DISASTER PROOFING YOUR BUSINESS

We have all had to re-imagine our business models with the arrival of COVID-19. Those industries that rely on being the person on site - service providers like hairdressers, event related industries like wedding and entertainment venues - have had limited options other than to try to hibernate and survive.

Many other businesses have re-examined how they work and shifted much of their work online. Recently we have been challenged to get a simple Statutory Declaration signed in a locked down city. Contract Managers and lawyers are re-examining how this can work in practice, at least for the time being.

Even with a vaccine we can expect many work practices to change. Medical advice suggests multiple vaccines are needed and that they might cover only 75% of people. Many of us have found working from home offers some work-life balance dividends and reduces the carbon footprint of our businesses. It's not all bad.

Pandemic also highlights the importance of your business supply chain relationships. Who can you trust to make arrangements for your changing needs? Who has enough disaster recovery redundancy in their business to support you when you can't be on site? Who can augment your business processes?

Well Done International Pty Ltd is a provider of critical contact support services. We have already invested in virtualised systems and support for our clients and a National Distributed Network operating from three states to meet a service uptime KPI of 99.9%. 

Clients have been consistently able to contact us and make arrangements through this unfolding crisis. We've handled all calls 24x7 for Councils that had to close down as bushfires roared through their local government areas. We've have covered switchboards as our clients have moved their staff to remote worker arrangements. We've helped Clients cover alerts, alarms, GPS welfare monitoring, emails, and Customer Care with digital platforms and outbound follow up.

Our decentralised and virtual operations are a natural defence to illness at one site or failure at premises. We have adapted to the new business conditions and are here to help. 

It's a lot easier than you might think. Contact us on 1800 935 536 or make an enquiry at https://www.welldone.net.au/contact.php to find out how it could work for you.

Way of the Champion - expert tips for Success

Lisa Curry MBE, AO, Olympic, Commonwealth and World Champion swimmer, won 24 gold, 21 silver and eight bronze swimming medals representing Australia 16 times over 1977-1992. Lisa would have to be the very definition of sporting success. It was utterly rewarding to hear her speak frankly about her life and the nature of success at the #cssummit #customerservice National Local Government Customer Service Network annual conference at the Gold Coast earlier this month.

Lisa (centre) with Well Done operational staff (L-R) Kellie and Liz

Noticed at a young age at the local pool, Lisa was invited to join a swim squad. Inspired by Shane Gould world record breaking performance and three gold medals in 1972, she trained hard, followed all of her coach's instructions precisely and quickly generated outstanding results. By 1974 Curry was the fastest 12 year old female swimmer in the world and went on to compete at the Olympic Games in Moscow (1980), two world championships (Berlin in 1978 and Ecuador in 1982) and the Commonwealth Games in Edmonton in 1978.

Competitive swimming was conventionally held to be a young person's game at this time, and one reason why Shane Gould retired at 17. Curry questioned this and, bucking the trend, made Olympic come backs after bearing children not once, but twice, to swim for Australia in Los Angeles in 1984 and again Barcelona in 1992 when she was 30. While Lisa obviously had natural ability in this sport it was clearly mental focus that kept her in the top 25 swimmers in the world for the duration of her career since age 15 and helped her ignore critical comment going into big races.

The question is, what can a champion like Lisa teach us mere mortals? 

Lisa's honesty and emotional were appreciated by our audience. She also talked about handling failure, and eventually turning this around with her competition surf boat racing team. Too engrossed, I can't relay the biographical detail but I can report what I thought about later arising from what she said. Consider this...

Do you have a goal or an interest? Competitive sport doesn't reward mediocre. Commitment in this context is training every day, not flaking out if the weather doesn't suit.

What are you prepared to do to achieve your goal? You really have to consider all aspects of your life - personal and professional - to make the adjustments needed to reach your potential. Is it worth it? Do you want it? Are you prepared to commit?

Goals are about priorities. Goals help us prioritise the myriad of tasks that wash over us daily. They help us set course and tack back to where we want to go.

It's not about the winning, it's about getting there. The day after you've won gold and the congratulations have been made, you move on. It's really about appreciating progress and what sort of person it makes you. This is really where our resilience comes from, if you think about it. 

I doubt that there was one person there that didn't take at least one powerful lesson home - be they carers in their personal life like me, professional trainers, managers or aspiring newcomers - whether this was a personal goal, a review of work-life balance or a startling new business initiative. 

In some ways, Lisa is quite uncompromising, and this clearly sets her apart. However, if we are less so, and do compromise, it is worth doing so consciously with our eyes wide open and not by default.

The real costs of handling your calls

A recent blog in UK newsletter Call Centre Helper by Carolyn Blunt, Director of Real Results Training, highlights some real choices for businesses - http://bit.ly/1I5NgO4 This blog is written for companies managing their own customer care teams, but when you consider the role of an outsourced contact centre partner like Well Done, it becomes more complex.

