Transforming Customer Experience

Supercharge Your Technology ROIBill Pieper President, EPIC Connections & Tom Cardella CEO, TLC Associates

About EPIC Connections

Founded in 2003, EPIC Connections, Inc. is a

global professional services company

focused on delivering optimal contact center

solutions and ROI for clients by engaging

the best talent, at the right time, with

effective tools and processes.

With over 300 successful contact center

engagements, our clients include Fortune

500 companies in healthcare, financial

services, insurance, retail and government

agencies.

TLC Associates offers a unique combination

of experience and expertise in the ability to

manage a variety of inbound, outbound,

email, and web chat programs.

Named an IQPC Call Center Leader of the

Year and Best Outsourced Provider in 2013,

TLC Associates operates in a “no-excuses”

environment and is dedicated to delivering

the best ROI for our clients’ campaigns.

About TLC Associates

What We’ll Cover

o Why look at process first?

o Avoid the “process pitfalls”

o Low hanging fruit: rehab for the most common processes

o EPIC’s prescription for healthy process improvement

o Case study: TLC’s Workforce Optimization implementation

o Q and A

Your Turn to Share

How many of you have recently

deployed or are planning to deploy

new contact center technology

in the next 6 months?

Why Process First?

o Overlaying new technology on top of outdated operational processes can lead to headaches

o A solid foundation enables you to utilize the technology to its fullest

o Success is based on people, process and technology

o The combination will drive meaningful ROI uplift

Workforce

OperationsTechnology

Avoiding the Pitfallso Skilling and Routing

• When was the last time you took a serious look at the way calls were routed based

on agent skills?

• If you are like most, you started with a list of skills and routing methodologies

when you last implemented a new platform

• Then you added to those skills over time based on new products/services, hours

of operation, regulations, language requirements, etc.

• Now you have hundreds of inefficient or broken routing processes

Blindly automating broken or ineffective processes can impact churn, CSAT and a host of other KPIs!

Avoiding the Pitfallso Self-Service

• Most contact centers create IVR scripts and forget about them.

• IVRs should be measured regularly to determine containment rates and where

customers are opting out to talk to one of your expensive agents.

• A cautionary tale:

• A group healthcare company that offered claims status self-service was experiencing less than

10% adoption, compared to 43% adoption in their industry.

• They implemented the IVR years before, did not implement technology updates and only added

new scripts without ever modifying existing scripts.

• This caused cumbersome navigation with customers opting out to get their claim status.

Would you lift and place bad, old scripts onto a new IVR platform?

Avoiding the Pitfallso Workforce Optimization

• 5% - 15% improvement in workforce efficiency can be realized through effective

process definition and tool utilization

• A workforce management tool only satisfies one fifth of the requirements for

effective WFM. The remaining 80% lies in the processes that are implemented and

followed.

• Key challenges:

• “Our forecasting seems close, but we can’t meet our SL goals consistently”

• “Why are our schedules not driving better results?”

• “It seems like we’re constantly pulling people off the phones just to put them back on again”

Are we using our tools to best benefit our operations and customers?

Is There Such a Thing as Low Hanging Fruit?

o Redesign reports to support day-to-day agent operations

o Increase call monitoring and coaching

• Focus on agent empathy and proactive willingness to meet callers’ needs

o Perform in-depth reviews to identify key requirements for new hires

o Upgrade training, hiring standards and agent qualifications

o Establish closely managed Workforce Management cycles

o Create monthly reviews that include both call center and operations managers

Another Audience Moment: Multichannel?o By show of hands, how many of you offer your customers three of the

following? Four of the following? Five of the following? All of these?

• Live Agent Voice

• IVR

• Email

• Chat

• SMS/Text

• Social Media

o How did adding channels affect your processes?

Doing it Right: Large Financial Services Company

CHALLENGE• Missing and non-integrated technologies

• Prolonged call handling time due to call transfers

• Operating model not sustainable long-term

SOLUTION• Enabled vast improvements in work flow and process management, agent efficiency,

schedule adherence, and customer self-service

• Skills based routing sends calls directly to collections agent best suited to handling the call

• Cloud platform allowed for scalable growth or shrinkage

RESULTS• Reduced duplication of call handling procedures

• Significant increase in productivity per agent

• Increased manager effectiveness

• Net savings of $1.9M by the third year

Process +

Technology =

ROI

Our Prescription for Process Improvement

oHarvest that low hanging fruit

• Reporting

• Speech Analytics

• Quality Assurance

• Dual monitors

• WFM

oBest practices and industry benchmarks

oDon’t set it and forget it! Tuning and tweaking matters

oKnow your true cost of operations

Transforming Customer Experience

A Real World StoryTom Cardella CEO, TLC Associates

A Cautionary Tale: Implementing WFO Without Process Rehab

CHALLENGE

• Forecasting and scheduling web-based retail client volume using outdated Erlang-C calculations in spreadsheets.

• Increased cost due to manual forecasting & scheduling.

• Increased recruiting, training, and management cost associated with overstaffing to handle volume spikes

• Low employee satisfaction due to manual break scheduling, inconsistent schedule updates & shift bids

• Frequent periods of both high queue and low occupancy in the same shift.

SOLUTION

• After shopping around, signed contract for WFO software package; set training, integration, and implementation time lines.

• Sent key management through WFO training; scheduled follow up training for front line staff to be conducted by key management prior to full implementation.

Sounds too simple? It was!

It’s a common trap that many technology buyers fail to recognize.

RESULTS

• Initially positive - reduced WFM overhead, increased efficiency through automated break scheduling.

• Within the first 2 months, poor foundational processes were exposed:

• Key management, having been busy with day-to-day concerns while going through training, missed fundamental training items. Front line management training suffered as a result.

• Lack of agent level education led to poor adoption rate of new break/scheduling procedures and increased front-line management time spent enforcing schedule adherence

• Issues with the underlying assumptions/variables in the WFO system cropped up rendering the output unusable.

• End result: we temporarily had to revert back to manual processes.

• We are now the re-starting implementation schedule from scratch with lessons learned.

A Cautionary Tale: Implementing WFO Without Process Rehab

Our costs: $60K that could have been avoided

• Upgrading software solutions offers the opportunity to increase ROI

• Increased workforce efficiency

• Reduced management cost

• Increased performance via skill based routing.

• But if done wrong, it will only exacerbate existing shortcomings and increase operating costs

• Address basic operational flaws first

• Fully understand the process and procedure changes needed for effective and sustainable use

A Cautionary Tale: Our Advice

Sample Social Media Slide

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