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You don’t know what you don’t know. So what can you do to find out what you don’t know, so you can take steps to start to know it?! This is one of the biggest challenges many contact centre leaders are faced with. This is where the Customer Excellence Maturity Assessment, or CXMA for short, proves to be the most beneficial self-assessment tool every customer service leader needs.
Managing a contact centre is no easy task. Managing a contact centre in an environment where both the customer and the contact centre are evolving rapidly can be likened to juggling swords while they’re on fire, one-handed, while blindfolded and riding a unicycle across a tightrope. At least, sometimes it can feel that way. And yet here you are.
It’s become quite evident that customer experience is a top priority for the majority of organisations, and the reason is simple: better customer experiences increases revenue — resulting in higher profits.
Find out how to improve your customer experience with the latest industry trends.
So, when there’s a noticeable dip in NPS and customer experience goes right down, so too, does revenue. At this point, contact centre leader’s spider senses are tingly, there’s a problem somewhere in my contact operations, but where?
Times are changing and in the midst of a pandemic, employee engagement has revealed itself to be a key driver of success.
You’ve probably mentioned this to the execs at one stage or another while pleading your case, that at the core of a ‘truly great customer experience’, is the agent.
It’s so undeniably true and yet we still find ourselves caught in a knees bent, heels dug in tug-of-war between what we know is the issue (and how to fix it) versus tight budgets.
It goes without saying, happy employees = happy customers. Employees who are valued by leadership and setup for success are much happier and more engaged at work. Happy employees create better customer experiences, which results in higher customer satisfaction and builds loyalty to the brand.
But you already know what employee engagement is and why it matters. The real question here is how much are disengaged employees costing your organisation?
In a time of unprecedented change, businesses must learn to transform and adapt to capture and retain the attention of their customers and employees. Perpetual technological advancements, paired with an increasingly disrupted world is accelerating the pace of change, making it harder for businesses to keep up.
To adapt in an ever-increasingly disrupted world, there are three important things contact centres must keep in mind:
I started working in the contact centre industry in 1998. It feels like a lifetime ago, and while many things have changed drastically in that time, there are also many things that have not.
Namely, the strategic value placed on the contact centre by its parent organisation (or lack thereof). In my 22-year career in this industry, the contact centre has been forever fighting to retain tiny budgets, losing in the battle for strategic investment, with metrics misinterpreted and operational complexity widely misunderstood.
Changes, the ones that we are electing to make and the ones we’re adapting to are happening at a pace that few of us could ever have anticipated. Even the Change Superstars amongst us can get caught up in running from task to task, doing what needs to be done next. So how do we give ourselves and our organisations the best chance of making our changes successful ones?
Workforce Management has always been considered a ‘dark art’, and with good reason. The unique blend of science, instinct and influence is somewhat similar to walking the plank blindfolded, with your legs tied together, holding an excited puppy who won’t stay still.
Over time, we WFM nerds learn to apply this unique blend of talents to deliver consistent business performance and insights, arming our people with the best possible chance of achieving greatness. Much of our success in the execution of this comes from absorbing and dissecting the past – finding nuggets of gold that help us learn how our customers behave, so that we can program our crystal balls to predict the future.
Then came 2020.
With the global spread of COVID-19, companies and people everywhere are unsure of what’s next. For some industries, COVID-19 has resulted in numerous redundancies, companies shutting down, and a general sense of anxiety for the workforce at large. In other industries, workload and burnout is at an all-time high.
Contact centres are at the epicenter of this – feeling the full force of the impact of the industry they support. In the midst of these uncertain and troublesome times for the workforce at large, it’s critical to support the mental health of your people.
![[4 Step Guide] How to Identify The Right KPIs For Your Contact Centre](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a583cb2be42d6ebc7a031e5/1616242441678-E6HMMKJMUW5QUUQYIET3/unsplash-image-unRkg2jH1j0.jpg)
