Background & Problem Faced
This project was for a Government e-Procurement Contact Centre, which is an end-to-end procurement system that uses a secure online environment that allows Government agencies and suppliers to trade efficiently and confidently. The contact centre was receiving more than 1,000 incoming calls a day and the hourly spikes was at unmanageable rate. The client had decided to hire a consultant to help manage the situation in order to overcome the situation. The contact centre metrics was not achievable and the contact centre process was not adequate to sustain the call capacity. Daythree was engaged to study the situation and to implement a process methodology to overcome the unmanageable call volume situation for the Contact Centre.
Solution Provided
Daythree begun the operations by studying the client’s shortfalls to their approach to the project. Over a period of 2 weeks a series of proposals was submitted to contact centre management team. We found the key reason impacting the operations was lack of manpower in answering incoming calls during peak hours. The support team did not have adequate contact centre training to manage call centre metrics. There was no standard operating procedure as far as the CRM team was concerned. Staff were not rewarded or recognized for excellent service causing motivational issues . We identified that due to poor hiring processes and low regard for motivation within the team contributed to the high attrition rate.
The above issues caused a huge customer dissatisfaction rate of over 60%. To rectify this for them, Daythree increased their head count with quality customer service staff with experience to handle all inbound calls off and on peak hours. The contact centre staff was given trainings on customer service etiquettes and on the product every two weeks to ensure quality of service. We created a standard operating procedure with KPIs to track staff performance and introduced a reward scheme based on performance on a monthly basis. Simultaneously we revamped their contact centre staff hiring processes and introduced assessments to further understand the candidates.
Key Business Benefits
The process re-engineering helped to reduce the customer satisfaction rate from 60% to 40% within 2 months. The continued operations monitoring and process enhancement to Standard Operating Procedure helped manage the huge call increases during peak hours as the contact centre agents were able to troubleshoot each incident with average an handle time of below 5 minutes per incident compared to over 20 minutes previously. The contact centre management was satisfied with the results and continued to engage Daythree for various other activities till this day. The above provided Daythree with a learning opportunity while continuing to offer other client a similar contact centre consultancy services. With the expertise in managing excellent Inbound Services with Customer Operations Performance Centre (COPC) standards, Daythree has also developed a strategy to overcome Outbound Contact Centre missed metrics with development of various outbound contact centre performance management techniques which would be beneficial to clients.
