Whitepaper Mtel - customer contact model

Whitepaper

The Customer Contact Model The road to distinctive customer contact

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Whitepaper: Mtel Customer Contact Model The road to distinctive customer contact

1 Introduction How important is customer contact to your organisation? Is your customer contact process in good shape or do you have the feeling that it could be better? How do other organisations do this anyway? Based on our experience with the hundreds of companies and organisations where Mtel makes a substantial contribution to the customer contact process, we have established a customer contact model. It is based on a 360 degrees approach and places your customer at the heart of the customer contact process. Our consultants use the model when advising both existing and new customers. In this white paper we are pleased to introduce you to it. We will explain the various elements of the model to you step-by-step, and we will give tips and ‘best practise’ ideas, together with relevant insights obtained through consumer research recently carried out by Mtel. By following the steps in the final section you can get straight to work on performing a self-assessment. Within one hour you will see where you are up to and the steps that you can take on the road to achieving distinctive customer contact.

2 Mtel Customer Contact Model On the final page of this whitepaper (page 10) you will find the customer contact model in large format. The strength of the Mtel customer contact model lies in the fact that it enables you to see all the essential matters relating to your customer contact process at a glance:

MCCM – Customer Contact Model for: ……………………… Date:................

The Experts in Customer Contact

Quality !  Management

portal !  Reporting !  Wallboard !  Surveys !  WFM !  Recording !  QM !  KPI’s

!  SLA !  FCR !  AHT

Suppliers !  WAN !  Fixed !  Mobile !  Inbound !  IT !  HR

Customer team !  CCM !  ICT !  MT !  C-level

Process management !  Sex !  Age

!  B2B !  B2C !  Frequency

Customer profile

!  Multi-channel !  More control !  NPS

!  Cost savings !  Improving service !  Customer satisfaction

Targets

!  Phone !  Free Phone !  Premium Rate !  Corporate !  Local

!  Email !  Call-me-now !  Chat !  Social Media !  Fax !  Voicemail !  Outbound !  Website !  Counter

Channels

Contact reasons

1 2 3

Top 3

Volume

!  Target group !  Customers !  Prospects !  Suppliers

!  Customer value !  Products !  History !  (Customer)number !  Location !  Number of followers /

social media friends !  Loyalty

Identification !  Per number !  Selection menu

!  Customer-specific !  Multi-lingual !  Speed !  Male !  Female !  Generic

!  Speech recognition !  Contact form

Subject !  Proactive info texts !  Time of day !  Queue

!  Priority !  Music on hold !  Escape

!  Skills !  Overflow !  Load balancing

Routing !  Live

!  Internal !  External

!  Skill !  Overflow !  Time

!  Screen pop CRM !  Scripting

1st line !  Transfer

!  Warm !  Presence !  Screen pop

!  System !  ACD !  PBX !  Mobile

2nd line !  Registration

!  Wrap up !  CRM

!  Logistics

Fulfilment

Locations Systems

CRM ERP

ACD PBX

Knowledgebase

IVR

!  FAQ !  Transactions

Self service

January'

February'

March'

April'

May'

June' Jul

i'

August'

September'

October'

November'

December'

Phone'

Email'

Chat'

•  Who are your customers? •  Why are they contacting you?

•  What systems do you have?

•  How can you be contacted?

•  Is call routing via a telephonist or automatic?

•  What arrangements are in place for dealing with and concluding customer contact – both functionally and physically?

•  To what extent does seasonality have an influence?

•  What are your targets and what resources do you have for measuring the extent to which these are realised?

If you fill in this model together with your contact centre manager, your ICT manager and your marketing manager, you will immediately see where you are up to and the aspects that can still be improved.

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In the following paragraphs we explain the various elements of the model step-by-step.

2.1 Customer profi le In customer contact it goes without saying that it is all about the customer. But ‘the customer’ does not exist. For distinctive customer contact it is therefore necessary to distinguish various customer profiles, and to align your customer contact process to these. Wikipedia describes CRM as a working method and the associated technology in which the optimisation of all customer contact is of central importance and in which an attempt is made to offer each customer an individual value proposition, based on his or her desires. The idea behind CRM is that the customers receive better treatment to the extent that they are more important to the organisation. From research by Mtel it is apparent that the contact wishes of customers vary in line with demographic characteristics. For example men prefer to telephone in the evening, women prefer mornings, and young people prefer the afternoon. Those aged 65 and older call during office hours and those between 30 and 40 call more frequently outside office hours. Today’s technology makes it possible for you to adapt your services to the caller. Caller frustration with IVR menus is understandable, if a potential new customer also has to listen to options relating to customer service or accounting, which are irrelevant to him!

