Key Considerations for Your Post-Pandemic Contact Centre Operating Model
With Garry Gormley, founder of FAB Solutions and The Contact Centre Network
Show Notes
Garry Gormley is the founder of FAB Solutions - the contact centre specialists. He has nearly 20 years’ experience in the contact centre industry. In that time, he’s working across a wide range of industries, and has been responsible for a number of projects.
Garry also runs The Contact Centre Network. The Network holds free monthly events, with industry thought leaders sharing practical advice and support to help improve the running of your contact centre.
He shares the key considerations when it comes to deciding on your post-pandemic operating model.
Garry’s Top 3 Tips:
Evaluate what your operating model needs to look like. If you’ve still got resource challenges 12 months on from COVID, there are some core issues which need to be addressed (21:55).
Listen to your employees and take action on what they’re saying. The employers who do this will suffer lower attrition when certainty returns and people start looking for jobs again (22:37).
Invest in the capability of your leadership team, so they’re better able to coach and communicate with their team remotely (23:37).
You'll Learn:
The percentage of remote workers who want to remain remote, return to the office, and want a combination. The numbers may surprise you (05:26).
9 advantages of having an operating model with 100% of agents working from home (07:15).
3 benefits to agents for working in centre (11:38).
How remote working can jeopardise agents’ resilience, and what to do about it (12:27).
What needs to change to ensure work from home agents get the support they need (13:28).
Advice from a leader of a 100% remote BPO, to get the best from work from home agents (16:26).
Garry’s Customer Experience equation. Get these pillars right, and great Customer Experience is assured (25:17).
Connect with Garry here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garry-gormley-fism-the-contact-centre-specialist/
Join ‘The Contact Centre Network’. Garry runs free monthly events, with industry thought leaders sharing their experience and best-practice tips.
If you'd like to understand how the future of contact centre coaching - which is a behavioral science based approach - can help you to strengthen employee engagement and enhance customer experience, send me an email (at blairs@bravatrak.com) and we can organize a 15-minute call over Zoom or Teams.
Transcript
Blair Stevenson (00:00)
Welcome to the Secrets to Contact Center Success podcast, connecting you with the latest and greatest tips from the best and the brightest minds in the industry.
I am Blair Stevenson, founder of BravaTrak, the Future of Contact Centre Coaching. The BravaTrak system measures and improves coaching effectiveness, so you strengthen employee engagement and enhance customer experience.
Today, I am fortunate enough to be joined by Garry Gormley, who is founder of The Contact Centre Network. Garry is also the founder and director of the contact centre consulting company, FAB Solutions, based in Manchester, England.
Today, we're talking about the new normal for contact centres, and the pros and cons of the operating models Contact Centre Leaders are contemplating right now. So Garry, welcome along. Great to have you here.
Garry Gormley (00:53)
Thank you very much for having me, and thank you very much for this late evening session, Blair. I know it's early here, late there, so I appreciate that.
Blair Stevenson (01:01)
Cool. Thank you. So just to get started, tell us a little bit about your background and your expertise.
Garry Gormley (01:07)
My background is contact centres. So I'm hugely passionate about all things contact centres. Hence why I set up my own business in the contact centre space.
I've got nearly 20 years in the contact centre industry doing a variety of different roles in that space, from healthcare to retail, to insurance, general insurance. So I've had a fair myriad of different roles.
It's a great industry to work in. And I've been fortunate to do lots of different projects from quality assurance, to sales transformation programs, to people transformation. All sorts of great things that you can get your hands on and get stuck into and change.
I set up my business nearly two and a half years ago now, specifically helping improve customer experience in the contact centre by looking at process, people, leadership and technology.
(02:13)
And as part of that, what I want to do is also pull together a really great community of people that can help feed each other by sharing experiences. Which is why just over 12 months ago I set up The Contact Centre Network.
