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help you?

TOPIC: High-Performance Customer Service

Four Tips for Becoming a High-Performance

Customer Service Organization
The right mix of tools and techniques can ensure that agents are delivering the types of experiences customers want
Just the Facts: Delivering exceptional support experiences is table
performance that may require their intervention before customer or
stakes these days. According to research from Ovum, 76 percent of
quality issues spiral out of control.
customers have stopped doing business with a company following
Unfortunately, many companies are hampered by data disconnects
a bad customer support experience. This statistic speaks volumes
in one or more of these areas. Every customer interaction needs to be
about how customers have little patience for
recorded and available, says Patrick Russell,
poor experiences. Moreover, as customers
product marketing manager at inContact. This
have become accustomed to receiving excepenables leadership to have a complete view of
Every customer interaction
tional experiences from companies such as
all customer interactions and the customers
needs to be recorded and
Amazon and Zappos, the bar has been raised
history with the company. It also allows superavailable. This enables
on customer expectations for their interactions
visors to determine whether there are aspects
leadership to have a complete
with all companies.
of the customers support experience handled
view of all customer interactions
In order to survive in todays highly comby an agent that can be improved upon.
with the company and for
petitive global market, companies need
Companies that use cloud-based contact
supervisors to determine
high-performance customer service orgacenters
make it easier for both agents and
whether there are aspects of the
nizations that meet and exceed customer
contact
center leaders to access customer
customers support experience
expectations. Whether a customer reaches out
and
performance
data. Meanwhile, the use of
handled by an agent that can be
to a company by phone, the web, email, social,
workforce
optimization
and speech analytics
improved upon.
chat, mobile, etc., they expect timely, relevant
software enables customer service leaders to
Patrick Russell, Product Marketing
support to address their concerns.
analyze customer interactions, determine the
Manager, inContact
This involves a lot of moving parts. It requires
root causes of customer and employee behavagents to have easy access to a full range of
ior, and act on agent coaching and training
customer information. Meanwhile, contact cenopportunities. This can help the customer serter supervisors must retrieve real-time performance data that can
vice organization make performance adjustments on the fly and allow
inform them about any changes in customer satisfaction or agent
it to operate at the highest possible levels.

WFO: The Pursuit of Customer

Experience Excellence
According to a May 2014 Aberdeen
Group study, organizations involved
in the use of workforce optimization
(WFO) tools have increasingly shifted
their focus toward improving the
quality of customer interactions.
Source: Aberdeen Group, May 2014

59%

Improve the quality of

customer interactions

32%

Improve agent productivity

and utilization

44%
65%

Improve forecast accuracy in

predicting call volumes to plan
employee availability
Percent of respondents,
n=83

19%
43%
0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

1to1
media

2015 1to1 Media is a division of Peppers & Rogers Group.

a division of Peppers & Rogers Group

TOPIC: High-Performance Customer Service

Four Tips for Becoming a High-Performance

Customer Service Organization
Before contact center and customer service leaders dive into any efforts aimed at improving the
performance of the customer service organization, its
important to obtain an overall assessment of how well
(or poorly) the group is executing and how it compares
to industry standards in areas such as first-contact
resolution, customer satisfaction, etc.
The first area of focus should be quality, says
Russell. This includes defining quality assurance as it
relates to the processes and procedures that are used
to improve the customer experience, whether quality scores are positioned favorably or not along with
the factors that are driving good or bad quality performance, he adds. Also, is it streamlined as much as
possible from an agent or supervisor level to reduce
wasted time?
Once a customer service quality assessment has
been made, here are four additional action items
for becoming a high-performance customer service
organization:
How may I
help you?

How may I
help you?

The contact center

that wants to put its
agents in the best
possible position to
resolve a customers
issue requires a truly
integrated omnichannel
offering.
Patrick Russell, Product
Marketing Manager,
inContact

How may I
help you?

How may I
help you?

1. Deploy a cloud contact center to integrate a variety

of customer data that can enable agents to deliver
seamless customer experiences. One of the biggest
challenges that customer service organizations face in
delivering consistent customer experiences is poorly
integrated customer data from CRM systems, transactional data, and channel support systems. Poorly
integrated customer data impedes an agents ability to
obtain a 360-degree view of each customer and provide relevant support.
The contact center that wants to put its agents in
the best possible position to resolve a customers issue
requires a truly integrated omnichannel offering, says
Russell. Indeed, and the contact centers that do just
that achieve the best results. A 2014 research conducted by Aberdeen Group reveals that companies
that have deployed a cloud contact center enjoy higher
year-over-year improvements in areas such as customer retention, average revenue per customer contact,
and higher levels of cross-sell and upsell revenues.
2. Utilize effective workforce management tools and
techniques that can enable contact center leaders
to quickly identify and respond to customer satisfaction and quality issues. There are technologies
available in the market that enable contact center and
customer service leaders to identify shifts in customer

