Today’s customer demands quality. Organizations need to invest in infrastructure and processes to service customers. This coupled with the tremendous pressure to increase revenues and bring down costs leads to difficult decisions to be made in terms of arriving at optimal solutions to achieve this. An important issue facing Organizations today is arriving at a tradeoff in handling the inherent contradictions in the system. This paper attempts to address this issue and discusses possible solutions to the problem by analyzing ways of optimizing the workforce, defining service levels and understanding the importance of Service Chain Management in the Service delivery process.
Introduction
Customers demand quality. They want to see quality in the product or the service they use. They want to see it in the buying/registering process, they want to see it in the service fulfillment process and they want to see it in the pre-sales and after-sales support process. In short, they want to see it. Period.
Today, an Organization is under pressure to increase revenues and keep costs down. Customer satisfaction impacts revenues. Ensuring all customers are satisfied cuts into an Organization’s resources and adds to costs.
So the big question is - how do you balance the two? How do you handle this tradeoff in the face of pressure to increase revenues and bring down costs, and handle the inherent contradictions in the system?
There are three questions that can be considered while addressing this issue. They are:
1. How do you optimize your workforce?
2. How do you define service levels?
3. How important is Service Chain Management in the Service Delivery Model?
These larger questions in turn throw up further questions in terms of workforce management and performance measurements, measuring and optimizing cost of customer interactions and measuring and aligning the cost of customer interactions with the revenues being generated from the interactions. These are areas that need to be studied carefully and considering that these metrics are in the process of evolution, each organization’s service levels and workforce performance metrics need to be defined and aligned with the organization’s larger business objectives and goals.
Optimizing Workforce
How do you ensure that you can deliver quality service with an optimum workforce? You can reduce your workforce if you reduce the work that needs to be done and you can improve the quality of service by using tools that will allow the reduced workforce to deliver the same level of quality while servicing the customer.
The key to optimizing the workforce is to:
o Reduce/minimize the volume of customer queries and complaints
o Minimize the number of messages per interaction for email based support.
o Maximize automated responses to emails by using Rule-based filtering and auto-responses by the CRM system
o Agent training to achieve proficiency levels across product families
This can be achieved by:
o Building a Customer Support Portal which will provide the customer the required information and allow the user to report problems in a simple and easy-to-use manner
o Configuring the CRM system for rule-based filtering and automated responses.
o Quality of Responses
o Cross training agents across product families and rotating them on a regular basis
o Monitoring Workforce performance and fine-tuning the system as required
Customer Support Portal
A customer support portal should serve as a self-help channel and should have comprehensive FAQs that provide the user with information that is relevant to his needs. A user with basic doubts or questions about a product or service should be able to quickly find the needed information on the site. If the information can be found easily, then it will reduce the number of mails being sent in to Customer Support asking for this information, hence reducing the load on the resources and the cost of processing.
The Customer Support Portal should have carefully designed forms with relevant options and information input points to ensure that the user can easily report any problem faced while using a product or a service. If a problem which is being reported does not have all the necessary supporting information required for troubleshooting, then it will result in additional mails being sent to the customer to get the required details. A form based interface which will allow the customer to enter all the related information required for troubleshooting will ensure that just one mail needs to be processed during the trouble shooting phase. This will help in minimizing the number of messages per customer interaction.
The Customer Support Portal should ensure that the mails that are sent from the forms interface have the proper keywords associated with them to facilitate Rule-based Filtering and Responses. For example, the subject line could be inserted automatically by the application to ensure that the mail can be uniquely identified and routed to the assigned team/agent as required automatically. This will save effort on manual inspection, routing and responding to the mail
Configuring Rules
Rules can be configured on the CRM system to route and respond to mails that are received from the support portal. All mails that require standard responses can be automatically answered thus saving on effort and time being spent by the agents on mails that require standard canned responses. The success of this depends on the system being able to successfully filter and identify mails belonging to such categories that require canned responses, which will depend on the way the forms are designed and presented on the Support Portal.
