What’s The Difference Between a Leader and a Laggard?

Leaders take action!

Over the past few months, we’ve teamed up with ContactBabel and CCA Global to understand the challenges in the contact centre and how to address them.  The research was enlightening, but not necessarily surprising as it revealed there is a big disconnect between the perception leaders have of the advisor’s role and the reality of this for the advisor.

As our research series comes to a close, I wanted to share with you some of the highlights we uncovered and share our advice and initiatives we’ve put in place here at Kura and Inisoft to address them. Below is just a summary of these initiatives, but you can read more in our new report.

Attrition in the Contact Centre

One of the biggest things that stood out in the research for us was that only 21% of leaders viewed advisor attrition as a driver for change. We found this alarming, especially as in the advisor survey 39% said this wasn’t the role for them – meaning more attrition to come.

From our experience, attrition is a problem that affects all contact centres, by not having the correct people in place results in a poor customer experience amongst other challenges. Although we don’t have the silver bullet to fix this fully, at Kura we’re on a journey and improving attrition is a key goal of ours.
One of the biggest ways we measure and try to improve this is by our culture index – this is the retention rate of our people. The Culture Index is what drives the whole organisation’s bonus from the leadership team all the way down. We have bold plans to reduce our attrition and if we don’t achieve these – no one receives a bonus! Some would say this is a crazy strategy and many would shy away, but we know that if we want to truly achieve our vision of being “Unrivalled in Developing People”, we need to improve our advisor morale, empower our advisors by giving them the right skills and training, and in doing so hopefully reduce attrition. We believe that by being bold and delivering this strategy, we’ll create strong employee engagement and in turn the best customer experience for our clients.

Too Many Systems

• 50% of the advisors surveyed used between 4–6 applications to perform their job.
• Even more astounding is 37% required 7–10 applications to perform their job!

Why are we making it so difficult for our contact centre advisors to perform their job?

We need to help our people to make it easy for our customers and one recommendation would be to unify applications, providing advisors with a single view of the customer and letting the systems do the hard work. In doing so, the advisor can focus on their job – listening to and helping customers. Inisoft’s Syntelate XA does just that! It unifies disparate systems into a single user interface which allows advisors to stop focusing on the technology and start engaging with customers.

Listen to the Experts – Your Advisors!

Our research revealed that 42% of leaders spend no time or very little time in the contact centre speaking to employees or listening to calls. However, they are the ones responsible for making decisions related to the contact centre! What’s interesting, though, is 61% of leaders said they could do more to improve employee feedback. We believe this is essential as 35% of advisors said they didn’t feel valued as an employee!

In our opinion, employee feedback is a great way to understand and learn how engaged your workforce is. However, it should only ever be measured if you’re going to do something with it!  At Kura we believe all feedback is good feedback, a learning opportunity, so we encourage it at all levels. We have also designed processes and tools to support this for our advisors, such as our “Ask Brian” tool where anyone in the organisation can ask a question or offer their suggestions to our CEO and he responds in person.

Another initiative we have, as part of Inisoft’s Syntelate XA solution, is a unique feature called Voice of the Agent (VOA). This feature pops up on the screen at the end of a call and asks the advisor to rate the success of the call from a training perspective. Our VOA feature helps organisations identify training gaps and to process problems and areas where organisations have potentially not empowered their advisors. Based on this vital feedback from the advisor, improvements can be made that enhance training and efficiencies going forward.

These are just some of the initiatives we’re taking at Kura and Inisoft to help build our unique culture of focusing on people and their development. If you’d like to explore further initiatives we’ve introduced, you can download our new report on this topic, here.