2015 1to1 Media is a division of Peppers & Rogers Group.

satisfaction and agent performance. The problem with

most of these tools is that they require supervisors to
hunt for this data.
An effective workforce management tool can help
adjust agent scheduling based on current abandon
rates. This can help ensure that enough agents are
available to handle customer contact volumes and can
then be adjusted once enough agents are in place to
handle current volume levels.
3. Apply best practices for using text analytics to
evaluate customer support experiences and make onthe-fly adjustments as needed. Customers share an
enormous amount of information about their attitudes
and preferences throughout their support interactions.
This includes streams of data that they generate while
receiving support via the web, email, chat, mobile,
social, and other channels.
Text analytics can enable both agents and customer service leaders to quickly pick up on customer
sentiment and fine-tune customer handling as each
situation dictates. For instance, if an agent has been
on a chat session for a longer-than-usual period of
time and the customer types in phrases such as Im
not happy or Im quitting, a supervisor can be notified about the situation and immediately determine
whether theres an opportunity for agent coaching that
can be acted on promptly.
4. Equip customer service supervisors with workforce optimization tools designed to ensure that the
right customers are being connected with the right
agents with the right skills and experience. In light
of intensifying global competition, one of the biggest challenges facing companies today is customer
loyalty. Because of the sensitive nature of customer
service, the delivery of relevant and highly personalized support is a great way for the customer service
organization to help strengthen loyalty and long-term
customer lifetime value.
For instance, imagine that a retail banking customer
who calls into the contact center for product support had
a quality score of just 50 out of 100 the last time they
dialed in for support. Workforce optimization tools can
identify this and automatically route this customer to an
agent with a much higher customer satisfaction rating to
better ensure that the customer has a positive support
experience and remains loyal to the bank, says Russell.

TOPIC: High-Performance Customer Service

CASE STUDY

St. Lukes Health System Treats the Patient Experience with QM, WFM Tools
St. Lukes Health System is a not-for-profit based in southern Idaho.
As it supports a growing population in Idaho and Oregon, the health
systems contact center has also grown steadily. The continuous
growth prompted the organization to consolidate a half dozen satellite
contact centers into a single center aptly known as Connect in 2013.
St. Lukes contact center focuses on addressing outpatient
scheduling, primary care, and specialty services. The organization
recognized that it needed help ensuring that patients received the
best possible support across each of these three primary support
services.
As we were growing, we saw that we needed help with quality management and workforce management. The goal was to help our agents
field calls effectively and to schedule staff based on patient demand
and agent specialization, says Chelsie Shakespeare, patient access
services supervisor at St. Lukes Health System. Although the organization cross-trains a small portion of its agents, most of its 150 agents
are specialized to support patients in one of its three disciplines.
The implementation of inContacts Quality Management software represented the first time St. Lukes had used any kind of QM
software. We were sort of flying blind and not able to track down
the root cause of any issue, says Shakespeare. We desperately
needed hands-on visibility into our operations.
Both the inContact Quality Management and Workforce
Management software applications being used by St. Lukes
Connect contact center provide patients and agents with multiple
benefits. For instance, St. Lukes quality assurance team can pull a
recorded call between a patient and an agent to determine opportunities for agent coaching based on an agents tone of voice or other
tendencies he or she may have used during a call with a patient.
Empowering Agents
Instead of creating a confrontational atmosphere by putting agents

on the spot for how they handled a specific call, agents are able
to select the patient call they want to review, and then work with
a supervisor to identify those aspects of the call they handled well
along with opportunities for improvement.
It has really changed our culture and the relationship between the
quality team and the front-line staff, says Shakespeare, adding that
70 percent of the discussions are driven by the agents.
Meanwhile, the use of inContacts WFM software has provided
rich insights to St. Lukes Connect contact center supervisors on the
performance of individual teams and labor units for its three patient
support disciplines. This information has also been extremely useful
for forecasting call volume demand and agent scheduling.
We can see and respond proactively to seasonal trends, says
Shakespeare. For instance, before flu season hits, St. Lukes can
adjust scheduling for agents who have experience assisting patients
with flu symptoms.
Since St. Lukes implemented inContacts QM and WFM solutions,
its Connect contact center service level metrics, including patient
satisfaction, have improved steadily while patient hold times have
declined. Better-trained agents and more efficient customer support
have resulted in a better patient experience.
Weve really been able to focus on the front-line experience our
patients have with our agents, says Shakespeare. Weve been able
to use the technology to support our vision and use these tools to
help train our staff.
Delivering great patient experiences isnt new to St. Lukes. The
organizations hospitals in Boise and Twin Falls, ID both received a
Healthgrades 2015 Outstanding Patient Experience Award, placing
them among the top 10 percent of hospitals in the nation.
Says Shakespeare, The tools we use from inContact have provided us a lot of insight into areas of our business that we havent
had access to before.

