How Change Management Can Improve your Customer Interactions in 2024 and Beyond
The New Year’s resolution is a tradition that goes as far back as ancient Babylon, and serves as a way for many people to orient themselves towards their goals in the year ahead. While many people set New Year’s resolutions every year, according to an article by US News, 80% of these resolutions are abandoned by February. While setting a goal for yourself is easy enough, it can be hard to maintain that momentum throughout the year, leading to many of these goals not seeing completion.
New Year’s resolutions can come in many different forms, be it wanting to learn a new language or cleaning out your garage, but some financial organizations can have ambitions for the new year as well: For instance, finding a time to overhaul your contact center software. Changing over from an older software to brand new tech can be a lengthy, difficult process that takes time and dedication to see through, just like keeping any other New Year’s resolution. Change management is the name for methods commonly deployed to help navigate these organizational shifts, and many tips and tricks learned through these methods can be just as useful in navigating a contact center upgrade as they can be in keeping yourself on track for your new year’s goals.
Here are a few methods to help you visualize and achieve a goal, be it personal, professional, or organizational.
Keep Your Goal Tangible
When setting a goal for yourself, it’s always better to go with something concrete and objective rather than subjective. For instance, a goal of ‘I am going to visit the gym twice a week’ is going to be more productive than something like ‘I want to get in shape this year,’ as the former has a clear marker for success that you can measure. Having no clear way to tell how much progress you have made makes it more likely for you to feel you’ve failed and give up early.
The same principle applies to change management: Before deciding to take on a project such as a customer interaction solution overhaul, it’s important to determine what goals you hope to achieve. Identifying which metrics you want to improve, be them cost metrics (such as lowering handle times or increasing efficiency), revenue metrics (like increasing sales), or experience metrics (like increasing NPS), aligning yourself with a particular KPI to achieve can help guide and motivate the experience forward.
Communicate and Plan your Goal
A goal that doesn’t have a proper plan behind it is no more than just a dream. To ensure success with your goal, you need to make sure you are clear to yourself (and anyone else who’s support you need) what this goal is and how you’re going to achieve it. You’ll want to make sure you know how this goal will benefit you and what steps you need to take to achieve it: Try writing down exactly what your plan is to accomplish this, ensuring you have a solid idea in mind of what needs to be done. If you have others that know about your goal and are willing to help you complete it, it will make seeing your resolution through all the easier.
In the same vein, to initiate an organizational change requires a similar amount of planning and communication to get right. There’s bound to be many different parties needed to get the change underway, and making certain that every one of them is clear on what needs to be done is top priority. Ensuring that all stakeholders are properly briefed on the planned changes, including the benefits to their own departments they can expect, will ensure a cooperative and equally motivated change. If everyone knows how this change will benefit them, they’ll be more likely to prioritize this initiative and help see it to a successful completion.
Start Small
If you try to go from never jogging to running ten miles 5 times a week, it’s very likely that you won’t be able to keep it up for long. It’s good to set an ambitious goal, but if your goal is too intense and too sudden it’s much easier to find yourself unmotivated to continue. You’ll find much more success if you ease yourself into it, maybe a short jog once or twice a week to start, and then you can work your way up to going further and more often.
Similarly, many organizations find a ‘crawl, walk, run’ approach to work best for organizational change management. While it can be hard to manage a large amount of change all at once, the flexibility to start small and build up at your own pace can help ensure everyone is on the same page. Finding a solution that can allow for this flexibility is crucial to ensuring change on a timeline that everyone can agree upon.
With an Interaction Platform like Glia, you can choose to deploy different solutions at different times in order to achieve this effect: You can start with a digital platform for your online customers before moving on to adding Glia Call Center for dial-in phone service, or deploy in the opposite order as well. Additional features and add-ons can be continuously implemented as they’re seen fit, allowing organizations to implement change at whatever pace they need.
Learn more in our Change Management Guide for your Contact Center Transformation.