2.2 Reasons for contact Why do customers contact you? In practice many organisations have little to no insight in the contact reasons. But it is essential to know this: it will help you to avoid unnecessary customer contact, for example by clear and proactive communication in letters or via the website. Furthermore you can deal with frequently asked questions more efficiently, for example by means of self-service. A question that is dealt with automatically costs 10% of what it would cost if the question came into the contact centre. Besides this significant cost saving, your employees gain more time for complex, more valuable questions, which makes their work more enjoyable. Research indicates that above all you must be easily contactable for complaints or faults, and that someone who wants to buy something has limited patience.

2.3 Channels How can you be contacted? Nearly all organisations have a website and can be contacted by telephone and via email. Consumers indicate that the most important contact channels are telephone (82.5%), email (67.5%) and website (49%). Young people are more open to the idea of using new channels such as chat and social media. So telephone remains, for now, the most important channel. Here it is also important to think what type of telephone number you are going to use: free or paid, and a local or national feel. If you use a premium-rate service number, pay good attention to the regulations covering this: under political pressure the level of permitted tariffs is subject to ever-increasing regulation. Align your (multi-channel) strategy, amongst other things, to the reasons for contact, age, sex and region. During the orientation and sale phase consumers mostly make frequent visits to your website. When it comes to service, the telephone is the favourite. Men email more than women (76.1% vs 59.1%). Email is also used more frequently outside office hours.

!  Sex !  Age

!  B2B !  B2C !  Frequency

Customer profile

Contact reasons

1 2 3

Top 3

!  Phone !  Free Phone !  Premium Rate !  Corporate !  Local

!  Email !  Call-me-now !  Chat !  Social Media !  Fax !  Voicemail !  Outbound !  Website !  Counter

Channels

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Social media like Facebook and Twitter and mobile smartphone apps are growing strongly in popularity. Larger organisations have been active now for quite some time with these new customer contact channels. They mostly start using this from their marketing organisation. However it is very important to your customer contact strategy, for the contact history to be centrally managed. This demands close co-operation between marketing and the contact centre, and it also means centralising all customer contact channels in the contact centre as soon as possible.

2.4 Contact process: identif ication The customer contact process begins with the identification of the customer. If you know who is contacting you, you can differentiate your services accordingly. From Mtel’s research it emerges that approximately three quarters of respondents are happy to identify themselves if the services are then tailored to them. On the web, identification can be a barrier and it is often avoided. In the case of other channels customers identify themselves with their telephone number, username or email address. By matching this unique ID with your CRM system, your system can tell you who it is that is contacting you within a couple of milliseconds. Based on business rules linked to customer profile, the conversation or message can then be transferred optimally to the most qualified agent or self service. You can make use of the intelligence of a voice response system to relate the telephone number of the caller to a particular region, or to record frequency of calling. Based on this you can adapt your reachability to callers from a particular region, for example in the event of a local disturbance. You can also prioritise customers who called for the second time within one week. For instance we are seeing increasingly that a person with a lot of followers or friends on Twitter or Facebook is prioritised.

2.5 Contact process: subject If you know why someone is contacting you, you can route the question straight through to a specialist or self-service. For questions via the website this is fairly simple by linking a particular email address to the contact form. For telephone conversations the subject can be identified in three different ways: 1. With an IVR menu a caller can make a choice with the buttons on his phone, from

(relevant) options; 2. A caller can ask the question or make a choice from certain subjects, using voice

recognition; 3. A voice response system, linked to your ERP system, can predict what the subject is

based on a variety of variables. Tip: Adapt the ‘tone of voice’ of an IVR to your target group/customer profiles and tie this in with your marketing communication publications (e.g. the same voice/background music as in your commercials). From research it emerges that 40% of the category 18 to 25 have a preference for a popular female voice and that those aged over 65 prefer to hear a formal male voice (48%).

