Contact Centre & Call Centre Health Check
More than ever, the contact centre is becoming a critical business function managing customer enquiries, complaints, sales orders, technical support functions and more just to name a few. Those critical functions are also coming with increasing complexity with contact centres requires skills across technology, people management, stakeholder management, process design, workforce management, customer journey mapping and more.
And now we’ve got COVID to deal with resulting in agents working remotely or across numerous locations adding another new layer of complexity.
Yet for most call centres, key personnel have either evolved from working on the phones or perhaps from another part of the business with little understanding of how a contact centre works. Whilst some or all of your calls may still be being answered, the call centre may still be a long way short of being efficient and effective and not contributing to the overall business strategy.
With decades of real-world experience (actually managing a contact centre) and winners of numerous industry awards, our call centre health check (aka call centre assessment or call centre review) is designed to provide you with independent, expert advice on all or part of your contact centre operations.
In short, we’ll identify real, practical opportunities to improve your call centre operations – we’ll tell you what you are doing well, the areas you need to improve in (including industry benchmarking) and provide you with a roadmap on how to get from A to B.
A call centre health check is perfect for:
✅ Getting independent, expert advice on specific components or all of your contact centre operations to improve efficiency and effectiveness.
✅ Getting a clear roadmap on how you can improve your operations.
✅ Understanding how your operations benchmark against best-practice and industry norms.
✅ Identifying any roadblocks that are preventing your contact centre channel from achieving their objectives.
✅ Receiving guidance on new technology and optimisation opportunities including moving to multi-channel operations (e.g. emails, live chat, SMS, Social Media etc.
Why our call centre assessments are different
Contact centres are deceptively complex business units. To be a successful call centre manager requires skills across a range of different disciplines including people management, workforce management, performance management, process design, establishing the right Key Performance Indicators, technology design and execution and so on.
But it’s even more than that.
The contact centre also needs to be aligned with the corporate KPI’s and objectives so strategy, stakeholder management and of course, being the customer advocate all play a key role.
Both Justin and Derek have decades of real-world experience from starting on the phones through to senior executive and industry leadership roles and it’s this insight, being able to see things through multiple lenses, that makes them unique in the call centre consulting marketplace.
Those decades of experience enable us to provide you with a comprehensive, holistic review of your contact centre. We aren’t interested in trying to pad out our consulting engagements, conduct extensive and time-consuming analysis or try and sell you programs that will take months to implement or lock you into long term consulting arrangements.
In fact, we are typically able to complete most Call Centre Health Checks within a few days whilst still providing you with sufficient analysis and a clear roadmap so you can make informed decisions beyond our consulting engagement.
If you need copious amounts of data analysis and a nice big report we can do this for you as well, but we typically find most of our customers are happy with our analysis and a report that presents the key findings without all the fluff that you ultimately pay more for.
We speak your language!
If you’re new to the contact centre and customer experience (CX) industry it can often sound like everyone is talking a different language. ASA, GOS, AHT, Erlangs, Conformance, Adherence and so on are just some of the over 150 acronyms, abbreviations and slang that is used within the industry.
And we would know as we literally wrote the glossary! You can check it out here >
With Justin and Derek both holding senior positions including CEO, Chairman, COO and so on the good news is though that they also speak your language!
They’ll act as a great conduit between your operational teams where they can ‘talk the talk’ and then break it all down and explain it in clear English so it makes sense to someone not as familiar with the industry.
Call Centre Review Focus Areas
Prior to commencing, we will conduct an initial planning session with you to understand your current pain points and enable us to tailor our Health Check to ensure we focus on the areas the matter the most to you. As a general guide, the following areas would typically be included:
Targets & KPIs
We’ll review your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) against best industry practice and provide recommendations to ensure your KPIs are supporting your business objectives.
Efficiency
We’ll identify ways you can improve your efficiency to reduce costs or free up resources to handle an increase in capacity.
Reporting
We’ll review your reporting and dashboards to identify opportunities so that you can better understand your data and use it to manage key stakeholders and drive business outcomes.
People Capability
We’ll identify the skills and capability of your frontline team and leaders and provide guidance on how to improve them.
