Here’s what every contact centre manager needs to know about the value of Business Acumen and how to apply it to get results fast!
You open your email in your inbox from the BI department. It is the customer services KPI report from yesterday. Unbeknownst to you, there’s a massive increase in repeat calls. Your sales reports show a sharp decline in sales and your collections report shows that a particular team has dropped significantly on PTPs. If only you could also, alongside it, see why? Why…why…why?
As a Contact Centre, BPO or CX leader, a comprehensive understanding of your business and operations is sometimes somewhat understood only in terms of high-level hygiene factors. Things like, ‘What’s my Repeat Call Rate’, ‘What is my Sales Conversion Rate’ or ‘What is the PTP Rate?’ Knowing these high-level hygiene factors only estimates how far you are from where you should be, but not really telling you a whole lot more.
Together with the above facts, working at steering your operations is not just about the operational effectiveness and efficiencies, but also how your operations create and continuously increase the value delivered. So then why is a deeper understanding of business acumen important and how can it be better understood?
Not too long ago, I dug into this topic, to get an understanding of the concept. I was curious to know how it can be applied as a model for value creation and management within contact centres.
Why is Business Acumen important?
Business acumen, as I started understanding it from my research, is the capacity to comprehend business concerns. It is the accumulation of information regarding how and why things are done on a general and organisation-specific level. It is a crucial quality for leadership and manifests in both the questions one poses about your business operations and the choices one makes because of the answer one gets from these questions.
“Quality questions create a quality life. Successful people ask better questions, and as a result, they get better answers.”
– Tony Robbins.
So how then can we ask better questions when dealing with such a complex environment is that of a contact centre? This is where business acumen plays a vital role in the establishment of the various questions needed (and furthermore what capabilities are really needed to answer those questions accurately).
The benefits of business acumen, however, go beyond simply comprehending business matters in general. It enables you to direct your team to the areas where they can have the biggest influence. You assist, guide, and support them in concentrating on the important issues for the business.
What can be seen as the different elements of Business Acumen?
Elgood1 defines business acumen as a combination of knowledge, skill, and ability. Knowledge about key business & operational issues, the skill to apply that knowledge, and the ability to understand what right action will lead to the desired outcome.
Let’s look closer into each of these:
Knowledge
Knowledge in this relevance is the combination of Financial Literacy, Contextual Knowledge & Organisational Knowledge.
Financial Literacy is the capacity to comprehend how your operations are using resources to attain their goal. This goal is often measured in the sense of sales success, revenue assurance, cost management or profitability depending on the type of contact centre you run.
Organisational Knowledge includes having a comprehensive understanding of the policies and processes contributing to or detracting from operational performances. Knowing deeply how agent interactions with the processes add or subtracts from your operational performance is key.
Contextual knowledge within a contact centre is the ability to contextualise any finding that could add to your success (or detract from your success) to either steer more towards (or away from) it.
In trying to attain this, contact centre managers can use tried and tested capabilities such as Diagnostic Analytics which empowers them with deep actionable intelligence into all of these knowledge elements.
Ability
Ability to deal with ambiguity– It often feels impossible within a contact centre environment to be fully informed about a situation. However, through certain snapshots in time, one can unpack findings within a specific context to really start understanding the situation and thereby have the ability to deal with the ambiguity much better.
Ability to link cause and effect– Understanding how your decisions and action may affect your contact centre performance is essential to developing your business acumen.
Root Cause Analysis, inherent to interaction intelligence, can provide contact centre managers with sufficient deeper detail and give them the ability to deal with ambiguity and link causes to the effects observed.
Skills
Often the measurement capabilities of people skills within contact centres fall short. Do you really know at a much deeper and more comprehensive level to which each person’s unique skill stretches? Do you know where they may need more help and support to progress in areas not yet fully developed for the tasks at hand?
Self-awareness is key for everyone within their team to recognise that each person’s development needs are unique. It’s not about training everybody on certain problem areas but having the ability to ring-fence training and coaching to a specific individual’s needs. Having the right interaction intelligence on everyone within your team truly changes the way they feel valued and understood.
Stakeholder awareness – The ability to keenly understand the interaction between a customer and an agent (and any other person within the organisation that will get involved with that interaction) can also accurately be understood using interaction intelligence.
Interaction Intelligence provides contact centre leaders with the ability to understand the gaps of their people to create better self-awareness, but also that of stakeholder awareness throughout the value chain of client interactions.
How to develop better business acumen within your contact centre?
The ability to measure business performance at a deep level can greatly enable and accelerate business acumen within a contact centre. Here are 3 ways to advance your business acumen capabilities:
1. Listen to your customer
Your consumers have first-hand knowledge of how your company is doing, which is extremely valuable. You may utilise this knowledge to increase your business acumen the more you understand your customers:
- What are their pain points & why?
- What queries do they require answers to & why?
- What features of your business and services do they genuinely like and why?
- What do they want you to improve on & why?
To really get to the bottom of the issues expressed by customers every future-oriented contact centre needs the capability to structure these conversations into business acumen assets.
2. Learn about the business strategies of your company
Your decision-making is less likely to have a beneficial effect on your business goals when you don’t fully comprehend how your organisation and how the contact centre operation adds to its success of it. Having the ability to measure and extract actionable intelligence from customer interactions, throughout the customer’s journey, is one of the best ways to understand the value chain. The detailed view of this will provide you with a firm grasp of how it adds or subtracts to the customer’s experience and ultimately the business goals.
3. Recognise the business and operations financial side
Your business acumen and knowledge will both expand because of your ability to understand the financial side of your business and contact centre operations. The key financial aspects of your business to understand are:
- tracking important metrics, not only at the top levels but root cause levels also and
- examining analytics to determine their effects on your business to contextualise what effect it has on your business and contact centre’s financial performance.
The process of increasing your and your contact centre’s business acumen takes time. Over the last few years, interaction intelligence has been deployed by several top companies to support the acceleration of business acumen to contact centre leaders. This has given them a much-needed advantage not only knowing what has happened in their operations but also knowing why they are seeing an incidence of repeat calls on the rise, why sales performance is slowing, and why that 1 team is battling with PTP success and what to do about it.
Reach out to Genii today to learn how we have matured the business acumen of more than 50 brands using intelligence.
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Sources:
- Chris Elgood Associates Ltd: Business Acumen