Continuous improvement

Continuous improvement

Marginal gains

The British success at the Rio Olympics was put down in part to the pursuit of excellence – always striving to find that extra 1% to improve performance and then investing to achieve those marginal gains. In contact centres the same is true – developing a plan for success and then acting upon feedback to make the small changes that matter.

Factors to consider

The digital service environment lends itself to an agile approach – making a series of incremental improvements that have the Customer Experience as its guiding star.  It is really important therefore that the contact centre acts as the eyes and ears of the organisation (not just the voice) in identifying customer issues and trends.  A process is required to be able to share this information with key stakeholders – such as the propositions team and digital development team – so that improvement ideas can be identified and impact assessed.

Three methods that can be used to develop these senses include:

  1. Customer contact logging and MI – to provide an evidence base to able to qualify and quantify the improvement opportunity and also to track the realisation of benefits after an improvement has been implemented
  2. Test and learn – many improvement ideas will be dependent on customer behaviour in response to the new customer process or online design and this will require the ability to adjust the change ‘mid flight’ in order in respond to the reality of how customers use your online services
  3. Collaborative team working – so that technical development communities buy-into the customer rationale for making a change and are able to visualise a design solution looking through a customer lens.

These approaches need to become part of the culture of how customer service in your organisation can add value to the digital proposition. It is an integral part of changing customer behaviour, so that overall digital service completion rates go up at the same time that contact volumes into contact centre down.

A true win-win for both the customer and the business – ask MCX to show you how.