How to define and create a Business Strategy
Contact centres are diverse and highly complex organisations made up of many functions but generally, they are all the same. They are part of an organisation in which incoming and outgoing communications from both new and existing customers are handled by teams of agents.
A simple way of explaining the make-up of an organisation, such as a contact centre is the commonly used term, ‘People, Process and Technology’. People themselves do the work, Process helps people do the work better and technology helps people do faster more innovative work.
People
They do the work but how they do that work is crucial. There is lots of talk at the moment about how artificial intelligence (AI) will impact the role of humans, but people are, at least for now, still required for governing output.
Process
These help people do their work better. Processes help define and standardise work, preventing people from having to reinvent the wheel all the time.
Technology
Helps people do faster and more innovative work.
Change
Change is the key to the outgoing success of any business; standing still does not breed success especially in contact centres where customers are demanding faster and simpler ways to communicate with them.
People utilising processes allow businesses to scale and this is where growth is accelerated; one person utilising a great process can be the same as ten utilising a poor process.
People interacting with technology allows us to innovate. We start by creating new ways of doing the things we’ve always done, but then we open our minds to new ways of doing things.
Processes that interact with technology allow us to automate. Machines execute things far faster than people can.
When businesses successfully manage all these interactions, they grow and they see success.
“In reality strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell.” - Jack Welch
Strategy
What are the questions businesses need to ask themselves?
1. Are we fast enough?
2. Are we creating value?
3. Are we efficient enough?
The answer to these questions allows us to start to understand where change is required. However, one key ingredient is missing: a strategy. If an organisation doesn’t have a strategy, how can it answer these questions?
But just as people process and technology come in in 3’s, so does strategy:
· Strategy is why we make the decisions we make
· Tactics are what choices we’ll make to achieve those decisions
· Execution is how we’ll implement our choices
Businesses need to be able to answer the question of why in order to answer the subsequent decisions of what and how.
Creating a strategy for your business
1. One of the first things you must do before creating a strategy is to know where you are heading and knowing where you are right now. You should review the past performance and the current situation which will determine what works well and what doesn't.
2. Having a mission statement in place defines the organisation's purpose and outlines its objectives. For example, Where do we want to be in 5 years?, What do we do? How do we do it? Which is what follows into identifying strategic objectives.
3. You will need to highlight the main objectives in all areas of your business to ensure you can deliver the company’s vision. This will help by looking over a SWOT analysis so you can incorporate the main strengths and weaknesses as talked about in step 1.
4. Now you have your objectives, it’s now time to create a short-term plan. Creating short-term plans will enable your business to see how well it's performing for departments and functions in your organisation. Which is what leads onto the final step, performance management.
5. As a business, you must be continually managing and monitoring objectives to make sure you are on track to achieving your targets.
So how can we help?
CCS has a team of over 100 experts who are business, people and process orientated, half of whom are technical experts in communications and technology. This team can, if required, help and support the delivery of the overall strategy.