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, Customer Experience Management, customer service, digital innovation, Government Customer Service, Performance Management, Strategy, Technology

IMPORTANCE OF AN OPERATIONAL AUDIT IN A GOVERNMENT CONTACT CENTER

Why are government contact center operational audits important?  According to the Institute of Internal Auditor, an operational audit is a systematic process of assessing an organization’s effectiveness, efficiency, and economy of operations under the influence of the management and giving details of the evaluation and recommendations to suitable persons. An operational audit has a number of objectives that define the importance attributed to conducting it on a government contact center. Some of these benefits include:

  1. Influence a positive change: Conducting operations audit for government contact centers assists its management to understand how future processes and policies will bring about maximum efficiency. An operations audit assists in developing clearly defined aims and strategies that will make the contact center a high performing one. An operations audit entails verifying written policies and procedures for operations.

For instance, the procedure by which employees are placed on shift sessions is evaluated. Assessing each process to determine if any of them should be combined or scrapped is also important. When these instances have been sufficiently sorted out by the operations audit, the path to positive change isn’t a lengthy and difficult journey any longer.

The employee turnover is another measure to demonstrate a positive change in a contact center. Fortunately, an operations audit evaluates this factor. When an employee has a high turnover, it may be that the manager has inadequate supervisory skills. Organizing seminars and workshops for these supervisors may help in improving the employee’s turnover.

  1. Review Internal Controls: In the accounting department, internal control is a term used to describe the processes that ensure organizational aims have a positive impact on operational efficiency, reliability of financial reporting and is in compliance with rules and policies. Internal controls provide an avenue by which organizational resources are allocated, monitored, and assessed. Internal controls help in protecting organizational resources and identifying fraudulent schemes.

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) of 1977 and the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 posted that there is a need to improve internal controls in public corporations including government contact centers. Truly, many a time the internal controls need improvement. However, these internal controls are key elements of the operational audit. Hence, getting to assess those internal controls helps the organization improve its performance.

  1. Understand Risks: There are several risks that are susceptible to occurring during operational hours. These risks may include errors committed by personnel, IT system failure, network interruption, safety and health matters, fraud, and litigation amongst others. There may not be a definite stop to these risks, but operational audit gives us an insight into how these could happen. When a government contact center employs agents, they are given access to sensitive information about the citizens.

Contact centers often have a high turnover and average attrition which is put at about 30% in the United States. Additionally, the employees at government call centers are mostly entry-level workers. An operational audit helps the management to understand how all these threats to the security of citizen’s information may be mitigated and avoided.

Discover areas that need improvement Opportunities: A consequence of understanding risk is the recognition of faulty areas where improvement is needed. There are various forms of risk – financial risk, operational risk, environmental risk, and reputational risk. Operational audits allow the auditors to determine these risks and thus, discover opportunities to do forestall them. Conducting a regular operations audit on government contact centers allows auditors to determine how these centers can improve their services and prevent risks such as network interruption, fraud, and theft of information from happening. Every operational audit brings with it an opportunity to make positive changes and improvements, no matter how small. Thus, the role of operational audits in a high performing government contact center cannot be overlooked.

Rosetta Carrington Lue 311, Business Processes, Customer Experience Management, customer service, digital innovation, employee engagement, Government Customer Service, Performance Management

How To Exceed Your Government CX Contact Center via Benchmarking

Background story: 

I recently met with Cynthia, a Senior Government Contact Center Leader, who was at her wits end trying to manage the agency’s initiative to transform and modernize the contact center as part of her performance expectations.  Cynthia was familiar with the buzz words around “customer experience” but was struggling to decide how to prioritize and build a business case for change.  She didn’t know what “specific problem she was trying to solve” but knew she had to show she was doing something to improve the customer experience.  “Journey mapping, multi or omnichannel communications, CRM, IVR, data visualization, AI, knowledge management, etc. What should I do?”

My Response:  Step back and begin with a Contact Center Audit, Assessment, and Benchmarking initiative to roadmap where you should start the contact center’s transformation and modernization journey,

I explained to Cynthia that it’s critical to understand the current contact center customer experience environment and the future (vision) environment to identify gaps in the operations.  In addition to understanding customer experience operational gaps in the contact center, benchmarking other government operations to improve their customer’s digital experience and agency’s service delivery performance.

Let’s discuss why benchmarking is important

For an agency contact center to transform and modernize, there is a need to evaluate the performance against that of other government contact center establishments. Although a government may not be in competition with regards to the citizens it cares for, there is a need to benchmark the performance of a contact center against another.

As such, government contact centers can quantitatively evaluate the difference in performance level with other reputable call center agencies. Consequently, government contact centers can set customer experience goals and objectives which can serve as motivation for employees to work to the highest standard.

