I get asked for advice all the time about how to get senior management to really value the call center and its purpose. While CEOs will tell you that the customer facing operation is of critical importance, it is one of the first places they go to cut costs when the going gets rough. I don't have to sell this audience on the importance of continuing to deliver World Class Service even in the face of financial adversity. The key is to sell the C level executives on the real and financial value of the call center in a way that is meaningful and compelling to what's important to them and usually, but not always, it's the bottom line.Plan Ahead
To say that the best approach would be to demonstrate this value before the potential cost cutting initiatives begin is a gross understatement and I am sure all of you are well aware that once your executives are in the financial crunch mode it's most likely going to be a done deal. But I can't tell you how many call center leaders I talk to who have been forced to look at outsourcing and other ways to cut costs, pulling people out of their job functions and reallocate them to special task forces with tight deadlines to figure out how to increase calls handled via technology, reduce headcount and decrease services.
Seizing the Moments
The 4 keys to leverage the greatest opportunities to demonstrate value to senior management are:
- great internal partnerships
- strategic data capture and mining
- compelling report writing
- passionate story-telling
Great Internal Partnerships - are critical to adding value to the organization in a way that is visible to the C level executives. This means getting out to all of your internal partners in marketing, research and development, sales, production, legal, brand management, etc. and developing strong business dependence on the value your organization brings to them, based on their business objectives and aspirations (which can change regularly).
Identifying their concerns, needs and barriers to achieving their business goals is a mandatory step in becoming a valued partner of theirs. This is not about the call center, this is about them as an internal client of your information services. Knowing what they need in advance will help you to be able to identify opportunities as they present themselves during the year.
Make a decision to provide each one of these internal clients with just one value-added informational product during the year and keep them in mind as you analyze the data that comes your way during the course of the quarter. This might be a good time to determine whether you are actually capturing the right information from customers when they call in.
Strategic Data Capture and Mining - When I talk about "strategic" data capturing and mining, I am talking about making sure that you are thinking more broadly than what you need for your standard reports (which everyone tells me nobody reads anyway). This is where you have to take what you know about your internal client's business goals and barriers and determine what information may be important to them. For example, while at Levi Strauss & Company, I interviewed the Brand Manager for Men's Jeans. He was relatively new to the organization and up until then most of the print and media advertising was geared toward men. He had an idea that Levi's should be marketing men's jeans to woman, because he had a feeling women were really the decision-makers for the men in their lives when it cam to clothing. His boss didn't agree. This gave me the idea that we should be capturing whether it was a man or a woman who called to find "where to buy" men's jeans. Since gender was not a piece of data we captured in our CRM, we needed to add that field so that we could statistically report on who was calling to find men's jeans. I probably don't need to tell you that, in fact, more women called the 800# to find out where to buy men's jeans, which really changed a long-standing paradigm in the company. We were able to provide a compelling report to the new brand manager and his direct and vice president that changed their advertising strategy. So, through a casual conversation with a brand manager an opportunity arose to add value.
Compelling Report Writing - This is, perhaps, one of the most difficult things for us to do. The report doesn't need to be exhaustive, in fact, it shouldn't be complicated. But it does need to do is tell a story - a compelling story. It should be simple, yet brilliant. What better way to tell a story but through a picture with a caption that says it all? While you will need to drill down for yourself and make sure you have all of your ducks in a row, the C level executive doesn't need it unless she asks for it.
Passionate Story-Telling - Many times we have the opportunity to present our compelling story to a group of senior executives. I have interviews many senior vice presidents, executive vice presidents, COOs and CEOs for my clients. They all, with a few exceptions, tell me the same thing when it comes to their perception of the information that comes out of the call center and how it is delivered - more emotional-based than business-based and not convincing. What they want is conviction backed up by empirical data. They want interpretation of the data, not just the raw data. They want to be convinced.
These four keys to becoming a valued mission-critical department within the company have been used by a number of call center leaders who have had great success in demonstrating their value within their own organizations. They have been well-prepared to sustain their foothold during business downturns and have flourished during the good times. It's all a matter of being prepared to seize those opportunities when they are presented.
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