Lean Call Centre
The concept of the 'Lean Contact Centre' is our response to combating the general trend of rising contacts levels - across all channels telephone, post, email and web. If you do nothing about this increased contact demand then there will greater difficulty for customers to get through resulting in a worse customer experience, loss of business and potential damage to your reputation. A traditional response to these pressures is to seek higher productivity from your Agents or just to recruit more staff.
But do you have to treat these rising contact demands as a given. Is there not a better way?
Managing contact
Our fundamental insights are that not all customer contact is necessary and not all is valuable. Customer demand for contact does not have to be treated as a given and responded to. Some is pure waste and the goal can be – and should be – to eliminate it.
Typical examples of contact with no value to either the customer or to the organisation are:
- Progress chasing.
- Requests for clarification.
- Requests to correct errors and mistakes.
- Misdirected calls.
The underlying reason for all these calls is the organisation’s failure to do something: to do it at all, to do it right or to do it within an expected time frame. Often the root cause does not lie in the Contact Centre – it may be product design, back office performance, unclear communications – but it is in the Contact Centre that the consequences are felt.
Our response
The concept of the 'lean contact centre' is one where you:
- Know what’s happening to overall levels of contact.
- Are clear what contact has value to you and to your customers – and what doesn’t.
- Are able to measure the extent of no value contact and understand what triggers it and what the root causes are.
- Develop a strategy for addressing the root causes.
- Monitor progress and identify new sources of no value contact as they arise.
