As discussed in Why your globally distributed contact center depends on access to clean data, quality data across your operation underpins the effectiveness of your contact center. Real-time data insights can drive better business decisions, increase productivity, and elevate service quality and customer satisfaction rates.

But did you know that quality data also can help you find and resolve issues faster—and even prevent some from ever happening? In this follow-up post, I’ll share how globally distributed contact centers can leverage data to improve issue identification and resolution.

Intelligently designed metrics

The ability to set thresholds is vital to issue identification and resolution. And this means using intelligently designed metrics to define what constitutes an issue.

For example, let’s say that you’re a cellular provider. Your service level agreement specifies that 95% of calls are answered within five minutes, and 90% of issues are resolved in the first call. To ensure you meet these targets, you need to know when you’re at risk of missing them. Intelligently designed metrics enable you to define the thresholds that alert you to potential issues. 

Automated issue identification

If you’re doing manual work to identify issues, you’re overdue for some built-in automation. Not only is automation more efficient than having humans perform this work, it’s also far more timely and accurate.

Case in point: say an issue pops up in one of your remote centers. The responsible person has stepped away from their desk and doesn’t see it until 20 minutes later—or worse, misses the issue altogether, negatively impacting service levels.

Automation, on the other hand, never steps away from the desk. And while a human might misinterpret data and send teams to chase the wrong issue, automation is far more likely to make the proper diagnosis.

Monitoring 100% of data

Not only do you need access to data across your call centers—you must monitor every system that feeds into your ecosystem.

Going back to the cellular service provider example, let’s say you suddenly see a massive spike in call volumes. Your call center data is clean, and you’re scrambling to pinpoint the cause. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to you, the retail point-of-sale systems are down across the west coast, prompting in-store representatives to call into customer care to activate phones. Having access to that data would have saved you valuable time.

Defining issue resolution

When tackling an issue, it’s important to know that you’ve addressed the root of the problem and not just a symptom. For example, perhaps you resolved a spike in call volume with additional agents. But have you determined what caused the spike and will it happen again? This is why you need to establish clear metrics that define issue resolution—such as recurrence within a specific timeframe.

You also need very clear processes on how to achieve resolution. The most successful organizations have a runbook that saves them the time and frustration of the trial-and-error approach. They have a checklist that they follow immediately if something goes wrong, much like an airplane pilot. Clear, repeatable processes drive efficiency.

Discover opportunities to improve issue identification and resolution

Operating a globally distributed contact center has become increasingly complex. Access to quality data across the business streamlines your ability to identify and resolve issues and meet service level requirements. For a more holistic understanding of your organization’s strengths and weaknesses in this area, I highly recommend completing this free survey.

When operating a contact center, it can be challenging optimizing staffing levels. Too many agents on a shift can eat into profits. Too few can negatively impact the customer experience. And when you’re managing staffing levels across multiple, globally distributed contact center partners, the complexity escalates.

Between technical debt inherited from contact center partners, manual forecasting, siloed teams, and suboptimal data access, ensuring the proper staffing levels poses a tremendous challenge for many global organizations. In this article, I’ll share four issues global contact centers face and why taking a holistic assessment of your organization is the first step toward improving workforce optimization.

1. Technical debt

As the saying goes, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. This same concept applies to technical debt. While your organization may be aware of and working to resolve your own technical debt, you have no control over your subcontractors’ systems. So if any of your contact center partners are working on legacy systems, their technical debt affects your organization. And when you’re working with multiple partners across the globe, technical debt becomes an even bigger problem, impacting data and processes. Therefore, organizations must have a plan to deal with partners’ legacy systems and technical debt.

2. Manual forecasting

Manual forecasting is not only inefficient—it’s not terribly accurate. Say you have 100 contact centers in 30 countries and centrally forecast the number of staff across the global organization—which is precisely what many organizations are doing. This kind of labor-intensive work involves teams of individuals pouring over spreadsheets to analyze and interpret historical data around call center spikes, outages, and product releases. These teams manually combine these variables to develop forward-looking guidance, which is sent to the call centers to inform staffing levels.

It’s a ton of work that uses data that may be heavily influenced by the limitations of partner systems, including technical debt. Cleaning up the technical debt can undoubtedly make forecasting easier. But even better is automating processes to minimize manual work.

3. Siloed teams

All parts of an engine must work to run correctly. When one part breaks or falls out of sync, issues occur. Similarly, team silos substantially reduce efficiency, productivity, and overall effectiveness. Like many contact centers, you likely have several other teams in addition to your workforce forecasting team. For example, you may have a team responsible for interfacing with individual partners, another that monitors partner performance, and another accountable for escalating partner issues. The work of all these teams feeds into accurate forecasting and staffing levels, among other areas.

Yet all too often, these teams work in silos, with ad hoc and inefficient communication between the groups–as depicted in the original customer care structure diagram below. This churn generates extra work cycles to overcome gaps in data sharing and hinders the ability to make informed business decisions. Consolidating these functions—such as in the revised customer care structure diagram below—helps streamline operations and ensure all teams understand the current state, including issues and spikes. 

4. Data access issues

Quality data provides the foundation for making better, more accurate, and more timely business decisions. When you have limited access to disparate data on disparate systems, it’s hard to get to a single source of truth. As a result, decisions are clunky, requiring manual work to consolidate data across systems. Workforce optimization depends upon the ability to access clean data and derive comprehensive insights across the entire network partner systems. This access can feed into real-time monitoring and surface trends to enable and streamline accurate forecasting.

