World Class Call Center Trends

I recently did a seminar on call center trends and where we see the industry moving in the next few years.   The biggest change we’re seeing isn’t in process and technology – it’s in the way companies are viewing the contribution of the call center.  More executives are starting to see that the call center can create a competitive advantage and in most cases provide a positive ROI.   Because of this new focus we’re starting to see more investments in helping the leadership teams in call centers better understand the “why” and “how” of call centers.    Our 2 day customized program is focused on helping contact centers move the bar and we’ve delivered programs to great companies, such as  USAA, DELL, Farmers Insurance, Sykes,Cash America, Isagenix, ADP, SWBC, Allstate, Prudential,  Kodak and many more.  More information on our customized training program can be found by clicking the link below:

http://servicelevelgroup.com/files/Onsite%20Contact%20Center%20Leadership%20Workshop%20Outline.pdf

Some great insight into what world-class call centers do can be found in the new issue of Business Week and its coverage of USAA’s service delivery program

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_09/b4168040782858.htm?chan=magazine+channel_special+report

Speaking of USAA, I’ve been fortunate to work with some really great companies and people – I take every opportunity to discuss the “how to” with leaders of  world class organizations.   I recently had a conversation with the former COO of USAA, Tim Handren.   I asked him the “how to” question and he started down the path of “diet and exercise”.    Like most people that hear the story, I wasn’t sure where this was going to go, but it all comes together in a way that easily reminds everyone that they have to focus on the basics every single day to obtain and maintain world class call center service. This conversation turned into the article below:

http://servicelevelgroup.com/files/LTjul09_CustLoyalty.pdf

More articles and free downloads can be found at http://www.servicelevelgroup.com

Opportunity #6 – Use existing technology to create and control capacity

Your quality monitoring system is an often-ignored yet extremely valuable source of customer business intelligence. It also can serve as a quick early warning system — use it to regularly update everything about the way you are serving customers. There are tools available that can also be used to provide real-time training or information necessary for agents to handle calls based on new customer or company demands.  When done correctly, you can transform agent training from a push strategy (you send them away, at a scheduled time) to a pull strategy where they have more control over the expansion of their job knowledge and their personal growth.  

Your daily real-time queue management program can also be improved with a foundational approach to agent training. By providing agents with the tools, structure and roadmap to help customers find answers, you’re no longer limited to the often chaotic movement of agents and skills to break down your self-created silos.  Most ACDs have ways to automate the overflow to other queue groups or skills based on predetermined algorithms.  By providing the appropriate tools to those with the foundation training, you’ll have a lot more flexibility in where you send calls when things don’t go as planned. And you’ll free up all of the time and energy your company spends monitoring and reacting to changes in volumes.

Again, this is a focus on company productivity vs. individual agent efficiencies. With a foundational approach, customers’ interactions with agents may take a little longer, but the customer’s overall “engagement time” will likely be the same. Remember: Waiting on hold for three minutes and talking to an “efficient” agent for five minutes is the same as waiting on hold for 30 seconds and talking to a “foundational” agent for seven and a half minutes. And the customer is left with the feeling that you care about them and have people working for them… not them working for you. 

Impact:  This addresses one of the most common frustrations voiced by agents in a contact center – not having the tools to help the customer efficiently and effectively.  If done right, you’ll gain the capacity you need to handle the planned and unplanned demand spikes and spend less time trying to drive calls out of queue.  Not only will you get help from a new group of agents, you’ll have more flexibility with your existing staff. Give every agent the ability to find the answer vs. having to transfer the customer.

Get more, including Free web seminars and articles at http://www.servicelevelgroup.com/

Opportunity #5 – Move the training department to the frontline — and let them drive.

Bring trainers into the loop early, and constantly communicate with the frontline. Training is often viewed as a separate group with a different mission, and often reports to a different part of the organization. In some cases, the contact center has to coordinate and schedule time with the training department several weeks or months in advance.  This not only creates another silo, but in many cases, by the time training is complete, the company and customers have already repositioned themselves several times.  First step is to move your trainers from the classroom to the frontline. Give them responsibility for dissecting the daily feedback you get from your agents and customers. Once moved to the frontline, their job is to learn from it and apply their expertise in training to determine the best way to provide appropriate information to agents.  Your goal is to stop focusing on “perfect” training classes, and to instead develop a flexible approach that is focused more on real-time customer service.  Even without an automated e-learning solution, you can leverage your existing intranet and recording technologies in new ways to get this started.

