Rosetta Carrington Lue Contact Center, Crisis Management, Customer Experience Management

5 Crisis Management Strategies for Contact Centers

I recently created a post noting government leaders are increasing the inclusion of the 311 non-emergency contact center operations into their crisis emergency communications strategy and reaching out to the media to advise the public to call the 311 contact center operations during catastrophic events.

The benefits of driving the public to contact 311 for customer support allow the city’s 911 centers to focus on active emergencies, ensures consistency and accuracy of messaging and provides real-time data and stakeholder reports identifying the public’s concerns or complaints trends.

Stephanie Thum, the founder of Practical CX, reached out to me to for an in-depth interview on best practices guidelines for leaders to incorporate in preparation for or during a crisis.

Here’s the link to the interview: Contact centers during crisis: An action plan from experts

Rosetta Carrington Lue 311, Business Processes, Connected City, Connected Customers, Customer Experience Management, customer service, Government Customer Service, Performance Management, Strategy, Technology

A Best Kept Government Culture CX Transformation Secret

C62DDEAF-89F9-41A8-8C1B-0C6ADE18727A-2862-000001F129B41E38The Secret? Implement an Organization-wide Department Customer Experience Officers (DCXO) Program
 

When trying to implement a customer experience transformational strategy across an organization, you can expect many hurdles to arise which could slow down its implementation at various levels within the organization. Some examples of these hurdles are departmental processes, individual leaders or a change-averse culture. Thus, for a strategy to be completely adopted, you need to elicit key stakeholders to drive it forward.

Government leaders should consider creating an innovative Department Customer Experience Officers (DCXO) program within the organization to help drive customer experience management strategies and activities. The program should be centralized, managed, and budgeted out of the Administration’s Customer Experience Office (CXO).
 
The Department Customer Experience Officer (DCXO) program should align perfectly with the Administrative Customer Experience Office, led by the Chief Customer Experience Officer, based on their managerial responsibilities and oversight since the primary duties of the Chief Customer Experience Officer role are to:
 

  • Provide a single vision and a consistent customer experience across all methods of access is required by customers

  • Design and support key activities and projects to support the customer experience throughout the organization

Launching a departmental Customer Experience Officers (DCXO) program as a customer-focused strategic initiative allows a Department Head to select and appoint the employee to act as a liaison between the Chief Customer Experience Officer and the Department Heads. Over time, participation in the program will provide each Department Head with a trained “customer experience expert” to work directly with their staff on customer and employee engagement activities, such as the development and validation of key performance indicators, implementation of customer journey mapped process re-engineering projects, or enhancement of the employee engagement programs.
 
During the Department Customer Experience Officers Training Program, the Department Customer Experience Officers (DCXO) will learn, research, and create documentations which are unique to their department or function:

  • Customer Experience Vision and Mission Statements

  • “Voice of the Customer Program” Process to Identify and Prioritize Customers’ Needs and Wants to Improve Service Quality

  • Customer Experience & Customer Service Training Program

  • Customer Feedback and Engagement

With this model, each trained Department Customer Experience Officer (DCXO) can provide department-specific customer/employee insights and articulate evidence-based recommendations to help the Administration’s customer experience transformation strategy survive and succeed throughout the organization.
While it might seem that this approach might create a fragmented customer experience initiative across the organization, it is the responsibility of the Chief Customer Experience Officer to make sure their deliverables are consistent and aligns with the Administrative strategic level plan.
 
What’s noteworthy are the Department Customer Experience Officers (DCXO) can be involved in the yearly Customer Experience Office customer experience strategic plan review and give valued feedback throughout the customer experience transformation implementation journey.
 

What programs do you currently have in place to ensure the organization is executing your customer experience plans and initiatives?

Rosetta Carrington Lue 311, Business Processes, Connected City, CRM, Customer Experience Management, customer service, Government Customer Service, Performance Management, Strategy, Technology

Is Your Government Contact Center ISO Certified? Why Not!

CX is critical for customer and employee engagement so knowing the current state of CX is important. Many organizations don’t do this, don’t know how or cannot afford to do so for time and cost reasons.  How can this be resolved?  Get your government contact center a prestigious designation with the ISO 18295 certification.

What is ISO?  International Standards for Organizations (ISO) International Organization for Standardization develop and publish International Standards. International Standards make things work. They give world-class specifications for products, services, and systems, to ensure quality, safety, and efficiency.

Why an ISO 18295 certified is important for government contact centers? 

