Great Customer Experience Begins With A Contact Center Audit & Assessment

The first step in the "Government Contact Center Operations Audit, Assessment & Benchmarking" is the execution of a contact center benchmarking audit.

Who needs to conduct an annual operations audit and assessments? Anyone who needs to understand how to improve their customer's digital experience and the organization's service delivery performance. Whether they manage a team, offer organizational help to team managers or are an industry body in search of industry benchmarking, an assessment tool can help you figure out how to improve your government customer experience delivery, reduce operational costs and increase employee engagement.

Through the completion of the operations audit, you can ensure that the organization has a good understanding of the current state of the operation. The audit allows you to examine the operations maturity and performance in contrast to 'best practice' centers globally.

This creates the baseline and context against which the operations can be viewed and assessed. The execution of the audit by surfacing issues and/or concerns is an essential step in ensuring the success of the contact center operations.

Government contact center operations audit categories include:

1. Technology Review - All digital channels, operating technology (i.e. CRM) and telephony within the center, the effectiveness of technology, it's utilization, scalability, interoperability, new technology opportunities including specifically any required telephony upgrade and return on investment (ROI) calculations.

2. Operations Management - Process improvement opportunities, workflow process opportunities, automation opportunities, change management, employee and customer satisfaction, measurement and reporting.

3. Compliance Management - Awareness and understanding of applicable rules, regulations, and standards. Policies, processes, and procedures for ensuring the operation is and can document compliance.

4. Operational Alignment of the contact center to the business goals, especially related to desired patient journey both within and outside of the normal center operating hours, and presenting suggested approaches and results.

5. Human Capital Management - Recruiting, Hiring, Job Descriptions, Skills Mapping, Workforce Management, and Optimization, Forecasting, Scheduling, Training, Coaching, Succession Planning, and Quality Assurance.

In assessing the operations, the approach involves a review of its existing processes and practices, communications and technology, and, of course, the most important element: staffing. The outcome of the project is an agency report. This report always assesses current operational objectives, involves peer-to-peer benchmarking and identifies the gap between the "as is" vs. the "to-be" environment to achieve the agency's vision. The report offers recommendations toward optimizing operational objectives, setting relevant operational priorities to close identified gaps and deploying an efficient innovative cloud-based technology

Outcome: After the completion of the audit and assessment, you should expect a clear direction, in the shape of detailed reports to empower you to deliver better customer experience and give you a precise idea of where your organization stands in the world map if you also include a benchmarking tool.

Author Rosetta Carrington Lue is a pioneer in the field of Government Customer Experience Management. She is a certified contact center auditor and is right at home as the CEO of GovCX Professionals (www.govcxprofessionals).