will never have heard before. Navigating your way through the layers of Big Data applications may require external advice.

Most importantly you will need to align your Big Data plans with business objectives to ensure the information you derive has business value.

But do remember, Big Data is best used for answering questions you didn’t know you had.

Enterprise feedback management

Creating a mechanism for the ongoing collection of customer feedback should be the starting point for any customer experience improvement program. This is best achieved using enterprise feedback management, a process defined as: the systematic collection, storage and use of customer feedback data that covers all customer interaction channels at the customer level, to enhance business objectives and overall profitability.

In 2012, a study by Fifth Quadrant found that approximately $90 million is spent on customer experience research every year in Australia. It amounts to a staggering ten per cent of revenues for the total market research industry. Yet only 78 per cent of organisations have a customer experience feedback program in place.

Imagine how much better the customer experience would be, and how much closer relationships could become, if more organisations decided to really listen to their customers; if they established enterprise feedback management programs that sat alongside and fed into big data mining programs.

We've entered an era in which consumers hold the power. Rather than simply accepting whatever products, prices and conditions their local retailer can offer, they are using the weight of their numbers and technology to redefine the rules of engagement. Organisations that wish to compete need to cultivate their relationships. We have to be smarter in the way we communicate, more precise and more targeted in our engagements. It's not hard to see that soon, success will rely on an integrated customer analytics strategy that puts quality data in the hands of decision makers.

The introduction of a multi-channel strategy may initially appear dauntingly complex as it potentially incorporates seven categories of channel: face-to-face, call centre, online, social media, mobile apps, correspondence and video.

But it is something that almost every consumer services organisation will need to address in the next 12 months. The consumer desire to interact with suppliers across a range of channels is not going to abate and companies that cannot respond to this need for multi-channel convenience risk being left behind.

To avoid being overwhelmed by the challenge, organisations going down the multi-channel path will find it much easier if they spend time upfront working out their customer’s needs, expectations and requirements and the resources and capabilities the organisation has to develop such a strategy. By documenting it all in an overarching strategy, organisations will find the path to multi-channel customer experience delivery becomes much clearer, and they will increase their ability to achieve, profitable as well as high customer engagement interactions.

Step 1: The Strategy

Begin with an internal review of your organisation’s strategic imperatives. This requires a look at your corporate strategic goals, brand essence and values, your service promise and charter, and current channel strategies. This is also the time to establish revenue and cost imperatives, and identify the ROI required.

Because your strategy isn’t being designed to please only management and staff, you’ll need input from external sources. Conduct customer research to see what your most important stakeholders think about current operations. Identify service needs and channel preferences. Then take a step back and look at the broader environment. Analyse what your competitors are doing from a channel experience perspective and consider the impact of any regulatory frameworks on your business.

Step 2: Data Modeling & Big data analytics

Now it’s time to see what information you may already have in your existing customer data. Model the how the combination of different channels for different products, customer segments, demographics effect customer experience, engagement, acquisition, retention and up-sell and cross-sell. Also start to consider the role Big Data analytics might play – assess the data for volume, variety, velocity, veracity, value and viscosity. Use this to model and predict customer behaviour, estimate revenue and cost models, and to calculate the profitability of each channel.

Step 3: Customer Experience Design thinking

Establish the principles for your ideal customer experience and let these inform the design of the strategy. Co-creation with customers is the key. You’ll want the experience to be user-centred, so get customers and other stakeholders involved as you create the design. Consider the probable sequence of requirements and try to design a holistic experience for your customers. Tools such as stakeholder maps, personas, customer journey maps, cultural probes, storyboards, service prototypes and blueprints will be invaluable at this stage.

Step 4: Understand your operational capabilities

Having decided upon the ideal customer experience, you need to identify any operational changes that may be required to support your design. Look at current operational performance and capabilities, your analytical capability, technology and telephony platforms. Will the company culture and your HR practices support the expanded range of activity? Does management fully understand what will be required and are they on board? Identify the changes that will be required to make the new strategy work.

Step 5: Allow your Customer a Voice

Develop a multi-channel customer feedback system, or Voice of Customer program, that allows regular and real time feedback from customers. Use this to drive process improvement, employee behavior, product design and on-going strategy.

Step 5: Contingencies

Never introduce any business strategy without assessing whether there are other contingent strategies or programs of work that will impact your strategy. Work out what you need to do if there are changing market conditions or internal circumstances.

Step 6: Document everything in a customer experience strategy roadmap

Having worked your way through all the facets of the strategy, you now need to put it all down on paper.

At the end of this process you should find yourself the proud owner of an enterprise-wide Customer Experience Strategy complete with plans on:

• multi-channel design
• operations and process analytics and possibly big data
• customer feedback management
• technology and telecommunications
• culture and HR
• a well defined business case and
• an implementation plan.

All you need to do now is carry it through. At least you know where you are going and what you need to do to get there.

Rather than being a passive outcome of everyday business activity, the customer experience has become a strategy in its own right. Channel design, customer feedback management and analytics are all essential parts of this strategy. Get it right and you’ll find your multi-channel strategy will quickly repay all the effort with profitable and happy customers.

Outsourcing of contact centre seats is a relatively small, but firmly entrenched practice in Australia.

Right now, the local contact centre market comprises roughly 2,000 organisations operating a total of 223,900 contact centre seats. Seventeen per cent of those organisations use outsourced providers, resulting in a total of 46,000 outsourced contact centre seats.