  • Measure productivity in service delivery across all of the government.
  • Apply consistency of benchmarking data, performance metrics, digital engagement, staff training, and technology to access customer experience results with other government customer contact centers.
  • Create value for the customer, the community, the employee, and customer contact centers.
  • Deploy strategic tools that reduce costs by minimizing waste and errors and increasing productivity.
  • Improving the efficiency of the service and the client or customer contact center relationship.
  • Demonstrates that you have an effective quality management system in place and firm control over your processes and procedures.

Zainuddin Hussein, Chair of ISO/PC 273, the project committee in charge of ISO 18295 (Requirements for Customer Contact Centers), said it considered and addressed many customer concerns when developing the standards, such as waiting times, means of contacting the company and customer experience expectations.

“The committee established that there are already some regulations and national standards present in some countries,” he said, “and our research showed that where they were implemented, customer satisfaction improved.

“The new standards bring together international best practices that can improve the service offering and customer experience even more, while also providing a framework on which future national standards can be based.”

ISO 18925 International Organization for Standardization specifies requirements and gives guidance for in-house contact centers and outsourced contact centers. It is intended to be used for any customer interaction with a Customer Contact Center (CCC).

This standard can be applied by organizations both in-house (captive) and outsourced (third party operator) Customer Contact Centers of all sizes, across all sectors and all interaction channels, including inbound and outbound. It specifies performance metrics (KPIs) as and where required.

Key global principles in standard development for contact centers:

1. ISO standards respond to a need in the market
ISO does not decide when to develop a new standard but responds to a request from industry or other stakeholders such as consumer groups. Typically, an industry sector or group communicates the need for a standard to its national member who then contacts ISO.

2. ISO standards are based on global expert opinion
ISO standards are developed by groups of experts from all over the world, that are part of larger groups called technical committees.

3. ISO standards are developed through a multi-stakeholder process
The technical committees are made up of experts from the relevant industry, but also from consumer associations, academia, NGOs and government.

4. ISO standards are based on a consensus
Developing ISO standards is a consensus-based approach and comments from all stakeholders are taken into account.

How do you get started to become certified and accredited to meet the ISO 18295 contact center requirements?

Many companies hire a consultant to get outside help to manage the certification process. With the right preparation and a good understanding of what is required for ISO 18295:2017 certification, most organizations can expect to achieve certification within 3 to 6 months depending on their size and complexity.

Rosetta Carrington Lue 311, Business Processes, Communications, Connected City, CRM, Customer Experience Management, customer service, digital innovation, employee engagement, Government Customer Service, Local Government, Performance Management, Strategy, Technology, user design, website

Using Human Centered Design for Government Digital Transformation

Let’s be clear about my position – government will better serve all stakeholders by establishing a focus to oversee the design and implementation of a human-centered design-centric digital strategy.

The Business Case for Using HCD:

  • Streamlines, integrates, and scales websites and call centers consistently over time,
  • Takes a holistic, iterative approach to prioritizing improvements across channels,
  • Maintains a mobile-experience first philosophy (people seeking information often use mobile devices first because they want information immediately, or rely on mobile exclusively because it is what they can afford),

Digital Customer Experience Values and Benefits:

  • Uses clear, concise, and consistent language and messaging across all channels,
  • Identifies and responds to key touchpoints in a stakeholder’s journey,
  • Establishes a feeling of trust by providing consistent experiences across channels to different stakeholders, and
  • Firmly focuses on the future by laying the groundwork to integrate social media and emerging technologies in later phases of the project.

I am a staunch believer and GovCX Practitioner who understands leading a human-centered design change initiative requires vision and broad oversight to bring stakeholders, products, technical processes, and communication into alignment.

Jane – Typical Government Customer:

For example, picture Jane, a retiree who needs help. She goes to one website on her phone to get information fast, but it doesn’t help. Later she visits another site on her laptop and can see it better, but finds additional information, organized in a new way, and described with a different language.

Jane doesn’t know what to do or trust, so she tries a call center looking for a person to talk to instead. The wait times are long because so many others are having the same problems. When she finally gets through, the call center staff wants to help but they talk about services and options in yet another way.

Jane is distressed by her experience across siloed channels. She encounters disconnected technologies, has to translate between different language use, and finds that information is inconsistently organized or even offered to leave her frustrated and miserable. The call center staff who takes her call can hear that misery as it overflows into their conversation making the staffer’s job harder, the call longer, and both the financial and emotional costs higher for both.

Each time Jane’s journey plays out for another taxpayer or call center staffer, taxpayers lose confidence in the government agency and increase the costs of call center operations.