2.6 Contact process: routing Now that you know who has contacted you and for what reason, the following step is to determine how you can best answer this question from this customer at this point in time. Your starting point in doing so should be ‘prevent as many questions as possible’ and ‘assign it to the right member of staff as quickly as possible’.

!  Target group !  Customers !  Prospects !  Suppliers

!  Customer value !  Products !  History !  (Customer)number !  Location !  Number of followers /

social media friends !  Loyalty

Identification

!  Per number !  Selection menu

!  Customer-specific !  Multi-lingual !  Speed !  Male !  Female !  Generic

!  Speech recognition !  Contact form

Subject

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As stated earlier, an IVR system is capable of predicting questions. A real-time query on your ERP system may for example determine whether a customer has recently placed an order, or has an appointment today. In that case the caller is probably contacting you to find out when the order will be delivered, or to change the appointment. In both cases the IVR can automatically and proactively answer those types of questions, and can reduce the load on your contact centre agents. If a contact is best handled by a ‘live’ agent it will happen that the most qualified agent is busy. The call or email can then be temporarily queued. Research demonstrates that having to wait a long time is the main reason for customer dissatisfaction. So it is also important to reduce waiting time as much as possible, or to offer alternatives such as calling back and sending confirmation of receipt. Because the subject of the question is known, relevant information can be provided automatically while they are waiting in the queue. Consumers regard expertise amongst your employees as being the most important (50.2%) aspect of customer contact. You achieve the routing of the call to the correct agent by creating a matrix of competencies (skills) per employee, and by then applying a weighting of these amongst the personnel. The Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) function of your telephone exchange uses this matrix to achieve the optimum routing of a customer contact.

Agent name

Written Spoken Sales Service Dutch English Dutch English

Agent 1 7 8 9 9 7 X Agent 2 8 6 9 7 6 8

Based on the matrix above, a question in English about sales, received via email will be offered first to agent 1 and if he is not available, to agent 2. A question about service will only be offered to agent 2. In this case a customer will have to wait for a moment until agent 2 is available.

2.7 Contact process: 1st l ine Based on the previous three steps you have determined the most suitable agent to answer each question. All the information that has been gathered about the customer, and information about the subject, are presented to this agent’s screen just before the call is transferred, so that your employee can briefly prepare and has all the required information immediately at hand. The staff are the biggest expense category within a contact centre. In the interests of efficiency, but also in order to ensure uniform customer experience, companies often make use of ICT tools such as knowledge base and scripting. The challenge is finding the right balance between the strength of the individual and the greatest common factor. If you outsource the live handling of your customer contact this enables you not just to route contacts on the basis of skills, but also for example based on the load on your own contact centre, or the costs of external support. Cloud solutions make it possible for your own and the external contact centres to both work on the same system, so that you retain complete control of all your customer contact.

2.8 Contact process: 2nd l ine Specialised questions, or questions that cannot be answered within a couple of minutes, can be addressed to the 2nd line. When making the transfer it is important that the information that was discussed at the 1st line is known in advance by the member of staff from the 2nd line, for example by sending with it the CRM customer card. This avoids the

!  Proactive info texts !  Time of day !  Queue

!  Priority !  Music on hold !  Escape

!  Skills !  Overflow !  Load balancing

Routing

!  Live !  Internal !  External

!  Skill !  Overflow !  Time

!  Screen pop CRM !  Scripting

1st line

!  Transfer !  Warm !  Presence !  Screen pop

!  System !  ACD !  PBX !  Mobile

2nd line

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customer having to tell their story twice. Insight into the availability (presence) of the 2nd line employees is also important for dealing with the question quickly. In the interests of optimum co-operation it is best if the 1st and 2nd lines use the same ACD environment. Providers often have an interesting licensing model for the 2nd line personnel, because they make relatively less use of the system than the 1st line.

2.9 Contact process: self-service Self-service is up to 10 times cheaper than handling questions live. Besides this self-service is available 24/7. If you have a good understanding of the reasons for contact, it is easy to make the business case for self-service. In a number of cases consumers even have a preference for self-service. For reasons of privacy, for example. In the case of information on a balance, or financial transactions, a computer has an image of being non-judgemental and reliable. You can easily introduce self-service to a variety of channels, such as telephone, website and mobile apps. The dialogue, the back-end systems and the fulfilment process are fundamentally identical. The fact that multichannel self-service is little used in practice may be because many organisations have their website managed outside the contact centre. There is scope here for achieving increased return from existing investment.

