ICYMI: Top Strategies from Leading Private Sector Contact Centers

*NEW EDIT* In this episode, panelists from industry share their strategies and experiences for improving contact center operations. The session is moderated by Crystal Philcox, a former federal executive at GSA and IRS. Topics discussed include the importance of customer feedback, leveraging AI and analytics for better customer interactions, proactive support strategies, and empowering employees for better performance. 

Facilitator: Martha Dorris, Dorris Consulting International
Moderator: Crystal Philcox, Former Federal Executive
Panelists: Michael Lassiter, Senior Process Manager, Consumer Intelligence, Capital One
Tara O'Brien, Senior Director, Johnson & Johnson
Brian Pancia, Senior Client Partner-Solutions, Verizon

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Intro/Outro Music: See a Brighter Day/Gloria Tells
Courtesy of Epidemic Sound

(Episodes 1-159: Intro/Outro Music: Focal Point/Young Community
Courtesy of Epidemic Sound)

Chapters

• 3:49 Panelist Introductions and Backgrounds
• 6:15 Improvements in Contact Centers
• 13:18 Leveraging Data and Insights
• 19:51 Omnichannel Experience and AI Integration
• 26:46 Best Practices for Agent Engagement
• 30:36 Key Performance Metrics
• 35:47 Audience Q&A and Final Thoughts

Transcript

Martha: [00:00:00] Yeah. So in in, in addition to learning from governments, uh, as governments learn from other governments well, there's also a lot of strategies, um, that we can learn from industry con, uh, contact centers. So today I'd like to introduce Crystal. Phil Cox, former federal executive at GSA to moderate, uh, and IRS, to moderate the top strategies from leading private sector contact centers.
Martha: Welcome.
Crystal: All right. Let my esteemed panel get seated here.
Crystal (2): Okay. Um, I'm super excited to be here with this group. Um. Uh, and I will let them sort of introduce themselves, but this, um, [00:01:00] this panel is gonna be really interesting and it was really interesting to me to get to talk to these folks because they've got such a mix of, um, experiences in what they're doing around contact center.
Crystal (2): So, uh, we have, um, Brian Panacea, who is the senior client. Partner for solutions at Verizon. Um, he's working with federal agencies on their contact centers. Um, we have Tara O'Brien, who is senior director at uh, Johnson and Johnson, and she is running an internal contact center for Johnson and Johnson, which is huge.
Crystal (2): Right. So very big job. And then we've got, uh, Michael Lasseter, who is a senior process manager, um, in consumer intelligence for Capital One, um, and who is doing some internal stuff inside Capital One as well, and has some customer facing pieces too. So, um, and has, has, has experience in Capital One doing some customer facing stuff.
Crystal (2): So, really. Interesting mix. Um, and it's gonna be a really, a, a nice, [00:02:00] um, everybody's gonna have a different perspective, which, which I think is good. So, um, you know, as long as we are all revealing the contact centers that we once worked in, um, I did, uh, at one point, um, I think in college, uh, as a summer job, I was trying to make enough money to make it through the year, um, coming up and, uh, sold at and t long distance.
Crystal (2): Um, and I would go do my internship at IRS in during the day, and I then at night I, for four hours, I would go to somewhere in Reston and, uh, and sell at and t long distance if I, that really dates me, um, letting you know that I was that old when long distance was still separate. Um, billing from the rest of the phone bill.
Crystal (2): But, um, so, uh, so I'm gonna, um. Uh, uh, I'm gonna start actually just asking folks to introduce themselves and tell you a little bit about what they do, what kind of contact center they're, um, they're involved with, um, and you know, how their companies are kind of looking [00:03:00] at their contact center as, um, you know, this, this kind of valuable channel inside their organizations.
Crystal (2): And do you wanna start, Michael? 
Michael: Is this thing on? Okay. Working. Um, uh, as Crystal said before, uh, senior Process Manager for Capital One, um, we, for, for my particular position, I am concentrated on the closed loop feedback aspect of experiences. So when the survey comes in and they tell us about the experience, um, we are kind of breaking that down and understanding what that experience looks like for the customers.
Michael: And then, uh, there's an outreach process. That we do or we're calling, calling to those customers and having conversations about their experience and just gathering more information, um, trying to fix the things and make those customers whole. And that's happening across our card business and our, uh, auto finance business.