A single focus and oversight for government Contact Centers and the internet presence is a logical first step towards an improved Customer experience. Needed research must be conducted across channels and changes prioritized coherently across all platforms to maximize results. If the system is not treated as a whole, customer experience will continue to be fragmented and frustrating no matter how many isolated improvements are made over time.

A seamless experience requires a consistent approach to technological solutions, human needs, and organizational responses. The goal is to inspire taxpayer confidence and government efficiency by making it easy to start with a website, reach out to a call center if needed, and then complete tasks on the web when they are ready. In the future, integrating social media will increase responsiveness and better serve millennials and future generations.

A robust online database of Frequently Asked Questions can enhance customer experience based on insights from web analytics and call center topics. Web analytics and the call center knowledge management technology can be used to identify frequently accessed data, searches that come up empty, and how often users access particular information. In-depth interviews with call center personnel can shape resource allocation and better prepare them to address complex situations since the basics are covered in a searchable database.

Starting with aggregated website and call center data creates a solid foundation for human-centered research to address persistent pain points across channels then effectively design and deliver satisfying stakeholder experiences.

What if Jane went to a central website and found the basic information she needed quickly and easily? If she still wasn’t sure what to do in her situation, she could reach out to a call center. When she did, her wait time would be shorter since more people were finding what they needed on a streamlined easily searchable site that highlights frequently asked questions. Jane wouldn’t be so upset when she connected with a staff member, her questions could be answered more quickly, costs would go down, and Jane would regain confidence in the government agency. Later when it worked for her schedule, she could fill out any required forms on the website and get immediate confirmation that they were submitted. Now when Jane talks about the government agency she shares her experience. I get help when I need it, I get things done on my schedule, and I trust that the government agency has my back.

Conclusion

Integrating processes, products, services, and content in an organization like a government agency takes time, vision, and leadership. Consolidating oversight with the right vision offers the best possible chance to successfully transition the taxpayers to a coherent seamless experience.

About me: I am a pioneer in the field of Government Customer Experience Management and have devoted an entire career to bettering the lives of everyone around me through my work. I am right at home as the CEO of GovCX Professionals where I am able to spend all my time focusing on establishing government and their partners with a building a welcoming, innovative, and engaging government customer service experience.

Rosetta Carrington Lue 311, CRM, customer service, digital innovation, Government Customer Service, Local Government, Performance Management, social media, Technology

Celebrating 311 Day in Government

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In 2002, the City of Baltimore, led by Director Lisa N Allen, was the first city in the country to launch 311 as an intake center for all service request and requests for general information from citizens and visitors. Over the years, many cities and counties have modeled Baltimore’s 311 and have implemented 311 call centers internationally.

On March 11, 2019 local governments of all sizes are using this date – 3/11 – to showcase and to celebrate how they are using 311 and centralized contact centers to provide a coordinated and seamless approach to service delivery.

For many communities, contact centers have become the face of government to the public. With the implementation of 311 systems, digital and civic media, and apps which allow the public to make service requests and enables direct interact with government officials, local governments are setting new standards for customer/community participation.

I encourage city, county, state, and federal governments that are using 311 and centralized contact centers to use March 11 (3/11) as an opportunity to promote your efforts to provide for responsive service to the public.

Rosetta Carrington Lue customer service, employee engagement, Government Customer Service, Performance Management, Strategy, Technology

Improving customer experience to enhance performance in government

 

What could happen if government viewed certain public sector challenges through the lens of customer experience? By changing the way people interact with a process rather than focusing solely on the process itself, agencies can broaden the range of available solutions.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www2.deloitte.com

“The experience begins the moment a customer contemplates buying a book, and doesn’t end until she’s finished reading it and, if it’s really good, recommended it to her friends.

Customer service, on the other hand, is narrowly focused on the actual transaction of buying the book only.”

Rosetta Carrington Lue Business Processes, Customer Experience Management, Government Customer Service, Uncategorized

Using Lean Management & Human-centered Design to Improve Government Customer Experience

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Lean Management is a customer-centric methodology used to improve the current business process by using the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control) technique. Following the DMAIC blueprint will provide organizations insight into what the actual root cause problem is by measuring and analyzing various data sets, and developing process flow maps to understand the “as is” state.

• Define: Understanding the problem through the outputs of the human-centered design research

• Measure: Measure data pulled from the contact centers

• Analyze: Analyze and determine the cause(s) of the defects (understanding the waste).