And that was born in the time of COVID, which is strange - 'the time of COVID' - it's like an era, isn't it? The Network was designed to pull together people from the community and the industry, and try and help them navigate the period that we've just been through over the last nearly 18 months.
FAB Solutions is the business that I run, and I'm proud to be part of the contact centre industry and helping contact centres change and transform and do really great things to improve customer experience.
Blair Stevenson (02:57)
Very cool. Thank you. So talking about COVID, clearly there has been massive disruption over the last 15 to 18 months, and there's bound to be some positives out of that. So I'm just curious about your take on what you regard as the positives for contact centres out of this disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic?
Garry Gormley (03:21)
I am a big believer that you have to draw positives out of everything. I am the eternal optimist. And I think what COVID has done for the contact centre community, if you think about it, 18 months ago, conversations that maybe employees were having with management were, "Can I work from home? Can I submit a flexible request to work from home?" And the answer generally was always, "No, it's not viable. We're a contact centre. You need to be in the office".
And that has massively shifted in the last 18 months. So we've had this huge shift to cloud technology deployment, and it's maybe brought the game on. When I speak to people, people talk about that digital transformation and how technology has changed. It brought their technology platforms probably two or three years closer than they first imagined.
(04:13)
So there's been that huge shift to cloud-based technology. There's a lot of adoption to all sorts of collaborative tools like Microsoft Teams and other tools to kind of bring yourself together. Like different communication tools like Slack. And they can help people communicate more effectively.
And in the initial part of COVID, what we did see - because of that greater flexibility of being able to work - employee engagement increased. People were working from home, they didn't have the commute. They were saving time, they were saving money. They were spending more time with their family. And as a consequence of that, people's appetite for staying in the contact centre - not searching for jobs - reduced, and therefore attrition in the contact centre reduced.
There's been some real positives out of this whole pandemic. But there are peaks and troughs to that. So it's understanding how that is going to change over the course of the next six to 12 months as we start to maneuver out of that comfortable bubble we’re in at the moment, and then move into a state where we get to a new level of normal. So it'd be interesting to see what happens.
Blair Stevenson (05:26)
Yeah. So let's talk a bit more about that. I saw a recent survey by a US job listing site called FlexJobs. And I think they went out to more than 2000 workers.
In that survey, 65% of workers who were engaged in remote work during a pandemic said that they want to remain remote workers. So that's almost two thirds. 33% - moving forward - would prefer a hybrid mode, some work from home, some work in the office. And interestingly, only 2% wanted to completely return to the office.
So two thirds wanted to totally work from home and one third wanted the hybrid model. Given the cost implications, and the likely recruitment - and as you point out, the retention - challenges of returning to a fully in-centre operation, I really can't see that being a model being preferred by most Contact Centre Leaders moving forward, which really leaves only two models.
One is a pure work from home model, which I know some contact centres are pursuing, and the other is a hybrid work from home model, with an incentive model. What that might look like, for example, could be something where they come into the centre for two days a week, work from home maybe three days a week. But let's start with the pure work from home. What do you think are the positives of taking that approach moving forward as the ongoing post pandemic model?
Garry Gormley (07:15)
It's a really interesting question, isn't it? Because there's lots to take into consideration when you look at how a contact centre can completely change their operating model from being 100 percent in centre to now 100 percent working from home.
I think there are a number of things that you can think about from a positive perspective. Because the instinct is to think about all the reasons why you can't do it, isn't it sometimes?
But when we think about how that could be seen as a positive, I think what it gives us, it gives us the opportunity to say, "Actually, let's recruit the best people from anywhere in the country". And I was about to say anywhere in the UK there, but actually, if you think about that globally, you can have your cherry pick of anybody in the globe, as long as it kind of fits.
(08:06)
And certainly in some contact centres, where you're operate 24/7, that's a really advantageous model to look at, is to say, "Actually we could have our pick of anybody in the globe". So I think there's something there to say, actually, you can recruit anybody.
