It is so important to always deliver for your Customer, but how do you achieve this at a time when there are so many economic factors at play and when Customer’s needs are continuously evolving, often in an accelerated way, pointing them towards holding higher expectations than ever before? Dealing with this can be challenging, but if your industry is experiencing rapid change as well, this will create significant strain not only on Customers and colleagues but also on the service and support you offer.
This is universal. Challenges like this are felt across many businesses over time; however, how you react and respond to them is critical to converting negative and positive outcomes for your Customers. Being proactive in your approach, seeking out new opportunities while dealing with threats of problems before they even emerge, allows you to maintain consistency and is key to the successful management of an organisation in any industry.
Banking in Ireland has changed significantly since the 2008 Financial Crisis, and the introduction of further digital enablement coincided with Covid-19 has seen considerable growth in online activity across a number of key areas, for example, app users, contactless payments, logins on both apps and web – they all returned unprecedented rise in usage. This increase was reflected in our Customers choosing digital channels within the last two years while most of our everyday lending applications were received online.
“Dealing with events that cause surges is challenging and requires a reset approach, especially when it is deemed controllable”
This shift in activity from the voice channel to online was reflective of Customers wanting to execute independent and seamless journeys in their own time with positive outcomes. This can be achieved only when Customers are confident and trust in an organisation that has proved to be steady, ready, and able to service their journeys digitally over the years.
In an ever-changing Banking landscape where banks have continued to exit over the last ten years, the appearance of Covid-19 has fundamentally changed Customer behaviour, not to mention the challenge we faced with the weakened and retracted recruitment market. While these are considerable challenges, Banks are continuously refining their approach and offering for Customers, both through a business lens and a regulatory lens which have introduced enhanced Customer protection, some of which were new services. Like with any changes, these new adjustments are not always adopted easily by Customers in the initial implementation phase. Their resistance or challenge in adopting can lead to surges and unplanned events occurring in your Contact Centre that will not always align with the supply of the available resources. Also, as digital adoption has increased, new forms of sophisticated fraudulent activity have escalated. This requires us to simultaneously combat such activities and provide Customers with a flawless digital experience. The new approach must be fast, collaborative, and coupled with new technology to control the risk and fight fraud.
Dealing with events that cause surges is challenging and requires a reset approach, especially when it is deemed controllable. Key components and capabilities must be built to support the introduction of any service, the launch of any initiative, or new technology, especially where it’s expected to become part of the wider Customer offering. A number of questions must be asked before we release the change: How did we arrive at this point? How long is the surge expected to last? Could we have stopped this from happening? How do we prevent this from happening again? What might be the short and long-lasting consequences? Are we ready to respond to Customer demands proactively and effectively?
If you are experiencing the aftermath of incidents like this, regardless of what you do next, a dedicated team must be mobilised with a clear mandate to build out the required capability now and in the future to communicate and introduce the required changes that will navigate, guide and return the Contact Centre back to the service level agreement that is expected by our Customers.
“We are guided by what our Customer wants and needs, and to support this, we focus on bringing technology and people together to make every day easy, so our Customer can do big things.”
There is no one universal solution to approach a challenge like this. Depending on the organisations maturity model, different businesses will hold various positions to address concerns and respond to Customers’ surge in demands. However, the one common theme to building and executing real change is the data you hold.
Capacity Planning Model. As most businesses will say, it is fundamental to any business to determine staffing versus call demand. However, with sudden economic changes likely to happen at any time, building a capacity planning model to enable the business to deal with surges and unplanned events ahead of time was the focus. We identified key components and deeper access points than ever before, which ranged from the inclusion of new data lines and new parameters that would support the business in creating a surge view for unplanned, scheduled, and potential events. We also expanded our forecasting capability by using previous and current year outturns while allowing for adjustments for specific events aligned with the availab bility of Full-Time Equivalent (FTE). Our forecasting during our next phase of change was managed ahead of time. The delta forecast and our performance aligned as it included the economic impacts of change expected and also assumed a level of digital adoption for new services and support.
Resource Augmentation. Once our forecasting was completed, it found its way and reflected in our workforce planning model. This also helped us realise that, given the unsteady recruitment market, we needed to look at other ways to ensure a sufficient, robust, and flexible supply chain workforce. The success on all fronts year 2022 proved that we did with onboarding new partners to the business.
Digital Adoption & Education. While the introduction of new digital services and offerings is not new, directing Customers, who for years got used to dealing with Agents on the phone, towards online services and asking them to acquire a new self-service routine is difficult, especially if there are multiple clicks or the offering and the application of it is complex and not userfriendly. While Customer's trust has increased considerably in online offerings, and most are now comfortable with self-serve for routine and repetitive activities, clear and continuous communication is still required to activate Customers digitally. A number of capabilities to support this approach should not be underestimated - from using push notifications; improved Interactive Voice Response (IVR) routing and messaging; monitoring, navigating, and managing social media and understanding its Customer reach; introducing interactive elements to a website; to using a webchat messaging channel and bot behind a login to encourage digital adoption in a two-way chat.
Being dependable and delivering on the Customer promise is critical to a business, but continuously meeting this promise while the business landscape, internally and externally, is changing is much more difficult. Customers must know we listen to them and respond and act accordingly. The business must systematically adapt its approach with improved data forecasting and evolve levels of flexibility to the business operating model. We must also enable ourselves digitally beyond the current use that minimises journey drop-offs. While these three levers might not solve all businesses’ problems, they will provide the required and steady foundations that will allow the business to grow, build stronger and diverse offerings and resist headwinds that come with uncertainty.