Tara: So I am responsible for the Johnson and Johnson internal IT help desk, which yes, no one comes to Happy. I think there was a reference to that earlier. Uh, but we support [00:04:00] 200,000 employees and contractors. Uh, we do about 39,000 tickets a month. If you had asked me eight years ago when I presented at ServiceNow's Knowledge Conference was actually 88,000.
Tara: So we've done a tremendous amount of work. Over the last eight years to really reduce that. I also have responsibility for our experience. I have some other stuff that aren't related to contact centers, like our managed print service, uh, and a few other things, but those aren't relevant for today. 
Brian: Hello, I'm Brian.
Brian: Cia. This might sound on. Is it on? Could turn it on. 
Crystal (2): Test. Test. Okay. 
Brian: All right, that's better. So I'm Brian Pany. I'm with Verizon. I'm not gonna hold it against Crystal that she worked for at and t at some point in time. So, uh, I, I forget that conversation even happened. Uh, but as Crystal mentioned, I am with Verizon.
Brian: I'm a senior client partner with them. I work with, one of my biggest customers that I work with right now is IRS, where Crystal came from. Um, and we're doing a lot of stuff. Not only am I responsible on the IRS side of the [00:05:00] house for, for Verizon, but. Also within the DOD community doing a lot of things with many of our partners that you, uh, you, you see on the walls over here.
Brian: So thank you for having us. Yeah. 
Crystal (2): Great. Good. Uh, so that gives you a sense of their background. I'm gonna start by, um, just, uh, you know, thinking about over the last couple of years, right? Because we, we've, we've been talking a lot about the future here today in AI and all this cool stuff that's happening, but thinking about the last couple of years.
Crystal (2): What kinds of improvements have you made in your contact centers, uh, or contact centers that you're working with? And, um, be, because I think it's good to just sort of look back and, and, and, uh, recognize how far we've come. You wanna start? I, I could jump in. Okay. 
Michael: Um, I would definitely say one of the things that, like for my particular experiences and the things that I'm, that I'm, uh, handling is, um, leveling up like the case management systems and understanding like.
Michael: What are we giving to our agents at that level? For them to be able to gather [00:06:00] more information from the customers, to be able to have those conversations, some tough. Hard hitting conversations, but they don't have to go deep into the details because the case management is kind of grabbing. Grabbing that, grabbing that information for them has been super important.
Michael: Um, we set up a team, uh, for, uh, set up a team to actually work on that together and like get that wishlist, you know, all the things that they would want to be included so that we can really gather the details and. I, someone touched on it earlier, like storytelling, analytics, and like, that's what we consider this because we're getting the drivers, we're getting the sub drivers, we're getting all the information all in one place so that we can say, how do we vet this information out to the, to the, to product managers, product owners, people like that, that wanna look at this and in a different light for what customers are saying versus just the scores has been like super important and crucial for like this mission and understanding like.
Michael: What, what, like what are the drivers of closed loop feedback and how can we like, make customers whole or at least get the story so [00:07:00] that we know who to go to and like increase and increase like productivity, increase the, the cleanness of like our products and services and, um, just improve the overall experience at the front lines with coaching.
Michael: Uh, 'cause a lot of that goes into like conversations that are had from a second voice perspective to say. How do we generate, um, like information that front liners can take in and go, okay, I can get better at this because I'm learning X, Y, and Z. And then the other facet of that is that we've set up like an agent portal.
Michael: So the agents can come in and look at their feedback directly. Like they wanna see word for word what the customer's saying. They can see the scores, they can see what they're doing well, what they're not doing great, great at, and then take those into their, um. They're like one-on-ones with their manager and just have like deep and meaningful conversations from that perspective to say, how can we make improvements to.
Michael: What the, the performance or experience that I'm giving to this customer. 'cause I've [00:08:00] taken 40 of the same call today and each one of them I thought went great, but this one did not. And let's like break that down and analyze it. So 
Tara: I would say there's two main areas we focused on. One is service recovery.
Tara: One is proactive support. Um, the, the service recovery, we are using the Medallia tool. We have it set up. Our agents also go in and are able to see the full survey response, what the end user provided them as a score or any comments. They then actually have to take an action on it and say whether. Um, how they're gonna improve it or what they learned from it.
Tara: I think we've also been mining all of that data to find where we have issues. So a lot of reference to people, process technology, find all of those things in our recovery data. Um, we found something really simple in the first month, which was like, uh, the person told me I had to go buy my own monitor monitoring keyboard for the office.
Tara: Uh, and it was a rumor that spread through all of our texts in the Latin America region. Uh, and they were all telling everyone this, and we're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. What are you doing? They don't, [00:09:00] for their, for the office, they don't have to buy their own monitor and keyboards really easy to find that in that first month.
