Achieving Frictionless Contact Center Transformation with Process Mining
Contact centers, irrespective of the industry, continue to be the driving force behind customer experiences. But the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted and exposed siloed front office operations.
Disparate systems and inefficient processes create contact center challenges like unnecessary escalations, long wait queues, unresolved complaints, and many more that do not just lead to attrition but can also have a hard-hitting impact on brand image. This has created an exponentially increasing need for friction-free operations that streamline the entire customer journey and provide seamless experiences at all touchpoints.
Tech Mahindra’s process analytics-led transformation solution in partnership with Celonis addresses these leading contact center challenges and brings more value to customers, and hence, businesses.
Contact Center Challenges that Need to Be Addressed
Why has Contact Center Transformation become the need of the hour? Businesses must first understand the challenges that require resolving to be able to prudently put a plan and a solution in place. Usually, these are some shortcomings common to businesses with different core operations:
1. Agent Utilization – Resource planning is one of the major factors creating friction in contact centers. And while agent utilization indicates efficiency, extremely high agent utilization rates may lead to agent attrition. Companies need a creative solution that helps strike the balance. Other similar challenges include limited agent-level performance tracking.
2. Customer Satisfaction – Customers may not always choose to give businesses second chances. Shorter attention spans and the need for quick service can result in customer satisfaction challenges like high number of IVR hang-ups, high hold times, high escalation rates, reactive customer service, recurring first call resolution (FCR) errors, and incorrect tagging in CRMs.
3. Agent Productivity – Agent productivity is the foundational metric that requires tracking with a careful focus on contributing factors like high average handle times (AHT), incorrect call routings, and unnecessary escalations.
4. Risk and Compliance – A lack of accountability in agents and oversight on the company’s part can lead to challenges like limited fraud detection, agent misconduct, lack of process conformance, and compliance issues.
5. Revenue and Cost Impact – Friction in contact center is also the result of missing self-service capability, lack of automation, and limited insights on upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
In essence, all these challenges are largely due to not tapping into vast data sets coming in from the CRM and IVR that are crucial to define customer support journeys. With the help of process mining, companies can overthrow such issues and achieve a frictionless Contact Center Transformation.
Process Mining and Seamless Transformation of Contact Centers
With the onset of the pandemic, a global digital change was observed. But there still remain inefficiencies despite companies’ best efforts. Process Mining empowers leaders and agents to remain efficiently operational in constantly changing, high pressure setups. It is an advanced analytical discipline that helps companies discover and monitor business processes to draw fact-based insights that have the potential to dramatically improve the existing system.
Process Mining can help capture digital footprints from any number if BI tools. These digital footprints are converted to meaningful insights that cater to KPI improvement, for example, optimized agent utilization, reduced escalations, shortened call cycles, reduced AHTs, high customer satisfaction and high Net Promoter Score. In other words, it provides a digital view of end-to-end processes, highlighting gaps and anomalies across the process value chain.
Process Mining also identifies opportunities for automation, business process reengineering, and operation model change. The calculated approach of a well-designed Process Mining tool can increase agent efficiency and augment overall service support while optimizing cost – with zero friction.
Tech Mahindra’s Process Mining Solution for an Advanced BPO Transformation
Frictionless contact center transformation with process mining heralds a remarkable shift in the way contact centers are revolutionized. Through the strategic application of process mining techniques, organizations can unlock a wealth of insights into intricate workflows unveiling hidden bottlenecks.
Tech Mahindra came together with Celonis, the global leader in execution management systems (EMS) to enable contact center transformation while preventing profitability loss usually rendered by the challenges we discussed above. Our co-developed solution helps senior executives and contact center directors to identify front-office inefficiencies and opportunities for omni-channel support, automation, and revenue optimization.
In a nutshell, here’s what our expert solution does to revolutionize contact center support in companies:
- Use digital footprints to paint a complete picture of the actual process and use it to explore pain points.
- Identify high-impact processes to drive quick optimization and efficiency.
- Recommend intelligent actions to transform contact center processes.
- Provide a real-time performance cockpit where stakeholders can have a bird-eye view of the entire process.
- Identify tasks that can be automated in order to improve first-call resolution and reduce the number of tickets.
- Facilitate better agent utilization along with zero-touch interactions and resolutions.
The entire solution is the result of a pragmatic approach to bring permanent and tangible improvements in the complete contact center ecosystem, including complaint trend identification, reduced repeat calls, intelligent escalation, demand prediction, and improved agent utilization. And the results have been nothing short of exemplary with
- Up to 30% lower call hold times
- Up to 85% resource occupancy
- Upwards of 75% first call resolution
- 0% unnecessary escalations
Since the start of this strategic alliance in December 2019, we have had the opportunity to transform over multiple contact centers, including the contact center of the largest North American retailer who reported savings of $2.2 Mn and a 60% improvement in NPS.
We have also introduced a process mining center of excellence to maximize the execution capacity of our solution across industries. This extended offering is a part of Tech Mahindra’s NXT.NOWTM framework to offer creative and comprehensive CX solutions that help enterprises grow exponentially.
