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Telethons are an iconic part of the TV experience. Seeing the donation total rise while a whole variety show plays out for hours on end is a unique form of entertainment. But putting the gimmicks aside, telethons do a great job of depicting the delicate balance of chaos and order when it comes to managing multiple calls at the same time. And that’s a balance CX leaders work to navigate every day in their contact centers.
Today, we’re doing a deep dive into contact centers. We’re going to find out what the biggest pain points are in managing one, and how to successfully run yours. Tim McDougal, Managing Director of Deloitte Consulting, and Contact Center Offering Leader at Deloitte Digital, shares how they’re leading the way in creating the best contact centers in the industry. And luckily for us, he shares all his insights in today’s episode.
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"Contact centers are the face of your organization." - Tim McDougal
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Time Stamps
* (0:00) Stage lights and turkey legs
* (6:54) Deloitte’s view of contact centers
* (10:26) The Global Contact Center Survey
* (13:42) Personalizing your contact center CX
* (17:59) How to have the best customer experience at your contact center
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Sponsor
This podcast is presented by Oracle CX.
Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at Oracle.com/cx/perspectives
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Links
Narrator: Milton looked down to see a giant, glistening turkey leg in front of him. A local restaurant had sent it over. Under the intense stage lights, after hours of work, it looked equally tempting and unappetising. But–always willing to commit to the bit—Milton reached down, grabbed it, and took a massive bite. With turkey falling from his mouth, he turned his attention to the phone...
“Hello? Yes, you’re on with Milton. Thank you for your donation. Goodbye!”
With his mouth completely full, he could barely get out the words. And the live footage was...well...gross. He would go on to say some variation of these sentences 5,500 times over the course of 16 hours. But fortunately, only one turkey leg was harmed in the making of his broadcast.
Milton was starring in the first-ever live TV telethon in 1949. The good people at the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation had seen this fundraising process established during World War II to sell war bonds over the radio. And they saw an opportunity that could be...Often Imitated (lol).
The telethon was an immediate success, attributable mostly to the fact that Milton Berle was known back then as Mr. Television. He had a show called Texaco Star Theater that pulled in a whopping 97% of the viewership at the time. After his show premiered, nationwide sales of television sets doubled. Stores and movie theaters didn’t bother staying open on Tuesday nights—all their customers would be at home watching Milton perform.
Booking him to run the first ever telethon was a no-brainer. Over the course of the 16 hour broadcast, he basically performed a non-stop one-man vaudeville show. There were beautiful models answering the phones to collect pledges. a series of entertainment acts throughout the night. From jazz bands to a quiz show, to messing around with fellow comedians, to Milton’s own mother showing up for a bit...the show kind of had it all. It was *the* comedy gig of the era. But Milton was pretty much working 16 hours nonstop. With the only breaks being to change his suit 4 times and his shirt 8 times—hopefully pretty quickly after the turkey incident.
The modern day equivalent might be Scott Hanson on NFL Red Zone doing 7 hour of commercial free football
After seeing the success of his telethon, other organizations started booking their own. And celebrities were champing at the bit to get on those stages. Some ended up being wildly successful, and others ended up going a little bit like this
Telethons created a unique environment where callers got to see the direct impact of their actions on screen. They got to talk to a model—or if they were lucky, Milton himself—and see it play out in real time. Watching the money count grow higher and higher.
We saw that talking on the phone could create a broader sense of community...not just between who called and who answered, but for an entire organization. And that’s a lesson that has been capitalized on for the past 70 years.
But most of us aren’t calling into telethons everyday. We do, however, still have a similar experience when we call into contact centers for help. We dial into a room full of people, hoping to get to the real person in charge, and more often than not—end up spending some money...
So thank you for your patience. Your call is extremely important to us. If you’d like to speak to a representative, please press one now.
Please listen carefully because our menu has changed. We’ll need to place you on a brief hold before we dive into today’s lesson. But we promise, you’re the next caller in line....
Welcome to Often Imitated, a podcast about remarkable experiences from the past, and how they inspire people to create great customer experiences today.
In this episode we’re doing a deep dive into contact centers. How telethons played a crucial role in laying the groundwork for them, and what they look like today. In this episode we’ll hear from Tim McDougal, Managing Director and Contact Center Practice Lead at Deloitte, about how they’ve perfected the recipe for a seamless contact center experience. But first, a word from our sponsors.
Often Imitated is brought to you by the generous support of our friends at Oracle. Make every interaction matter with Oracle Advertising and CX. Connect all your data and empower your entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences from acquisition…to retention…and everything in between. Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at oracle.com/cx.
We’ve all had our share of experiences with contact centers. And let’s be real...none of them are as fun as a Milton Berle telethon. If you’re like me, you’re probably getting the meat sweats just thinking about dialing a 1-800 number. But these days, the truth is that call centers are at the core of almost every big company’s CX. And the employees working in them have a huge impact on the customer. Despite the fact that it’s a crucial touchpoint for many customers, the experience is often clunky at best.
