Driving performance with the challenger model
The way your contact centre runs impacts everything from staff retention to customer experience (CX). It’s part of the engine room of your operation and the place where your consumers have direct engagement with your brand. All in all, the contact centre is a central hub that requires efficient processes, ongoing feedback loops, and strategic recruitment. Businesses are employing a call centre challenger team (also known as a challenger model) to improve performance and efficiencies and positively impact CX
Integrating a challenger model into your contact centre can be the difference between growth and stagnation.
What is a challenger team and how does it work?
It’s all in the name. ‘Challenger’ refers to the central idea of the model, a way of managing call centres that focuses on constant improvement by challenging the status quo. Essentially, you outsource part of your call centre, bringing in new ideas, methods of working, and expertise. This challenger team works to deliver improved outcomes across the board.
A challenger team has three key principles:
- Continuous improvement: You’re always looking for ways to improve the contact centre’s processes and technology.
- Innovation: You’re open to experimenting with new ideas and fresh ways of operating.
- Motivation: You’re looking to light that fire with friendly competition and bring constructive tension to the current team.
Just like when you’re faced with any challenge, or competition, this model sparks motivation and improves performance for all contact centres.
Integrating into the team
The challenger team is all about partnering with an outsourced team. They work alongside your internal team, either taking on overflow work or providing a comparison to pinpoint inefficiencies. Another way the challenger team can be incorporated into the centre is through taking over a channel or function where you would like to test run a new approach.
The challenger team has proven benefits for contact centres, including:
- Additional Support – without the need for onboarding
- Improving customer experience
- Better working environment
- Mentoring – bringing new skills and capabilities to the table
The competitive advantage
The competitive nature of the challenger team stirs up productivity, which in turn, makes the call centre a more formidable competitor in the industry. This doesn’t mean your workplace becomes a cut-throat, competitive environment, it simply refers to the boost in motivation that can be found through some healthy competition.
When the challenger team is constantly striving for innovative approaches, the internal teams will feel the encouragement to match or even outperform them. And this search for better ways also means that once the challenger team has proven they work, the new processes can be rolled out across the entire team, and they’ll move on to different areas.
But it’s not all about competition, the challenger team is there to collaborate with the internal teams, creating a safe space to share knowledge. The internal staff should be encouraged to take advantage of the new expertise outsourcers bring, leveraging their expertise in customer behaviour to improve customer service skills and overall CX.
Moving towards a fully outsourced contact centre
If your business is struggling to keep up with call centre demand and your actual core function is beginning to suffer, then full-time outsourcing could lighten the load. Your energy shouldn’t be spent on becoming a call centre. When you outsource, resources can be channelled into business growth and core activities that impact your bottom line. A challenger team can be there to ease the transition into outsourcing, allowing you to select the best partner.
Want to know more about how contact centre outsourcing can help
build great customer experiences? Download our whitepaper
Preparing your company for the challenger team
Don’t just jump in the deep end. A challenger team only works if your team is onboard and fully committed to the idea. There are a few things you should do before engaging a challenger team:
- Get the leadership team invested: Management needs to be committed to the process, as they will have to invest time and energy in training and resources to make it work.
- Bring your employees on board: Your employees need to understand how the team works and why it’s necessary. They’ve got to understand the level of healthy competition and opportunities for new knowledge and be open to the experience.
- Culture of improvement: If your company’s culture is based around innovation and challenging the status quo, then your teams will understand why you’re partnering with an outsourced provider to set up a challenger team – and they’ll be excited to dive in.
The challenger model process should help your team enjoy their work more, rather than create added stress. If you’ve prepared your internal contact centre teams for the introduction of the challenger team, it should improve staff retention and create an engaging workplace of innovation and camaraderie.
Finding an outsourcing partner
Whether you’re testing the process and igniting competition with a challenger team or outsourcing your contact centre team to meet overflow demands, an outsourcer like TSA Group can help prioritise what’s important for your customers through a measured, data-driven approach.
TSA are Australia’s market leading specialists in CX Consultancy and Contact Centre Services. We are passionate about revolutionising the way brands connect with Australians. How? By combining our local expertise with the most sophisticated customer experience technology on earth, and delivering with an expert team of customer service consultants who know exactly how to help brands care for their customers.