Quality of Response
Quality of Response is another key factor that will help reduce the number of messages per interaction. If the response includes all the relevant information with links and references to additional information that will clearly answer the question posed by the customer. This will avoid further mails asking for clarification. Responses should adhere to committed response times. This will avoid subsequent follow up mails enquiring about the status of the original query/problem report.
Agent training
The customer service representative should be trained to handle multiple products and services so as to allow dynamic allocation of resources in case of surges in mail traffic or handling backlog as needed. They can be allotted services based on the load, this will prevent underutilization of capacity and allow optimal use of the workforce.
Enhancing Performance
The baseline metrics could be defined and used to fine-tune performance by varying agent distribution and redeploying resources across channels or by modifying the process required to gather customer inputs.
Agents can be redeployed across applications if team performances show variance from the defined service levels. They could be redeployed across customer channels also if required. A clearly defined customer handling process with the necessary system support will ensure a smooth transition regardless of short-term or long-term redeployment of agents.
The online forms provided in the customer support portal could be modified to fine-tune the format in which Customer communication is received by the support system. This can be fine-tuned to provide more information or build in more automated routing and response as required. Modifications to existing processes with respect to dependencies on external agencies or partners or with respect to internal processing could be made to ramp up performance levels.
Defining Service Levels
There is a definite shift in paradigm in Customer models, from the one where a customer was considered “king” to a model where a customer is accorded a level of service that is proportional to his value to the Company. This need has arisen to address the inherent contradictions in the system. Based on calculations leading to a Customer’s Value to the company, different levels of service could be defined which could lead to a more efficient use of a workforce in addressing customer issues.
How do you define a service level?
Service levels can be defined in qualitative and quantitative terms. The values accorded to the service parameters can be decided on the resource and infrastructure availability and the capacity available to service requests.
Defining quantitative parameters would include specifying values for the following:
o Time to first response
o Time to problem resolution
o Time to follow up on resolved issue
o Service availability timings
Once these values are defined, then high value customers can be accorded a response time of fewer hours as compared to lower value customers. Communication from high value customers can be identified and routed into priority queues that have alert mechanisms built in and which are monitored on a higher frequency.
Defining qualitative parameters would include:
o Customer access points
o Dedicated Agents for defined customer groups
o Amount of follow up
Customers can have multiple modes of reaching customer support. High value customers could be allowed more modes of communication than lower value customers. There could be dedicated agents that would ensure that the case was closed satisfactorily and and all issues resolved with proper follow up.
Arriving at a Customer Value
The levels can be defined after a careful study of the customer base to identify customers who will be valuable to the company. The following factors need to be considered while arriving at a customer’s value:
o The total value of the relationship with the company.
o The potential value of the customer in future transactions.
o The profitability of the relationship
o The insights and the feedback that the customer can provide on your products and services.
o The influence that they can bring to bear on other customers and recommend and advocate your services.
All these points can be used in arriving at a Customer Value. Further there has to be a system of identifying such customers and flagging them off in the system so that they can be identified and the appropriate level of service extended to them.
The objective should be to align how much is spent on servicing a customer with how much revenue the interaction generates or will potentially generate.
Implementing Service Levels
Once the service levels have been defined and the customer value parameters identified, the customer value can be arrived at and the service offered accordingly. To be able to do this, the system should have the necessary support. This includes:
o The ability to calculate the value of a customer and classify them accordingly in the database and
o The ability to identify to the agents the status of these customers
o The ability to set down rules for the procedure to be followed when requests from these customers are received
o The ability to prioritize based on customer classification in the Service Chain Management model.
The service levels need to be defined through the entire customer resolution cycle and should be across customer communication channels and supporting service functions. Once these are defined and implemented, a query or a problem request that is received from high value customers can be accorded a service level that has a higher turn-around time in terms of response and resolution of issues.