Customer Experience
Our experts will uncover opportunities to improve your customer experience, leading to higher customer engagement/net promoter scores and ultimately, a better bottom line!
Processes
We’ll review your existing processes, and identify ways to improve efficiencies and customer experience.
Technology
Contact centre technology is moving at an extraordinary pace! We’ll review your existing technology and provide recommendations to ensure you are making the most of the technology on-hand.
Stakeholder Expectations
We’ll gain insight from your key stakeholders into their current experience and future requirements.
What happens during the call centre health check?
We tailor every Health Check to ensure we deliver the best outcome for your business. Our standard framework typically includes:
Customer Testimonials
For PEXA, the experience our members have with the system is paramount so when our user-base increased rapidly, it was critical we had the right processes in place to support the industry through best practice methodologies and systems. We know for many of our members, their concerns are time-sensitive so our first priority was ensuring access to our support centre in the most time-efficient way.
We engaged CX Consult to conduct a health check on our support operations and provide a holistic view of what we were doing well, and where we could make quick and critical improvements. We’ve since implemented a number of the recommendations made and wouldn’t hesitate in recommending CX Consult to other firms looking to lead the market in the support they provide.
– Heather Crichton, General Manager Member Success, PEXA
Justin Tippett and the team from CX Consult have been a pivotal part in the transformation of our call centre department which was initially very business-centric focused to now, a high performing call centre team who understands the value of the customer experience.
We were impressed at how Justin took the necessary time to first listen and understand our business needs and our pain points, without making any prior assumptions to how we should improve. Justin’s comprehensive initial ‘health check’ process resulted in establishing real evidence-based call centre solutions that aimed to solve our current problems, yet ensured constant alignment with our overriding business vision and strategies.
Justin has supported our company all the way through our call centre transformation process including frontline and leadership training and he continues to offer ongoing support which is a testament to his professional, client-centred consultation approach.
– Tim Green, Manager, Commercial Capability, Philip Morris
We engaged with Justin and CX Central to unpack and health check our call centre operations and service team. This enabled us to identify and reinforce areas of strength, supported business cases for improvements and to also make some immediate efficiency changes.
Justin’s knowledge and expertise was exceptional providing many learnings across the Customer Management team in best practice and industry standards. We were able to streamline a complex call centre system enabling staff efficiencies and high level reporting, Justin providing the insight and expertise required offering ongoing support.
In addition to streamlining of business operations, the suite of development and training sessions offered by CX Central complimented the work with the team including customer experience and interaction training. Well received by the team and implemented into day to day practices. The Customer Experience course was enlightening and not only was the learning insightful it was refreshing to spend time with like-minded individuals.
Justin has made a significant impact on the Customer Service operations aligning with strategic priorities, a pleasure to work with and I highly recommend the services available.
Katrina, Manager Student Engagement, The Gordon
Some of our previous customers:
Frequently asked questions
How much time do you need to spend on-site at our call centre?
No two health checks are the same and we will tailor our call centre health check to ensure we meet your key objectives.
The advantage of having decades of industry experience in managing contact centres, however, does enable us to quickly identify key pain points and opportunities.
As a general rule though, the larger the centre or the more depth you need in the report, the more time we need.
Will you provide an overview or hone in on a particular area?
We can do either, so we’ll work with you on defining the key outcomes in our initial planning session before we provide you with our health check proposal.
How do you present your findings?
We can either send our report findings to you or we can present our findings to your key stakeholders.
Are you able to conduct a Health Check remotely?
With the emergence of COVID-19 it’s not always possible to conduct our consulting on-site, especially if you are running at-home workforce. Whilst we’ve found in the past the best results are obtained by seeing and experiencing your centre in full operation, we can still provide effective consulting from a distance using Zoom conferencing, Skype etc, reviewing data, remote listening to live calls and connecting remotely to your call centre software where applicable.
Are you able to conduct your review discretely?
We understand that for a range of reasons there may be a high level of discretion required in reviewing your contact centre operations. We’re used to working with businesses to disclose as much or as little as required and have a number of methods we use to do this. If this is of particular concern, please let us know and we’ll address it before we begin.