If You Are Transforming Your Contact Center and Don't Do These Five Things, You Will Fail!

Transforming a contact center isn't just about upgrading software or implementing new technologies. It's a holistic process that involves aligning people, processes, and technology to deliver exceptional customer experiences. Through my experiences in leading contact center transformations across more industries than I can count, I've learned many valuable lessons that have ultimately defined my approach to these types of projects. Here, I'm excited to share my top five that I think have the most critical impact.

1. Speak a Common Language (and have an excellent facilitator)

In any transformation initiative, clarity and understanding are paramount. Speaking a common language serves as the foundation upon which successful collaboration is built. I've found that using a shared vocabulary and conceptual framework for the tech solution we are building, helps establish a baseline understanding among team members, stakeholders, and vendors.

The first goal in any transformation must be for your technical leads and your business leads to have a "mind meld". The technical stakeholders must understand the business team's goals and pain points and be able to separate it from their current technical solution. Likewise, in a contact center transformation, it's of greatest importance that the business team understands the baseline product that they are transforming on. I assure you this new product will have its own set of conventions and paradigms than they will not be used to!

It is from this foundation that a team of technical and business stakeholders can efficiently build and iterate. A technical team is now equipped with the knowledge necessary to guide a business team away from expensive low return wins and focus on the areas of low-expense high return first. This is the foundation of value-fast thinking!

2. There must be a single technical owner from the big to the small (ideally with a shadow)

Agile methodology for all of its strengths, can often result in a patchwork of individual efforts that fail to coalesce into a cohesive whole. This means solutions that do not scale well, features that get produced that feel silly when juxtaposed with other features, and worst of all, that annoying weed that suffocates all of your team’s innovation if left untreated, tech-debt.

That's why having a single technical owner that vets the design of solutions big and small is crucial to continual success. This type of technical owner ensures that all pieces of the puzzle fit together seamlessly, features are built in a scalable manner, features compliment each other and the solution can continue to mature rapidly.  Sometimes agile teams attempt to fragment this responsibility but ultimately it always lands the team in a quagmire.  Technical owners may delegate work but ultimately they need to ensure they understand and approve each part of the design. You need a technical owner for the whole solution!

3. Focus on Incremental Milestones and Embrace Flexibility

Whenever I see a team that wants to bite off too much at once I'm reminded of that team game with the stick where everyone in the team has to lift the stick up at once. Go too fast relative to your teammates and you'll create an air gap between the stick and your teammates fingers and the stick will fall. Building a complex solution is like lifting that stick, bite off too much at once and you'll create an air gap for bugs and inconsistencies to infiltrate. This costs you more time in the long run as each stakeholder wrestles with the problems. The time-sucking exercise of troubleshooting and knowledge sharing delays cascades through your team or organization with the added weight of stress and anxiety burning people out.

By breaking down the transformation journey into manageable milestones and the right balance of value-fast scope management (see point 1), teams can adapt to changing priorities and evolving requirements more effectively. This style of iterative approach not only allows for quick wins but also enables course corrections based on real-time feedback and insights that empowers teams to navigate uncertainty with confidence.

4. More Bodies Does Not Mean Quicker Delivery

It's a common misconception that throwing more people at a project will expedite its completion. I've witnessed on too many occasions, despite much protest, the powers that be insisting on adding more bodies on a project to address a bottleneck with throughput, when it is actually the opposite that is the remedy.

While having a talented and dedicated team is essential, building a large one is a slow and expensive process. Adding more bodies actually results in deceleration as less time gets spent on work and more time gets spent on synchronization. The bigger the team the more opportunity for mistakes, confusion, re-work and most of that effort will land on your best resources, distracting them from getting the job done.

Does this mean you can't have a big team? No, that is not what I am saying. If you want a big team, build it slowly. Do it incrementally, as a small percentage of the overall team; do it with the understanding that each body will actually slow things down for a while. What I am also saying is if you want velocity, don't start out with a massive team, and don’t add people in a panic to try and meet aggressive deadlines. It is critically important for the morale and productivity of the team to balance the efficiency and size of the team with the goals of the project.

I assure you, a lean, cohesive team that communicates effectively and feels the thrill of working in a fast paced, high-synergy environment can achieve far more than a larger, sluggish, disjointed group.

5. Have Decision Makers Actively Engaged

Often, I witness workshops where key decision makers are conspicuously absent. Instead, stand-ins and proxies attempt to represent the business, but in reality, they represent only the current business process and can be rigid when trying to transform. As I emphasized in my initial point about speaking a common language, this current process likely reflects the shortcomings of the existing product or tech-solution. When aiming for optimal outcomes efficiently, it's imperative to have decision makers actively-present who possess the authority and willingness to say, “Yes! That new process makes complete sense, and it's so much easier!” This avoids the game of telephone, where nuances and tweaks are lost in translation, resulting in compounding person-hours for what could have been resolved in a few minutes of direct conversation.

Bringing decision makers into the fold from the outset of the transformation process allows ideas to be either quickly dismissed or quickly incorporated into the overall vision and iterated on.  This will ensure that the transformation can gain momentum swiftly, embodying the concept of value-fast.

In conclusion, efficiently delivering a successful contact center transformation hinges on a combination of effective communication, comprehensive product ownership, tight scope management, a nimble team, and engaged decision makers. By embracing these five key principles, organizations can navigate the complexities of transformation with confidence and achieve meaningful results in the shortest time possible!

Ascent CX offers many services that deliver on these principles - if you’d like our help to ensure that your contact center transformation is a success, contact us at info@ascentcx.com.