The Messy Middle Office

Paul Baptist explores how to customer engagement and service operations can improve clogged up workflows and damaging your customer experience?

What is the measure of good customer experience? Typically, the focus is on how customers can engage with contact centres—what channels and self-service tools are available and how easy it is to speak to someone.

Even with good customer management practices in place, the reality, however, is that agents are trying to “do the work” to resolve customer issues either manually or using disparate systems, and their organisations are holding them responsible. This results in customer call-backs and delays, causing what we call experience fracturing.

A true measure of great customer experience should therefore involve both customer engagement and service operations (the act of “doing the work”).

Most organisations are reluctant to give their agents the necessary tools to help them with doing the work to resolve customer issues because it isn’t easy or straightforward. Often there are different departments, different people, different processes and different systems that they have to navigate. We refer to this as the “messy middle” office. The best way to work through this messy middle is to ensure that work can flow through the organisation.

Fixing Kiwibank’s messy middle

Kiwibank, the largest New Zealand-owned bank, was challenged with a cost-reduction and customer experience initiative. It was suffering from multiple tools and extensive manual overhead across its operations, contact centre and branch systems. It also needed to comply with an impending Commerce Commission regulation on loan transparency and tracking customer updates on loan changes, or otherwise face significant fines.

Our solution was the implementation of one common platform across the entire bank that digitalised workflows incorporating integrations across the systems, and improved data capture, analytics and visibility. It enabled teams to apply automation to customer processes efficiently and effectively. They had the right information available when talking to customers, responded to customers faster and could dedicate more time for high-value customers.

Kiwibank was able to deliver better outcomes for their staff and customers, realise time and cost savings, and ensure compliance. It has predicted savings of 1 million minutes per year by the first workflow, 25% reduction in time for new hires to reach full productivity and 30% improvement in customer retention.

We can see how relieving pressure on the frontline improves agent satisfaction, which in turn improves the customer experience.

How to make work flow through

For true workflow to happen, you need the right manual and automated work processes, people and technology. Here are some important things to consider:

1. Identify the most complex process but design for the more common processes to ensure you aren’t spending all your time on the exceptions. But don’t ignore the exceptions either—often these are the cases that make front-page news.

2. Identify the steps in the process where you interact with customers directly and ask the questions: Should this be automated? Will human interaction add to or detract from the experience I am offering my customer? What impact will automating this process have on that experience?

3. People are needed to make work flow.

4. The right technology empowers people to make work flow better.

5. The added dimension of time can add complexity. Waiting for a step to complete can be just as crucial as pushing for immediate action.

Ultimately, creating the best customer experience involves giving agents great ways to engage with customers and helping them make work flow through the organisation to resolution.

Author, Mandy Hale, wrote: “Change is painful. But nothing is as painful as staying stuck somewhere you don’t belong.” We don’t often get opportunities to engage with customers. Let’s not waste them

Paul Baptist, Senior Director, ServiceNow