The goal in implementing change should be minimal disruption so that agents can focus on their customers.
What does every contact center have in common? Surprisingly, it’s change. While change isn’t typically the first answer that comes to mind, it does have a profound effect on every aspect of operations. It’s a simple concept that is so ubiquitous that it’s often taken for granted. But increasingly, successful organizations are taking a more active approach to addressing change within their contact centers. Managing change proactively is becoming a business differentiator to drive employee and customer engagement.
With complex organizational structures and the need for effective, motivated and well-trained agents, contact centers can greatly benefit from leveraging organized change management strategies. Change management is a strategic approach to change that enables individuals and organizations to adapt and excel in an evolving environment by utilizing a combination of training (system and process), education, performance management and extensive communication. The approach helps enable individuals and companies to adapt and excel within an environment in transition.
Significant contact center projects, transformation activities and other events require change management to drive success. In today’s fast-paced business environments, best-practice organizations are incorporating change management techniques and skills as an integral part of their day-to-day operational approach.
Looking at Event-Driven Change Management
Change management impacts a variety of projects. Examples include the way customer contacts are handled by way of new technology (i.e., new agent desktop, CRM, workforce management, call recording), the introduction of a new channel (i.e., chat, mobile, self-service), standardization of processes across multiple contact centers, and the consolidation of numerous contact centers. Transformation projects like these can often experience significant resistance where many different stakeholder groups are affected.
To get started, organizations typically identify change management representatives or liaisons from each stakeholder group. These individuals participate in regularly scheduled meetings, where the project team provides status updates and solicits feedback on findings and changes. It’s also important to provide information at the employee level—through such avenues as newsletters, suggestion boxes and other communications vehicles—about planned changes. The purpose is to engage employees and encourage the opportunity to offer detailed feedback about the project.
Keep in mind that every project has challenges. Change management activities won’t necessarily eliminate them, but instead will surface issues and resistance much earlier in the process.
Contact Center Example #1
During a transformation project, one contact center expressed significant concern about some of the process changes that were planned—including new approaches to scheduling and quality measurement. These reservations were raised months before the implementation. With this advance notice, the team was able to spend dedicated time exploring other options on how training and new tools would enable the location to develop fresh skills and perform their jobs better. It turns out the employees had not received adequate training during past implementations, creating fears that their performance would suffer and their jobs might be at risk. Taking the time to address these necessary changes with employees reinforced the company’s commitment to a successful transition. Training was enhanced to address specific concerns and extra town hall meetings were scheduled. As a result, the improved process changes were implemented without any problems.
Contact Center Example #2
Another contact center in the process of a significant speech analytics rollout was concerned that the transition might be met with some trepidation by the agents. As a result, the contact center created a multipronged program to increase awareness, drive acceptance and cultivate excitement. It included, among other components, a blog-based communication program and town hall sessions for supervisors at every contact center site. Supervisors were armed with ways to communicate the benefits to agents, and talked regularly about it with the teams in group and one-on-one settings. The result included such excitement that most sites started to put up temporary decorations about the speech analytics project and some agents even had custom T-shirts made!
Implementing a Holistic Change Management Strategy
In an environment where employee and customer engagement steal the show, many change management techniques can be used to enhance learning and the adoption of new processes and techniques across the contact center.
Let’s look at ongoing agent training, as an example. When processes change, additional training is needed to educate agents about changes and updates to standard operating procedures. Change management techniques can enhance that training by identifying specific areas of agent concern, and developing specific tools to accelerate learning and understanding.
A few examples include the following:
- Classroom training: It’s very common to hear agents say they believe they are well trained on their role. However, many don’t step inside a classroom after they first take the position. Policies, procedures and contact center content changes fairly often, so an agent who started two to three years ago may have different process context than the agent of today. Structured refresher training can be a great way to ensure that everyone is on the same page. Such training can also serve to boost morale since agents often welcome a reprieve from back-to-back calls and appreciate an opportunity to interact with one another.
- Online learning: Many organizations have invested in an online learning program that pushes out information to agents. Generally, the technology is set up to track when agents complete the training, which helps to drive compliance—and more importantly—consistent communication to the team.
- Knowledge base: Contact centers leverage software or a shared website/intranet to track the answers to frequently asked questions and to provide information or call scripts to address specific scenarios. These tools are designed to evolve over time, and when deployed effectively, will supplement other change management techniques.
- Job aids: These are one-page visual guides that clearly explain critical process steps, system screens and outputs. For example, if a new customer statement format is introduced, the job aid would be a sample customer statement with callout boxes around key areas explaining each key section in detail. In some situations, these job aids are created as easy-to-use laminated flash cards on the desk of every agent.
- Process maps:* Many organizations develop detailed, large-scale process maps that provide an overview of the end-to-end customer interaction. These maps develop greater awareness and understanding of the end-to-end process and highlight where the agent’s activities fit into the overall process, as well as other interactions the customer may have had with other areas. It is common to find these process maps hanging on the walls in the contact center for employee reference.
- Enhanced communications: Adding additional communication activities and feedback opportunities geared specifically to the team’s demographics is a great way to identify potential operational and change issues. Team huddles, regularly scheduled focus groups and additional supervisor meetings show that the organization is focused on their success and providing avenues for feedback and improvement suggestions. Sometimes individuals just want to know that opportunities exist to offer input.
Kick-starting a Change Management Program
Here are a few key considerations when launching or enhancing a change management program in the contact center:
- Make it personal: Agents are particularly sensitive to feeling like they are treated as a number. It’s critical that employees are engaged and feel that their specific fears and concerns are being addressed early in the process. A change strategy needs to be contextualized and personalized. Performing a stakeholder analysis to best understand the change dynamics is a great way to determine the optimum way to achieve this goal.
- Supervisors are key: Contact center supervisors have a key role in keeping everyone on the same page and driving the consistency and morale of the operation. The change management strategy needs to include trainingcommunicationmentorship for supervisors.
- Stay the course: While there are many different ways to stay in contact with the contact center, it’s not necessary to do everything all at once. It may be beneficial to start with a few techniques that are most appropriate for the culture and context of a contact center. Commit to doing them consistently for a period of time before changing course or increasing the level of communication—and master those as you go.
- Ensure that feedback mechanisms are in place: Establish different avenues for providing feedback from the organization to allow opportunities for ideas, concerns and risks to be raised. These mechanisms should range from options as simple as an email alias for suggestions to monthly meetings with stakeholder groups to dedicated change management resources. It’s critical to ensure that a variety of ways are provided for all employee groups, levels and areas.
Focusing on Customer Engagement
Fear and hesitancy toward change is human nature. So it’s important to focus on individual employees’ concerns first in order to address fears and concerns upfront. Once these are addressed, employees can digest and understand messages focused on the organizational benefits.
The goal in implementing change should be minimal disruption. Agents should be focused on their engagements with customers rather than worrying about negative consequences of the change, perceived or real. Ideally, if communicated correctly, agents will embrace the positive aspects of the change. Understanding it will make their jobs better, and help them to continue to perform their job functions as seamlessly as possible.
Best-practice organizations are incorporating change management resources into their core teams and activities across ongoing contact center operations, often in conjunction with workforce optimization, analytics and other tools to deliver optimal customer engagement. With the pace of new technology advancements and evolving customer demands, change continues to be the only constant.