Industry voice: 5 best practices to improve CSP call center support

sincity · November 5, 2014

Building a consistently excellent customer experience and receiving high marks for customer satisfaction is no easy task for today's Communication Service Providers (CSPs), most which are supplying a variety of services to business and residential customers, such as high speed Internet, TV, and both wireless and traditional phone services. We all have high expectations for our service providers and very little patience for long waits on the phone to get help with a sluggish Internet connection or cable TV outage.

The old adage, "It takes a village," applies in many of these situations because it truly does require CSPs to adopt an "all hands on deck" mentality to focus on the customer to be successful in the long run. From the CEO, to engineering, to the field technician, to sales, putting the customer first must be job one. Like all highly competitive industries, CSPs must deliver superior customer service and support in order to retain legacy customers and acquire new ones.

A decade ago, it might have been possible to get away with sub-par support and customer service – that was long before Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, among others, made it easy for customers to vent, very publicly, about poor customer service. Some high profile vents, such as the recent Comcast customer service incident, have created a sense of urgency around the important role that customer support plays in all industries, including communications services.

First Call Resolution (FCR) is critical because it directly impacts customer satisfaction. Although some studies report that customers are more willing to stay on the call longer if they can get their problems resolved, it doesn't mean they're happy about it, nor do they leave the call with a warm and fuzzy feeling about the company or the time they wasted while they were on hold.

So how can CSPs deliver superior customer service and drive up FCR? There are actually five best practices that CSPs can implement as part of their incident resolution processes that will allow them to fine tune FCR and decrease the potential for incident escalation:

1) Process guidance capabilities in an incident resolution system should be front and center.

One of the issues that counteract incident resolution efforts happens to be a pretty common industry issue that must be addressed. Level 1 (L1) agents or Customer Service Reps (CSRs), the first in line for problem resolution, tend to be filled by less trained and less technical staff. Because of the lack of training and technical know-how, and minimal tools that provide L1 agents with clear resolution procedures, these L1 agents become escalation points to Level 2 (L2) agents and field engineers because they require an experienced, trusted engineer to carry out the technical diagnostic, assessment and repair tasks the incident requires. This results in a measurable increase in the cost per resolution, as well as lengthy delays in the resolution process. To compound the delays and spike in costs, as CSPs add new services, their operation centers and L1 agents are forced to manage more events and incidents.

2) Process Improvement needs to be perpetual and continuous

It's been proven time and time again that when process improvement efforts are ad-hoc and disconnected from the overall incident resolution processes become unsustainable.

As a result, new services and new more effective ways to resolve incidents are driving CSPs to create more sophisticated support processes. Capturing the details used to troubleshoot and resolve incidents is essential to improving the process – this goes for the actions taken and the results. However, this often does not happen because it is too time consuming or laborious.

CSPs need to adopt a culture of continuous improvement and leverage systems that can help them to capture this information in real-time to continuously improve the process. When these processes and systems are baked into the daily resolution process, processes can be analyzed and improvements can be continuous leading to improved incident resolution and customer satisfaction.

3) Automation is not "one size fits all" for all incidents

Automation is an important part of incident resolution and FCR and the ability to automate some or all of the procedure can dramatically improve time-to-resolution. However, to fully leverage and optimize the power of automation, the resolution system should provide capabilities to automate sub-tasks in the manual resolution process as well as end-to-end procedures.

For example, diagnostics can automatically run while results identifying next steps for an L1 agent, such as triggering another automation to update the trouble ticket automatically. By combining process guidance and automation, Level 2 or Level 3 Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) are now able to shift the handling of repetitive problems to the L1 CSRs, avoid escalations and drive up FCR. Instead of constant fire-fighting, SMEs can focus on driving more resolution to L1 agents, consequently improving first call resolution and customer satisfaction.

4) Collaboration between support teams is crucial

It's typical for multiple teams to work together to resolve more complex incidents that arise. L1 agents and CSRs can leverage collective, cross-team operational knowledge to more quickly resolve issues and can collaborate with peers as needed as part of the resolution process. Some incident resolution systems, like our RESOLVE 5 Software System, allow information about the incident to be easily shared across multiple teams, and also to capture all activity and communications between teams automatically as part of the resolution process, providing the necessary context and avoiding extra administrative work after the incident is resolved.

By combining process guidance and automation, L2 or L3 Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) are now able to shift the handling of repetitive problems to the L1 CSRs, avoid escalations and drive up FCR. Instead of the constant fire-fighting, SMEs can focus on driving more resolution to L1 agents, consequently improving first call resolution and customer satisfaction

5) Leveraging the power of analytics drives productivity and efficiency in the resolution process

The same theory behind big data and web analytics, which are ubiquitous across today's organizations, can be applied to incident resolution and FCR. CSPs can leverage the power of analytics to drive productivity and efficiency in the resolution process during the lifecycle of the incident: from trigger to resolution. Some incident management platforms offer out-of-the box reporting and analytics that not only measure system parameters, but also business impact and ROI.

The ability to gain insight and analyze Decision Tree paths taken by L1 agents, and optimize these paths, allows agents to more quickly resolve incidents in the future. The dashboard approach to viewing and analyzing incidents allows service agents to more quickly isolate problem areas for complex services and provides the navigation to the right process guidance.

The Bottom Line

By putting these proven incident management best practices into action, CSPs can keep their high priority commitment to putting the customer first. Case in point: one US-based Managed Service Provider (MSP) with hundreds of L1 and L2 agents across three support centers made their customers a top priority by making, and keeping, a commitment to decrease support call wait times.

After implementing an enterprise, accelerated incident management system across all three call centers, the MSP was able to shave more than three minutes off of each call, exceeding their goal. In a highly competitive communications services market, providers that continue to devote resources to making sure they're continually improving the customer support experience will continue to thrive and expand into new markets, thanks to a decrease in customer churn and an increase in the ability to service more customers in less time.