Service Chain Management
One of the most commonly faced problems of any service, is the high level of customer dissatisfaction arising out of factors outside the immediate control of a company’s internal processes. It could be a given that the quality of the products and the services available is high, but despite this there still exist customers who are unhappy, frustrated and very likely to abandon your service because of shortcomings in the supporting logistics and fulfillment channels that form part of the Company’s virtual service delivery model.
Any company that services its customers using a “virtual service team” will be faced with this problem as the entities involved transcend the walls of the company both logically and physically. An important part is understanding and defining the Service Chain Management model.
A company needs to have a deep understanding of the virtual service delivery model that includes the customer handling process, partner relationship management and internal support processes and infrastructure. The links between the different entities need to be carefully examined and the inter-process communication very carefully defined and implemented.
The single most important cause for problems arising out these processes is the failure of communication links between the various entities. The model that is defined should be flexible enough to accommodate changes as and when required. It should provide for alternate and backup mechanisms in case of failure of primary communication channels.
The key points to be considered while defining the model are:
o Inter-Process Communication between the support systems
o Update mechanisms in the application systems
o Network efficiency in the logistics functions
o Vendor Management issues
o Fulfillment process issues
Managing this virtual service delivery process is vital and requires dedicated management resources and attention. It needs to be constantly reviewed and monitored for any degradation in either system resources or relationships. It is very important to understand that as far as the customer is concerned, you are the single point that they are dealing with and keeping this part of the service model functioning smoothly is necessary to continue to retain a customer’s faith in your products and services.
Monitoring and Measuring Performance
Tracking performance of the system is essential to ensure that quality of service is maintained. An important part of defining the service model is the parameters that are defined to measure and track performance of the service delivery function. Measuring agent proficiency and monitoring the performance of the optimized workforce is important to be able to further optimize as required.
The parameters could be tracked at two levels:
o Team Level
o Agent Level
Team level metrics would be derived from individual agent level metrics.
The metrics to be used to monitor the performance can typically be:
- Number of mails responded per day
- Average response time
- Number of messages to resolve an interaction
- Number of assigned and unresolved interactions at any given time
- Ageing of unresolved interactions at any given time
Team proficiency in terms of the total workforce size to the number of customers being serviced could be measured by monitoring the team’s performance and applying the metrics above to the whole team and calculating averages for the team. For eg. The number of mails responded and the number of cases resolved for the whole team could be calculated and compared with the total mails received by the team.
The baseline metrics could be defined and used to fine-tune performance by varying agent distribution and redeploying resources across channels or by modifying the process required to gather customer inputs.
Conclusion
This paper examined the question of how a tradeoff between increasing revenues and bringing down costs could be handled in a Customer Support function. The three areas that were examined and the questions that were considered were on optimizing your workforce, defining service levels, and the importance of Service Chain Management in the customer service process. An optimal Service Delivery Model can be defined based on this.
Workforce optimization can be achieved by reducing/minimizing the volume of customer queries and complaints, minimizing the number of messages per interaction for email based support and maximizing the automated responses to emails by using Rule-based filtering and auto-responses by the CRM system. The implementation of this can be achieved by building a Customer Support Portal which will provide the customer the required information and allow the user to report problems in a simple and easy-to-use manner, configuring the CRM system for rule-based filtering and automated responses and by cross training agents across product families and rotating them on a regular basis
Service levels need to be defined so that customers can be extended a level of service which is based on their total value to the company. Customer value can be arrived at by considering a customer’s value of present and predicted future transactions and also on the quality of insights and feedback provided on services and products and on the ability to influence other customers.
The service chain management plays an important role in the service delivery model and it is very important to maintain communication links between the various processes and the relationship with logistics and vendor partners.
Performance metrics need to be defined to be able to monitor and track the performance of the system at various levels.
A Service Delivery Model that is implemented based on the above should be able to optimally use the available resources and address the issue of being able to balance increasing revenue and bringing down costs.
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