Thankfully, there’s someone out there who’s made it his mission to solve this problem. His name is Tim McDougal, and he’s the Managing Director and Contact Center Practice Lead at Deloitte. He and his team are dedicated to making contact centers more efficient and effective for both the callers and the employees on the other end of the line. Not every call is going to be as eventful as Milton’s first telethon, but at least you won’t be calling someone with a mouth full of turkey...hopefully.
Let’s hear how Tim is approaching the problem by first learning a little bit more about his work at Deloitte.
Tim: so Deloitte digital is part of Deloitte consulting and it's an experience consultancy that brings to you. Creativity strategy technology, data, and con consulting services to really help our clients deliver truly integrated solutions, focusing on our client's most complex problems.
And I think that's across design bill run, operate in the customer sales service and marketing domains
I am the context center offering lead, which is a fancy consulting term to really say I help clients optimize and transform the contact center, really focusing on addressing the different challenges and the opportunities, um, especially focused, uh, you know, especially focused around.
The complex challenges of today's world with the pandemic, with, uh, with, uh, staffing challenges and with technology challenges that, uh, that our clients are facing
Narrator: Before we dive into it, let’s cover a quick definition of a contact center. It’s basically an advanced view on what you might think of as a “call center”. It’s the front line of customer support and a pretty influential part of the customer experience.
People who work there might be redirecting calls, answering emails or chats...really any kind of customer outreach. It’s a major budget item for CX leaders. So when it comes to strategies for ticket management, matching calls with agents, service requests, or a whole slew of other issues, companies reach out to Tim and his team for help.
Tim: companies come to us, um, really to look at maybe two, two or three things. Clients specifically are looking, um, look to us to help them solve. Um, they want to improve the customer experience and that that customer experience might be, Hey, I know, um, I want customers to use the digital channels more frequently, or I want to improve how customers interact with us.
And so that can be measured through things such as. Um, customer experience scores, um, that can be net promoter score. And so we have conversations and work with clients to help them improve the customer experience. And so the context center fits into that because, um, oftentimes, um, customers interact with a contact center and have a less than desirable.
Long hold times multiple repeat calls, things of that nature. So we have clients that ask us to help they're in the customer experience space. We also have, uh, clients that ask us, help us. Right-size the cost picture. Um, we spend a lot in customer service and, you know, it's not unusual for, for many of our clients to have, you know, annual budgets of hundreds, hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars of customer, uh, customer.
Um, service cost. And so when you look at, look at those those numbers, and you say, how do I, um, how do I think about that, that line item in my budget and how, how might I reduce costs? How do I think about the balance of customer experience and cost? How do we think about, um, addressing that? And there's lots of levers that we pull from technology to strategy, to process, to operations, to even to say, um, even sometimes even looking at how do we locate the.
The labor to support lower cost labor to, to handle those types of interactions. So we sort of look at the gamut of different, um, different opportunities or different levers to pull, to help our clients solve those equations.
Narrator: As you can imagine, Deloitte—being the brand that they are—does pretty well with what they do. They pull in great clients, and they also tap into that customer base to solicit feedback on how their clients approach contact centers.
Tim: the global context center survey is a survey that we've conducted really for the last 10 years.
We do it on a BI annual or every other year basis. And we reach out to our clients, um, and we survey them around trends, opportunities, investment decisions that they're making, um, in the contact center. And, and, and that yields really interesting. We wanted to try to do it as, as the, as the, as the world sort of, um, exited the pandemic in the January and February timeframe of 2021.
So just a few months ago. And the idea was we wanted to get a sense of. Have things changed. Um, and, and to what extent have they changed given, you know, sort of the, the, the black Swan event that the pandemic was, especially for contact centers and those contact center leaders,
So what we saw was, um, these really unprecedented, um, challenges for our contact center leaders. So we wanted to ask some questions around what investments they were making. Um, how were they thinking about work from. And sort of the challenges that, that brought to their operation, how they did, you know, how they were channeling, how are they dealing with those challenges?
Um, and how they saw that going forward? My hope was that we would have, uh, reached some consensus around work from home. Um, but we also looked at other questions like, um, what technologies were they, were they considering? Um, what did the pandemic teach them relative to, um, their go forward strategy?
Narrator: This survey is obviously a hugely valuable collection of information. Thankfully, Tim’s here to share what they learned:
Tim: And really we identified what I'll say is, are five major trends, which I could could outline. And one of those is just this focus on flexibility. And the, the, the, the movement of capable, uh, movement of contact center capabilities to the cloud. Um, the second was the focus on AI and those types of technologies to drive a different, um, experience.