Businesses usually hope to reduce the Average Call Handling Time (AHT) of their calls to reduce their costs, but this can be counterproductive if you…

(a) Lose the customer or prospect or

(b) Fail to address the problem and force the customer to call back.

Outsourced call centre providers come under this pressure from clients to reduce handling times and costs all the time, so productivity is a key focus across services.However, industry best practice now suggests that the better approach is to consider the Customer’s Experience. Many corporations are taking the opposite tack to bringing down AHTs. Instead they are providing online tools so that customers mostly don’t have to call and, for those who do call, forgetting about reducing the AHT and focusing on resolving the customer problem so that they will be happy with the service and not have to call back.

Refreshingly, Blunt suggests that in some cases, however, we can address BOTH costs and the customer experience. Simply, she suggests that we think about the impacts of reducing AHT or redesigning the process journey from the customer’s point of view.

For example, reducing AHT is great for customers if this reduces their wait time, so the question we need to ask ourselves instead is ‘what can we do to help with this from the customer’s point of view?’

You may come up with your own answers, but how about:...

• IVR routing to help you push calls to different answer points so that simple calls can be handled quickly (this could even be an answering service role) and perhaps customers may be prepared to wait a little longer for complex support?
• Considering what can you do to improve the process for customers? Streamlined processes help reduce AHT, too.
• What about your systems? Is there an easy link on your system to pull up the customer’s details so that less needs to be checked during the call? Web based systems are best - Virtual Private Network (VPN) and remote log in systems slow handling times dramatically in an outsourced contact centre environment.

Your outsourced call centre provider often isn’t party to this discussion and ends up handling the brief given to them, which isn’t ideal. At Well Done we prefer to see us both working as a team, so don’t be wary of asking us for an opinion!

SOCIAL MEDIA AS INNOVATION

At the recent LGPro Social Media Conference in Melbourne we received a mind-boggling overview of Telstra's social media marketing paradigm from their Executive Director Communications and Chief Social Officer, Jason Laird. (All credit to Jennifer Bartlett at Red Rebel Communications for organising this.) This presentation became the back drop to all discussion that followed on the theme 'Transforming the way we do business.'

In recent years apparently Telstra decided to use its very scale to its advantage in social media, encouraging all 32,000 staff to use their networks to put out the word across an array of the company's brands. The reward for doing this might be a donation to their local preschool, for instance. Each store now also has its own facebook page. Some use this well, some don't. Telstra is running a numbers game and fielding enough horses in the race is part of the strategy. Most of us would worry about the risk management this approach involves, but Laird described mis-use of social media as a performance management issue like many others. Of those 32,000 only one person has been dismissed following misconduct, and in their view this particular incident could easily have happened on other channels instead. Tellingly, half of Telstra's customer interactions are digital and the rate of increase shows no sign of decline.

Various sessions at the conference looked at uses of social media in local government to meet key objectives - support disaster coordination, provide responsive customer service, promote events and services, engage people in decisions about their communities, give a human face to organisations and promote community spirit in local areas. Generally the people responsible for social media in local government juggled multiple roles and responsibilities and either monitored their channels on an unpaid volunteer basis after hours or not at all.

In some ways the concluding panel session was the most interesting. We considered the known facts, trends and threats:

• Volumes of social media interactions will increase dramatically as more of the general public (and particularly young people) elect and expect to interact online with organisations; 
• Social media is an opportunity for a conversation without media intermediaries; many Councils are releasing information on their facebook pages rather than via traditional media releases for this reason;
• Posting information online is cheaper than newspaper advertisements or home letter drops and is a viable alternative in many instances;
• We may need to rethink business processes as well as people go mobile - links to submit online are more user friendly than paper forms;
• Social media engagement can be immediate and measurable;
• Social media can allow extended conversations around complex issues and help Councils make better informed decisions;
• Social media can be more effective in engaging particular audience segments (e.g. the young) than traditional channels
• Social media communication is best harnessed with a whole of organisation approach, a diversity of voices and open two-way communication with audiences; 
• To do nothing leaves us at risk of irrelevance and mediocrity.

It was a classic innovation dilemma. In this room full of social media practitioners, who was really prepared to let go of control and invite others, perhaps many others, in their organisation into the inner sanctum to post, tweet and respond to the general public? Best thinking indicates that we need to encourage everyone in our organisations to be leaders and nurture innovation. But at the top, we are risk averse and hesitate to let go.