• Improve: Improve the process by eliminating defects (unnecessary steps, decreased wait times, and shorter scripts)

• Control: Control future process performance (governance through new policies and procedures)

The lean approach focuses on increasing taxpayer value by improving the processes associated with delivering high customer value. Using the problems defined through the human center design research will point government in the right direction to which processes it needs to begin to hone it on. The problems government thinks are pertinent, may not be relevant in the eyes of the taxpayer. The contact center, being one of the first touch points for a taxpayer, can be reengineered to run more effectively and efficiently by making the internal workflow of calls leaner. The “as is” process map is the starting point to improving services because it visualizes the current process allowing for a clear picture of evident breakdowns in the process.

Defining the problem with the contact center and understanding the process is one piece to the puzzle, the ability to measure, analyze and improve based on the data collected is a critical component to developing sustainable, scalable solutions. Analyzing the various data sets will allow designers to identify areas of waste in the process, ultimately improving the experience of the taxpayer while simultaneously decreasing internal costs for government. Often than not, the government will tack on more employees and additional resources to a problem that can be easily solved by redesigning the process to work more efficiently. The desired outcome is to develop a solution that will be sustainable for government and taxpayers in the future and not a stop-gap solution for today.

Improving how calls are routed, improving the verbiage in the scripts, shortening wait times, and upgrading data collection platforms are all interlocked in improving the taxpayer’s experience when interacting with the contact centers. The one common denominator for all this to be successful is data. Data will allow leadership to understand the pain points in the process and begin to take a proactive approach in improving the taxpayer’s experience. Lean methodologies break down each component of the process to ensure the internal value stream is being utilized effectively to increase customer satisfaction. Human center design thinking is instrumental in providing lean management with accurate taxpayer problems to lay the framework for business process improvements across all facets of the contact center.

Rosetta Carrington Lue Communications, Customer Experience Management, social media

8 ways Social Media has changed Customer Service

by Silky Sinha, on Tue, May 26, 2015

Social Media has completely changed the face of customer service and the way consumers interact with a brand. Instead of dialing the call center number and going through the pain of dealing with agents with little or no knowledge of their problems, customers prefer to post their issue on Facebook or Twitter that earns them immediate response and their queries are solved within a blink of an eye. Companies have nowadays started focusing on omni-channel customer service to serve their clients and potential customers on their preferred channels, hence driving effective customer engagement.

Below, I have explained 8 ways social media has changed customer service. Let’s go through them one by one.

Customer Interaction has Gone Public Now

Many Customers no longer prefer to call the customer service and have a one-to-one interaction with the representative to get their problems resolved. Instead they want to share their problems on online platforms especially social media. The companies can’t afford to hamper their brand image in public forms like these and needs to take immediate action to solve the problem which also gives them the opportunity to demonstrate how helpful and highly responsive they are. This will definitely create a positive impact on potential customers by showing that you take care of the customers at real-time and that you are very proactive.

According to a study, more than 60% of consumers have already engaged in a customer service transaction using social media. There are both challenges and opportunities for companies here.

Customers Choose their Medium of Communication

There are still many companies who don’t handle customer service on social media. This is really alarming as most of the customers are now choosing social media platforms to interact with companies. Even if the company has all the other channels for customer service, they might suffer and lose their customers to the competitors.

Customers have Plenty of Options Today

If you do not take care of your customer’s issue as soon as possible and fail to provide a good customer experience, then you are surely at a risk. Your customer will not take much time to find a viable alternative to your company. All your competitors are present on social media and social networking will lead to your customer switching to your competitor.

Customer can Make or Break a Brand’s Reputation Easily

In a matter of seconds, customers can ruin your company’s reputation by writing a complaint on your Facebook page. Reputation management has now become a core part of customer service over online mediums and companies will have to take care of it without delay as customers want immediate results now and are not willing to wait. Regular social media monitoring can help companies in managing their reputation well.
Companies can Deal with Multiple Customers at Once

Tackling customers over phone, requires a lot of time as each customer take his/her own time to describe their situation to the contact center agent. However, with the emergence of social media, customer service reps can handle multiple customers at once and can easily deal with customers facing similar issues by posting the solution on a public forum.

Companies can Leverage Social Media Influencers to Build their Brand

Connecting with social media influencers allows you to increase awareness of your brand, create brand advocates and increase online reputation. Maintaining good and lasting relationship with these influencers will provide your company with an opportunity to improve site ranking, gain more followers and eventually become a social media influencer. They can help you in many ways. By writing a good review about your product they can influence many others to purchase your company’s products. If they share a news about your company on social media, it will definitely help in improving your brand’s reputation.

Companies Can Announce Policy Changes Instantly

In the past, companies had to take out advertisements in newspapers to deliver mass messages to consumers about any change in their customer service policy. But things have changed now with social media coming to light. Company can post the changes on social media and will take seconds to spread among their clients.

