I would rather Run A Marathon Than Shop
I hate shopping.
Whenever I shop my back and feet start hurting after about 10 minutes. They don’t hurt when I’m going on a run or working in the yard for hours on end. I also feel fatigued like I just ran a marathon on 2 hours of sleep.
It’s perplexing for someone who enjoys endurance sports that relish in suffering, but I just cannot compete in the brutal sport of shopping. Years of practice and I’m terrible at it and now I’m past my physical prime too, RIP mid-twenties Mike!
But I say this all with a caveat – there are actually two types of shopping I like:
- Grocery shopping: because checking off a checklist quickly = gratification, especially when ordered online and brought to my vehicle. Sorry, never going to set foot in a store again if I can avoid it!
- Technology shopping: because I can usually visualize the end benefit and that gives me the motivation to dig deep
Tailoring Contact Center Technology For Your Team
In ‘shopping’ for technology in my role as Chief Revenue Officer I think of the specific impacts it’s going to have on my team: efficiency for Jane and her team, better customer experience for our customers, being able to produce a more systematic process for inside sales, etc.
Those things motivate me and shopping feels like… well, not the awful other kinds of shopping like back to school clothes shopping for my kids. That is a fair comparison though because each team member can sometimes act like my kids when clothes shopping. They don’t like anything, they like wearing their same Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt that is way too small, and they don’t like change. Sound familiar when thinking about new technology for your team?
Approaching Contact Center Technology Like A Shopping List
Now that I have spent way too much time evaluating shopping habits, I have diagnosed a major reason why people hate grocery shopping, it isn’t the store, it is the way we approach our list. Most of us have it in sections like Dairy, Meat, Snacks, and so on. Granola bars could be in aisle 2 and Gushers in aisle 8, so we will inevitably miss something on that list.
Why not take it aisle by aisle? You know the store, just like you know the landscape of your contact center. What do you need from aisle 1, 2, 3, etc.? You’re in charge of helping your contact center, customer interactions, and customer experience, you know the ingredients. The good news is you only need 10 ingredients, and they are in a couple of isles!
10 Questions And A New Approach To Contact Center Evaluation
Here are 10 questions to help you identify some important details so you can get to the really good part: making cool things happen for your organization with that technology:
Aisle One: Foundation Of Your Contact Center
- What are the customer type(s) your contact center serves?
- What are the examples of common customer interactions?
- What is the most important type of customer interaction provided by the contact center?
- What other systems are important to your contact center?
Aisle Two: Current Initiatives In Your Contact Center
- What are the current initiatives around customer experience, agent experience, reporting/analytics, or anything else related to the contact center?
- What is the priority order for them?
- Are there any problems you’re trying to solve that involve customer interaction or communication?
- What are you not getting out of the contact center that you wish you had?
Aisle Three: Reporting & Data In Your Contact Center
- What kinds of key types of reports are being used today?
- Do you need to see your data by customer, product, DNIS, customer type, skill, queue, etc?
- What does contact center leadership report on?
- What about the executive team?
- What are the frequency and format?
- What do you need to see on dashboards – real-time and historical to best manage your business?
Just Like The Best Stores, Contact Center Consultants Have A Diverse Offering
Maybe I don’t hate shopping as much as I originally thought? Is it possible I just used the wrong approach, only shopping when I was hungry and easily irritated, or desperate? Having a well organized inside out approach to technology in your Contact Center can help you choose the right technology.
There is so much technology available in today’s Contact Center space. Having a partner who can help you bring all the right ingredients to the table without forcing a solution on you is critical to your team adopting what is right for everyone. The first step is easy, get in touch for a discussion on where you are at in your shopping before you feel like running out of the store completely!
