Understanding Call Center Economics is Key to Gaining Senior Management Buy-In

During my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work with a variety of organizations — some better than others, but all focused on how to do more with the resources they have. Whether it’s applying technology in new ways, implementing new training techniques to enhance sales, or simply making customer service representatives more “productive,” everyone has some type of improvement focus going at all times. The companies that are good at this often have formal, focused ways of getting the employees involved in the solution. The best actually get the front-line employees to not only generate the solutions, but take responsibility for the design and actual organizational implementation.

Unfortunately, in many cases, the contact center isn’t given the ability to invest the necessary people time it takes to realize a measurable return. Yes, to get the full impact of a focused front-line solution initiative, agents will not only have to be given time off the phone, it must be done in a way that shows the company values their input in the same manner as their handling of a customer.  Good, valuable employee feedback is obtained when you have scheduled formal meetings and everyone invited gets to attend because you’ve planned the workload and workforce around the customers. When employees feel like the company is making an investment in them, they’re more willing to share openly and help to provide solutions that make a difference.

While this approach makes sense to most people running contact centers and executives will typically, “buy-in” to the concept, there needs to be a formal, measurable plan developed to keep everyone on focus and engaged. And because just about everything in a contact center comes with the need to justify the investment, you’ll want to have something to refer to when the “buy-in” isn’t as strong.   The ROI is easy, but you’ll need to create ways for everyone in the organization to understand the real economics of call centers.    Just this past week, I did a web seminar for the National Association of Dental Plans (NADP) on this very topic  – here is a link to the Power Point file”

http://www.servicelevelgroup.com/files/NADP call center economics July 2009.ppt

Feel free to use anything you find helpful and if you have questions, email me at timm@servicelevelgroup.com

Good luck  –  more articles and free downloads can be found at

www.servicelevelgroup.com

How do World Class Call Centers Stay World Class?

Getting a call center operation to the world class level is something most leaders never experience.   A recent study by a leading service organization found that less than 5% of companies fall into the “world-class” category.   It also found that about 80% of companies fall into the average or below category  – many want to achieve greatness, they just don’t know how.

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 companies.   I recently had a conversation with the current CIO of Mutual of Omaha and 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.

After our conversation, I convinced Tim to help me write an article for an industry magazine on the subject and it can be found on page 14 in the below link.

http://www.servicelevelgroup.com/files/CCP200907.pdf

Good luck  –  more articles and free downloads can be found at

www.servicelevelgroup.com

What is the right service level objective?

One of the most misunderstood and misapplied call center metrics is Service Level.  Most call centers have established an objective to answer a certain percent of their calls in a defied number of seconds.   In my work with call center leaders, I often find that they understand they have to have it, but don’t really know “why” it’s important or “how” it’s calculated.    To illustrate this, I start my call center focused speaking sessions with a question on the percent of calls that will queue with an 80/20 SLO given a 100 calls and a five minute handle time.    In a good session, we’ll get 10% of the audience with the correct answer – yes, the most important metric to most call center leaders is more of a goal that must be hit, than a goal that must be understood.

Key is to understand call center dynamics – it’s not rocket science, but if you understand the REAL impact of losing a few percentage points of service level, you can quickly connect the dots to customer satisfaction, agent burnout and leadership focus.   Here is a quick primer on service level that has been effective in communicating the basics to call center leaders at every level:

http://servicelevelgroup.com/4%20slides.html

Below is a link to a McKinsey story on finding the right objective  – you might be over optimizing the center and got getting the best bang for your buck.  But, remember,  you have to be consistent in hitting the low end and you’ll see in their analysis how quickly a low service level object will impact the percent of customers willing to recommend you to others.   There are some pretty good call center articles on their site, so it’s worth subscribing and getting other points of view.

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/newsletters/chartfocus/2009_06.htm

 

Email any questions to timm@servicelevelgroup.com

More info available at www.servicelevelgroup.com

Real-time management made easy

Many of the call centers I work with have very good processes and technology – but, for some reason it all gets thrown out the window when calls begin to queue. A disciplined approach to how you handle calls in queue is key to successful call center management. In the latest issue of Contact Center Pipeline Magazine, I outline ways to help call centers increase their real time management success. We also provide some tips on ways to move your center closer to world class.

