Alignment is Critical to Customer Experience Success

 

Keep your Employees Happy

 

Top Industry Secrets for Successful Contact Center Scripting

 

By Colin Taylor

[This post was adapted from a webinar that Colin Taylor delivered for Customer Contact Central on September 8, 2022. You can see the replay here while available: https://www.customercontactcentral.com/frs/22041151/top-industry-secrets-for-successful-contact-center-scripting/email]

When we think of a script a number of things can come to mind: The Cambridge English Dictionary defines it as both ”the words of a film, play, broadcast, or speech” and as “a piece of paper on which a doctor writes the details of the medicine or drugs that someone needs” (in other words, a ”prescription’”).

My experience with scripts may go back to my education in TV and Video. In the call or contact center context, however, it goes back to the 1980s when I worked with advertising agencies and was responsible for about half of all of the telemarketing scripts employed in Canada.

What do we exactly mean by Contact Center Scripts?

• Scripts attempt to set out an ”ideal’” path to success on the call: a sale, a resolved inquiry, or a closed case.
• Scripts can be verbatim (or word for word) or they can be guides.
• Scripts can keep the messaging and communications from the call center consistent and accurate.
• Scripts can also shorten call length as they follow an efficient flow or path.
• On the negative side, canned responses and robotic delivery make customers feel that the organization doesn’t value them enough to have a genuine conversation

Scripts have been around as long as contact centers. They set out an ”ideal’” path to success. Scripts try to make it easy for the agent. For example, legal compliance requirements may mandate that verbatims be read, word for word, hence the use of a script. The aim of a script has always been to assist and help the agent. Today’s technology has enabled many enhancements, automation, real-time guidance, and agent assist capabilities, such as real-time sentiment READ MORE    

FCR, and Real-Time Guidance

 

Taylor Reach recently helped to sponsor the ContactBabel Inner Circle Guide to FCR (First Contact Resolution). This comprehensive report provides insight into the current state of FCR and will prove to be a valuable tool as you examine your FCR practices within your customer-facing contact centers.

You can download the ContactBabel Inner Circle guide to FCR https://thetaylorreachgroup.com/the-inner-circle-guide-to-first-contact-resolution

Lastly, I recently did a webinar on scripting and real-time guidance for Customer Contact Central. If you are interested you can access the recording here https://www.customercontactcentral.com/frs/22041151/top-industry-secrets-for-successful-contact-center-scripting/email

Understanding your Contact Center Costs: FCR

 

By Colin Taylor

Contact centers are always striving to improve efficiency, increase customer satisfaction and deliver a superior customer experience. Technology is frequently the strategy employed to achieve this goal. While technology can certainly support improvement in all three areas, improvement can also be realized through increasing First Contact Resolution or FCR.

FCR is a contact center performance metric that identifies the center’s ability to resolve an inquiry on the first attempt. While not a true measure of customer satisfaction, as the customer is not always asked if they are satisfied, or if the interaction met their need, it is nonetheless indicative of satisfaction for both your customers and your agents.

Whenever anyone reaches out to a contact center, they are looking to get “something done.” Completing that “something” to the satisfaction of the customer is resolving the reason for the inquiry. That is why contact centers exist, to resolve questions, issues, and inquiries. Those who can get what they want to get done, on a call or interaction will tend to be more satisfied than those who don’t. So, the higher your first contact resolution rate, the higher the satisfaction levels you will tend to see from those customers.

There are a number of ways to measure FCR. The simplest READ MORE

Advanced Contact Center Metrics: Speed to Competency

 By Colin Taylor

Having their best agents poached by other departments is a common refrain from contact center operators. These center leaders do not have any issue with upward mobility of their staff, in fact they likely support it as it offers the opportunity for advancement within the organization which can be a motivating factor.