The importance of benchmarking government contact centers includes:

  1. Evaluate the success of your customer experience improvement initiatives: What is the point of making improvements in certain areas and not having to know whether it was successful? Benchmarking helps to create a status quo towards which the success of a government contact center is measured against customer service standards and to understand your position against world best practice.
  2. Gain an insight into other government contact center standard practices: A government contact center trying to compare its success with that of a corporate contact center is futile. It is a lot more beneficial to know what other governments are doing, especially those setting the pace. The failures and successes of a government contact center may help others learn and improve their policies and procedures.
  3. Rate customer experience channels performance objectively: Conducting customer surveys and using certain operational metrics speaks volumes about the performance of an organization. However, it is not enough since a government contact center may not be performing up to international standards. Hence, benchmarking leads government contact centers to rate their performance about similar organizations, rather than having the performance score based on internal assessment tools alone.  The findings from a study indicate that institutions that pay more attention to great customer experience will have a 30-50% more chance to get recommended by its customers. This metric is subjective and it is derived by requesting that customers complete a survey where answers have scores ranging from 1-5, 1-10 or Very Satisfied – Not satisfied.

I also recommended for Cynthia to work independently certified government customer experience professional.  They bring industry experience and knowledge to the table, enabling her to navigate the assessment process in record time by supporting management. They are experts at identifying and anticipating opportunities for growth, staff development, cost reductions, increased productivity and technology improvement within your organization. Ultimately leading to cohesion within teams and customer service delivery support, they add tangible value to the assessment process.

Next Blog:  What’s Included In A Government Audit and Assessment Report

Author Rosetta Carrington Lue is a pioneer in the field of Government Customer Experience Management and has devoted an entire career to bettering the lives of everyone around her through her work. She is right at home as the CEO of GovCX Professionals (www.govcxprofessionals) where she spends her time focused on building a welcoming, innovative, and engaging government customer experience.

Rosetta Carrington Lue Customer Experience Management, digital innovation, Technology

Wanted – Women CIOs in Federal Government

About 18% of chief information officers or chief technology officers at big U.S. firms are women, according to a Korn Ferry analysis conducted in early 2019 covering the country’s top 1,000 public and private companies by revenue. That’s up from 16% in 2017.

An informal survey indicates the number of females leading IT operations in the federal government is even less than the national average.  However, in the government, a lot of women have a great reputation in the technology field which includes, but not limited to, Federal Chief Information Officer Suzette Kent, Dana Deasy, CIO, Department of Defense, and Renee Wynn, CIO, NASA.

Federal CIO Advice

Worldwide spending on information technology is expected to reach near-$4 trillion this year, according to Gartner, with the fastest growth rates in enterprise software, IT services, and data-center spending, as the cloud still booms and greater cyberthreats loom. Larger technology budgets and resources are being made to improve the customer experience for customers and employers. Therefore, it is very important for women to be at the table to help bring their diverse expertise and experience to drive those discussions and have the authority on where to prioritize those investments.

Women in the public sector have played pivotal roles in moving toward a more open, innovative, and responsive government.  Women can move up their career ladder and get hired on the government IT jobs. It is not an easy task but is not impossible indeed.

Women climbing the ladder would have to make their own place in the government sector by following this advice:

Be Passionate
Try to be passionate. It is crucial to make your work your passion so that you can enjoy it. Taking pleasure in your work is quite a motivator. If you will have a passion for your work, then you will be able to pay full attention to it and will achieve success shortly. There are about 8 million women who have started doing work, which they love in different Government sectors and received success in those positions. You should come up with new ideas, increase your responsibilities and try to get more projects. These things will lead you to success and make you more visible.
Make Yourself Valuable
It is time to make yourself useful so that you can get hired in the government. Perfection is important for all. Simply, finish your work on time, try to solve problems and figure out the solutions quickly and provide better services than others. These are the primary qualities that can make you valuable.
Be a Risk Taker
Many women are afraid of taking risks. They are afraid of failure. NO! Never do that! Risks can find you new ways to success. It is better to be brave and bold to perform different tasks. Do not be rigid as it can be a hurdle between you and your success. Take different risks and always believe that you can do it. If you would believe, then you can do! Think new ideas, do research and then implement your ideas. These things are important for getting hired in the Government IT sectors.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is changing the way we receive information, how we process it, how we work and what jobs we will do. Because of this, we simply cannot afford to have any less than our whole population engaged and contributing.  Women can and will be critical to leveraging this revolution to benefit our global society.

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 Scoop.it

311 Data Fuels Government Response & Transparency

From managing requests to running rich reports and engaging citizens regularly and during disasters, 311 data systems are evolving government operations.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: efficientgov.com

Customers are holding public sector agencies to service standards typically found in private industry. As a result, local governments are turning to innovative technology to keep up with rising service expectations.

311 systems offer local governments speed and insights that boost overall performance. They:

  • Enable citizens to submit requests from anywhere at any time
  • Provide location accuracy related to requests with GIS functionality
  • Mobilize information sharing across government departments
  • Account for service costs more accurately and timely
Rosetta Carrington Lue 311, Business Processes, CRM, Customer Experience Management, digital innovation, Government Customer Service, Technology

Maximizing the Value of Experience Data

 

Think mobile first.

Sourced through Scoop.it from www.entrepreneur.com

Think mobile-first.

This news puts the spotlight on experience data, but the reality is, this is not a new idea.

The most successful companies have known for a long time that they need to understand the sentiments, attitudes, and emotions of their customers in order to succeed.

The existence of the market research industry rests on the fact that companies need ongoing feedback from their customers to make the right decisions.