The third was really making work from, uh, working from home, actually work. And what were some of the thoughts that, uh, clients had there and some of the trends? Um, a lot of conversation, a lot of discussion around, um, right channeling and the thought about how do you create a digital first environment?
And finally, how does the context center deliver value? And I think this was probably one of the most interesting things is that during the pandemic, the context center sort of became the face of an organization to meet. Many customers. And so you would call or you'd go to the website and, and, and where, where organizations were doing really well.
That was a very seamless exercise. There were others where it was very difficult to get service. And so we see many organizations focusing on how do you try, how do you deliver value through the contact center? And that looks like, how do you empower your agents to sell, to sell and serve. How do you deliver a better experience?
And that better experience can be measured in lower hand, lower speeds of answer, how quickly you answer the phone, but also how do you get to a knowledgeable rep who can handle, who can handle your, your request, whether it be a sales service, a high, you know, high value transaction, or what have you.
Narrator: Delivering a valuable experience. It’s at the core of every CX leader’s agenda. Unfortunately, what’s valuable to one customer *might not* be as valuable to the next. Tim’s team at Deloitte has figured out a way to uncover what’s most valuable to each customer. And to act on it.
Tim: one of the problems that we've seen our clients historically have is, um, I'd say at the highest level is really, uh, customer adoption of, um, of technologies. And we, we, we sort of have created, we create this. We've created a component called right channeling. And so the historical approach has been build all the capabilities you can and meet the customer and the channel of their choice.
Meaning if a customer wants to, to email us well, we should be able to handle that either. And do that in a, in a rigorous fashion. If the customer wants to call us, we should be able to provide that service in, in, in, in, in different way. Um, that's very expensive to many of our clients because you end up building a lot of capabilities that customers don't use.
And so what we've seen recently and our survey, sort of our survey underscores this. Is the focus on being more deliberate in managing customers to the appropriate channel.
Narrator: Funneling your customer to the right channel means optimizing the chances of them having a good experience. Is the right channel them talking to a model? Or to an agent with turkey falling out of their mouth? There’s only one way to find out! Here’s how they address it at Deloitte:
Tim: So once we help our clients figure. What are the right channels? We start thinking about what's the, what, what is our measured, um, customer experience in that channel and how do we use technology to make that efficient? So part of it is understanding who the customer is. Um, and, and we can use tools like, uh, artificial intelligence.
To, uh, and machine learning to help us solve that problem. So, as an example, I'm working with a client. We knew customers called from, could call from various numbers. Um, and we use their, uh, their calling patterns to be able to, and, uh, use the calling patterns. And then the authentication that occurred post a post.
So we could say, Hey, look, Ian called from this number. He's called from this number five times. And we know it's been Ian because he's successfully authenticated. We know the next time he had calls from that particular number. It's the end. And so we could use machine learning to really drive an advanced artificial intelligence to really get at that, that, um, that information so that we could begin to provide a more optimal experience.
Right. So if we know who you are, we can now. Um, we can make predictions about why you might be calling. For instance, if we just sent you a bill that's 25% higher than the last bill that you had, you might be calling about your bill. So we can begin to, to, to create a very let's call it customized or personalized experience for you in that channel so that we can get at the answer that we want.
And more importantly, we can look at how do we provide the right level of service? Is it a transaction you want to come on? So we can do that in an, in a digital fashion, without you speaking to an agent, or this is a truly a moment that matter matters that we can really drive. We need to drive you to an agent.
So in those examples, I was sharing, you know, we, we sort of map out the customer journey and we look at what is the optimal experience that we want to deliver with the focus of, um, a slightly different focus than in the past. The focus in the past has been, how do we get you to an agent? And the, the, the, the focus that we use now is, is, is, seems a little obvious, but it is.
How do we think about serving you digitally as the primary focus and an agent being the secondary focus? So can we deliver up content to you, keep you in the right channel? So if you start in the chat and the chat channel, or in a messaging channel, can we keep you there?
But my point is we use that technology so that we can deliver again, that optimal experience. And so there may be times where a text message is effective in delivering, um, a URL or information to a customer that satisfies their need. And so we look very closely at how do we do that in a digital fashion so that we can deliver that optimal customer experience
Narrator: That brings us back to one of the core themes across every episode of Often Imitated: Creating a great customer experience that’s personalized to each customer’s needs. Digital-first tends to be preferred by most people these days, but sometimes a customer just needs that extra bit human interaction to make them feel taken care of. Here’s Tim’s advice for what makes a great customer experience:
Tim: I think a good experience, um, I think it boils down to probably a handful of attributes. So, um, one is, uh, is, is personalization. Is the interaction personalized? Um, or is there an effort to make it personalized? So if I'm calling and you and I've, and I have a relationship with, uh, with a customer, um, as a.