Here is a link to download the entire issue and if you like it, there is also a code for a 50% discount on the subscription fee. Enjoy.

http://www.contactcenterpipeline.com/orderdownloads/100271_59550/CCP200905.pdf

The discount http://www.contactcenterpipeline.com/p-15-contact-center-pipeline.aspx

Be sure to enter the coupon code TM09 during checkout

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

 

Getting Senior Management Onboard – Part 1

“Senior management just doesn’t get it.” That’s a comment I’ve heard time and again from call center managers who are struggling with issues such as staffing, getting support for new technology or obtaining respect for their department. My reply is always the same: It’s our job as call center leaders to get them to understand, and we can’t stop until everyone appreciates the value and dynamics of our real-time inbound environment.

Now, you might be thinking (and I’ve heard it time and again) that it’s easy to say if you don’t have to live it every day. Fair enough, but as a consultant involved in transforming senior management’s opinions on the call center on several occasions, I know it can be done. The key is making it happen in targeted, digestible chunks. I’ve worked with many very smart people who, for one reason or another, have adopted a “keeping your head above water” approach to call center management approach.

The truth is that many senior executives with call center responsibilities have never run a call center. In many cases, they’re focused other organizational issues that pull them away from gaining a true understanding of our challenges. But that’s not a bad thing – it actually makes it a lot easier to transform their opinions.

OK, so where should you start and what should you be doing? First and foremost, you need to be on top of your game. Make sure that you have a solid understanding of how to intelligently describe the tactical stuff, and make the connection between the call center and the value it brings to the company. Yes, to get buy-in from others, you have to become a student of call centers and continually look for ways to sharpen your own skills.

My advice for staying on top of your game is don’t try to reinvent the wheel – chances are, if you’re reading this, you’re looking for new ideas, which is a great first step. Make sure that your knowledge of call centers is not only accurate, but the way things are still being done. Attend conferences, seminars and training courses that focus on the basics of call center management or more advanced courses on strategy and technology. (There are several organizations that offer these types of programs. You can find more information on the Industry Links page at the Service Level Group’s Web site.  Another way to keep abreast of the latest trends is to subscribe to – and READ – as many industry publication as you can. There are lots of free call center-focused publications available and most provide weekly email updates.

While you’re getting yourself up to speed, try to get a feel for what your senior management is reading. Many times, their ideas and strategies are derived from popular business books and non-call center periodicals. The next time you’re in a senior manager’s office, take a look around to see what newspapers, magazines and books are laying around – and then get a copy for yourself. You’d be surprised at how many ideas and theories from mainstream articles and books can be applied to the call center environment. The best part is, you can use it as point of reference the next time you have an opportunity to “talk call centers” with the boss.

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

Call Centers are Starting to Get More Respect

It is wonderful to see call centers  get more respect when it comes to the service they provide.  Much of the work we do is to help call center leaders get others in the organization to appreciate the impact and potential of the call center.   The latest Customer Service Champs issue of Business Week magazine provides some great tips on how to maintain a service focus during challenging times.   There is a lot of focus on call centers and getting the right people doing the right things.  Below is a link to the main article:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_09/b4121026559235.htm?chan=magazine+channel_in+depth

Here is a link to an advanced workshop that has been adopted by some of the world’s most celebrated service organizations:  http://www.servicelevelgroup.com/files/Onsite%20Contact%20Center%20Leadership%20Workshop%20Outline.pdf

My friends at Contact Center Pipeline have a great new publication with valuable information for contact center leaders at every level – click here to download a free copy:

http://www.contactcenterpipeline.com/

Opportunity #7 – Refocus efficiencies on reducing volume, NOT handle time.

Many centers focus a lot of energy on reducing agent handle time. There are good things and bad things associated with this measure. If managed correctly, better handle times can result in improved service to all customers and happier agents. However, if poorly managed, the outcomes can have disastrous effects –higher agent turnover, loss of focus, management burnout, customer attrition, etc. By moving your real-time activities from attacking calls in queue to moving closer to the customer, you’ll soon see a reduction in overall call volume. How? When you gather, record, report and centralize customer feedback, you’ll quickly discover that your organization’s errors and inefficiencies are what cause many of the calls to the center in the first place — things like missing information on statements, non-user friendly self-service tools (Web-based and IVR), confusing communications/letters, etc. Armed with critical customer feedback in real-time, you can quickly make changes or adjustments to the things that are causing unnecessary calls into your center. And a reduction in call volume has an even greater impact than an overall reduction in call handle time for a given skill set. 

Impact: A temporary reduction in call volume will have a positive impact on your contact center’s results, but with an ongoing, companywide focus, the improvements grow exponentially. If you transformed your current real-time “queue” management efforts into a disciplined approach to eliminating the unnecessary reasons why customers call, you’ll quickly find the same results without the chaos and headaches of trying to slay the queue.

