There is a disconnect between the agents who use contact center technology and the upper management who control the budget and could approve its upgrade. This disconnect can make it hard for workers and middle management to get the technology they need to improve their productivity and results. It isn't a lost cause, however; you just need to frame it in a way that upper management will understand—because they think differently than those of us on the frontline.
To convince upper management that your office could benefit from new technologies, you need to use high-level strategies, like the following presentation tips:
New forms of technology and software offer valuable analytics-powered tools that allow your company to better measure their success. By starting with baseline numbers, you can highlight for your upper management teams the areas that are lacking, and illustrate how the new tools will help improve on and measure those numbers. Setting (and then meeting) the proposed improvements and goals you make will help build credibility on this and future technology projects.
Before presenting your proposed technology, you'll want to come up with all the potential pushback concerns. For example, if you're proposing new analytics-based tools that can help them improve the overall customer experience, they may say, “But then I have to learn a new toolset, and that takes time.” Your rebuttal can be a demonstrated learning curve that takes only X amount of time.
One major issue that upper management commonly sees in new technology implementations is the time needed to upgrade or switch to it. By setting forth a plan that details exactly how implementation will be handled, and then demonstrating that any time spent there will save time and money going forward, you can win management over by defusing that objection.
While this advice might seem counterintuitive, for management, many times it all comes down to the bottom line. Without knowledge of the costs, the rest of your presentation may be moot, so it’s important to include this information. However, it is definitely also important to include how much money this new technology will save your company, in order to put those costs into perspective.
In terms of the types of technology that your call center might be upgrading to, there are a number of upper management-friendly benefits to point out. Let's discuss the two biggest ones in the contact center industry: Workforce management/optimization software and voice of the customer software.
A workforce management and optimization software suite is likely exactly what your upper management didn't know they needed. It turns call recordings into a searchable-by-criteria action items, provides analyzation tools for quality assurance, offers dynamic customer surveys, and offers web-enabled staffing management tools . And, those technologies integrate with each other—a true powerhouse of benefits.
Voice of the customer can be the ideal software for an upper management team as it helps turn quality-assurance monitoring from a stagnant data center full of call recordings into a real-time, speech-analytics-powered monitoring solution that is actionable.
If you're still unsure that you have enough points to convince your upper management to move to a workforce management/optimization or voice of the customer software, don't hesitate to call us here at KOVA. We've helped a number of companies pull the trigger through an upper management tech buy-in, and we’d love to help your business, too.
