• Contact centre current state assessment

Major international Hotels Group

Major Hotel brand – assessment and digital strategy development across international online and call centre channels for Customer Relations and Loyalty operations

Our client’s customer experience was delivered mainly by franchises, supplemented by a small Guest Relations and Loyalty function operated in the UK, US and the Philippines. A new leader was concerned about a potential lack of alignment between the central function and its stakeholders – internal and franchisee. He instigated a review of the organisation’s customer strategy and operations - including a complete review of multi-channel operations - to inform plans to change the strategy, governance and performance of operations.

David led a team to performwith a thorough operational review of their existing operations across 3 continents to assess.

  • Strategic alignment of the organisation, operating model & RACI
  • Customer experience delivery
  • All aspects of operational delivery, focusing upon opportunities for cost reduction
  • Performance of Applications & IT

We completed site visits to the major global call centre operations – interviewing management, meeting agents and team managers, listening to calls and collecting large volumes of operational & financial data for off-site analysis.

We completed deep-dive reviews into the data collected – focusing on (1) root causes of demand to understand opportunities for cost reduction by avoiding the need for some customer calls and diverting others to digital channels and (2) analysing all drivers of cost, compared with industry benchmarks.

We found opportunities to improve utilization, control of AHT and consistency of customer experience. Additionally, the process and RACI linking the performance of Customer operations to stakeholder needs needed some improvements, for example clearer external sponsorship of activities to avoid the function “marking its own homework”.

We developed a set of key operational recommendations with greatest potential to deliver cost efficiencies while improving the customer experience delivered. We prioritised these into ‘quick wins’ focused around coaching and incentives to enhance agent performance and longer-term investments, covering improved workforce management, multi-skilling and workforce flexibility, process and IT changes)

  • Addressedstrategic issues on Customer channel’s operating model relationship to key stakeholders functions
  • Operational cost efficiency initiatives
  • High level operational designs for a data analytics and inbound/outbound sales operation
  • Team coaching & performance management improvement initiatives
  • Flexible resourcing to deliver more consistent customer experience/better utilization.
  • Process simplification aligned with greater agent “empowerment”