Tara: And I think the second thing is if you have an IT desk of some sort. We have a tool called Next Think. I don't know if it meets any of your federal standards that you've all been referencing, uh, but it's a little collector that actually tells the health of PCs. We have moved so much into a proactive support space, so your PC has high memory usage.
Tara: Your CPU utilization is ridiculously high. When we see that in that happening over and over, over a period of a day or two, we actually pop up a screen that on your Windows or Apple, uh, device that says, Hey, we noticed you're having issues. Would you like to make an appointment with us? We'd be happy to fix it for you.
Tara: And the difference is us approaching them, which was referenced earlier today as well, uh, changes the whole conversation from a satisfaction perspective. What it wants to help me, like, yeah, it has been slow, but I wasn't gonna call because I never bothered the call unless it's actually broken, broken, broken, right?
Tara: So, um, that's been really, really helpful and a really [00:10:00] big change, uh, in the attitude of our end users. 
Brian: Awesome. So, so there's a, a saying, I was in the military and I was in a combat comm unit, and we had a saying that said, you could talk about us, but you can't talk without us. So that's kind of with Verizon in that communication space.
Brian: Verizon's backbone is one of the most trusted, reliable, secure backbones on the planet. Uh, and, and we realize this, but with that backbone, we have to connect our solutions or other solutions to that backbone. With that, we understand that we can't be a master of every solution that's out there. We want to have partners that we partner up with.
Brian: So part of our key initiatives that we have. It's to partner up with many of the partners that you see out here today and how do we collaborate and come up with solutions, um, that we don't only use internally, but we also use to our customers and we tell 'em, Hey, we, we kicked the tires on these, we drank our own champagne, so to speak, and we know that these products work and this is what's gonna fit for, for your solution.
Brian: Not only what we're doing internally, but what we're doing our partners out there. [00:11:00] Um, another thing, me being. Facing, customer facing. Uh, I don't have a lot of insight into the products that Verizon's having, but one of the things that they just announced the other day that I was excited, 'cause I was gonna talk mostly about.
Brian: Customer facing solutions that we have. One of the solutions that we just announced is our next Gen IVR, so that next Gen IVR is using generative AI and other other AI models to do predictive journey analysis on our customers. So when that customer reaches that agent at some point in time, you could see where that customer's been, what they're doing, what their frustrations are.
Brian: We align that customer with the right agents so they could help them. And, uh, that customer journey, um, is, is, is optimized and the, and the best that they can do. 
Crystal (2): I, I, I love this. I, I the focus on kind of tracking and the analytics and how you can see what's happening, um, in, in your, in your spaces. Also, just, um, you know, it, government folks, please listen up when we're talking about [00:12:00] things like, um, uh, uh, case management, single case management system and product managers, and making sure that you're bringing the business in to help you develop the case management system.
Crystal (2): Love that. Um. Thanks for that, y'all. The, the, um, okay. Um, and I wanna move now to, um, you know, how, how you think that, uh, you're, you are working with, or your clients are working with, um, you know, how they're taking, how they're kind of mining what's coming out, the information that's coming out of the contact center and maybe, um, you know, using that to inform.
Crystal (2): Uh, websites, um, I think, uh, Marcy called it, um, harnessing Ways to Listen. Um, and, uh, if you are, are doing anything in that space to kind of grab, grab the insights that are coming out of your contact centers and, and using those in other ways. 
Michael: Yeah, I can jump in. Um. One of the, there's two, there's two like main networks that we, that are that, that the [00:13:00] co contact center is kind of leading in that space.
Michael: There is what we call the change champions, which is a way for. Our card associates to be able to plug like, Hey, something on the website's not working and these, and we've had like 10 customers in the last hour, like, flag this thing. Or we know that there's some copier script that just isn't right, written the right way for like the customer to understand so they can actually do a.
Michael: Case management, um, in order to like make an, make an overall improvement for something that's already in existence that we rolled out and thought was working as intended and it was not. Um, because they're at the front lines, they're gonna hear that. They're gonna hear those things first and foremost.
Michael: And that's gonna, they're gonna be able to like flag that process and say like, something's not working as intended. And then we're, we can see call center volume spike, and some of those things are like. Kind of take care of themselves in that sense. And then there's an alternate, um, there's an alternate option, which is a frontline feedback network that's hap [00:14:00] happening in our bank space where bank associates are actually utilizing like our internal communications process to be able to flag those things with emojis and reactions to say, Hey, this thing is really, really bubbling up.
