Contact Center Leaders are continually being pushed to improve processes, decrease cost, increase customer satisfaction, and improve sales or metrics. Understanding the best path to follow, with the fluidity of the contact center industry, can be a daunting task.
In this article, we will provide a summary of many situations where a Contact Center Consultant could provide immense value.
Bring in Expertise – Wealth of knowledge
Although you are the expert on everything about your company, center and customer, an outside consultant can bring in expertise on industry best practices for a variety of workstreams.
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Employee retention and engagement
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Onboarding and Training
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Performance Management
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Workforce Management workforce Optimization
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Quality Assurance
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Knowledge Management
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Agent Motivation, recognition, and gamification
Idea Generator – Sounding Board
You have a problem and do not know where to start? A consultant can be a sounding board for ideas. They have experience across many centers and industries and can either present quick solutions or listen to your ideas and provide feedback on what you might expect.
Identify Gaps or problems – Find the Problem
Consultants conduct full 360 reviews of your contact center. They review all workstreams to determine gaps from industry best practices and provide full readbacks on the gaps along with suggestions for improvement and roadmaps to success.
3rd Party Perspective – View from the outside
When you always do what you have always done, you can expect the same results. By bringing in a consultant you have access to a fresh perspective that is objective looking at your operation. They bring ideas for change that you may not have considered and can provide guidance on bringing in the new best practices that align with your organizational goals and vision.
Promote positive change – Catalyst for change – create a solution
Consultants are expert change agents. This is what they do. They identify the need for change, produce a plan of action for change and work with your team to promote the positives of the change. By following industry best practices on change management, consultants ensure a more comprehensive adoption and acceptance of changes needed to produce significant improvement.
Mergers/Acquisitions
Merging two organizations with different cultures and visions is a significant task. Consultants bring in a neutral perspective on processes, technology, and people to ensure your organization is stronger post-merger.
Downsizing/Layoffs
No one likes to downsize or layoff coworkers. A consultant brings a 3rd party perspective that make certain the right people stay and the right people go. Additionally, the consultant takes some of the negativity with them after they leave.
Move to home-based agent program
Moving from in center to work from home agents requires expertise in how to set up a work from home program that brings in best practices around training, performance management, WFM/WFO, quality assurance and coaching, technology, communication. culture, motivation, incentives, and employee engagement. There are well over 120 workstream affected when you move agent’s home. A work from home expert can process the change and training needed for success.
Understand technology
Contact center technology seems to change every day. Moving to Omni or multi-channel support, moving to the cloud (CCaaS), QA and call recording, WFM/WFO, speech analytics, customer relationship management (CRM) artificial intelligence(AI), machine learning(ML), self-serve, gamification, reporting behavioral analytics, business intelligence, integrations between technology… there is almost too much to know. Bringing in a consultant allows you to be educated on the functions and features that are available. More importantly, they can help determine what technology would benefit you the most.
Bring in new Technology
There are hundreds of contact center technology providers and picking the right one can be a challenge. A consultant works with you to create requirements documents that assess priorities for both functional and non-functional requirements. Many have experience building RFP’s that align with your goals. Finally, they create decision guides that categorize and compare all vendors based on features, functions, architecture, and cost, which allow you to select the right technology partner.
Implementation of technology
When you are bringing in new technology there are many things you may not be considering, like how to set up, how to roll out and how to manage. Consultants guide you through the process, ensure you set up the technology to integrate with other technology, optimize the performance of your center and align appropriate resources to ensure the right people are part of the implementation team.
Improve Performance
Contact Center leaders are always being pushed to do more with less. Performance improvement processes are a continual battle. Consultants understand industry best practices for performance improvement and can bring in best practice and train your leadership and staff on how to maximize performance.
Leadership Development and Training
Consultants are experts in many areas. Bringing in consultants to supplement your internal training can produce significant results. Consultants provide several training modules including:
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Leadership training
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Quality Assurance and Coaching
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Managing a remote workforce
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Personality Leadership
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Moving from Peer to leader
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Instructional design
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Adult learning methodologies
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Knowledge Management
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Workforce Management and Optimization
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Maximizing technology
Short term leadership – Supplement Staff – Capacity Issues – Lack of Internal Resources
Contact Center Consultants can provide supplemental support to your leadership during growth, significant change or during interim periods between leaders.
Migration from cost center to revenue center
In the continual drive to do more with less, more contact centers are moving from being a cost center to a profit center by moving from pure customer support, to a sales focused center. Consultants can bring in ideas and best practices on how to migrate from pure customer care to sales, including how to set it up, how to communicate the change to be positive and how to train your team to the new normal of your profit center.
Summary
Suffice it to say contact centers have significant challenges. Bringing in an outside expert to help facilitate change can make your job much easier, improve performance, decrease costs, and provide a positive impact to the agent experience and customer experience.
Eric Berg is a CCNG Academy member with a consultant focus on Contact Center Technology and Work at Home. Eric has been in the contact center industry over 25 years and is founder of ContactCenterPRO Consulting.