That doesn’t mean you can get away from formal classroom training; you’ll need such traditional training for new hires as well as for topics/modules that the trainers feel  require a formal, offline  approach. One approach is to focus the classroom training on the fundamental customer-centric skills agents need – things that won’t likely change with new products and changing customer expectations, like compassion, listening, setting expectations, capturing business intelligence, etc. Focusing on these skill sets will ensure that your agents are customer-centric and have what it takes to provide excellent service. As a result, they’ll be much happier in their role…and this satisfaction is transferred directly to customers – they can “feel” it.

Impact:   Making training an active part of your real-time solution helps to create a culture focused on continual development and improvement.   Not only will agents see their daily struggles being addressed immediately, they’ll also be provided with new tools and information to provide an enhanced customer experience.   And, it’s a new way to show agents you care about them and their quality of work life.

Get more, including Free web seminars and articles at http://www.servicelevelgroup.com/

Connecting with Call Center Agents Starts with Helping Them Understand the Environment

Some clients have asked me to not use the term “call center” while interacting with their agents or talking to their leadership team.   They feel the words foster a negative perception of the environment and drive down morale…  I could argue that if you have incoming contacts that are pooled, queued and distributed to available agents, it doesn’t matter what you call it, you have a call center…and I do this quite often.   The reality is, no matter what you call your environment, if you don’t teach your leadership team how to connect with agents, employee morale will always be a challenge.

Getting leaders to connect with agents starts with helping agents understand the real difference between call centers and just about every other type of work environment.   Agents need to understand that call center leaders live in a real-time world where things have to be addressed in seconds, and if the seconds become minutes, customers get frustrated and begin to think about alternatives.   By the same token, leaders must remember that real-time pressure finds its way up and down the organization, and in many cases lands solely on the shoulders of agents.   Managers who don’t fully understand the dynamic nature of call center and/or its impact on agents – the organization’s most valuable asset –   will spend a lot of time putting out fires and conducting exit interviews.  

To avoid such problems, consider implementing   a comprehensive call center awareness program for agents.    Doing so provides an immediate and effective return on investment, as  agents become customer advocates who are more likely not only to stick around, but to be strive to provide stellar service.

Don’t Try To Over Optimize Your Call Center Staff

About once a week I have a conversation about call center staffing, and it’s almost always focused on the various ways we can minimize the cost impact on the call center.   Staffing decisions are often made by people who are driving to hit a budget number, with labor being the largest dollar category – typically 75% or more.   With those numbers, it only makes sense that the labor cost line gets a lot of attention from just about everyone in the organization.    The mistake made by many is that they focus too much on the dollars and create new “efficiency” programs to drive down the number of people needed, thus reducing the overall cost.

 

We then start to make assumptions on what it would be like if we operated with a lower call handle time or if we got more of our customers to use self-service applications.   The problem with these conversations is the ease in creating the paper- based ROI.  Such ROIs often look really promising – so promising that it becomes the focus of the new budget plan.   Lost in the cost-focused and efficiency-focused conversation are two critical elements for providing customer service in a call center: 1) the customers themselves, and 2) the call center’s agents.

 

Customers must have a say in the self-service tools they use; trying to force customers to use such tools without asking them for permission is a recipe for disaster.  Similarly, a call interaction time that is focused on speed will leave the customer feeling rushed and limits agents’ ability provide holistic service and proactively provide solutions and recommendations.   It’s a bad idea to ignore agents and assume that they all will be able to adopt the new “efficiency” guidelines and become more productive.   Initiatives that focus to heavily on efficiency will fail because leaders become obsessed with numbers without realizing the impact on those that provide service.    Focus solely on efficiency and you’ll surely witness agents burning out at a rapid pace, leading to higher costs brought n by bad service and rampant turnover.

 

The best call centers fully understand that they need to provide a balance in both agent workload and customer-driven self-service.  Spend time with agents getting feedback on the things that add additional and unnecessary time to their customer interactions.   Get on the phone and call some customers that recently interacted with the call center -, ask them about their experience and how you can make things easier for them in the future.  When service is the first priority, profits will follow and the staffing conversation is focused on value vs. cost.

