Description of the process
Contact Centres primarily use their company’s key business processes to complete a transaction between the customer and the organization. A transaction that can be completed in just one contact creates value for the contact centre in the areas of customer satisfaction and cost efficiency. However, procedures within the fulfillment process are typically not within the complete control of the call centre. Therefore, contact centres need to focus on value created for their key customer of this process; their agents whose needs are:
- Simple procedures that explain what to do and why.
- “Easy to use” procedures that do not detract from an agent’s focus on the conversation with the customer.
- Tools to support them in completing the transaction.
- Assistance when things go wrong (and things do go wrong!)
All tasks within this process start when deploying internal key business processes to fulfill the customer’s request. The tasks end for the contact centre when an agent has issued a work order to other employees or systems in the organization or provided information to the customer that completed the request.
Characteristics of a best practice
The key to managing a process that is largely outside the control of the contact centre is to:
- Know how you can influence the organization.
- Know how you can tailor the procedures for contact centre use.
- The contact centre measures the number of requests completed with just one contact by the customer. Feedback is provided to influence the efficiency of the organization’s key business processes.
- If cross-functional teams are established in the organization for end to end process management, contact centres become key members.
- “How to” steps are identified for agents to fulfill each type of transaction. These include steps to handle customer requests for status reports and customer complaints when things go wrong.
- Without exception, information needed to fulfill a customer’s request is available on the agent’s desktop computer.
- Desktop technology is maximized to reduce the agent’s reliance on memory, to hide the complexities of internal business process design and to eliminate the need for post call processing to complete fulfillment.
- Desktop technology is utilized to collect performance data on the fulfillment procedures.
- Guidance is provided for those customer requests that are not fulfilled by the contact centre
- In organizations engaged in e-commerce, fulfillment procedures are re-engineered so that they are the same for both the customer on-line and the agent in the contact centre.
Relationships to other processes
Input to fulfillment process:
- Procedures used to fulfill each transaction work within the framework of the Call Handling process.
- The Change Deployment process can influence the design of the organization’s fulfillment procedures when change is initiated.
Output from fulfillment process:
- The Desktop Tools process is critical as an enabler to complete fulfillment tasks.
- The design of fulfillment procedures impacts the overall length of contacts accommodated in the Force Management process.
- Training and coaching of specific fulfillment procedures is a critical part of the Skill & Knowledge Transfer process.
- Consider the quality of the fulfillment procedure itself when evaluating employee results in the Performance Feedback process.
- Requirements for automating fax workflow of fulfillment activities are provided to the Process Tools process.
- Requirements for self-serve fulfillment are provided to the Automated Contacts process.
What’s in it for me?
Reduce the cost of complexity
A good way to evaluate the effectiveness of the fulfillment process is to seek out the ways agents have learned to work around or side step the procedures. The root cause of this deviation is normally because agents find the procedures too difficult to use or because agents continually get a negative response from customers. This situation adds an unnecessary level of complexity when monitoring quality in the contact centre.