Michael: And we're seeing a lot of customers come into the call center space and like mention these things and it puts an onus on. Like everyone to say like, we have recognized this as a problem, and now let's go ahead and find out what the solution is. So they're gonna follow that end to end and figure out when, when, like the, the launch time and date for this, for this product or service to be updated from that perspective, which really gives like some real time feedback.
Michael: And then like real time solutioning that sometimes feels like it, it isn't always heard because frontline agents can say, Hey, we don't think that something's working right, or We're actually looking at this from the, from a different perspective that scores are dropping and we don't know why and we need to dive into the numbers a little bit more, but this is.
Michael: Showing that thing in real time, [00:15:00] like exactly what the results of that could be before it ever makes it to our survey scores because we we're having those conversations with the customer on the phone and then flagging the things that are happening. 
Tara: I'll go a slightly different route. Uh, so we have all of our chat transcripts and our, our voice transcripts, um, and we are absolutely using data insights to figure out.
Tara: What is missing specifically when we get to our chat bot? So now we moved, we're doing a little experiment with ai, so uh, we're not too far ahead of you all in regards to the AI space. We just went live about 20,000 people we have it exposed to, but as we mine those chat transcripts and we mine the phone voice transcripts, we can find what's missing on our social service portal or in the chat bot.
Tara: And if it's something to your point that has very high volume, we immediately get that over to the chat bot. Our chat bot does about 38% deflection, uh, without the ai so far in the month that the 20,000 experiment, uh, person experiment is going, it's doing it about [00:16:00] 58%. So it's definitely working and it's feeding that information over so that we can close some of the gaps of miss missing information.
Brian: When I looked at this question, I, there's, uh, again, looking at what we've done for our customers, it's more, I looked at this more, how do we take this data? How do we take this information, um, and what do we do with it? What, what is the outcome that we want to deliver? So I'm gonna take a little bit.
Brian: Different perspective than you guys have. We, we analyzed data from some of our customers and looked at where their pain points are and, and how we brought this information from all these different sources, like these tools that these guys are mentioning. And we, we used it to solve problems. And one of the problems that we used to solve, uh, I know Tanya was talking about.
Brian: You get on a call and it's push one, push two, push this. Uh, we've all been on calls where you have long hold times where you're sitting on hold for it seems hours on end. Uh, and we took that information. One of the things that we did that was so simple, and I'm gonna call out one of our partners here today, is.
Brian: We offered, um, [00:17:00] a callback solution to one of our, our government agencies that was out there. And, and to put this in perspective, when we now analyzed all that data, their average call time was o whole time was over four hours long, which is crazy. So imagine sitting on hold for over four hours with one of these federal agencies out there, because as a customer you don't have any choice.
Brian: You, you can't go and go to a new agency to provide you some type of service. You have to go to that agency. So you're stuck. Waiting on hold for four hours at a time. We put a mindful callback solution in, and by the way, a shameless plug for them, they were just a FedRAMP moderate authorized. Today was a press release that they did, so co kudos to them.
Brian: But in. In addition to a bunch of other things, I don't wanna say that their, their solution completely solved this problem, but we, this particular federal customer, we took them down from a four hour, uh, hold time down to just minutes. So if you think about how we took that data, put a viable solution in there, solved that problem, and the impact that [00:18:00] it had on that customer journey was just absolutely amazing.
Crystal (2): I, I love the stories. The stories are so fun. Um, and, um, and, and I, I think I, I also like Michael, that you, you sort of hit on this idea of really empowering your, your people. Right? And I got, I, I get that a lot. I heard, heard that a lot from you. Um, is that making sure that you, you people are involved in how you continue to improve.
Crystal (2): Um, and, and, uh. Uh, Tara, you talking about the self-service portal, um, and how to, how you're feeding back into that self-service portal and, uh, these are so good, such good stuff. Um, love all that. And, and so and so as you're thinking about, you know, the future and. Kind of beyond just, um, harnessing data, harnessing data and information today, putting it back, you know, in the website.
Crystal (2): What about like, other kinds of channels? Um, it, how, how are you help, you know, supporting, I guess, create kind of an omnichannel experience? Do you have, besides the websites, chats, social media, um, you know, portals, [00:19:00] um, any, uh, are you feeding AI coaching tools? Right? Are there other things that you're doing, uh, that are.