2.10 Contact process: fulf i lment The customer contact process does not finish with hanging up the phone or hitting the ‘send’ button to send an email. Agreements that have been made during customer contact have to be recorded, and above all adhered to. Many organisations make use of a workflow management system in order to do this. Any appointments to call people back can be planned immediately in the contact centre application (ACD), so that they occur automatically at the agreed time. In order to achieve optimum insight and control of your customer contact it is important for your contact centre personnel to document the reason for contact, immediately after the conversation. You can help them in doing so by offering them a fixed set of options. In real-time reporting a supervisor or planner can detect a sudden increase of calls on a particular matter and can respond to this. With the help of detail from historical reporting you can determine at a more tactical/strategic level which contacts you wish to avoid, for example by introducing self-service.

2.11 Targets You will wish to manage the customer contact process just like any other process, on the basis of measurable targets. In the field of customer contact the most common targets are ‘cost savings’ and ‘increased customer satisfaction’. In order to monitor the realisation of targets you translate them into key performance indicators (KPI’s) which are measured monthly or even daily Frequently used KPI’s include: • Service level: Percentage conversations that are answered within

x seconds • Average handling time: The average duration per conversation • First call resolution: The number of conversations that are successfully concluded in one go

!  FAQ !  Transactions

Self service

!  Registration !  Wrap up !  CRM

!  Logistics

Fulfilment

!  Multi-channel !  More control !  NPS

!  Cost savings !  Improving service !  Customer satisfaction

Targets

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It is vitally important that you derive the KPI’s from your targets and that they are not mutually conflicting. Rushing to finish conversations within three minutes is not conducive to customer satisfaction.

2.12 Process management When organising the work the main challenge for the contact centre manager is working to realise even more ambitious targets, with a budget that is continually under pressure. Close cooperation between the contact centre and internal divisions such as HR, marketing and ICT, is essential for realising the targets. Besides this, supplier involvement is also important, not just in the case of trouble, but also for tips and advice. A contact centre manager often only has personal control over the deployment and the skills of his employees. For changes in the routing of applications he is dependent on ICT. The contact centre manager does bear final responsibility for the KPI’s and for the realisation of targets. Luckily more and more suppliers are offering a user-friendly management environment with which a contact centre manager remains ‘in control’. In the interests of quality-control and planning you first need complete insight into what is going on. A dashboard offers live information, based on which you can respond immediately to current events, for example by changing the routing through the management portal, or by asking home workers or back-office employees to log in. Historical reporting is essential for such things as planning, the KPI scores, measuring the effect of improvements undertaken, and coaching employees. Besides quantitative reporting you can also assess the quality of contact by replaying recorded conversations. The quality circle is only complete if you make comparisons of the conclusions from internal quantitative and qualitative reporting, with the scores from research into customer satisfaction.

2.13 Volume The way you set up your customer contact process naturally depends greatly on the number of contacts you deal with each month. In practice the involvement of ICT increases in line with volume. Easily accessible SaaS/cloud solutions ensure that advanced technology is also available now for contact centres with a relatively low volume. Each organisation experiences peaks in the number of customer contacts. These are often disastrous for your service level. It is important that your organisation and infrastructure are sufficiently flexible to deal with this, without this leading to inefficiency or unnecessarily high costs. A good analysis of the reason for peaks may well prevent this, or help you to anticipate them better.

2.14 Systems As in every process, supporting ICT systems also exist for customer contact. Many of these systems were once developed in order to be able to work more efficiently, and to be able to monitor quality. Because these are important issues within contact centres, many suppliers have appeared who are able to offer this. Traditionally these are software solutions which are installed at your premises. The biggest challenge is in integrating the various systems, keeping

Quality !  Management

portal !  Reporting !  Wallboard !  Surveys !  WFM !  Recording !  QM !  KPI’s

!  SLA !  FCR !  AHT

Suppliers !  WAN !  Fixed !  Mobile !  Inbound !  IT !  HR

Customer team !  CCM !  ICT !  MT !  C-level

Process management

Volume

January'

February'

March'

April'

May'

June' Jul

i'

August'

September'

October'

November'

December'

Phone'

Email'

Chat'

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the various versions up-to-date, and having the flexibility to be able to scale up and scale down capacity and functionality. In The Netherlands Mtel was the first to offer contact centre software in the form of a service (SaaS), in 2007. Today a broad range of IVR, ACD, PBX and CRM applications are available in the cloud. These types of SaaS solutions are offered as a one-stop shop in some cases, with a single contact point and a single SLA. Your ICT organisation is in this way relieved of many of its concerns and your contact centre is in possession of the latest technology with optimum flexibility.

