Achieving frictionless contact center transformation with process mining

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Contact centers, irrespective of the industry, are a driving force behind customer experiences. Yet too often, customer-facing, front-office operations are siloed, creating unnecessary friction, which can lead to increased costs and poor customer service. However, these friction points also create opportunities for customer service leaders who want to drive change and create value by making their processes work for their customers and the company.

What these customer service changemakers need is a solution that systematically accelerates the transformation of the contact center. A system that monitors performance in near real-time and uses process intelligence to help leaders identify and act on opportunities for automation, omni-channel support and revenue optimization. The Frictionless Contact Center, co-developed by Tech Mahindra and Celonis, is designed to be that solution.

We are pleased to share this article from Tech Mahindra and Celonis. It was co-authored by Kaushal Desai, Lead Ecosystem Consultant at Celonis, and Amit Bhalla, CME and Business Consulting (BPS) at Tech Mahindra.

Key challenges for today’s contact centers

Before implementing a contact center transformation strategy, businesses should understand the challenges faced by today’s customer services departments. The following are factors that often create friction in contact centers, regardless of industry or core business.

Agent utilization: Resource planning is a major factor creating friction in contact centers. And while steady agent utilization can indicate efficiency, extremely high utilization rates can lead to agent attrition. Companies need a solution that helps managers and team leads strike the balance. Similar challenges include limited agent-level performance tracking.
Customer satisfaction: Customers don’t always give businesses second chances. Shorter attention spans and the need for quick service can result in customer satisfaction challenges such as a 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 customer relationship management systems (CRMs).

Agent productivity: Agent productivity is a foundational metric that requires tracking with a careful focus on contributing factors such as high average handle times (AHT), incorrect call routings and unnecessary escalations.

Risk and compliance: A lack of agent accountability and company oversight can lead to challenges such as limited fraud detection, agent misconduct, lack of process conformance, and compliance issues.

Revenue and cost impact: Friction in the contact center can also be caused by an absence of self-service capabilities, lack of automation, and limited insights on upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

Overcoming these challenges and transforming the contact center requires a solution that brings together data from underlying systems (CRM and IVR) and enriches that data with process intelligence to provide a shared understanding that enables companies to effectively orchestrate process improvement, drive change and deliver a Frictionless Contact Center.

Seamless contact center transformation via process excellence

Process mining is an analytical discipline for discovering, monitoring and improving processes, by studying event log data from source systems. This data is enriched with process knowledge to develop meaningful insights on improving critical KPIs. For contact centers, those KPI improvements can include optimized agent utilization, reduced escalations, shortened call cycles, reduced AHTs, high customer satisfaction and high Net Promoter Score. Think about it like an MRI that shows you a three-dimensional, end-to-end view of your business operations.

Process mining can also identify opportunities for automation, business process reengineering, and operation model change. By implementing process mining into their contact center transformation strategies, companies can improve service center efficiency and effectiveness, leading to improved customer satisfaction and loyalty, better agent engagement and enhanced compliance and risk management – all while optimizing cost.

Tech Mahindra’s process mining Solution for an Advanced BPO Transformation

To create the frictionless contact center, Tech Mahindra, a leading provider of consulting, digital transformation and business re-engineering services, came together with Celonis, the global leader in process mining and process intelligence, to develop the Contact Center Transformation solution. This co-developed solution is designed to help senior executives and contact center directors identify front-office inefficiencies and opportunities for omni-channel support, automation and revenue optimization.

The solution’s key benefits include:

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 Contact Center Transformation 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,” said Rahul Agarwal, Global head (BPS) - Pre Sales/Solution, Consulting and Digital Transformation at Tech Mahindra, speaking to Celonis.

According to Agarwal, the results have been nothing short of exemplary with customers seeing:

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 50 contact centers, including the contact center of the largest North American retailer who reported savings of $2.2M and a 60% improvement in NPS,” said Agarwal.

Tech Mahindra has also established a process mining Center of Excellence (CoE) to maximize the execution capacity of their solution across industries. This extended offering is a part of Tech Mahindra’s NXT.NOW framework to offer creative and comprehensive CX solutions that help enterprises grow exponentially.