It's a massive cultural shift to be willing to open the agenda to new possibilities, try new approaches, admit the possibility of failure, develop what works, and move on. Some of the younger people attending were quite pragmatic about this, advising that it's OK to make a mistake because it's ephemeral - the discussion moves on in a day or so - just don't 'hurt the brand'. For the older and more risk averse this is a new frontier with new rules, but even most savvy social media practitioners attending were reluctant to release control (even with appropriate user guidelines). We were all put on the spot and left to wonder if, how and why we could open these channels more to others, given the signposts we'd seen in the course of the day.

CUSTOMER SERVICE DRIVES THE SWITCHERS

Research undertaken by independent research company Opinion Matters over 4-14 April 2014 with a sample size of 2,004 adults in Australia is worth considering for any business. We have to thank contact system provider NewVoiceMedia for bringing this research to our attention.

10 key questions were asked. The key responses revealed the following...

Switching providers

•   58% have switched to a different business as a result of poor customer service. Of this group, there was no gender difference and the reasons given for switching were, in order:

-        46%: Didn’t feel appreciated as a customer

-        38%: Staff unhelpful and rude

-        32%: transferred too many times

• Of those who switched, the average spend over a year for the product or service in question was $807; extrapolated to Australian consumers overall, this equates to $8 billion per year

Waiting to be answered 

• People hated being put on hold, but we were surprised how long people reported that they would wait:

-        19% said that they were prepared to wait up to 5 minutes and 52% would wait 5-10 minutes. 

-    Generally women were more prepared to hold than men, and surprisingly, those aged over 55 years were less patient than people in the 16-24 age group.

-        The most impatient were 15% of women and 23% of men, who indicated that they would hang up within 5 minutes of holding.

 Does Good Customer Service win Loyalty?

• About three quarters of all age groups reported that they would be more loyal, or actively recommend a company that provided good service to them.

Which Communication Channels were preferred?

• At 59%, calling was the most popular channel for communication with a business, ahead of email (32%) and social media (12% cited this as most effective). 
• However, there were generational differences with this; 26% of those aged 16-24 believed that social media to be the most effective means to resolve an issue, with Facebook being the favoured social network for interacting with business.
• Even so, when it came to obtaining the quickest response, the ratings changed again, with 73% opting for telephone over email (16%) and social media (3%).

We think that there is one other thing that businesses should consider with this research. Most people responding to this survey were probably thinking of their interactions with larger businesses. We might settle in for a 40 minute wait to speak to someone at a large organisation, but we won't wait anything like that for a small business. But what happens if your line is busy? 

Most of these large organisations have sophisticated queuing systems to encourage people to wait. If you have one line into your business and it's busy, what's your fall back? This is where a well briefed answering service could be of value. You need only overflow your calls during business hours to ensure that you need never miss a call. 

The research above looks mainly at switchers - the existing customers you stand to lose. What about the ones you never get as well? What percentage of your calls are new sales enquiries? If you divide the number of sales enquiries by your advertising and marketing budget, you can arrive at a very real cost of obtaining each sales enquiry - and this is before you even work out the average value of each sale that you land. Very sobering!

Well Done is an Australian owned and managed contact centre provider. To find out how to get a reception service us with us - anything from a simple message service to complex support - call Well Done on 1300 551 796 or make an enquiry on our website at http://www.welldone.net.au/contact.php We would be pleased to discuss your business requirements and quote.

IVR Worst practices to avoid - best practices to adopt

IVR stands for Interactive Voice Response systems – the automated voice options you often hear when you call large organisations. Call Centre Helper is a very useful British industry newsletter. It recently posted an article on what NOT to do with IVR based on advice from a galaxy of industry experts. To turn this around, let’s consider what is the right thing to do if you are considering an IVR component to your customer service delivery...

The first lesson is that what works for one company or purpose won’t necessarily work for you, so your first question must be why do I want an Interactive Voice Response system? Often the scale of the client’s operations is the determinant. Here are some common purposes we encounter at Well Done:

1. Urgency - The simplest purpose clients want an IVR for is to choke off non-urgent enquiries after hours. Is this an emergency? Hell, yes, many will decide - and proceed to talk to our agents anyway, but the question will deter some and you can still provide good customer service to those who proceed … An IVR like this could also send your callers to different skills based queues on our systems – one for simple enquiries, and another for complex enquiries requiring escalation.
2. Function – some clients direct particular calls to a contractor so they don’t have to handle them; some want to be able to direct enquiries to different trained staff. Some clients sift the easier work and send this to us so that their experts can handle the more complex enquiries. Some clients send calls to different answer-points on our systems based on IVR responses on their systems (e.g. entering their postcode, or selecting an issue). With an IVR you can have one national number but still control your call routing.
3. Cost – sometimes the simplest questions can be answered perfectly well with an IVR response at a minimal cost. Bill paying by credit card is often handled this way by larger organisations.
4. Service – you may be able to provide better service through streamlining enquiries; wait times for high volume queues requiring simple assistance can be dramatically reduced through IVR streaming of calls. People will be more prepared to wait to discuss a complex matter with an expert, or be happy to leave a voice message for a call back from this team rather than wait.

