ATA – No mothballs for innovation … despite the economic downturn
Key Points
-
Why now is not the time to cut back on progressive strategies
-
New study reveals contact centre performance
-
Harnessing your agents’ knowledge
Once upon a time Australia shut down for about six weeks following Christmas, much to the amusement of our international trading partners. Those days are long gone and the great Aussie summer break is a wistful memory due to current economic conditions. Australia is weathering the turbulent waters of the global economy better than some, but all industries will hunker down over productivity and efficiency gain priorities, meaning strategic, innovative projects may be mothballed.
But should innovative and progressive strategies be shelved in favour of a focus on traditional practices during tough economic conditions? Contact centres operate on tight operational budgets often not commensurate with the constantly improving productivity and results expected of them. Running a razor blade over the budget, cutting heads and carving off new projects is a fast way to produce gains in the current climate. Decision makers need to carefully consider whether this approach is sustainable weighed against risk to competitive edge, service levels and the high cost of staff level resurrection.
At the same time, there is no way to justify forging ahead with projects unless they can be definitively shown to produce benefits and sound fiscal outcomes. The industry needs to be very clear about which innovative practices and technologies are most likely to deliver critical gains quickly and sustain them over the long term. One area tipped to offer the best results over the next two years is knowledge management (KM).
The ability to investigate the value of KM can be hindered by time constraints, resource availability and financial limitations. Producing the appropriate business case and cost justification to move forward with strategic, technologybased KM initiatives is a hurdle many may find hard to clear even if the benefits are apparent, but it seems help is on the way. Two students at the University of New South Wales have completed a study into the industry, which has resulted in their ability to accurately and effectively determine the real cost of poor knowledge management. The pair also developed a fast way to assess the ROI on KM projects, based on collection of real-time data through a purpose-built web portal.
Dominic Byrne and Matt Dixon authored Measuring Staff Productivity Loss Relating to Knowledge Management for their masters in Business & Technology at the University of New South Wales. The study centres on KM productivity gaps and profitability drags in contact centres and applied a new method for identifying KM-related Productivity Loss Factors (PLFs) and KM-related Productivity Efficiency Gains (PEGs).
The pair were given access to large government contact centres operated by the Australian Workplace Authority (WPA) and collected a comprehensive sample of more than 1,500 calls handled by 50 agents throughout Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth over a three-day period in late October. This represented 154 hours of customer contact and 15% of total calls made by the public into the WPA’s contact centres.
It was critical the study not be intrusive and required only minimal time from participants. A dedicated, web-based knowledge gap portal was developed by the research team with study participants needing only to answer a few on-screen questions as calls were being managed. The data captured was then analysed to gain a clear understanding of the knowledge-gathering methods used by agents to resolve customer inquiries and the results of the study have identified the potential to eliminate hundreds of thousands of dollars of cost and benefit from similarly large sums in efficiency and productivity gains.
Productivity gains were most evident when the call was resolved with ‘self found’ knowledge using tacit or selfcreated resources, while ‘assisted knowledge’ resolutions that required another team member or more senior advisor took the longest.
The use of self-made notes or tacit knowledge resulted in an average handling time of 2.58 minutes and 3.51 minutes respectively, whereas reliance on a variety of sources like internal systems and databases, websites, assistance from another person, or escalations to experts, generated much higher resolution times of between six minutes and 11 minutes on average.
It may seem intuitive and obvious to identify that agents resolving calls themselves produced the fastest average handling times, but the majority achieved this working from inherent knowledge or self-made notes not available to the rest of the team. This has some interesting implications.
The initial research will need some refining to test results in different markets because the research was conducted in an environment that is not indicative of the majority of contact centres. WPA agents typically deal with a great deal of one-off calls. They cover a very wide, disparate range of inquiries meaning the WPA can not, as a bank might, build a customer profile based on the frequency of contact and this is common of many government and community service oriented contact centres.
What remains to be seen is how these findings translate into the private sector and what additional insight can be gained by cross- referencing the experience of the two different kinds of centre.
Nonetheless, early indications from the research show categorically that enhancing the way tacit or inherent knowledge is captured and shared across a team produces very real fiscal and competitive benefits for the business.
Beyond this, the study has some unexpected outcomes that may prove to be of real interest and benefit to the industry. Firstly the research has served to highlight the crucial role tacit and inherent knowledge plays in the public sector. This is especially pertinent given the recommendations for tighter call prescriptions contained in the Woods Report, handed down following investigation into DOCS in NSW.
There is little doubt that carefully prescribed call management techniques are vital, but how do you prescribe the untrained instincts that mean one agent has a natural ability to gauge the emotion in the pace or tone of a caller’s voice, that makes it second nature for them to listen for and interpret background noise or hear the warning signs in the language that are being used when a caller is in real distress?
These are the sorts of calls that are handled daily by very talented and dedicated contact centre agents working for organisations like DOCS. This study of tacit and inherent knowledge comes at a very important time for all contact centres that provide crisis or emergency services to the community, particularly considering the strain many people find themselves under during these tough economic times.
Secondly, as a result of the study, our industry now has the benefit of access to an effective, inexpensive tool used to develop accurate cost benefit analysis on proposed technology projects in contact centres. This tool will mean contact centres can carefully audit the likely ROI on new projects before initiating them, based on real-time data captured around knowledge use.
Finally, it has highlighted the fact that tacit or inherent knowledge almost always results in the fastest and most accurate call resolution, which raises some interesting questions about what kind of systems and processes can be put in place that guarantee the most valuable knowledge is captured and shared for the benefit of all in the business.
To download this article, click here (PDF – 1.14MB)
Michael Meredith is the CEO of the Australian Teleservices Association, the peak industry body for call-intensive, servicecentric organisations and teleprofessionals.