Crystal (2): Um, that are supporting, kind of making sure that you have this consistent message across an organization. And, and, um, for Verizon, you may, you may, you may be, uh, working with a number of different agencies or, um, creating, uh, offerings for agencies in that direction. 
Brian: You guys? Sure. I'll, I'll, I guess I'll take this one first.
Brian: Um, mi Michael, pass it off to me. So, thanks. Uh, so at, at Verizon, um, we wanna create that, that high quality, frictionless, uh, experience for the customers. We wanna meet them at the channel that they prefer in. Uh, somebody may prefer voice, somebody may prefer a website. Uh, somebody may prefer other avenues.
Brian: So it, it's how do you bring that all together for a seamless experience and have that consistent across all the channels? So the customer, regardless of where they want to go, they're gonna have the same experience over and over again. So there, there's a couple and, and I'll go back to [00:20:00] some of the Verizon products that we're doing today since I get.
Brian: To, to talk a little bit about that, uh, there's a product that we're using. It's, uh, called, uh, convo iq. So what Convo IQ is, it's a data aggregator. Um, and it's aggregating all this data from all these various sources that you guys have, have, have talked about from all our different partners and, and, and whatnot.
Brian: And it's putting ai, different AI models to. Provide real time analysis, prediction and optimization for that customer journey. And one of the things that we're, we're doing with that too is AI matching. So we're using that AI to match based on this data that we're pulling those customers with the right agents so they could solve their problems, uh, quickly and, and get them on their way.
Tara: I, I would say we're pretty consistent. We have voice chat and self-service, self submission and, and request, uh, that the end user can submit themselves. Um, by the way, I heard a few of you mention [00:21:00] email. We got rid of email like nine years ago is the best thing we did. So if you can figure out how to do it for your agency, if you're offering chat or you're offering alternatives, just.
Tara: Dump the email. It's so unstructured data and making your agents, uh, probably crazy. Um, but we have the three and, uh, you know, we, we, we really just try to integrate them from the chat agents and the voice agents all have the same information. Everyone's using the same playbook. Um, we don't. We don't switch between channels.
Tara: We started to do that and then we realized that there really wasn't a lot of people who were gonna start a chat and move to voice or voice and go to chat. Just it's an internal it help desk. Right. Um, what we did do, and it was a little controversial, I took a lot of heat for it. Um, our self-service form was basically a catchall, right.
Tara: And it was just. I don't wanna talk to an agent right now, so I'll just fill out the self-service form. It went in the, the desk queue they have up to four hours. It was kind of our lowest rated channel intentionally, uh, to respond to it. Uh, and then I would constantly, every [00:22:00] January when thousands of people for, forgot their passwords, the self-service queue would get forgotten about, uh, for a little while, while everybody ran to do phone, um, to do reset passwords.
Tara: And then, you know, the end of January, I have 1100 tickets sitting in there, which for us was high. Then it would take us a month or two to clear out. And so I said, enough with this. So they can't just submit our report and issue form anymore. There's some scenarios, predictive intelligence, uh, using some of the ServiceNow capabilities.
Tara: There's six scenarios. Uh, I won't go through all of them, but essentially if it, um, comes to the desk and the desk typically resolves this, then we make them go to chat. We don't let them submit the form. It was controversial. People were like, you're making me go to chat. I don't wanna go to chat. Um, I wanna just submit my form.
Tara: But the data shows I. That the first contact resolution went up, the CSAT went up, and the manage, uh, the meantime to resolve went significantly down because we were waiting. Those tickets were sitting there for three or four days. They had a five day SLA. Now they're being solved if [00:23:00] they're going right to chat in minutes.
Tara: So, as controversial as it was, I haven't turned it off and I'm not going to. I'll take the couple of dsat. Uh, you know, five or to 10 dsat about, I don't want this form, and it's mostly from my IT colleagues by the way. Um, and, and deal with them versus the people who are actually getting the service in a much faster, much more efficient way.
Michael: Awesome. I will say what you described is what we call death to other, where people just can't like give you the, the big mound of go figure it out. Um, we have a similar approach in, in the sense of like, when we think about how we're gathering our, our feedback, so. We do still have an email program, but our digital program has caught up to that in terms of like the submissions that we ha have coming in that space.
Michael: Um, but they're more for like in moment, like that thing that's happening right there in the app or in the website that where we're gathering that feedback and we pair that with text analytics. So, so we can read across all the things that are coming in, what customers [00:24:00] are saying. We have like predefined.