No, the reason for the lament is simple math. New staff cannot perform at the same level as experienced staff. We all know intuitively that it takes time and attention for new staff fresh from their onboarding to mature into competent agents. Heck, when an agent graduates from training they are about as poor a performer as you will find. They are barely adequate to perform the role, and this is a far cry from the competent staff we are asking them to replace. It will take time, training, coaching and support to assist the adequate agent to complete the journey to competent.

“Competent” we would define as the point where agents are independent, require little support, perform well in all metrics.

There is a cost to the center to replace an experienced agent with a newbie who 
READ MORE

Taylor Reach NPS Score +100

 

By: Colin Taylor

Customer Satisfaction is critical for the success of any organization, and Taylor Reach is no different. Each member of the team strives to delight our customers and exceed their expectations.

To gauge the satisfaction of our clients we employ a customer satisfaction survey and all of our clients are asked to participate and complete a survey.

The results we achieved so far in 2016 have blown us away… our NPS[1] score is an impressive +100, a perfect score! This score is truly remarkable as “a Net Promoter Score of +30% is truly excellent” for B2B firms according to Deep Insight. Circle Research has indicated that score of +35 is the top quartile of all B2B NPS scores.

Thank you to all of clients that participated in this survey. We are delighted and honored to have our customers give us this vote of confidence. We will continue to work hard to earn and retain your trust and patronage.

Colin

October 7, 2016

UPDATE:

It has been almost 6 years since I published our attainment of a perfect 100 NPS score. Since then a lot has changed in the contact center customer service and customer experience industry, we have seen the pandemic drive work-from-home, technologies that we could only imagine in 2016 become realities in 2022. 

But one thing hasn't really changed....Our clients still love us, since we began tracking NPS in2015 our scores have never been below 88, and as of today stands at 91!

We appreciate our client faith and trust in us. We appreciate the positive NPS score and know that this score reflects their satisfaction with our services and with the positive changes and improvements that they have been able to achieve with a little help from Taylor Reach.

Colin

September 15, 2022

[1] Net Promoter® and NPS® are registered trademarks and Net Promoter System^SM and Net Promoter Score^SM are trademarks of Bain & Company, Satmetrix Systems and Fred Reichheld

via The Taylor Reach Group Inc. http://ift.tt/2dky994

Understanding Your Contact Center Costs: Training

Sometimes it seems inevitable that every time a budget is approved with funds allocated for new, additional, or improved training, something occurs and the training is the first thing removed from the budget. We have heard this refrain many times over the years. From the perspective of senior management, Training looks like a safe place to cut:

“We will be no worse off by cutting here than were are today.”

I would agree that this statement is true. However, if you are bleeding, staunching the wound might be a better approach than the status quo of continued bleeding.

Training, coaching, and personal development must be viewed as an investment. Only seeing the cost side of the equation is a common blind spot. It is not about the upfront cost; it should be about the downstream benefit.

Typically, when we think about the cost associated with new agent onboarding training we think of the trainer, the training room, the students being trained, and the cost of each of these. The Trainer for...
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Understanding Your Contact Center Costs: Attrition

A recent report from Gartner[1] referenced the cost to replace a frontline agent at $14,113. We have seen similar figures when working with clients. A major municipality that we have worked with, shared that their cost is just over $10,000. While this cost seems high, it is likely too low. When we look at the cost to replace an experienced agent we must include costs that arise in four major categories:

1. Recruitment & Hiring costs
2. Training costs
3. Lost productivity costs
4. Reduction in quality costs / Potential revenue (there is also potential to damage organization reputations but for now we are only including the internal costs).

Recruitment costs include the cost to place or post the position, human support to review applicants, the time it takes to administer any assessments or tests and the cost of the tests themselves, candidate interviews, background, and criminal checks, drug tests, etc. There are then the hiring costs, setting up a new employee into your systems, acquiring licenses, registering them in the benefits program, etc. This cost varies by organization, some employ more automation than others and some may complete this process largely internally while others outsource the entire process. Our research has shown that a reasonable estimate of this cost is...READ MORE