Don't Just Coach Contact Center Employees; INVOLVE Them (Q&A With ACCO Brands)

There is no way around it: change is difficult. That is especially true within the contact center, for which transformation has represented a notorious challenge.

But you can make it considerably less difficult. How? Involve your employees in the innovation process.

Doing so allows you to capitalize on their great ideas and secure their immediate and resounding buy-in. It allows you to transition from a business that is struggling to keep up into one that is proactively introducing ways to create better customer experiences and drive better business results.

Lisa Davis (pictured), the director of inside sales and customer care at ACCO Brands (Kensington, Swingline, Mead, Five-Star, Trapper), will be speaking on change management and innovation at the Call Center Week Winter event this January. She recently joined Call Center IQ to discuss the pivotal role employees can play in contact center transformation.

Do not simply "coach" your employees. Definitely do not impose on your employees. Involve them.

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Call Center IQ: "Change" is notoriously difficult for all business units. Why is it particularly challenging for contact centers and customer service teams?

Lisa Davis: The customer service environment is very fast-paced, and it has experienced a high frequency of change over the years. A lot of that has to do with the voice of the customer and constant changes in how customers want to interact with companies.

This frequency of change is greater than that found in other areas of the organization, and it can become taxing on customer service employees. Often times, they’ll find that as soon as they’ve mastered one skill, they’ll immediately have to start learning a new or different one.

CCIQ: How can businesses address that challenge?

Davis: We find that the greatest success comes from involving employees in the transformation process. Instead of simply imposing change on employees, we allow them to drive it.

Within our organization, we allow employees to volunteer for committees that address business challenges. These employee groups know the business better than anyone, and they come up with creative ideas regarding how we interact with customers to create satisfaction and loyalty.

You obviously need your employees to trust leadership, but they trust each other first. Since the employees are involved in making the decisions, they more willingly carry the message to their peers and help gain acceptance for the new ideas.

CCIQ: The contact center environment is notorious for being reactive, which likely compounds the impact and difficulty of change. How can we create a more proactive, innovative customer service environment?

Davis: The contact center definitely tends to be more reactive than proactive. Businesses are, unfortunately, often surprised by what they learn when actually interacting with their customers. They often don’t find out what needs to be fixed until those broken processes or systems have already caused problems.

To become more proactive, we put forth a theme at the start of each year. This theme represents a mission for our employees. It is our commitment to them, their commitment to us, and our joint commitment to our customers. It allows us to be a more progressive, innovative organization.

This year, our theme has been "efficiency and empowerment." For 2016, our theme will become "keep it simple." We’re going to automate what we can and optimize processes that definitely cannot be automated.

The committee concept also helps us become more proactive. We have an anchor team that looks toward the top of the mountain and where we need to "anchor" each step to make the improvement.

We have another committee that has been solely focused on using process improvement to maintain customer loyalty. When looking at our processes, we ask, "If I were a customer, would these things build loyalty?" If not, we identify what we can change regarding things like routing calls, answering calls, and responding to chats and emails. We really look at ways to better give customers what they want today and make sure we’ll be able to give them what they’ll want in six months.

CCIQ: As contact centers look into introduce new and improved strategies, how should they balance business interests and customer interests?

Davis: While you have to balance the perspectives, the concept we began to follow is that there is no value in us being "right" about a particular policy or process if we are not first right for our customers. Rules and procedures need to be followed, but if we’re not first and foremost making things feel good for our customers, then we need to modify, change, or evolve those rules and procedures.

To make this happen, it is important to gain alignment from leadership. It is also important to talk to employees.