Michael: Um, topics that we have that are like for our enterprise, like for voice of customer and voice of associates, so we can identify exactly where, like what, what type of feedback is coming in so that we are speaking the same language across the entire enterprise for what, what an experience looks like. So anyone can come in and they can essentially filter for their specific data.
Michael: And then look at these topics and say, I know exactly what the customer's saying. So now I know where to like concentrate my efforts. If I was trying to boost my score, if I was trying to understand what customers are saying. It helps from that perspective, from a technology, or I'm sorry, from a technology perspective, to be able to not go in and read a thousand verbatims.
Michael: 'cause it's. Virtually impossible at this point. Um, but we can define what those topics are and we can go back and refine those models. 'cause people change the way that they refer to things and how they talk about things all the time. New slang, new things that develop. So we go back and we, and, and we go and update that model all the time just to make sure that we have the right [00:25:00] information that we're, that we're supplying out to lines of business so they understand like what the experience looks like for them and they can go and make those improvements for the product managers, product owners, and other people like that.
Michael: So. 
Crystal (2): Awesome. I, and this, this concept of frictionless service right, has come up a lot today. Um, and, and it sounds like there's, I, I love this, this idea of, uh, email is just unstructured data. Get rid of it, which is so true. Um, and, uh, and, and really forcing people to go into the channel that is gonna give you the most ability to understand what their experience has been, I think is great as well.
Crystal (2): And, and you mentioned that with your, uh, doing the analytics of the form, right. Trying to get people to fill out that form. So, um, great stuff. And, uh, and, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna pivot just a little bit here because, you know, I don't think we can talk about contact centers unless we talk about people. And, uh, and really, um, you know.
Crystal (2): Wondering if there are some best practices that you have, um, [00:26:00] that, that you've, uh, that you've started implementing on anything. Right. Recruiting, training, um, incentives, um, culture, um, any, any, anything that has, um, increased retention or, uh, or reduced attrition for you. 
Tara: Yeah, so, so I'll, I'll probably have the quickest answer.
Tara: So my desk is completely outsourced. Uh, we had a partner of 13 years who we just, uh, my organization just spent the last six months, uh, moving to a new partner. I. Uh, and we finished it actually officially April 1st. Um, but what was important to me as the senior director responsible for all the services is I went to as many go lives as I possibly could, and I stood up in front of all the new agents and some of, and, and to the testament of our, our culture.
Tara: There was one site that was exactly the same location as our previous or our outgoing vendor. Uh, and we actually probably had 30% of those agents moved over to the new vendor and one stood in front of me and said. I, j and j has been good [00:27:00] to me where you go. I go and he, and he said, that's why I moved over here.
Tara: But I stood up in front of all of them and I told them, your job is not just to help dusk agent. You are helping save lives. When a scientist is in the lab and needs something help done on their computer, you're helping that scientist get whatever he, he or she needs to get out the door. When the Salesforce rep is walking into the operating room and all of a sudden their iPad isn't working, you are helping that, uh, sales rep get back, the get back in the operating room to be with the surgeon to do a knee replacement, hip replacement, whatever it may be.
Tara: So I gave that message. So for me. Because it's a managed service, uh, relationship. To me, it's about stressing that we're partners and making sure that they understood our mission as well as we understand our mission.
Crystal (2): Anything else? People? 
Michael: I can say that the decision making is definitely above my pay grade for what we do there, but what I will say is that I've noticed that there is a, [00:28:00] there is a distinct push to make sure that people are. Met in the channel that they are like preferring or contacting us in. And then when it comes to like helping out with the agents, like reducing the amount of screen.
Michael: 'cause I've heard many people, men mention it, like the screen switching, the contact switching, figuring out exactly what your. What you need to do for this customer like adds to the level of complexity. And I think there's, there's an, the idea here is like, to make it as simple as possible. Me coming from the call center and working in the call center, like directly in more than, more than one, like in, in collections, in fraud.
Michael: In the relationship recovery where we were just contacting customers and trying to get them back on board. Um, I have noticed that the less screens I have to work with, the easier it is for me to like mend this relationship with a customer when it comes to that or get them where they need to be, like get them from end to end.
Michael: First Contact resolution, I think has been super important as a, as a part of like our [00:29:00] internal mission. And then, um, just overall like I think, uh. Like the more technology that we have that is like helpful to the customer as, as well as helpful to the agent themselves in getting the information that they're looking for is gonna be crucial and important to like the missions of like people talking about average handle time and all the other metrics that come out of that.
Michael: I think getting a customer to close is like one of the most important metrics, like in my opinion. 