Avoiding “Dumb Contacts” in Call Centers

In their excellent and actionable new book, The Best Service Is No Service, Bill Price and David Jaffe provide several examples of how companies can better leverage their investment in contact centers.  One of their suggestions   that is close to my heart is to “eliminate dumb contacts”  – something I suggest to all my clients during our post-assessment workshop. 

The first step in accomplishing this is to empower the front line to find the answers – another theme in Brice and Jaffe’s book.   This was actually the topic in my very first article for Call Center Management Review back in 2001; it was based on a program we’d developed when I was a manager at USAA, and has since been the foundation for millions of dollars of   savings for my consulting clients.   Below is that article. (Be sure to also check out Price and Jaffe’s book.)  

Process Improvement Teams: Boost Rep Morale by Avoiding Calls

Would you like to learn about a simple, yet effective way to channel your frontline customer service representatives’ energy in a desirable direction while, at the same time, positively influencing the company’s bottom line?

In our consulting practice, we have the opportunity to talk directly with agents from contact centers of various sizes and scopes. Typically, we find that the more appreciated an agent feels, the less likely he or she is to display negative behaviors, such as trying to avoid work. Anyone who’s spent time on the front lines as a call center agent or manager understands how thankless it can feel being in the trenches. Showing a little appreciation goes a long way toward improving agent morale and engagement, which quickly leads to higher levels of customer service.

One way you can help your agents feel more appreciated is by including them in more of the organization’s decisions. Although many companies obtain employee input via internal surveys, team meetings or project committees, the feedback requested is often focused on a specific topic. In these cases, the information is presented in a way that makes representatives feel they’re simply validating a decision that already has been made. And, unfortunately, there is little to no communication on the progress or status of their ideas. The next time they hear about it, it’s in the form of an updated policy or procedure.

Use One Stone to Fix Two Problems

Forming process improvement teams comprised of agents who focus on e issues they can  impact directly  is an effective alternative to traditional, static feedback methods. Not only will you be able to streamline call center processes, it’s a great morale booster for your agents.

This method works particularly well if you want to reduce the number of unnecessary inbound telephone calls to your center. The business case for establishing this team is simple. How many calls do agents take each day that involves questions so common or basic that agents don’t even need to look up the customer’s information to provide an answer? If this happens twice per agent, per day, and you have a call center with 30 agents, one “avoidable” question can generate at least 15,000 calls a year.

There is nobody in your company who understands your customers and the questions they ask better than your frontline agents. So why not let them be the ones to develop the plan for “avoiding” frequently asked questions? When successfully implemented, this approach will reduce the inbound workload, and improve the morale of the folks who you want to be the happiest – the ones who continually “touch” the customer. Following are a few considerations to keep in mind when establishing a “call avoidance” team:

• This team belongs to the agents and needs to be kept separate from any other ongoing committees or meetings. Select someone from outside of the agents’ reporting structure to lead the team. This should be a high-level person  who has the ability to get the team any additional information or resources needed for success.
• Make sure the team is sponsored by an executive who can clearly communicate the team’s objectives to the entire organization. This helps to ensure that supervisors understand the importance of the team and provide agents with the necessary time for meetings, etc. It also helps the team to get buy-in from other areas of the company. It’s important for the executive to communicate the team’s successes to the organization on a regular basis.
• Invite representatives from all supporting areas and departments to join the team, such as marketing, finance, telecom, billing, staff, HR, Web site, IT, , mail room, etc. This is an important component to the team’s success. Having the supporting parties on board will help to identify quick wins, as well as reinforce the importance of the team and the ideas being generated by the front line.
• Schedule team meetings at the same time each week, and ensure that each representative has a backup. Encourage team members to take the ideas and issues discussed back to their peers to solicit feedback and provide updates.
• Most importantly, the members of the team should approve any changes or updates in the final form. This will give them the feeling that they are directly affecting the business. The positive feelings generated will quickly make their way through the company.

Making an investment in your people can have long-lasting benefits for the organization. Once the entire organization understands the wealth of information available from call center agents, you’ll have increased visibility for the center as well as companywide respect for your staff. Help your company discover the hidden talents and skills possessed by your agents – leadership, project management, teamwork and more.

Get more, including Free web seminars and articles at http://www.servicelevelgroup.com/