How to Be a More Proactive Customer Contact Leader

Too many leaders find themselves trapped in an endless cycle of reactive “firefighting” with little time to focus on anything else. But this doesn’t help anyone in the long run – least of all, customers!

So how do you shift the balance? We spoke to experienced customer contact experts Afshan Kinder, Gareth Brophy, and Pier Ragone to find out what it takes to be a more proactive leader.

Analyse Where You’re Spending Your Time

If you truly want to shift from a reactive to proactive approach, you first need to take a long hard look at where you’re spending your time – and understand what proactive work boils down to for your team.

“Proactivity lives in work that is important but not urgent. This is the time for planning and to work on things that move the business forward.

One could say that reactiveness comes from a lack of planning, but it really comes from a lack of understanding where your time goes. Every operation must leave time for crisis management, escalations and things that are urgent and important.

The objective is to do post-mortems to reduce this time, but this time will never go away.” – Afshan Kinder, Thought Leader and co-author of three books – including ‘Call Centers for Dummies’

You do have a great deal within your control, however, so once you analyse the remaining time (that’s not lost to crisis management), you can apply 4 approaches to help you move from reactive to proactive – by making decisions to either:

• Stop doing something
• Do less
• Consolidate
• Or delegate

A good way to kick-start this journey is to first stop creating reports no one reads, as this happens far too often in contact centres and is probably happening under your nose too!

Where these cases are discovered, be kind to the perpetrator. Often, there’ll have been a reason why that report was created and that reason simply no longer exists, but the report’s never gone away. It’s just baked into the weekly reporting process with no one challenging it.

A good test is to just stop sending out a report and see if anyone notices. If no one does, you have your answer, don’t you?

For strategies to free up contact centre capacity and improve operations, read our article: How to Fight the “We Don’t Have Time” Mindset

Stop and Think About How You Are Actually Using All That Data

Part of the puzzle is also to stop and think about how you are using all the data that comes through your contact centre.

If all you do is collect it and look at it once a month, you’re missing a big opportunity! Success comes from making a habit of using data to dig into root causes and drive more efficiencies in future.  

“Don’t just sit there and think “Oh my, there’s been a spike in calls. Let’s just get more people on the phones and fix it!” and then quickly forget about it. Yes, being reactive has its place in the moment, but that shouldn’t be the end of it.

Instead, host a debrief, look for the root cause and get into the habit of reviewing what just happened and what you can proactively do in future to make sure that doesn’t happen again.” – Gareth Brophy, Vice President of Customer Experience and Back Office Capabilities at The DDC Group

Be mindful of who has sight of the data too! Being truly proactive is about empowering everyone to not only have access to data in real time (where possible) but also the time and inclination to spot trends and say, “I’ve spotted this”.

Beyond this, even feeling empowered to brainstorm a possible fix, so they can come to you and say, “Shall we try this?” That’s where the magic happens!

Set Up a Series of Focus Groups to Revisit and Improve Key Areas Across the Year

Don’t just wait for issues to arise to set up an investigative session. Instead, schedule key focus groups across the year to keep revisiting key areas for improvement.

“When I’m leading a contact centre, I map out monthly focus groups 6–8 months in advance and put them in everyone’s calendar.

This ensures we’re proactively rotating through key issues and looking for opportunities for improvement on an ongoing basis.

Of course, not everyone needs to attend every session, but clearly scheduling them and making them part of our annual activity helps keep the conversation moving in the right direction.” – Pier Ragone, Principal Consultant, CX Operations & Strategy

From here, you can then track and communicate priorities to fix and even create a top 10 list of customer issues.

It’s about keeping problems and inefficiencies front of mind and showing your colleagues that you are always listening to them. After all, it’s far easier to be proactive when there are clear lines of communication open to discuss improvements.

Pulse-check surveys can also help you quickly learn what’s happening across the contact centre and take a proactive approach to fixing things – as we heard from Fasthosts.

This allows managers to instantly ask their team a question such as “what issue are you currently dealing with on your call?” and get a snapshot of responses back.

This can give early insight into the scale of any problem, as well as empower the team to deliver proactive customer service by setting up IVR messages and status pages to start managing any issue at the earliest point.

If you want to to start identifying and repairing your broken processes, read our article: How to Repair Your Broken Contact Centre Processes

Don’t Forget to Take Your People on the Journey With You

And finally, never skip out on the coaching and development of your people!

So much of being more proactive comes down to focusing on what you can control. And where better place to focus your energy than on the coaching and development of your people to bring them on the journey with you?

What Have You Tried to Shift Your Focus From Reactive to Proactive?

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With thanks to the following people for sharing their thoughts for this article:

• Afshan Kinder, Thought Leader and co-author of three books – including ‘Call Centers for Dummies’
• Gareth Brophy, Vice President of Customer Experience and Back Office Capabilities at The DDC Group
• Pier Ragone, Principal Consultant, CX Operations & Strategy

For more advice to help you improve your contact centre, read these articles next:

• Get Started With Proactive Customer Service
• The Little Things That “Make or Break” a Contact Centre
• Which Soft Skills Do CX Leaders Really Need?

Author: Megan Jones
Reviewed by: Jo Robinson