Crystal (2): Okay. Okay, let, let's go on to metrics actually, and start to talk about, um, performance. We, I, we've had lots of conversations about, uh, metrics here today, but, um, you know, for you, for, in your opinion, what are the most important performance measures?
Crystal (2): Um, you know, is it, and I, and I'm thinking about ones that are really driving. Um, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, you know, at the same time that you're focusing on efficiency. And, and, and we [00:30:00] and, and we, Marcy I think also talked about outcomes, right? Um, really focusing on outcomes. So, uh, you wanna talk a little bit about what, um, what measures you're, your working with and you're using, and what do you find are the real drivers of customer satisfaction and loyalty and, and how are you assessing that?
Brian: Sure. I guess I'll, I'll, I'll take that one. I'm, I'm not on the metric side of, of the house, however, I've been consulting in the federal government space for a very long time. Um, hence the, the white hair. And, and you can, you can see the, a age a little bit. Um, I, I've gotten this question many times, uh, across all the federal organizations that I've worked with and what.
Brian: The problem is with this question is they're looking for what the industry best practices are, what the standards are, and they're looking for whatever metric you can throw out there. However, what. You don't take into consideration is what your best practices are, what your customers want, what your employees need.
Brian: Um, and, and when you [00:31:00] take everybody else's best practices, you lose sight on what is working well for you. And a great example, when Colin was talking about how they went and reached out to employees and they just put another button that pointed to the same place, but it had a drastic impact that wasn't based on any metrics that was reaching out to the employees and saying, Hey.
Brian: What's working well is what is not working well, and I encourage to do the same with the customers. Uh, having a, a metric or a survey that goes out is. Is pretty generic. And when you talk about that unique customer experience and, and individualizing those experiences for those customers, when you start to put some of those metrics together, it takes out that individualized, unique experience for those customers.
Brian: So I encourage, it's great to have those common ones that you have out there, but reach out to your employees and reach out to your customers to find out really what they're looking for. 
Tara: I would say we have all the traditional ones officially in our contract. Right. Uh, I did forget to mention we have, uh, we support 12 languages [00:32:00] in voice and 18 in chat.
Tara: 'cause we have machine translation. Uh, so we do from a daily day-to-day basis. Right. There's a big board behind me when I sit down at my workspace. First thing I look at in the morning is what's my chat queue and my voice queue look like? Um, because then I know if we have some major outage. Um, most of the times we don't, so that's good.
Tara: Uh, but I think, um, in a monthly review with our service partner, um, I don't wanna talk about all the stuff that's green, like you can a SA me and, uh, hold time and all that. If all that's green, we don't need to talk about it. And if month over month it's green, that's great. You're, you're doing what I'm paying you to do.
Tara: That's awesome. Let's talk about the ones that aren't green. Let's also then talk about some of the recovery stuff that we need to be focused on. Uh, so that's where we, we talk Now first contact resolution is one that we still look at, uh, pretty consistently outside of the day-to-day. More on the monthly side.
Tara: I will caveat, uh, and, and agree with someone that said earlier today, right when we put the bot in place, our first contact resolution for chat nose dived. So it's [00:33:00] normal. Um, it's now, now that the bot is actually in front of it, it's nose diving even more because the more complex things are going to the agents versus the chat bot that's taking all the easy stuff.
Tara: So I do look at it, but we lowered in our most recent contract, we lowered the service level agreement for first contact resolution for chat. Uh, significantly where voice, it's still pretty high up there. So, um, those are two, those are ones that we know if we're doing a good job at the desk. Uh, then usually CSAT follows.
Michael: I could just add on, like for our, like for the closed loop feedback process, our juicy metric is, uh, our, our customer advocacy. Uh, so we actually ask a question at the end of that contact. To say like, would you recommend Capital One to friends or family? Like directly? Like after we've had that interaction?
Michael: Just 'cause we know that, they told us through the survey process, they did not have a great interaction. So we're just gonna ask 'em again. So it's a survey. On a survey. It's very meta, but the idea is for us to understand [00:34:00] like if we were to turn that into a return on investment for the metric itself, like we could do that.
Michael: Um, but it's more so just. Getting a general sense and feel of like how successful it was to have that conversation with the customer and close that loop. And it's an honest answer. If it's not a yes, it's a no, like at all times. So unless the customer says, absolutely yes, that an, that answer's always gonna be marked as no, and that's done by the agent directly on the call.
Michael: So. 
Crystal (2): Oh, fun. And you talked about how cool it was for agents to be able to make that shift, right? 