And if anybody wants to work from home, they can do it. It gives employees that flexibility to do full-time, part-time, flexi time. All that kind of stuff. So you've got an opportunity there to have a real flexible resource in your contact centre. So I think the opportunity, therefore, means that your attrition rates and your retention rates can be a lot more favorable, because people have that choice.
I think the other thing to think about, as well, is it gives you that greater opportunity to have more of a plan in the event that something like this happens again. We're all saying, "We hope that something like COVID does not happen again". But when you think about business continuity and disaster recovery, it gives you so much more flexibility.
(09:12)
And I think when we look at business continuity, we probably all had some sort of plan in place to say, "Right. If this happens for a couple of weeks, then we've got backup places where we can work". But I don't think anybody ever considered that for an ongoing period of over 12 months that we'd be in this situation.
So it really does give you that opportunity to have a more flexible workforce. And there are obviously the advantages that come in terms of saving on costs, saving on properties, saving on rent and all those kinds of things. And it creates a much more flexible workplace, and it gives you a much more flexible operating model.
And we talk about things like getting to work and that age-old argument of "There’s no car parking space when I get there for a late shift or a 12 to 8" - it eliminates all of that stuff. Employee engagement can be seen as a much bigger tool as well.
I think there are a number of positives, but then you have to balance the out, and say "Actually, contact centres are sometimes a social construct as well". So you have to think about that in balance.
Blair Stevenson (10:25)
Yeah. So that bring us on to that there clearly are several negatives. And a number of them, I suspect, have to do with that social construct. So just talk us through your thinking about what are some of the negatives that you see with a pure work from home model.
Garry Gormley (10:44)
There are contact centres out there that use the work from home model 100 percent of the time, and they have some real positives. But I think what we have to consider here is this has been forced upon some contact centres. So that whole switch, to 100 percent remote working at the moment has been forced on people who weren't recruited to be remote workers.
And what you tend to find is those, in say, the BPO space - that recruit people specifically for home working - they're recruiting a specific type of person. So that person has applied to be somebody who wants to work from home, wants to have that flexibility, and wants to be in that environment. Where what we've done in this transitional period is said, "Right, everybody is now working from home". And not everybody wants to work from home.
(11:38)
Most people that work in contact centres, work in contact centres because they like that social aspect. And they like that social dynamic where you can meet at the water cooler and have that water cooler conversation. They like turning into the person to the left or the right of them and having those in-between customer conversations. Or turning the chair and having the conversation with the person next to you.
So there is a definite need, if we're going to continue that, to think about what that recruitment model needs to be. Because if we don't have the opportunity to build those relationships sometimes face to face, then actually the culture can change. And we've got to think about that opportunity where people after a stressful call, they've got the opportunity to turn around to somebody and just vent a bit about that customer conversation.
(12:27)
And you can't do that in a remote setting. You can't suddenly jump on your Slack communication or send a WhatsApp complaining about a customer conversation, or something that's just caused you to kind of have that moment where I just need to talk to somebody.
So you've got the opportunity there where you can vent to somebody to the left or right of you, and actually get it off your chest. Whereas in a homeworking environment, you've not got that same outlet. You've not got that same opportunity to kind of talk about your frustrations very quickly and just get it off your chest.
And what that does is that impacts on our potential resilience levels. So when we think about what we're doing in some of these discussions, is we're inviting customers into our home and allowing them in certain aspects.
Whether it might be customer complaints or it might be a customer is particularly unhappy. They might be yelling at us. They might be shouting at us. They might be putting us in a position where we're not 100 percent comfortable with having that conversation in our home.
(13:28)
And there's no opportunity then to switch off. So we're dealing with those customer conversations in a very isolated environment, without the ability to then either raise your hand and talk to your Team Leader and say, “I'm just going to go and take five minutes and just debrief on that conversation”.
And the Team Leader isn't there with those peripheral conversations, listening out for things that might be happening, that might be identifying triggers or potential signs of stress in the agent.