STUDY

The Cloud Delivers Better

Performance
Companies using cloud contact center
platforms are able to provide customers with
more timely and knowledgeable support,
enabling these organizations to achieve
higher levels of performance in areas such as
average handle time. They outpace their peers
using premise-based systems in areas such
as customer retention and average revenue
per customer contact, according to research
conducted by Aberdeen Group.

2015 1to1 Media is a division of Peppers & Rogers Group.

Public Cloud Contact Centers

In-House Contact Centers

10%
8%
6%
4%
2%
0%
-2%
-4%

Cross-sell and
upsell revenue

Improvement in
average handle
time

Improvement
in average cost
per customer
contact

Customer
retention

Average revenue
per customer
contact

TOPIC: High-Performance Customer Service

Getting Started
The first step that organizational leaders should take to improve customer service performance is to examine quality scores. This includes
evaluating the current sample size used to determine the quality of customer service activities and determine why quality scores are at their
current levels, says Russell.
The use of analytics helps customer service leaders to drill down to the
root causes of customer dissatisfaction and quickly determine whether
there are process issues that need to be addressed or opportunities for
coaching individual agents.
Quality improvement isnt a one-and-done exercise. Customer service
leaders should strive for continual improvement to customer experience,
quality, and performance. Once quality scores have been evaluated,

what are the next steps? For example, is an agent coached once? Are
agents re-measured against quality scores on a continual basis to ensure
that theyre continuing to make improvements?
Of course, in order for agents to improve the quality of the customer
service they deliver, they need to have up-to-date tools that can make it
easy for them to provide customers with effortless support experiences.
Agents should also have easy access to online training tools that they
can use to renew and improve their skills.
Providing these capabilities can have a huge impact on agent morale
and the customer experience, says Russell.
Taking a multi-dimensional approach to strengthening the quality of
customer service can benefit both customers and a companys bottom

BY THE NUMBERS: Delivering Quality Care in an Omnichannel World

Customers use a combination of touchpoints to address product or service issues. In fact, 73 percent of 1,000+ consumers surveyed by PwC in
February 2015 said that a combination of digital and traditional customer service channels work best in resolving an issue. Still, while speaking to a
live agent is the most commonly used channel (81 percent), satisfaction with the quality of customer support interactions varies widely by channel.
2%

3%
6%
10%

5%

5%
20%

35%
27%

28%
40%

Postal mail
or fax (n=40*)

14%

42%

43%

Retail (n=149)

Email (n=438)

4% 4%

Online chat (n=303)

2%
6%

20%

6%

8%
33%

14%

9%

21%

9%

21%

11%

16%

39%

22%

36%

16%

41%
43%

33%

Online community
forum (n=25*)

2%

21%

22%

36%

12%

34%

15%

33%

28%

Phone call with

live agent (n=819)

7%

10%

36%

45%

3%

4%

5%

Social media
(n=77*)

Automated dial-in
(n=37*)

Website (n=190)

Very satisfied

Base: Used channel in past 6-9 months

Q6C: How would you describe your satisfaction with each channel?

(Answer only those channels with which you have had direct personal experience)

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strategy resources to help organizations optimize their customer experience and realize the greatest value from their customers. 1to1 Media
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and make customer-based initiatives the centerpiece of their strategies.
For more information, please visit www.1to1media.com

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Somewhat satisfied

36%

57%

Mobile website
(n=47*)
Neutral

Somewhat dissatisfied

Mobile app
(n=31*)
Very dissatisfied

*Caution Small Base Size

Source: Customer Care Evolution: Digital Leads the Way, PwC, February 2015

inContact inContact helps call centers around the globe create profitable customer experiences through its powerful portfolio of cloud-based
call center call routing, self service and agent optimization solutions. The
companys services and solutions enable call centers to operate more
efficiently, optimize the cost and quality of every customer interaction,
create new pathways to profit and ensure ongoing customer-centric business improvement and growth.
For more information, please visit: www.inContact.com

a division of Peppers & Rogers Group

2015 1to1 Media is a division of Peppers & Rogers Group.

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