Customers can Easily Help and Support Each Other

The moment you post a question or a problem or ask for advice, your friends and colleagues instantly reply after seeing the post. Even if somebody is not known to you, but has some knowledge about your problem or has himself facing the same issue, would come to your rescue and support you in reaching out to the company.

Rosetta Carrington Lue Business Processes, CRM, Customer Experience Management, Strategy, Technology

Return on Investment (ROI) Model in Government – Does It Really Exists? Maybe…

The question of how government can track the success of profitless projects comes into question on a regular basis. It is easy to follow a dollar. Money leaves tracks, but how does local government leverage private practice metrics to better inform future projects and practices?

Non-profits use a different measure of value to reflect a more impact-centric formula to measuring ROI. Monetizable outcome and value have taken command of the popular imagination, yet motivation, beliefs, and ethical practice are equally important, and have defined value in the public sector. Regardless, the bottom line is investment creates more investment.

According to a 2008 report from the ROI Institute, and comprehensive measurement and evaluation process data from over 200 organizations, “Global trends in measurement and evaluation” indicate “increased focus is driven by clients and sponsors,” and “ROI is the fastest growing metric.” These two factors demonstrate that increased focus for an organization is directly impacted by the return. Impact can easily be interchanged with the public sector’s definition of value.

The relationship between return, and exterior financial support, points to an across the board paradigm shift between all sectors. Activity is no longer sufficient evidence to justify activity. Activity–whether it is a program, a project, an initiative, or the creation of a product–must be result based. In this there is a need to abandon ambiguous performance measurements, forge more social partnerships, and use efficient CRM systems that capture data. With this paradigm shift, we see government adapting to result based processes.

Dr. Jack Phillips and Patricia Pulliam Phillips note in their review, “Using ROI to Demonstrate HR Value in the Public Sector: A Review of Best Practices,” that ROI methodology is currently being used in the public sector in a multitude of ways by entities like the USA Veterans Administration, Australian Department of Defense, and U.S federal government agency. These entities are using ROI to “demonstrate program success and impact of training on educational programs,” “measure the impact of a new human resources information systems,” and to “measure the cost benefit of a master’s degree program conducted on site by a prestigious government.”

The emphasis on managing data isn’t simply a sporadic interest in government, or a trend that the public sector is suddenly jumping on board with. From a federal level the 2002 President’s Management Agenda (PMA) pinpointed five government wide goals that have influenced this contemporary line of thinking. The goals speak to the need for strategic management of human capital, competitive sourcing, improved financial performance, expanded e-government, and budget and performance integration. The PMA’s goals indicate a need to find a comprehensive formula for combining ROI metrics and analytics that support social impact, program evaluation, and quantitative data to measure both a monetary and a non-monetary return. The outcome of finding this formula would result in more than just saving a few bucks, and could potentially result in productivity and quality increases.

In an earlier document from the ROI Institute, Dr. Phillips provides an example of what this would look like:

“In a government setting, cost savings measures are available from every work group. For example, if a government agency implements a program to improve forms processing–a productivity measure is number of forms processed; the quality measure is the error rate on processing forms; a time measure is the time it takes to process the forms; and a cost measure is the cost of processing forms on a per-unit basis. Improvements in work unit performance in a government setting have many opportunities for program benefits that can be converted to monetary value.”

One of the ways that the Third Sector Organization (TSO), in the United Kingdom, has attempted to qualify social value of their sector is through developing a methodology: Social Return on Investment (SROI). The goal of SROI is to translate social, economic, and environmental benefits into monetary value. Yet the SROI isn’t necessarily applicable to individual programs and initiatives, and still prioritizes financial measurements over, say, what a social audit would result in: qualitative information combined with financial data that informs internal performance.

Ultimately, even with the strides that the TSO has made, there is still a global gap in knowledge when it comes to gauging impact on smaller scale profit-less items. A 2013, working paper from the Tellurid Science Research Center concluded on a similar note, stating:

“There is an extensive body of grey literature on impact measurement practice, however this has tended to be small-scale and boosterist in nature. The field has also suffered from a lack of theorisation of key concepts and critical appraisal of previous research, with a few exceptions. A number of studies are emerging which attempt to address this theoretical and empirical gap, but in general empirical research on impact measurement practice in the UK third sector, particularly which organizations and subsectors are undertaking impact measurement and the practices and tools they are using, is limited.”

Though there are limitations, the potential remains there for the public sector to find an all encompassing return on investment model, however no formula or practice standard exists at the moment. BUT there is still hope!

How are you measuring the ROI or SROI in the public sector? I would love to hear your feedback and suggestions.