And we talk very much about customer vulnerability, but now I think in this environment, you have to think about Agent vulnerability. And how they start to handle some of those difficult conversations that might have been easily nipped in the board and identified in an office environment, that can't necessarily be picked up and identified as quickly in a remote setting.
So we need to make sure the right structure for Team Leaders is there, and structure for the agent is there to be able to flag some of those conversations. So it's a whole different dynamic, and a different operating model, a different leadership model that we've got to consider in an environment that has been thrust on people that weren't necessarily recruited for, in that same way.
Blair Stevenson (14:43)
You've made a lot of good points here, Garry. And I think one of them that really strikes home for me is agent vulnerability, because I've worked with a wide range of contact centres over the last 20 years. And up until roughly a year ago, I never once heard a Senior Contact Centre Leader talk about resilience, or agent wellbeing or agent mental health. It just wasn't on the radar.
But in the last year, every single Senior Contact Centre Leader I've spoken to has expressed a concern about one of those three. And in the end, they're talking about the same thing. That whole agent vulnerability. That need for resilience.
And so that idea of people really being alone at home, dealing with customers who are coming in, who may be upset or may have complaints, or have more complex issues that are more challenging to deal with. That's a tough situation to be in which can call on the resilience of the best of us.
So I'm just wondering about how a hybrid model might leverage the best of both worlds, where you leverage some of the best bits of work from home, but also you might avoid those disadvantages?
And as I said earlier, by a hybrid model, I mean something where maybe people come into a centre for a couple of days of the week, but the rest of the week they work from home.
Garry Gormley (16:26)
I don't think that's an easy task. And when I think about people that I've had conversations with over the last 18 months, there was a chap I had a conversation with that runs a 100 percent remote BPO. And one of the pieces of advice that he gave was, "Overcompensate and over-communicate".
So really over-index on some of the things that you're doing with your contact centre population, and don't be afraid of communicating to the nth degree. The worst that can happen is people say, "You're talking to me a little bit too much. I want to less from you". But that's a better place to be in, isn't it? Certainly in a remote setting.
And when we start to think about that hybrid structure, I think there's something out there to say, "Right. What proportion of the contact centre population actually does want to work from home? And what proportion would like to have that hybrid".
And then you can start to create the operating model that supports that blended workforce, supports that blended environment. And you can start to do things like shift pattern analysis and shift preferences, and you can start to really play to the preferences of your team.
(17:54)
Because there are people out there that would like to the late 12 to 8 shifts. There's certain people, based on their commitments as parents, would prefer to do mid-morning to mid-afternoon shifts. So you can start to have a much more dynamic shift pattern in terms of the structure that you want, and a more creative operating model to satisfy all ends of the contact centre spectrum.
And it also gives you the opportunity to really have those open and honest conversations with people about how they want to work, about what the contracts are about, how they want to work, about how they want to be communicated to, and how they like to have those discussions with Team Leaders.
So what this whole pandemic has done is it's given us the opportunity to start to communicate and start to think about what the art of the possible is, and what the new operating model can look like. When we start to unpick this, and when the dust starts to settle, we'll probably come up with a few variations about what the operating model needs to look like.
(19:14)
But I think the other part that that's also been driven from this, is how customers want to communicate. We've traditionally thought about voice. Now we've kind of thrust everybody into this omni-channel communication platform, where some contact centres might not have had the opportunity to have SMS, business WhatsApp, email, social media.
You've now got all these live chat options, web chat options, where you've got people now thinking about "How can I integrate chatbots into my customer journey". So you've got now a shift in demand, and you've got now a shift in capability as well to say, "Right. Somebody who can't do voice can now do textual communication".
So you can start to play people to their different strengths, and think about what that customer demand is and resource to that different demand in that channel. It creates a bit more flexibility in how customers can communicate, and how we can then apply the resource to those different communication channels, to maybe decide how we want the actual centre to run, and give customers the same options of choice at the same time.