Where do we outsource

Interestingly, when Australian organisations choose to outsource we prefer to keep our business close to home, primarily selecting partners from the Asia Pacific region. At present, the Philippines is the country we turn to most frequently, with other popular choices including India, New Zealand, Malaysia and China.

There are numerous factors that come into play when an organisation is deciding whether to outsource, and which country to choose from. The ability to maintain or improve the quality of service is paramount, as is the quality of available telecommunications services. (Hence our preference for outsourcers in countries with a comparatively stable and reliable telecommunications infrastructure). The cost of labour is always a consideration, as is the ease of doing business.

One of the biggest issues is the language skills of contact centre agents. Australian's typically show little tolerance towards contact centre agents with accents that are difficult to understand. Therefore, Australian companies tend to be drawn to outsourcers who can offer good English skills or American/Asian accents.

Why outsource?

Choosing to outsource a contact centre is not an easy decision. Almost half of all business (45 per cent) worry that outsourcing may lead to a loss of control in contact centre operations. The same number view security as a potential issue, particularly given the need to reveal internal processes and confidential data to a third party.

Just over one third (36 per cent) of organisations are concerned that there may be a loss or reduction in service levels and just under one third (32 per cent) believe the expense of outsourcing is prohibitive.

Despite these concerns, organisations are drawn to outsourced contact centre services due to the ever-present need to increase productivity and a desire to improve customer engagement. Occasionally, outsourcing is simply a question of technology. Implementing a contact centre system, or the need to upgrade and maintain currency of an existing system can be costly. In some circumstances it's just easier and cheaper to give the job to someone else.

Is it delivering?

Organisations that have outsourced their contact centres report the move does indeed support increased productivity, saves money on technology and it can deliver operational cost benefits.

To date, however, it has failed to address one of today's key business requirements – the need for improved customer engagement. Given the customer experience is integral to the raison d'etre of a contact centre, this makes the current value of outsourcing questionable.

One development that may help to make outsourcing more attractive is the emergence of South Africa and New Zealand as new business process outsourcers. Both of these countries offer capacity, the ability to reduce costs and good English language skills. In the case of New Zealand, there is also the benefit of a particularly strong cultural alignment.

Selecting an outsourcer

Outsourced customer interaction has become a commodity. This is placing tremendous cost pressures on outsourcers and has resulted in a highly competitive, low profit market. This is good news for organisations shopping around for an outsourced service, but it's never wise to choose a business partner on price alone.

Once you've decided on outsourcing, whether considering an offshore or Australia provider, look for a partner with a proven ability to innovate, who can demonstrate effective client partnerships at both strategic and operational levels. Check that they have a multi-channel customer experience strategy, that they can handle social and mobile interaction as a standard part of the service, and that they have a suitable technology platform to make it all happen. When it comes to cost, look for a flexible gain-share pricing model that encourages results. Most importantly, find a partner that you believe will successfully engage and add value for the customer.

After all, if you plan on entrusting your customer interactions to a third party, you need to be confident that they are in reliable hands.

Last year Fifth Quadrant together with the fabulous Dr Amantha Imber from Inventium were involved with the design, judging and awarding of the inaugural BRW's Most Innovative Companies List. It's well known that one of the best ways for Organisation's to grow is through innovation so it was excellent to see a wide range of orgnisations across Australia in the running for this award.

Supplementing the Awards, Fifth Quadrant and Inventium are running Breakfast Events on the 27th February in Melbourne & 28th February in Sydney showcasing Australia's Most Innovative Companies, so come along to hear how Click View (Australia's most innovative company), CBA, Blue Chilli & Coca-Cola Amatil ranked at the top. The Events will provide practical tips on how to develop a culture of innovation in your organisation. More details, click here. Totally brilliant.

The second most exciting thing I want to mention is the launch of the online Webinar Series, RAWomen. RAWomen is a free forum for (all) women to discuss how they are navigating their working and personal lives. In particular the forum will benefit younger women and women from disadvantaged backgrounds, who are seeking advice on how to be successful in business through to how to manage children, relationships and health.

A key finding of the Sydney Women's Fund Portrait Project was that income inequality was creating greater disadvantage and poverty for women and girls, particularly those living in low socio economic situations. A key pathway out of poverty is through education and employment, which mentoring programs and networks help to foster. Additionally there has been much conversation in the Australian business community about the absence of appropriate mentoring programs for women.

In essence we believe there is significant untapped potential in Australia’s women and hence RAWomen hopes to be able to support and mobilise women to better support these women.

Hosted by myself and the amazing Karen James, General Manager, Affiliate Business Banking and Women in Focus, Commonwealth Bank, RAWomen will be held once a month, on a Friday, at 1pm and will run for one hour and is the perfect chance for Women to interact and ask questions from outstanding Women within our community. The first Webinar will be held on the 1st March 2013, 1 pm - 2pm with Guest Speaker, Nova Peris, OAM, ex-Olympian, First Aboriginal Woman in Federal Politics & Mother. Register here.

Future guest speakers include:

• 5 April 2013 - Jan Owen, Australia's Most Influential, Woman 2012 - AFR & Westpac.
• 3 May 2013 - Ann Sherry, AO, CEO of Carnival Australia, Philanthropist.
• Dr Anita Heiss, author of non-fiction, historical fiction, commercial women's fiction, poetry, social commentary & an Advocate for the National Centre of Indigenous Excellence.
• Wendy McCarthy, AO, chairs headspace-Australia's National Youth Mental Health Foundation, Circus Oz, McGrath Estate Agents, Pacific Friends of the Global Fund & is Director of Goodstart Childcare.

Stunning.