Five Ways A Consultant Can Help Fix Your Contact Center

When your contact center is in need of an overhaul, it can be tempting to let your department heads and managers take over the repair process. Overseeing a complex internal “rip and replace” of a contact center can drain human and financial resources while risking failure.  Although fail-fast is a big buzzword in management strategy and innovation these days, your organization must have the funding and cultural mindset to make it work. That can be a very tall order, especially when trying to transform your contact center operations where their activity directly impacts customer satisfaction levels.

Gaining Senior Management Support  

This leads me to the first way a consultant can help you, and it might come as a surprise: outside consultants are able to encourage executive buy-in of your overhaul project better than your internal team can. (This isn’t because your internal team has a different skill set to offer; your internal team should have strong skill sets just as your consultant does.)

An outside consultant can link the corner office to the contact center on a personal level. They offer your company leadership a clear, unbiased view of the road to repair in terms of cost and realistic transition times. If your internal team hasn’t overhauled the contact center before, their projections on both will be either too rosy or too conservative.

It’s common to realize when your center’s results aren’t where you want them to be. What is hard is  understanding exactly why that is. Consultants have seen every kind of contact center problem you can think of, and lots of problems you can’t.

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Seeing Contact Center Mistakes

The second way a consultant can help is by seeing the issues causing the mistakes that may not be obvious to management or to the customer. Finding root causes to contact center problems can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Often managers think it’s easier to patch the issue and keep hoping the problem goes away. (or until the problem gets bigger.) Even the best managers can get caught up in “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” thinking – even when there’s trouble looming. Again, this is a function of pressure we can all understand.

As a consultant and outsource operator we believe in the Power of ONE. Find the one thing that is impacting a single agent and fix it. This may save time, improve customer satisfaction or performance. The power of one explodes when you bring that change to the other agents in the center. Suddenly that few seconds you saved for one agent leads to hours saved by the organization.

Getting What You Measure, Contact Center KPIs

A consultant will be able to identify the most appropriate KPIs to track based on your business strategy. This is a key benefit to hiring a consultant, especially in today’s business world. Companies in every sector are focusing on customer experience as the key to building loyalty and revenue.

Customers of all ages are now demanding fast, convenient and pleasant encounters with customer service specialists and your organization across multiple channels. As the fully digital generation increases their buying power, they will insist every customer service transaction should match the speed and availability of the Internet – regardless of the complexity of the issue. A consultant can help develop a channel response plan to pair your company’s objectives with the consumers’ expectation.  They create the dashboard of ideal performance metrics, and help you position your company for the next new wave of customers while supporting the ones you already have.

Practicing Contact Center Best Practices

Any consultant worth your time will be a human catalog of current contact center best practices. A speedy analysis of your center will reveal any gaps, and a consultant will provide strategies to fill them. The same goes for auditing. Consultants can bring objectivity to the audit process, examining your center’s productivity, adherence to policies and procedures, employee turnover, and the all-important customer satisfaction stats.

Consultants can help you fix your center in many ways, but let’s recap these top five.

Consultants can:

1. Establish C-level buy-in on contact center changes and improvements
2. Identify mistakes that may not be obvious to the customer or to management
3. Pinpoint the most appropriate metrics to track based on your business strategy
4. Analyze your best practices and help you keep them on track
5. Conduct objective audits of your call center

If you haven’t checked out our YouTube channel, give it a try. You’ll find great, easy to digest insights on the way we bring contact centers to peak performance.

When your processes are less than ideal, it doesn’t matter how much business intelligence you have, or how much planning you’ve done – great ideas go awry quickly without the power of execution. That’s why we focus on the best process in all phases of your operation. Great processes are your game plan for consistent performance at the lowest cost.

At GCS, our consulting methodologies are straightforward and sensible. We don’t waste your time and energy on distractions – we help you find your needs, partner with you to develop strategies that work, and execute programs on your timetable. Feel free to contact us for a no obligation consultation at 1-844-324-5427.

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