Blair Stevenson (20:29)
So what I'm hearing and seeing is that the pandemic has really accelerated change. Brought things together a lot faster.
You provide consulting services to contact centres, considering everything we've covered today, talk us through your top three tips for what you think Contact Centre Leaders should be considering when they're deciding on their post pandemic operating model.
Garry Gormley (21:00)
Over the last 12 months we've seen contact centres react exceptionally well. I think the speed at which they've transformed is incredible. And that's a testament to everybody that works within that industry, and everybody that's going through the change, the frontline teams and also the operational change team.
But I think there's probably still a few things that we need to think about as we start to move out of that model.
And what I still hear - even more than 12 months on - is a dependency on customers to accept that we're going through a period of change and the COVID is still having an impact. And whilst it might be, customers now - 12 months on - are becoming less and less tolerant of that as an excuse.
Tip #1 (21:55)
So the first thing that I'd say is you need to evaluate what your operating model needs to look like, and you need to have a robust operational platform that enables customers to communicate with you in a way that they want to communicate with you. But do that in a positive way, that fixes some of the resource challenges that you might have.
If you've still got resource challenges 12 months on from COVID, then it means that you've not really truly addressed some of the operating issues that are sat in the fundamental core of how you run your centre. So I think having a strong operating platform is essential.
Tip #2 (22:37)
And then I think listening to your employees. I think what COVID has taught us, is that communication is an absolute essential piece in the contact centre. And if it wasn't crucial before, it's even more crucial now. And I think those employees that thought they had a poor leader prior to COVID, now during COVID and coming out of it, think they were really poor.
So I think listening to what your employees are saying, listening to what your customers are saying, and take action from that, is really important. Because that will help give them a little bit more certainty, that'll help them feel that they're being listened to.
And those employers that listen to their employees and take action from what they're saying will be the ones that suffer a lower level of attrition when certainty begins, and people start to look for jobs in the market again.
Tip #3 (23:37)
And I think the last one, therefore, then has to be invest in the capabilities of your leadership team. So no matter where your new model lands, whether it's 50-50, or 100 percent remote, you've now got to really look at the capability of your leadership team.
And identify whether you need to invest in the capabilities in the training of leaders, to have more remote conversations, to be able to communicate more effectively in a remote setting, and actually understand what we want from the leadership team now, to embrace that new way of working.
(24:13)
So I think it's look at the operating model, listen to employees and invest in the capability of your leadership team to have a more varied conversation with your teams and coach in a slightly different way. Because they can't pick up on those 'at the desk' conversations when they're no longer at the desk.
So it's how do you pick up on those 'in the moment' conversations by being a bit more proactive in call listening, call monitoring, call observations, all those types of things, there's a new model now that we need to embrace. And we need to work out how we're going to do that.
Blair Stevenson (24:50)
Good tips. Thank you very much, Garry. Just to wrap up, I'd quite like to circle back to something you said right at the front end, which is your focus around helping contact centres improve or enhance customer experience.
So with that in mind, what would be your top tip for developing great customer service? Or great customer experience, which is probably a better description.
Garry Gormley (25:17)
They're intrinsically linked, I think. You can't have good customer service without a good customer experience. And vice versa.
And I've always said:
Operational Excellence + Employee Experience = good Customer Experience in general
Because if you've got a sound operating model, and you've got happy and engaged employees, they are more likely to deliver that discretionary effort, they're going to go over and above in terms of customer service, which feeds customer experience.
And I talk about customer experience from a very practical perspective, being an operational leader and my previous experience, being all in the operation. I talk about customer experience on a very practical level, and I think customers are now much more informed, they're much savvier than they were a few years ago.
(26:14)
They've probably accelerated that in the last 12 to 18 months, but now if a customer is ringing you, they're ringing you from a much more informed position. So you now have to focus on the practical elements of that.