Solving these issues

Data access, cleanliness, and aggregation

• Is data accessible and easy to understand?
• Are you using your data to identify issues?
• Do you know where your gaps are, and are you addressing them?

Issue identification

• Do you have clear business requirements and metrics to monitor?
• Are you automating, or do you have a roadmap?
• Do you monitor 100% of your business effectively?

Issue resolution

• Do you have measurable outcomes and are processes tied to these outcomes?
• Do you have issues resolution metrics in place?
• Do you have defined processes?

Reporting and processes

• Are you learning and continually improving?
• Do you analyze resolved issues to identify opportunities for improvement?
• Are you combining real-time monitoring and historical reporting to make data-driven decisions?

Assessing and understanding the current state of your global contact center is the first step toward addressing the most common issues impacting workforce optimization. Consider completing this workforce optimization survey, which can give you a high-level view of your data and organizational health.

If there’s one thing you can count on, it’s change. As time marches forward, technologies evolve, markets shift, new competitors arise, people come and go. These and other ongoing changes can have substantial impacts to your organization—whether you notice the effects right away or not.

Case in point: let’s say your business has expanded internationally and you’re getting ready to launch a new line of products. To gear up, your business has undergone a major re-organization to align teams to more effectively support the accelerated growth. As a result of the re-org, your teams are positioned for optimal success, and you’re already seeing the  results, including increased efficiency and productivity, improved quality, and best of all, skyrocketing revenues.

Your hard re-org work has paid off in spades! Then a year or two goes by, and you lose a few key employees. Their more experienced coworkers take on expanded roles and try to pick up the slack, but now they’re falling behind on deliverables and it’s taking a lot of time to onboard new employees. People are burning out. Customer complaints are stacking up due to a bug that went out in the latest software release. To complicate matters, your main competitor just released a new product with killer incentives, and suddenly business growth has slowed down. That major re-org you did is quickly becoming obsolete and you’re faced with yet another overhaul.

The fact is that rarely do we get things 100% right the first time. And that includes restructuring teams. Taking a continuous improvement approach to organizational design helps you work out the kinks and tackle challenges as they come. Below, I’ll share what a continuous improvement cycle looks like when it comes to organizational design, its specific advantages, and some best practices for setting up a continuous feedback loop.

What a continuous improvement approach to organizational design looks like

Major re-orgs take a lot of time and planning. They can be incredibly disruptive, especially to employees who may grow frustrated with upheaval and uncertainty. Furthermore, when you do a major re-org, there are often considerable business problems that have been festering in the background, eroding productivity, efficiency, and often, employee morale.

But a continuous improvement cycle enables you to address business changes and fluctuations incrementally. Rather than waiting to make a major re-org once problems come to a head, your organization evolves with your business. Instead of thinking about your org chart once a year during planning, you’re always looking at ways to optimize your teams. You’ve got listening processes in place. You’ve established tracking systems. You’re checking in with your employees. You’re making changes as you go.

Benefits of a continuous improvement cycle

A continuous improvement approach to organizational design offers many benefits, including greater agility, improved productivity, higher quality, better customer satisfaction scores, and happier, more empowered employees.  

In fact, empowerment, in my opinion, is one of the most significant benefits of a continuous improvement cycle. Employees who are put into positions that maximize their talents and enable career growth feel more empowered to develop new, innovative, more efficient ways to get work done. You create centers of excellence that foster a growth mindset, where people are invested in the business and believe that the business is invested in them.

How to set up a continuous feedback cycle

Rather than a linear, one-and-done approach, a continuous feedback cycle never ends. The four components—review, identify, plan, and execute—help you make ongoing changes and build centers of excellence.

Review: The review phase is all about establishing meaningful KPIs and then tracking against those KPIs regularly—whether that’s weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. KPIs will vary based on your business but might include revenue, expenses, customer and employee satisfaction, quality, on-time delivery, and more. Based on these KPIs, watch for signals that things are not working as expected.

Identify: By reviewing KPIs regularly, you’ll be able to spot issues, patterns, and trends more quickly. By surfacing issues early on, you can identify root causes and mitigate them before they become endemic and cause broad repercussions. By course-correcting along the way, you side-step broader business impacts.

Plan: Once you’ve identified the issue and the root cause, take steps to get things back on track. Determine the next steps, whether that’s training staff members, redistributing or outsourcing workloads, or making updates to internal processes. Circulate your plan to gather feedback and perspective from your leadership team and members of your business unit so that you not only identify gaps and risks but that you receive buy-in.

Execute: Once you’ve got a plan in place, communicate and implement your changes. Make sure staff members understand why you are making changes and what the expected outcomes are. Continue to solicit their feedback following the changes and update your KPIs if necessary to understand the impact and to learn if you need to modify your plan.

What a continuous improvement approach to organizational design looks like in practice

Going back to our original example, instead of taking a set-it-and-forget-it approach, you’ve got KPIs in place. You’re monitoring team productivity, product quality, customer satisfaction scores, and other desired metrics every month. You’re checking in each quarter with employees to understand what’s working well and what isn’t and balance out their workloads. You’re conducting a twice-annual anonymous employee survey to track satisfaction scores and to seek opportunities to improve. As each issue comes up, you tackle it right away. And to your relief, employees are happier and more productive. Your continued efforts are helping your business achieve its goals.

Taking a continuous improvement approach to organizational design sets you up for greater success in the long term. To learn more, please take time to review our white paper: Growing Global Teams: A Best Practice Approach to Organizational Design. Need help scaling and optimizing your team? With 32 delivery centers across five continents, Beyondsoft can help, whether you need business process outsourcing, professional services, consulting, or other support. Please feel free to contact us today.