Contact centre process workshop

[00:00]Tom Gallagher: Everyone got a coffee? Marcus, you look like you haven't slept.

Marcus Obi: Floor was flat out from seven. We had an outage on the card portal, so the queue was, yeah. It's settled now.

Tom Gallagher: Which is a good reminder of why we're doing this. Over to you, Change lead.

Change lead: Thanks Tom. Today I want to walk two processes end to end the way they run now. Contact centre enquiry and case handling, then complaints. I'll draw it on the screen as we go and you tell me where I've got it wrong. Jorge's here to listen mostly, so he can see what Service Cloud has to replace.

Jorge Alvarez: I'll keep quiet unless I can't help myself.

[00:05]Change lead: So a customer rings. What's the first thing the agent does?

Marcus Obi: Greets, then asks who they're speaking to. Verification. Name, date of birth, last transaction, whatever the policy says that week. They're doing that in Hamlink, screen one.

Change lead: Screen one is the customer search?

Marcus Obi: Customer search. Then if it's anything beyond a balance question you go to screen two to log a case. And screen three is where the account details sit. So you're flipping back and forth. A good agent can do it without the customer noticing. A new one, you can hear the keyboard.

Mei Tan: And the notes get typed twice. Once in the case and once in the card system if there's a transaction involved.

Change lead: Retyped.

Marcus Obi: Retyped. All the time. And there's no single view of the customer. If they rang yesterday about the same thing, you only know if they tell you, or if you go looking.

[00:14]Tom Gallagher: Which is the big one for me. Repeat contact. Customers hate saying it twice.

Change lead: That's captured. Next, resolve or escalate. How does an agent decide?

Marcus Obi: Depends on the type. Anything under the limit they resolve, anything with a dispute or a fraud flag goes to the specialist team via a queue, and you tell the customer a time frame. And that's, it's by feel a lot of the time. The scripts help but...

Mei Tan: Scripts are in the intranet, not in Hamlink. So that's a third place.

Change lead: Understood. I'll note that guidance sits outside the tool. Now, in the future, Compass Assist would suggest an answer from the knowledge articles and draft the case note. The agent would look at both and decide.

[00:22]Tom Gallagher: Can I put a stake in the ground on that? I'm fine with the assistant drafting. I'm not fine with it saving anything by itself. If the note goes in the customer record, an agent has read it and clicked. Every time.

Marcus Obi: Yeah, and that's what the team will want too. They don't want to be the person who didn't check.

Jorge Alvarez: That's how it works by default in what we've scoped. Draft appears, agent edits or accepts, then saves. I can show you.

Tom Gallagher: Then write it down as a rule, not a setting. Because settings change.

Change lead: Rule recorded. Compass Assist suggestions must be reviewed by the agent before saving. I'll carry it into the solution overview, and Fatima's session next week will probably want the same thing.

[00:30]Change lead: Complaints now. Louise, I'll let you lead.

Louise Chen: Sure. So a complaint arrives three ways. Phone, a web form, or an email to the complaints mailbox. The phone ones, the contact centre agent logs it in Hamlink with a complaint flag and passes it across. The web form and mailbox ones, my team picks them off the shared mailbox by hand.

Change lead: By hand.

Louise Chen: By hand. Someone reads it, decides the category, makes a case in Hamlink if it's not already there, and sets a diary reminder, because the regulated clock starts when we receive it. Acknowledge within the set time, respond within the set time. The diary reminders live in people's Outlook.

Mei Tan: That's the thing that frightens me. Someone's off sick and the reminder is in their calendar.

Louise Chen: Yes. It has happened. Not often. Once is enough.

[00:40]Change lead: And then investigation, response, and reporting?

Louise Chen: Investigation is a mix of emails and file notes. The response is a letter, drafted in Word, approved by me or a senior officer, sent. Reporting each month is a manual count out of Hamlink plus the mailbox. It takes one person about two days.

Change lead: What do you need from the new system?

Louise Chen: Case types with proper categories. Timers that run themselves. And reporting that doesn't need two days. The categories matter most. If the categories are wrong, the regulator reporting is wrong.

Change lead: Can you supply your current category list?

Louise Chen: I can. It has some legacy ones that nobody uses, I'll flag those. By the end of the month, is that okay? The twenty-ninth.

Change lead: That works. Friday 29 January.

[00:50]Tom Gallagher: Here's a question I've had in my head since the first briefing. Do complaints stay in the same queue as general enquiries? Because right now they get flagged and then they sit in the same list as everything else, and my team leaders are triaging them.

Louise Chen: I'd want them separate. But I'd also want the agent who takes it to log it straight away, not transfer it.

Tom Gallagher: Which means more calls land with a complaints queue I haven't resourced. I can't decide that today.

Marcus Obi: And what happens at night? Who sits on the complaints queue at nine pm?

Louise Chen: Nobody. They wait till morning.

Change lead: That's an open question, then. Do complaints stay in the same queue as general enquiries. Owner is contact centre and complaints jointly. I'll give it the number Q-04.

Tom Gallagher: Joint is right. Neither of us can do it alone.

[01:00]Change lead: Training and shifts. Tom, Mei, tell me what the roster looks like.

Mei Tan: Docklands runs about six in the morning until ten at night, in rotating shifts. Parramatta is similar but a bit shorter. At any time I need about eighty percent of the floor on the phones. I can release maybe twenty percent at once.

Marcus Obi: And people don't like half-days of training. They come out fried and then have to take calls.

Mei Tan: So short blocks. An hour and a half is about what I can slot into a shift without breaking coverage. If I can run the same session several times across the day, everyone gets it, whichever shift they're on.

Change lead: Ninety-minute blocks, repeated across all shifts. Does that work for the trainers, Jorge, in terms of how the training environment is set up?

Jorge Alvarez: Fine. It's just a sandbox. Sam's team will need to be flexible on their own hours though.

Mei Tan: I'll send you the roster pattern so you can see the shape. By Wednesday next week, the twentieth.

[01:10]Change lead: Let me read back. As-is for contact centre case handling and for complaints is captured, I'll send you drafts. Training is in ninety-minute blocks across every shift. Compass Assist suggestions are reviewed by the agent before saving. Q-04 is open. Mei, roster on the twentieth. Louise, categories on the twenty-ninth.

Tom Gallagher: That's it. Thanks everyone.

Marcus Obi: Can I go and see if the card portal's behaving?

Tom Gallagher: Go.