Guide
Written by Scorebuddy
20 May 2015
CCMA Ireland’s annual summit took place on the 14th of May in the beautiful surroundings of Killashee Hotel in Kildare. The booked out event was eagerly anticipated by contact centre professionals throughout Ireland who were not let down by the day’s agenda.
Chaired by Eoghan McDermott the summit started off with a presentation from Nick Miller, founder of Clarity Advantage about Crafting Customer Conversations.
How to Create Sustainable Value in your Business through Well Crafted Customer Conversations
Nick discussed how in his experience of banking that the metrics almost always go against the purpose of the organisation, this is detrimental because people only work by the metrics which they are measured by. He also spoke about the problem with call centre conversations is that people view call centres as cost centres rather than relationship centres. He offered great advice for coaching agents on conversations;
“We are interested in conversation quality, intonation, pauses, transition, listening – train for these.” – Miller.
Nick went to discuss the sales funnel pointing out two parts to it and one part which is often overlooked is helping people to learn how to make a decision. There are influences that affect how a person makes a decision that we don’t always consider. A great way of understanding these “other influences” is by using personas. Personas outline the needs as well as the environment that creates the need. Personas are common practice in marketing design but do they play into sales and in particular selling through a call centre?
Conversation is also commonly disrupted by technology and systems that don’t work for people. Nick suggests that if you can’t change the whole system simply change one thing; “try and make a change that makes call centre agents sound like humans.”
The Importance of being Different; the BT Sport Story
COO of BT Sport Jamie Hindhaugh described the growth of BT Sport from its infancy to its rapid growth in becoming a key player in Sports broadcasting in the UK and Ireland. BT Sport has delivered a new identity to the engineering company but when it came to broadcasting they had three clear priorities; clean, credible and responsible.
Clean: ensure the absolute basics were in place.
Credible: demonstrate prowess to show that they are here to stay.
Responsibility: deliver the content responsibly to live up to the rights they are renting.
BT Sport needed to be different from Sky and other broadcasters to help grow their identity, they tried things and listened to their customers. The customers enjoyed the new personality.
Jamie pointed out the importance of having a culture where getting things wrong is okay and that change is business as usual.
The Consumer in Recovery: Surly, Demanding, Disloyal… But Willing to Buy
Gerard O’Neill, Chairman of Amárach Research, presented the latest findings of the average Irish consumer.
Spending online has increased, research published by Visa last week showed that growth in spending online was more than twice the growth of face-to-face spending. The spending forecast clearly shows that Ireland is on a recovery path and spending is increasing. The share/compare economy of reviewing goods and services online has a massive impact on online purchases.
Gerard identified that Amárach Research found that there is a high correlation between NPS and the Intention to Switch and that customers are more sensitive to low fluctuations than high fluctuations. People know when they are being force-fed a formula and they want to talk to humans when they use a contact centre.
These 5 points summarize how consumers are feeling right now;
Goodbye loyalty.
Return to spending.
Old wounds still hurt.
Digital or else.
Share/compare.
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Sky Ireland’s Journey so Far
Sky decided to open their own call centre in Ireland a small number of years ago rather than relying on Irish outsourcers completely or sending customer service calls to the UK, a pet peeve of many of their Irish customers. Sky wanted to grow from 50 people in Ireland to 850, the challenge they foresaw was getting up to speed but not to destabilize. Another tricky point that became apparent was that while agents were new so were there team leaders and managers so their training was critical for the success of the new venture.
There were a huge number of metrics being monitored but Sky decided to focus on two in particular: NPS and Sales Conversion. Their sales conversion target was 40% but their baseline was only 25% which meant pressure was intensified. When they listened in on calls they found that the conversation and engagement was good and the product knowledge was very good too. Their sales reps were lacking the killer instinct to make a sale. They overcome this by better supporting their team leaders and getting them to take ownership over the goals.
Sky did achieve their 40% conversion rate but then when they wanted to go beyond 40% to get Sky Fans. This required looking getting the right incentive to drive the right behaviour and for the Sky the approach of focusing on the inputs and the outputs will follow has paid off.