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/

Opportunity #4 – Move from relying on system reports to receiving immediate direction from agents and customers.

Think about how often your company repositions itself – via product enhancements, new market segments, advertising messages, mergers, regulatory requirements, reaction to the competition’s reposition, etc. These changes occur often and directly impact your customer’s expectations of service and support. Consequently, you must revisit your call-routing strategy to ensure that it reflects changes in your organization and in your customers’ needs and demands.  If you focus on where the customer ends up and build from there, you’ll never be able to move your organization to the next level.  Just about all companies that offer live agent support have a gatekeeper – an IVR, auto attendant, etc.  Leveraging these tools to help get the customer to the right agent is a great idea, but if you’re not providing the right menu choices, then your efforts are wasted. 

Because your menu choices drive what is offered to your agent skills, you may end up trying to solve the wrong problem – just because a customer selects an option doesn’t mean that’s why they called, and  your internal reports (from any system) won’t likely provide the true picture of demand.   If you need more convincing, take a quick visit to gethuman.com.  Thousands of people make this stop every day to obtain a roadmap to navigate your prompts…and, armed with this, they no longer have to “listen carefully to the menu options.”

Overcoming this is easy: Move from basing decisions on your ACD reports to basing them on input from your agents and customers. Many companies ask agents to code calls by type, and this is a good start, but the codes have to be regularly updated and the results continually shared if this approach is to be  meaningful to the business. Give agents the ability and encourage them to provide additional information on changing customer expectations. Agents are always the first to know if customers are beginning to get frustrated with doing business with the company.

Agents shouldn’t be your only source of insight into the customer experience; your quality monitoring program recordings have thousands of nuggets of information to help you transform your business and offerings.  In addition to capturing the customer experience via recordings to improve the service that agents provide, many companies have established dedicated departments to extract “voice of the customer” data that can transform the business as a whole.  The key is to make this an ongoing activity, with the results fed into a process that is flexible enough to quickly make a change to the way customers are served.  

Impact:  A clear understanding of why your customers call allows you to continually reinvent your access strategy – what to do with them when they get to the door and how to efficiently move them around once inside.    This insight can also be moved to other parts of the organization (Marketing, IT, HR, etc) so they can make near real-time changes to things such as product information, Web capabilities and hiring profiles.  Not only will you reduce the volume into the center, you’ll also improve customer satisfaction along the way.

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

Getting Key Call Center Players Involved in the Moment of Truth Discussion

Leaders must start to look at your call center for what it really is — a “process improvement incubator.”   If each one of your agents takes 50 calls a day, that’s 10,000 moments of truth per agent per year.  There is so much opportunity and value in every single contact. 

The best companies have focused on the moments of truth and realized that this isn’t just a way to delight one single customer; it’s a way to delight hundreds or thousands of customers.  It starts with asking key questions of every single contact: How did this work? What did we do to solve the issue? What else could we have done to improve the customer experience?

It’s essential to take what you learn about the moments of truth and apply that knowledge to everything across the board. 

I’ve seen many companies focus on service level accessibility; they take that metric and say to me, “That’s world-class, Tim.”   They have this really aggressive average speed of answer objective and a fast service objective. However, we don’t want to focus on world-class. There are a couple of issues there: For instance just answering the phone quickly doesn’t make you world-class. What is true is that if you don’t get the basics right, you can never provide world-class service. 

Another thing that most companies fail to realize is the importance of having a process in place that allows the contact center to provide the accessibility that customers expect on every single interaction.  That goes back to the basics — making sure you have people available during every single interval during the day. Failure to do so will not only prevent you from ever becoming world-class, it will put every single customer that you have at risk because the poor service levels will make them feel like you don’t value them. You’re not only taking time away from them, but ultimately, when you do the math, it cost you more.  If you have an environment that’s not focused on making sure that you have the door open when you say it is, what ends up happening is customers wait, hang up, call back, and get frustrated – and it’s your agents who have to contend with that frustration. .  Consequently, your agents get tired of being beaten up, and they become frustrated, resulting in higher employee turnover and associated costs (to recruit and train replacements) – as well as lower customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

It can end up costing you more to have a lower target upfront because you’re going to pay for it in customer and agent attrition.  Having a great service level objective in place is only an enabler; it doesn’t mean that you’re world-class. Before you get there, you have to have the foundational things in place.

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