And customer experience starts with "How easy is it for me to find the telephone number? How easy is it to find the information on your website? How effective is your chat bot? How receptive are you to your live chat?” So it starts before you've even spoken to somebody.
So I think when you get to that point where a customer is actually ringing you up, if you don't satisfy that need quite quickly, then you're on a highway to a poor customer experience or a disengaged customer that's potentially going to give you some negative feedback.
(27:03)
So have a really sound operating model, and really test and kick the tires of your operating model. And if you've got really high customer wait time, then something is not right. Something is not right with your resourcing model. Something's not right with how your signposting demand to the customer. And there's something that needs to be addressed there.
And that has a waterfall effect in that angry customers then take it out on the agent, and the agent gets it in the neck, and then that has another knock on effect in that the Team Leader's time is then potentially taken up with customer complaints, which detract from their ability to be able to coach.
So I always look at that equation and say:
Operational Excellence + Employee Experience = great Customer Experience
And I think those are the pillars for me, for delivering great customer experience. That would be my top tip is analyze that equation, and really understand how to balance it effectively.
Blair Stevenson (28:04)
Yeah, I totally agree. And it's interesting talking to you because you're weighted - not fully - but you're weighted towards the operational excellence side, and I'm weighted towards the agent experience side. And those two together, as you rightly point out - are a powerful combination.
Lastly, you run The Contact Centre Network. You hold regular events. I know that you've got one on the 27th of May this year. Tell us a bit about that upcoming event.
Garry Gormley (28:37)
We just celebrated in April the one-year anniversary of The Contact Centre Network. So it was a great opportunity to bring people together. And whilst we're still in this kind of shifting dynamic, I'm going to continue to run them.
The next event, like you say, is on May the 27th. It's an hour long, so it's 60 minutes of value added activity. We'll have a QA panel discussion and we'll be doing some value share. And this month's theme is all around how to get smart with quality assurance.
One thing that I hear in the contact centre all the time is "I need to improve my quality assurance scores" or "Quality is giving me a challenge" or "My pass rate needs to be higher", and it tends to feed activity, doesn't it? It tends to drive where your coaching efforts go. But sometimes, we're sat there doing quality assurance on spreadsheets. Sometimes we don't get the feedback in the right way.
So we're talking this month about how we can create smart quality assurance, to deliver great customer outcomes, and how fusing the two together can generate a really great customer experience in general. We're going to have some guest speakers coming in.
So if you've got challenges with your quality assurance, you want to kind of talk about what's causing you pain in the funnel, then we've got some great people that are going to be helping to share some value, some tips, advice, and tools to help have great quality assurance conversations, which should lead to great customer outcomes.
Blair Stevenson (30:10)
And I'll share in a moment where people can find the link to that event as well. But it sounds like - just one last question - it sounds like you've run a monthly event? Would that be correct.
Garry Gormley (30:18)
Yeah.
Blair Stevenson (30:18)
Great. Well, that's all we've got time for today. Garry, huge thank you for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. You've provided some super useful insights into the pros and cons of two future operating models many Contact Centre Leaders are currently considering.
Now, for listeners, you'll find the link to the show notes in the episode description below.
And if you'd like to connect with Garry on LinkedIn, you'll also find the link to his LinkedIn profile and that description too (https://www.linkedin.com/in/garry-gormley-fism-the-contact-centre-specialist/).
And Garry, just a moment ago, was talking about The Contact Centre Network. If you'd like to join Garry's network, you'll also find a link to his website below where you can book into those events (https://www.fabsolutions.co.uk/contact-centre-training/the-contact-centre-network/).
Now, if you'd like to understand how the future of contact centre coaching - which is a behavioral science based approach - can help you to strengthen employee engagement and enhance customer experience, just send me an email (at blairs@bravatrak.com) and we can organize a 15-minute call over Zoom or Teams.
Well, that's it from us today. Thank you again to Garry. Have a productive week.