Secondly, the IVR experience should add value for your callers, so it’s worth considering the customer’s experience first, and then review the performance to check that everything is still working as it should down the track.

Bearing in mind that most smaller organisations won’t want more than 1-2 options for an IVR and that it’s really only large organisations with high call volumes that will push the limits, we ask:

What’s annoying and not useful for your customers?

• Long waits coupled with the same On Hold message; if the wait is longer, some apology or reassurance doesn’t hurt.

• Overly long descriptions of options, too many options; IVRs should siphon off the main reasons people call to streamline and improve the customer experience;  2 -5 options is really as much as I’m prepared to negotiate, with the most important ones first!

• If you ask me to enter my phone number or account details via keypad, use them. I expect that you will have these in hand when I speak with you, particularly if you are a very large company, yet this often doesn’t happen…

• Odd multiple voices, dull voices, machines that tell me to have a good day … Make sure your voice artist can be contacted to update options; it’s annoying to get multiple voices on the one line (it’s one conversation as far as I am concerned). Choose a voice that matches my idea of what your company stands for, and preferably one that sounds helpful and clear, not dull and officious. Keep your language simple and oriented to my needs. Keep the greetings and pleasantries to an acceptable minimum – I know that I am interacting with a computer, not a person.

• Not rewarding the time I spent calling you… Don’t send your customer back where they came from; make sure you provide more service or information. If the option selected is to hear specific information then don’t provide more than one level of IVR options beyond this; for example, at this point I might appreciate the option of speaking to a person. If you’re closed, tell me first up, not after I have gone through the IVR maze. (This can be done through the time context of your IVR messages.)

• Giving me no option to interrupt an instruction or speak to a person – afterall, I called you for help! There was conflicting advice from the experts on this one. It’s true that many will opt to speak to a human being and perhaps defeat some of the efficiency of having an IVR, but looping people through options that aren’t helping is a sure way to antagonise. 

• Asking me to do something I can’t understand on the keypad.  For example, most people don’t know how to enter ALPHA information into an IVR (you need the * key entered to do this); if you have a complex interactive IVR database behind your system, try to configure it so that all keypad responses can be numerals only. Keep it simple – lots may be going on back at the home-front to distract me!

At Well Done we can code simple IVR options within our system. Often these are announcements that have a time context once your call enters our system. Complex sequences may require database application development, or your 1300 number provider may be able to code your IVR routing so that calls of different kinds can be pointed to particular diversion-points on our system. We can discuss the handling of those calls that you decide to route to us. It’s wise not to consider IVR options in isolation. They are but one channel in your communications with customers, and it’s best to consider the total customer experience when planning your service.

How Are They Being Served?

The general wisdom being reinforced in Customer Service thinking now is that best practice is to respond to customer requests where possible using the same channel the customer has used to contact you (be it phone, email, social media or web enquiry) and to make the customer experience consistent across all channels. The expectation is that the cost of maintaining additional channels will be offset by cost reductions in self-service interactions and increased business won or retained; this particularly makes sense for larger businesses that can afford enterprise level software to automate these processes and specialist teams for service roles. 

KANA recently put out a post with an infographic to present the key findings of an APAC research project led by Independent Customer Service Analyst, Esteban Kolsky. You can download this file here.

As a software heavy weight with the enterprise solution to support this trend, it’s no surprise that KANA has gone to the trouble. It emphasises the continuing trend of customer service delivery to be moving across channels to web self-service (both PC and mobile) and social media, and provides a staggering statistic, that while email ranks number 1 aequal with telephone for customer service interactions, 4 out of 5 emails sent are not received! Significantly, however, over 50% of interactions are still happening by phone. This isn’t surprising to us at Well Done. 

Voice is still a great way to gauge if people are taking you seriously, understand what you mean or determine whether this is an organisation that you want to continue to deal with. Even on websites where we provide the option of streamlined self-service commencement, almost everyone wants to chat before setting up.  And don’t we all make the call (however inconvenient) when we have a tricky issue with a telco or utility rather than try to remember another log-in, trust an email or write a letter? For immediate results, a two-way telephone conversation is hard to beat.

This is also where a well scripted Live Call Answering Service can be a great way to leverage your firepower in the office at a fraction of the cost of employing staff. Well Done is an Australian owned and managed Customer Service Contact Centre Specialist company. We can answer your phone 24 x 7 and, with a robust set of FAQs in hand, we can handle many of your routine enquiries on the spot and free up your team to focus on more complex work. 

On a WebAssist Service, we may also be able to log credit card payments to your website or log into your systems to handle more complex service enquiries.

If you would like to learn more, please contact us on 1300 551 796 or make an enquiry on our website. We’d love to help.