Enhancing Public Sector Customer Service Conference | Melbourne | 15-16 February 2017
Contact channel
management
Performance
EVENT
HIGHLIGHTS
State-wide
services
Omni-channel
approach
Workforce
during regular “business hours”, but from the
customer’s perspective, the most convenient time
to call about personal or family matters may be
outside work hours, just when the contact centre is
closed.
•
How to develop & optimise a contact
channel strategy
How to effectively measure & analyse
customer data
Social media
•
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2
3
How to grow a high performing
customer service workforce
Optimising
budgets
Cultural
transformation
Attend to learn
Channels. There’s no doubt that adding new
channels such as web chat, social media or
video improves the accessibility of government
customer service. There are so many segments
of the population who appreciate service via live
chat for example, from multi-tasking Mums and
chat-obsessed millennials through to the one in six
Australians who experience hearing loss. That’s not
to mention overseas-born residents whose written
English skills are better than spoken, and citizens
who prefer to have everything “in writing”. In the
health arena, chat can provide a security blanket of
anonymity when discussing sensitive issues.
Languages. With 20-30% of people from nonEnglish-speaking backgrounds in many cities, it’s
disappointing that there’s not more of a focus
on hiring bilingual staff. Of course telephone
interpreter services are an excellent option to
manage the odd call in a variety of languages, and
government has traditionally been effective at
publicising the availability of this service. However
if 20% of callers in a particular constituency have
a preference for Mandarin/Cantonese, it makes
better sense to implement a recruitment strategy
which prioritises bilingual skills, and have an IVR
option or separate number for Chinese-language
service.
3. ENHANCE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Customers are most satisfied when it’s easy to get
their query resolved. It’s therefore no surprise that
Customer Effort Score (CES) is today’s “in vogue”
customer experience metric. Unlike AHT (Average
Handle Time) or GOS (Grade of Service), CES
transcends the contact centre and measures the
entire customer journey, across all touchpoints – from
website and social media to mobile, face-to-face, email
and phone.
There are many innovative solutions to enhance
customer experience, bringing together the traditional
silos of contact centres and digital, such as giving
customers online visibility of call wait times and
driving awareness of online offerings through
engaging in-queue or on-hold messages. One-to-one
videos are an exciting new offering which can be
leveraged by government to explain complex or – let’s
face it – boring statements in an engaging, interactive
way, while at the same time deflecting calls. For
example, a child support or council statement can be
brought to life and explained in a personalised video,
which includes each and every customer’s unique
payment details or balance. The cost of personalised
videos is surprisingly low, while the benefits in terms of
customer experience and call reductions is high.
Matchboard have partnered with
Criterion Conferences on th