Go BackPlanning makes the difference for 2008 award winners
The prestigious Contact Centre Innovation of the Year Award 2008 was presented this week to EDF Energy for using analysis of the root causes of customer contact to halve workload in key areas and create a ground-breaking end-to-end service for new customers.
The planning team involve advisers in creating and using bespoke end-of-call surveys to pinpoint areas where process or product changes can most improve results and establish a baseline for measuring the success of business cases for investment or service development.
"This has totally changed how managers see planning", explains Penny Wright, Resource Planning Manager at EDF Energy. As Su Martin, Head of Marketing Operations and Customer Experience, confirms "it's taken us to a totally different level . we don't just react, we plan". Glen Ewing heads New Customer Acquisitions, who have developed the pioneering end-to-end service in the Pontoon department. "It's changed the business and how we make decisions", he comments. "I think the Internal Investment Board was surprised. It made them realise that they need a different approach".
"Making life easier for customers, who currently need to make repeated or unnecessary calls, is still the biggest challenge for customer-focussed organisations", comments Paul Smedley, Executive Director of the Professional Planning Forum, the Award's organisers. "The successes at EDF Energy demonstrate the outstanding results that are possible for contact centres when they systematically preventing the service or communications failure that otherwise forces customers to call". Project work has led to reductions of 50% in direct debit queries and 60% in the billing helpline - increasing customer loyalty by 80% and freeing up time for 1:1's and team meetings.
The award was presented at Contact Centre Planning 2008, the Professional Planning Forum's seventh annual conference in Manchester on 29th April.
Almost 500 industry specialists gathered for the Gala dinner and the two-day conference at which all the award winners presented their achievements.
The following awards to recognise innovation in specific areas were also given:
The Management Information Innovation Award went to Carphone Warehouse for a rapid transformation of MI that gives visibility to the customer experience and has developed a coaching culture within the contact centre. The new reporting platform is outperforming external specifications at a fraction of the cost and saving £1.5m pa in Microsoft licences alone.
The Resource Planning Innovation Award was presented to Vodafone, for applying call centre planning to retail stores in the Czech Republic, growing sales by 18% and reducing cost overspends. This approach is now being rolled out in the UK.
British Gas Services gained the Innovation Award for Integrated Planning for a resourcing strategy that joins together recruitment, training and resource planning. In just one year, the centres have cut churn by 20% points, boosted new starter quality scores by nearly 60%, and increased employee satisfaction by 6%.
The Innovation Award for Lifestyle Planning went to Orange UK for Your Time, creating new lifestyle shift options, to attract and retain a deliberately diverse mix of employees, involving radical changes to recruitment, induction training and management practices on the operational floor.
Canterbury City Council won the 2008 Public Sector Innovation Award for a uniquely flexible approach to home working and job variety, supported by integrated planning for both front and back office.
Awards finalists are hosting site visits over the next few months as part of the Planning Forum's Best Practice Programme.
About the Professional Planning Forum
The Professional Planning Forum is the independent industry body supporting effective resourcing and planning in the contact centre industry. Established in March 2000, we are supplier-independent and work across all industry sectors to provide specialist support for contact centre professionals who take resource planning seriously.
Our aims are to share and promote best practice in effective resourcing, support centre managers in developing their in-house planning and support functions, provide professional training and certification for analysts and specialists in these areas and establish better understanding and recognition within the industry of the role of resource planners and what is required for the role to work well in practice.
Complex and specialist skills, resourcing, planning and MI are fundamental to the success of today's contact centres. Yet many call centres still expect specialists to learn the role, with little training, no help and few opportunities to share experience with other centres. Even specialist planners in large call centres can be isolated, without formal training or accreditation.
The Forum's programmes have been established to offer training and support for specialist roles and to provide case studies that show how the right planning team and improved procedures can make a dramatic improvement to performance on attrition, sickness, sales and customer complaints, as well as to costs and service level.
About the annual Contact Centre Innovation Awards
The Professional Planning Forum's Innovation of the Year Awards offer recognition for work that has made a significant impact on a contact centre's operation and strategic development in the last year. Contact centres have come a long way in the last ten or twenty years, but they don't stand still! These awards exist to recognise the successful initiatives that are making innovative centres great places to work and to contact.
The Innovation of the Year Award 2006 was presented to the Tesco Customer Service Centre for an Every Little Helps initiative that significantly reduced stress in the call centre in the Christmas shopping weeks - their busiest time of year when volumes rise by 25%. Service levels improved by 45% and attrition by 42%, by resourcing smarter and training people to 'choose their attitude' at work.
The Innovation of the Year Award 2005 was presented to HBOS for their fabulous work on developing a genuine work-life balance for over 5,000 front-line colleagues in centres throughout the UK. Sickness reduced by 5% points and, with the full support of the unions, 70% of those on fixed shifts volunteered for the new flexible patterns because of the benefits it offered them as well as the business.
The Innovation of the Year Award 2004 went to Norwich Union Life Direct for "Project Eureka", which transformed the centre raising sales conversion by 35%, reducing absence from 15% to 5% and abandoned calls from 20% to 5% in just three months.
We offer these awards because we want to demonstrate how much is in fact possible and to offer case studies on how these improvements have been achieved. The Awards winners are all call centres who have identified what needs changing - and delivered it - demonstrating significant change and measurable performance improvement.
Date - 01/05/2008
