How to select a good call centre consultant

Finding the right contact centre consultant for your business can be challenging. The reality is that contact centres are complex businesses with many different areas of specialisation.

Typically, contact centre consultants tend to specialise in particular disciplines that often reflect their professional experience and background e.g. workforce optimisation, learning and development, leadership, KPIs, automation, technology etc.

This often results in their recommendations and solutions skewed toward what they know best rather than what is necessarily the best outcome for your business.

But the truth is most contact centre operations that are experiencing challenges aren’t just experiencing a gap in one area and there is normally no one single magic bullet that will fix everything.

It’s often the result of deficiencies in many areas and like the foundations of a building, if you don’t get them right, it doesn’t matter how good your furniture inside is if the walls and roof are about to collapse at any time!

I’ve managed small and large centres, in-house and outsourced operations, public and private call centres and worked in all the different areas of the contact centre from Team Leaders, WFM, Training, Ops Management, Quality Assurance and more.

I’ve also managed the numerous internal and external stakeholder conversations that are often required in being the main centre for customer advocacy whilst always under pressure to do more with less, so I know how painful that can be sometimes!

Finding a good Contact Centre Consultant is crucial to getting the right outcomes for your business. So we really do understand how difficult the challenges are and how all the components of a contact centre need to work together to be successful.

I’m one of the few genuine ‘contact centre generalists’ in that I am able to take a truly holistic view of the contact centre operations and by doing so, I can achieve much greater outcomes than focussing on individual components.

Where additional specialist skills are required, e.g. a Workforce Planner with 20 years of experience or an Artificial Intelligence expert I can tap into those experts if, and when, required.

• What roles have you worked in a contact centre?
• What’s the most senior role you’ve had in a contact centre?
• How many years have you worked in an operational contact centre?
• What was the size of the contact centres you have worked in?
• What do you believe is critical to running a successful contact centre?
• What sector is your contact centre experience predominately based in?
• How many years have you been specifically consulting in contact centres?
• Are you actively involved in the contact centre industry?
• Can you provide customer testimonials or referees?