I have a relationship as a customer, I would want to be recognized. So, um, that's number one. So personalized second is, um, sort of the category of value my time. So a good customer experience. It means that I don't have to navigate a hundred different menus that don't necessarily apply to me. A great example of that is working with a client, um, and some of the basics, uh, around, Hey, I know you're calling from the U S.
Um, but I'm presented with a number of menu options that don't necessarily make sense. Like if you want to speak French, Canadian, not many Americans speak French Canadian. So, you know, just some simple sort of things like that could also create that better user experience. So looking at how do you drive a personalization?
How do you drive level of effort and make value my time, make it easy for me. The third. Um, don't make me navigate your, um, your internal organization. So think about the customer and what they're trying to accomplish. And so that's an important component of a good experience. Um, I would say, um, the fourth thing is, um, getting me to an agent that, um, makes the best sense, uh, that can help me with my, my interaction.
So it doesn't help me a good experience is about getting me to a knowledgeable rep. That's empowered to handle my issue. And then the, uh, the fifth thing I would tell you is, um, providing options for me to self care or self. So I don't want to have to speak to somebody if I can do something very simply on my own.
So it's great. If I can make a payment, I should be able to make a payment, um, without having to speak to somebody. If I have to speak to somebody I'm not, that's not a great experience. Um, but I think it's really those signs of those signs, those five sort of things that really drive that customer a better, a good customer.
Narrator: Now that we’re all experts on the ins and outs of contact centers...what next? Maybe you’re a CX leader currently scratching your head trying to figure out how to make your contact center better. We asked Tim what advice he has for you
Tim: the best advice is, um, when, when thinking about rehauling the contact center, um, the first thing I would say is, um, first take a step back and evaluate. Um, what are we trying to accomplish? And what I mean by that is looking very closely at, um, what is the customer journey?
What is the optimal customer experience I want to deliver? Um, we find that organizations are asking this question more frequently than ever before. And part of that is necessitated by the CRE you know, the, the, the adoption of new, new platforms that, that enable you to have that conversation. So what is, so the first thing, what is the customer.
What is, what am I trying to achieve? The second, the second is to consider a digital first strategy. So how do I deliver a digital experience first and foremost, followed by the analog or the agent experience and I, and I'm, and I think that's important because it's, it's thinking about when do, when does that human to human or human in the loop interaction?
Most. And how does that how's that additive to the brand, the product, the experience I want to deliver. So looking very closely at number two, digital versus analog experience. When do I deliver that? Um, the third component is when mapping out the customer experience, um, is, think about, um, where you can efficiently deliver the experience.
You don't have to be all things to all people in every time. Um, think about, you know, what are some of the north stars, um, or examples in the industry that, that really truly, um, are unique and there's lots of them, but they, you know, they're focused on how do I deliver the experience, not about being all things to all people in every channel.
So that'd be the, the, the third thing. And then the fourth thing I would say is, um, consider, um, your agent population and your employee experience. Um, I have lots of clients who, you know, are struggling with agent and agent attrition. And how do I compete in a Mar in a market where wages are moving, um, moving almost exponentially.
How do I deliver an experience for my agent population that creates a talent experience I'm proud of. And so looking at how do I deliver, um, the right career progression? How do I deliver the right experience for my agents? Is it important? Of the equation. As I mentioned, 65 to 75% of the cost is labor.
And what we see historically is agent labor is, uh, contact center. Agents are, um, some of the most underpaid, um, lowest paid, uh, individuals in the corporate structure. Yet they have the biggest impact on customers in terms of, uh, customer experience and the likelihood to repurchase. Sort of figuring out that fourth component is how do I deliver on an experience that I'm proud of from an agent perspective, how do I improve their efficiency and their ability to really do what they want to do, which is to provide customer service and to provide an excellent experience for their customers.
Narrator: You may think you have bigger fish to fry than spending all day thinking about contact centers. But whether you’re running them or calling them, contact centers play a critical role in the customer experience. So it’s in all of our best interests to make that experience a little better.
So for this week, your homework is to step into your customer’s shoes and take a look at your contact center. Submit a support ticket. Call in and speak to an agent. Maybe get behind the desk and answer a few calls yourself. See how you can make the experience better for everyone involved. What does that optimal customer experience look like? And how can you deliver it to your customer in the channel that best fits them? Figure out where you can push to be digital-first and make the employee experience better for your agents too.
This podcast is brought to you by the generous support of our friends at Oracle. Make every interaction matter with Oracle Advertising and CX. Connect all your data and empower your entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences from acquisition…to retention…and everything in between. Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at oracle.com/cx.
This is your host, Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios. Thank you for listening to another episode of Often Imitated. If you like what you’re hearing, tell one friend. This podcast was narrated by me, Ian Faison, and produced and edited by Mackey Wilson, Ezra Bakker Trupiano, and Jon Libbey. You can learn more about our team at CaspianStudios.com.