Michael: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No, they celebrate it from that perspective to say like, this is how well we are doing from this perspective by having these conversations with customers that didn't have a great experience the first time around.
Michael: So it's really cool. I 
Crystal (2): Awesome. Um, let's, we have one question that I just lost One question from the audience that we'll able ask in a minute. Here we go. Um, okay. There it is. Um. Ah. So how about this? What are some ways to keep your agents [00:35:00] engaged when the desk is not busy? 
Tara: My desk is always busy. I mean, maybe on the weekends and like, uh, you know, Mandarin isn't very high volume, but.
Tara: Um, we actually have them, we have committed with our previous partner as well as the current partner, right? We want them to have training time built in. Uh, we had a problem probably six, seven years ago where we found out agents were having to do their training during lunch. Now j and j makes them do a lot of training, plus they had their own company training and we said, no, no, no, no.
Tara: This needs to be built into their, their weekly schedule. Make sure it's in your workforce management. Uh, so they obviously have some training time for that. They can go through their closed loop and go through their service recovery. Um, and there's always learning, uh, the current, the new partner actually has a significant larger, uh, learning library that they can tap into and do classes in, in all kinds of technology things.
Tara: So, um, that's kinda where they are. But most of the time, uh, most of our language aren't, [00:36:00] aren't terribly slow.
Brian: I was gonna say my answer to that would've been simple. Just break out a deck of cards and have fun. 
Michael: We have a, we have an, uh, like a internal reporting thing that we do called, uh, tracking and trending escalations Report, AKA Tater. Um, the idea is that the group can kind of deep dive into some of the results that we've been able to put together, like from the conversations with customers and looking at some of the information that's coming back directly back from the front lines and like metrics that way and just put together almost like vignettes for each business to say like.
Michael: Here's the top five dissatisfiers that you have. Here's some of the sub drivers that we're able to identify. And then here is like talking points. Like put together a newsletter that has like talking points to say like, here's a particular talking point that was, um, that didn't go great last year based on our text analytics.
Michael: So we utilize the text analytics for that and we'll have agents ha like add in like [00:37:00] different talk offs that they can utilize at the front lines so they can share these out in their team meetings and things like that. That. It kind of takes up that time, but also is still related to the work that they're doing.
Michael: So it keeps them engrossed in network and makes 'em feel like they're contributing back to the front lines from that coaching perspective. 
Crystal (2): Yeah. Nice. And they are, you're investing in them. I love that. Um, okay, so, um, you know, last, last question. We've got just a couple minutes. Um, one message you wanna leave for this audience today, anything you wanna offer?
Brian: Uh, I, I think the biggest thing is, is build strong relationships and partnerships. Um, reach out to your, your business units, reach out to your vendors, learn from each other, collaborate and, and work on your business outcomes. You can't do everything in a vacuum and everybody can't do everything alone.
Brian: And, and last but not least. We're at such a pivotal moment in time with technology where AI's really starting to take off and do some transformational stuff. Just have fun and enjoy the ride because there's, there's some awesome stuff that we're, we're, we're doing down the road. [00:38:00] 
Tara: I would say whether you have an in-source or outsource desk, it's all about partnership.
Tara: And if you're asking the agents for their voice, if you're asking your business partners, if you're asking your IT partners, whoever it is, the partnership for us has come a long way. Um, and nobody rolls out anything at j and j. Uh, as my colleague Lance says, unless Tara's team approves it. So we've really gotten those partnerships to a place of strength, uh, so that we are ready and the desk is the front end, um, for our IT services.
Tara: Nobody understands, Hey, I just talked to, no, you talked to somebody else, but it's okay. We're all it. Um, so definitely strengthen those partnerships. Uh, keep them going, invest in them. Uh, even the ones that sometimes you cringe at and you're like, I don't wanna go talk to that person today, but you gotta do it and that's probably will wind up being one of your best partnerships, quite honestly.
Michael: I'll keep with the road jokes and say, um, that one of the biggest things for us is we just try to concentrate on not just fixing the flat tires, but fixing the roads. So like not just at the [00:39:00] individual customer level and having those conversations with them, but also fixing the road forward, which is with product managers, product owners, and leaders of experiences to say like, how can we make this better for customers moving forward?
Michael: Um, so just concentrating on that and just making sure that, uh, we try to make it better for everybody overall. 
Crystal (2): Love that. Contact center's leading the experience. I love that. Great. Thank you to, um, all of you, appreciate you and, uh, hope you get to chat later.