2.15 Locations Many organisations have come into existence as a result of mergers or takeovers. This has frequently led to a multiplicity of locations and systems. But it can equally be a strategic choice to spread contact centre employees over a number of regions, for example in order to be closer to the customer, or due to availability of talent. But on the basis of traditional on-site systems a widely dispersed contact centre is nevertheless difficult to manage. The advantage of a modern in-the-cloud contact centre solution is that the physical location of agents is no longer important. In a virtual contact centre you can create skill groups which span different locations. Personnel can simply log in at home. A great advantage is that you can now add skills for which you previously were unable to offer continuity, because only one or two employees with certain skills were available at each location. By getting these employees to work together virtually, this is now possible.

3 Getting to work with the model Distinctive customer contact needs to be based on a structured process, supported by smart communication solutions. This is a combined effort between the contact centre, the marketing division and ICT, in partnership with your suppliers. The Mtel Customer Contact Model supports you in this process. It is intended to inspire you and to set you thinking: where are we now and where do we wish to get to? What concrete steps can we take in order to achieve our objectives? It goes without saying that the person who is responsible for customer contact must take the initiative for the project. In most cases this is the contact centre manager. Organise a meeting with those having final responsibility for all the relevant departments, and make sure they have read this white paper by way of preparation. Complete the model together. Begin with the customer and end with the targets. In approximately 1 hour you will be able to see where you are up to and the things that could be better. You will find the customer contact model in large format on the last page (page 10) of this whitepaper. Would you like to talk about the model beforehand? Then contact one of the Mtel business consultants via +31(0)88 428 31 11. They will be pleased to help you to fill it in. Good luck!

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4 Company profile Mtel, the Experts in Customer Contact For all businesses, institutions and government bodies that depend on the faultless, efficient and effective processing of customer contacts, and are looking for professionalism, reliability, but also peace of mind, Mtel is the Partner for building up and extending customer relationships. We distinguish ourselves by a proactive approach and tailor-made solutions based on high-grade technical products, applications and services. Over 20 years of experience With over 20 years of experience and hundreds of customers, Mtel possesses the business and technical expertise to realise reliable, scalable and flexible customer contact solutions. Mtel handles approximately 20% of all the incoming telephone traffic in the Netherlands, which represents approximately 80 million customer contacts per year. Total solution Mtel offers a complete portfolio of ICT telecoms services, with which you can manage and monitor your customer contact. We provide these services in a SaaS model. And we can integrate them simply with your existing infrastructure. Satisf ied customers In our services, everything is focused on the customers of our customers. It is essential that they can contact you, and also that you can contact them. The basis of all this is optimum customer contact. Mtel has a tailor-made set of communication tools for each member of personnel. In order to produce this we have defined a large number of standard profiles, from account manager to contact centre employee, which work together seamlessly. If your reachability is well organised and you have complete control of this, you can offer a distinctive customer experience via our IVR services. By recognising your customer you can adapt your services to the individual. A bad payer is put directly through to administration and a ‘gold’ customer is connected to his personal contact person. Achieve more with your customers By analysing the use of your product or service at customer level you can offer your customers suitable advice, with the accompanying advantage that this often generates cross selling and up selling opportunities. For example you can advise your customer by email that their guarantee is due to expire, and offer attractive terms for extending it at the same time. Savings Besides increasing customer satisfaction and improving efficiency, you can also realise significant cost savings with our services. We provide our services from the cloud, which means that Mtel provides complete technical management. You only pay for what you actually use, both in terms of quantities and functionality, and you profit from very favourable call tariffs.

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Kralingseweg 233-235 3062 CE Rotterdam The Netherlands

t +31(0)88 428 31 11 f +31(0)88 428 31 13 e [email protected] i www.mtel.eu

The Experts in Customer Contact

Whitepaper Mtel - customer contact model

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