Contact Center Management
Labor Strategy & Performance Optimization
A Data-Driven Approach to Your Labor Strategy
JUST RELEASED!
The Northridge Group’s State of Customer Experience 2023 research report reveals a surge in preference for online agent chat versus phone amongst 18-35-year-olds—the first time online chat has eclipsed phone!
Our Approach
Whether you are staffing a Contact Center or back office environment, we believe an effective labor strategy must start with a solid labor market analysis and a review of your staffing, hiring and retention policies.
The Northridge Group is dedicated to assessing all labor issues and offering solutions that align with your business goals. Let us help you assess your needs and strategize solutions for:
- Labor Market Analysis
- Attracting the Right Talent
- Retaining the Right Talent
- Performance Optimization
Our Approach
Labor Market Analysis
Is your Contact Center in the right location to attract the talent you are looking for? This is often a difficult question to answer because there are so many competing considerations.
As part of a general labor market analysis, The Northridge Group assists clients with:
Staffing & Facilities Assessments
Our comprehensive staffing and facilities assessments result in recommendations for optimizing staffing efficiencies in current locations and in additional locations/facilities if necessary based on the competitive environment, the current labor market, pay rates, the organization’s work from home strategy and utilization of current and future facilities. When assessing against future growth, if additional facilities will be needed, we will include the best way to optimize the future use of existing and potential new facilities in our analysis.
Insource/Outsource Ratio
Outsource partners can provide labor balancing and cost savings to organizations; however, keeping the essential customer functions in-house is key when driving relationship-based growth strategies. Northridge can help you determine what insource/outsource ratio is optimal for your business.
Location Assessments
Our comprehensive location assessments include an evaluation of all current and potential new locations to determine which locations or combination of locations would most optimally meet your organization’s business goals. If our assessment indicates that new locations are needed, we will provide expert guidance on site selection strategy based on workforce availability, alignment with educational and experiential needs, the competitive environment, local pay rates and site costs. Optimal site locations are important for business continuity, time zone coverage and effective utilization of domestic/offshore and in-house/outsource resources.
Our Approach
Attracting the Right Talent
In today’s digital age, with a variety of channels that allow for the automation of transactional tasks, Contact Center agents who have the right skillset and experience are more important than ever for a strong customer-centric focus. Establishing a long-term hiring strategy is crucial. The Northridge Group can help ensure you are engaging with the right candidates. Our team will partner with you to understand your recruiting process and how to optimize your hiring strategy.
Our Approach
Recruiting
We believe the hiring decisions you make today can significantly impact your company tomorrow. We can help you design a recruiting model that ensures candidates have the required skills and are well-positioned to be successful before they are hired and on-boarded.
Optimizing your recruiting process will include careful consideration of the following:
Recruiting
Onboarding
Compensation
Career pathing
Attrition
Our Approach
Retaining the Right Talent
High attrition drives added operational costs and compromises a company’s ability to deliver a consistent Customer Experience. Northridge can help you develop and implement a plan that provides employees with the opportunity and motivation to build long-term careers with your company. It is vital to focus on strategies that allow employees’ talent and performance to result in steady advancement, loyalty and employee retention.
We can help you re-engineer and align your recruiting, onboarding and career pathing process to improve effectiveness, optimally meet staffing needs and support employee retention.
Our Approach
Performance Optimization
Once you have people in place who are committed to a long-term career with your company, how do you coach and guide them to achieve their best performance? The key is to ensure that you are using the right metrics to motivate and educate them while simultaneously using best practice coaching techniques that are proven to drive performance improvement.
Quality Redesign
While business leaders are concerned about improving business outcomes like First Contact Resolution (FCR) and increasing CSAT survey scores, agents need guidance and metrics that measure the behavior that drives to these outcomes. Northridge can help you redesign your quality program to correlate to behaviors that drive the business outcomes that matter most to your business.
Quality Monitoring
Unbiased monitoring and actionable feedback are just two of the many reasons why outsourcing your quality program needs to Northridge can result in better agent performance. With a quality program that correlates to key business indicators, improvement in business outcomes is bound to follow.
Coaching for Performance
Many supervisors who are tasked with the important responsibility of coaching front-line agents have never properly learned how to motivate and clearly communicate ways for agents to make changes that will move the needle on performance. The Northridge coaching & training program teaches supervisors the skills needed to take their agents’ performance to the next level for measurable quality and customer experience improvement.
Scorecards
Well-designed scorecards create opportunities for an actionable, cross-functional alignment that support the overall strategic objectives of your business and drive measurable results. Poorly designed scorecards can have the opposite effect and can even drive negative performance to business outcomes. Northridge can help you develop a scorecard that aligns to your company’s KPIs and, in turn, translates into results.
Northridge Insights
The Ultimate CX Scorecard: Using Metrics to Drive Revenue Growth
In this white paper, The Northridge Group’s President, Daren Moore, and Chief Strategy Officer, Marriann Cole, provide the guiding principles for successful Customer Experience scorecards, advice on how to view and organize your data and guidance for governance. A clear line of sight to customer needs and preferences, coupled with analytics to identify enterprise-wide opportunity for improved business value, and a governance process to drive prioritization and accountability are the keys to creating sustainable revenue growth.
Northridge Perspectives
Hidden Savings Opportunities for Healthcare Contact Centers
Contact centers represent an essential arm of the healthcare industry. When patients have questions or concerns regarding their billing and other logistical issues, they need to be able to seek the answers they need without tying up the resources of their physician’s...
Improve Medicare Star Rating Numbers by Teaching Kindness
Recent adjustments to the Medicare star rating system have had a negative impact on countless insurers, hospitals, and care providers. Entities that provide Medicare Advantage Plans have been hit particularly hard, as the adjustments may have dropped their star...
The Impact of ChatGPT on Contact Center Performance
ChatGPT is all over the news, especially since it has been reported that Microsoft may be considering a significant increase to its 2019 investment of $1 billion in OpenAI, the hottest startup in Silicon Valley and the creator of ChatGPT. The $10 billion investment...
Additional Contact Center Management Services
Let’s Talk About Your Organization
With experience across nearly every industry, non-profit and governmental agency, we have the team to help you grow.
