Angela looks after a large contact centre in a prosperous area of Nottingham. Angela has many competing demands on her time from looking after her young family to keeping her 700 staff happy. The trick is having the right team in place to support the highly variable workload in her multi channel contact centre and back office. Absences, holiday periods and the Christmas and Easter peaks are times to forget and simply a nightmare for Angela.

Angela and her organisation are passionate about treating their customers well but business can be very demanding indeed and the merest hint of good weather or a new sales promotion can send her contact centre into meltdown. So, Angela needs her finger on the pulse at all times. Angela’s stress levels correlate almost directly to the colour on her dashboard – low customer satisfaction and the red lights on her dashboard glow constantly.

Angela prides herself on having a good feel for the business and she works tirelessly to keep her staff motivated and her customers happy. In her highly competitive marketplace, staff retention is a constant challenge and the last thing that Angela needs is time consuming and expensive recruitment campaigns. Especially, with ever increasing recruitment agency fees.

Balancing the workload across the various contact centre and back office teams used to be an art form but now that job is relatively straightforward. Today, ensuring that all her agents are properly utilised is the major challenge because although Mike her MD understands Angela’s situation, he preaches that the business must balance service level demands with controlling the cost base. Whilst he believes passionately that customers are important, profit targets rule Mike’s life.

So like most of her CCA peer group, Angela is focused on the competing business challenges of looking after her people but fulfilling the highly variable workload created by her colleagues in sales and marketing. Luckily, Angela does not have to worry too much about compliance and regulatory control. Complaints are few and far between thanks mainly to Colin and his excellent operational processes and systems.

How numero helps Angela

The key to managing Angela’s stress is information at her fingers tips and having an effective operation in the call centre and back office to improve utilisation and efficiency.

Some of the ways numero solutions help Angela include:

Providing up-to-the-minute, accurate management information to allow Angela to manage and control all her large teams even when demand is sudden and unexpected; the dashboard and exception reporting keeps Angela and her supervisors constantly appraised of the workload across her operation; the automated quality functions allow Angela to work by exception

Making it easy for her team to answer a contact and immediately resolve the query first-time by automatically providing all the information an agent needs to handle a enquiry in one simple screen

• Ensuring that agent screens and systems are easy to use and operate; agent satisfaction means less staff turnover and simple-to-use systems minimise staff training
• Routing the contact intelligently and automatically to the most relevant team and team member to resolve first time
• Reducing the inbound contact volumes:
  • By keeping customers fully informed at all times through automated outbound proactive messaging – reducing inbound calls
  • By having systems that allow customers to help themselves through email, web and SMS
  • By linking all customer contacts into a single experience so that Angela’s agents know when customers have been in touch before irrespective of how or by what means; having all the information in a single form avoids wasting lots of time with the customer establishing the background to the contact
• Keeping customers happy through a personal and unique approach; Angela’s staff have information on all aspects of the customer’s journey at their fingertips; this makes her team look informed and knowledgeable to her customer.