Improving customer service levels while still succeeding in reducing overall contact centre costs
As the market slowed down over the last six months, we’ve seen increasing evidence that contact centre operators are being pressured into making short-term, cost-focused decisions about headcount reduction, outsourcing initiatives, and the shelving of IT programmes. Of course simple economics dictate that – in many cases – expenditure needs to be reduced: however at Sabio we believe that it is far more sensible to implement projects that succeed in both reducing contact centre costs while still protecting (and indeed improving) overall customer service levels.
And when times are tough, the ability to optimise the performance of your contact centre becomes even more important. Research has shown that it will be the organisations that succeed in retaining their customer-centricity who will be better positioned to take advantage of market conditions when the inevitable recovery occurs. With their ability to reduce agent overstaffing and improve attrition, approaches such as Workforce Optimisation – and specifically Workforce Management (WFM) – are ideally placed to help organisations do much more with less, and are set to provide a critical differentiator during 2009 for firms that are looking to optimise the performance of their most expensive asset – their people.
Achieving consistent productivity savings
This year, successful Workforce Optimisation projects will prove key in helping organisations to achieve their target efficiency savings, and the good news is that there are certainly real and quantifiable benefits to be gained. At Sabio, for example, we’re regularly seeing recurring productivity savings of between five and fifteen percent across most contact centre environments delivered through effective Workforce Management. We’ve recently worked on a number of projects where businesses have secured financial payback on their WFM investment within six months including Addison Lee and Thames Water as mentioned below.
The bottom line reality behind effective Workforce Optimisation
In tougher economic conditions it makes the most sense for contact centre operators to concentrate on optimising the performance of their most valuable and expensive asset – their staff. Particularly when you consider that less than half an agent’s time is actually spent talking with customers – the rest being taken up by briefings, breaks, coaching, call wrap-up activities, planning calls and idle time.
Best practice Workforce Management processes and tools combined with complementary Workforce Optimisation solutions such as Quality Monitoring and eLearning are instrumental in helping contact centre operators to target three specific payback areas:
- Productivity improvements
- Top line revenue growth
- Reduction in administrative overhead
Improving each of these categories will have a significant bottom line impact and organisations need to be looking carefully at each of these in order to continue to perform well during 2009.
1. Productivity improvements
Deploying a WFM tool can help to reduce idle time through more accurate forecasting and optimised scheduling, and can help to cut back on lost time thanks to better tracking of real-time adherence. Focusing on areas such as improved screen navigation will also help to enhance agent productivity; with optimised average call handling times and reduced call hold and wait times. Organisations can also deploy better training and coaching to help improve agent motivation and development, and increase the chance of first call resolution by helping customer calls to reach the right skilled agent, first time.
2. Top line revenue growth
These same disciplines can also be applied to help improve top line revenues, with the two main goals here being increased up-selling/ cross-selling conversion, and improved customer retention. Again the deployment of better coaching and training, the sharing of best practice performance and improved planning for business peaks can have a significant impact. Similarly, a commitment to achieving a consistently high level of agent quality, retaining more experienced agents, and targeting consistent service levels all combine to help improve customer retention.
3. Reduction in administrative overhead
There are also a number of areas where expense reductions can be achieved, allowing contact centres to cut their overall costs without necessarily impacting service levels. Here the focus should be on the more targeted use of eLearning and training techniques to reduce training delivery costs, as well as the introduction of initiatives such as transparent performance feedback and increased agent autonomy to target agent attrition. Other areas to concentrate on here include cutting telephony costs via increased first call resolution and optimising average handle times, while the introduction of transaction recording can help in solving disputes and complaints without recourse to penalties.
Workforce Optimisation as a strategic differentiator
Collectively these three areas combine to provide organisations with the ‘defensive’ Workforce Optimisation techniques that can help to improve productivity and lower costs. However, where WFO can become even more powerful – and position organisations to take advantage of market recovery – is where a number of WFO disciplines are integrated to deliver a more strategic approach with the contact centre itself considered as a business differentiator. Organisations can also benefit from extending their contact centre into areas such as the back-office, the branch network and homeworking, and using techniques such as speech analytics and customer feedback to gain a much clearer picture of what their customers are actually saying.
We’re certainly seeing an increased market acceptance for this broader adoption of Workforce Optimisation. Analysts including Gartner, for example, acknowledge that solutions such as Workforce Management have a strong role to play outside of the contact centre, suggesting that the broader concept of Workforce Optimisation can be effective enterprise-wide, particularly in the back office and branch networks. At Sabio we’re already working with one of the country’s top building societies to deploy a Workforce Management solution in a number of branch locations delivering additional business efficiencies.
Transforming Customer Services operations
Thames Waters’ recent WFO project has helped to transform the company’s front and back-office Customer Services operations. Deploying the latest workforce management technology has enabled Thames Water to effectively double its forecasting and scheduling productivity, with optimised scheduling adherence and reduced absence and shrinkage leading directly to annual savings of upwards of Ł250,000. Coupled with impressive customer satisfaction improvements, the Thames Water project clearly shows how an effective WFM deployment should be top of the 2009 to-do list for contact centre managers that need to be doing more with less.
Another organisation that is seeing the benefits of adopting a structured consultative approach to WFO implementation is Addison Lee, London’s leading private hire firm that has implemented a Workforce Management solution that is helping them unlock potential savings of up to Ł1 million. Addison Lee has found that optimising its call centre forecasting and scheduling activities and reducing overtime costs has already enabled a 30 percent overall saving on its annual staffing costs.
Given the results achieved by organisations such as Thames Water and Addison Lee, it’s clear that WFO has a valuable role to play during 2009. The question organisations should be asking now is whether they can afford to ignore such initiatives given today’s market conditions?
Next Steps – working with Sabio’s Workforce Optimisation team
It’s increasingly clear that effective Workforce Management is one of the greatest contributors to contact centre optimisation, and - given that agent costs are by far the largest contact centre expense – it makes sense for organisations to ensure they’re managing their agent costs effectively. To find out how your organisation can make the most of Workforce Optimisation techniques, Sabio has developed a comprehensive WFO modelling approach that allows businesses to find out exactly how much business value they could unlock from an effective WFO deployment.
Sabio’s specialist Workforce Optimisation practice works with customers to compare their current operating costs with projected costs and additional revenue generation expected with WFO implementation. This approach means that businesses can gain a clearer understanding of the quantified benefits from a given WFO investment, and also gain insight into the likely payback period, the ROI and the net benefit per employee. We also find that businesses benefit from an ongoing ROI measurement process so that they can ensure that their ongoing implementation remains closely aligned with their business objectives. A valuable additional benefit here is that contact centre management can use this ongoing ROI measurement to internally publicise their projects, and justify ongoing investment in today’s more challenging market conditions.
To learn more about Sabio’s Workforce Optimisation offering, click here.
To find out how organisations such as Leeds City Council, Homeserve, Addison Lee and Thames Water are benefiting from Sabio’s WFO expertise, click on the links below.
