Contact Center Leadership

Team Development Series

Week 1 – The Industry

All Readings Authored by:

 

Tim Montgomery, Principal, SLG

210.687.2714

timm@servicelevelgroup.com

Good Customer Service

“Good customer service is more important now than ever” is a headline that has been used many times over the years to help get companies to realize where they need to focus.   By now, I think we all know that good customer service is a necessity in every industry and is always important.  What continually evolves is how customers define good service and the ways they tell each other about it.   The Internet has given us a new vehicle for sharing praise and disappointment for companies with which we interact. Online forums and shopping Web sites have hundreds of ratings, comments and results – and many are focused directly on the service provided.  Today, that one exception that falls through the cracks and upsets the customer can become the documented example that thousands of people read and consider prior to choosing to do business (or not) with a company.  

So, is it really true that it’s more important now than ever?  I think it’s just the opposite – anything that’s just “ok” puts you at risk.   Companies now have to be looking for new ways to continually raise the bar and provide experiences that make customers proud of their decision to do business with them – and that compel customers to tell others about it.  Negative comments posted on the Internet can bring a company to its knees; positive comments can take your organization to the next level.  Your customer service today must be so good that people are happy….and willing to tell everyone – whether they know they’re telling thousands or not.

Contact centers are at the heart of the customer service experience. The best organizations have developed new ways to leverage their contact center as a true competitive advantage.  In the past, companies could differentiate themselves from the competition with their customer-facing technologies – the Web, speech, routing, etc.  Nowadays, even the smallest organizations can make their systems act just like that of the big enterprises -- the playing field is a whole lot more equal. The real differentiator between companies is the service they provide on every interaction and the impression that is left with the customer when they hang up the phone.  In contact centers, our technologies provide a tremendous amount of data, and the best organizations are finding new ways to use this information to transform the business. 

The data we get is often transformed into metrics that we use to help us validate, change, improve and enforce.  What often gets lost is that data and metrics are simply indicators of needs or behaviors…and if we spend our time trying to change the metrics, the needs and behaviors are never moved in the way they should be.  What follows are some new ideas on how to help your organization refocus its view of metrics, find new ways to funnel leadership influence, and develop plans for continually improving service in the contact center.

What Customers Want

We often lose sight that we’re all consumers – everyone that works in customer service is a customer and with that comes a tremendous amount of experience and expertise.   Many companies to whom I consult spend countless hours trying to figure out what their customers want without tapping into their own experience as a customer.   We often approach our own product or service through the company's eyes and have a hard time looking beyond the organizational chart for solutions.   I often find myself moving my clients from thinking like internal product leaders to just being a buyer, consumer, customer and recipient of service. When you’re able to make this transition in your mind, you’ll find that customers are pretty simple and just want a few things:

• Promptness and accuracy – get to me quickly and don’t make me wait too long.   And once I’m being serviced, I need you to do it right.
  
   
• Quality for the time invested – my investment in your company is time.  My time is valuable and I’d like you to make sure you respect the fact that I am taking time out of my life to work with you and I expect a return on that investment.

• Real first-contact resolution – let’s try and get this done the first time without any further action on my part…meaning, I just want to tell you my problem once and you find a way to fix it.  I don’t care about your internal silo, relationships or departments – just go do it when I tell you.

• A choice in automation – this isn’t my first time doing this and I know what I can do myself and I’m calling you because I want to talk to someone because I know that I need to.  Let me decide how I want to interact with you – after all, as the customer, I have the choice to go elsewhere. 

What Most Companies Want

Not many companies call me simply because they want to sustain mediocrity or reduce the service provided.  Most realize they’ve got to provide good service, and many have their needs clearly documented:

Most of the companies know that they need to provide service that is timely, efficient, professional and accurate.  Many have read the book and know that companies with happier employees provide better service to customers. 

They also know that they need to develop an environment that is more flexible and respects the talents of agents that interact with their customers every day.  

Unfortunately, this knowledge of need gets lost in the application and we end up sending the wrong message to the frontline leaders and agents, via:

• Metrics and reports and metrics and reports – it often starts with something like “what get’s measured, gets done.”  And, that’s not a bad place to start, but measurement doesn’t lead to change when people are what need to change…not the metric.   So we give our leaders a lot of metrics, graphs and charts on a daily and hourly basis – so many that leaders often end up ignoring the signals because they don’t have time to open, much less digest, all the numbers  

• No time to coach or get coached – because centers spend so much time looking down, they end up missing out on the opportunities to make real change – via a formal coaching and development session.   Without planning, there isn’t the time, and without the time, coaching becomes a “might” versus a “must.”   Coaching is key and something no one can grow without…and it’s not just for agents – all leaders need coaching on a regular basis. 

• Beeping wallboards and frustrated customers  -- it seems that just about every customer has realized that if you’re not happy, ask for a supervisor.  And just when you get the customer that got frustrated about the hold time, your wallboards begin to bleed red and let you know there will be more frustrated customers to follow.   Upset customers happen, but the resolution is often lost at the end of the call. The best centers treat every frustrated customer as a learning opportunity – documenting the resolution and telling everyone about it…yes, even the frontline reps.
  
   
• Pressure to do it faster and cheaper – someone, someplace realized and then documented the fact that a shorter phone call means you needed fewer people to meet accessibility metrics (service level, ASA, etc).  And most people also know that shorter calls, not done right, end up creating more work and frustrated customers.   Unfortunately, the part that is not done right isn’t captured by daily reporting tools, and leaders become focused on what they can measure – how long is it taking, and pointing this out to those taking a long time.   Metrics and reports don’t reduce agent interaction time, and many centers have felt the pain of a misguided focus on handle time.  

Basics of Improving Results in Processes, Organizations and People

There are several approaches to driving change. Some are more formalized than others, but all have some common themes. These common themes should be kept simple enough so that even those without an education in leading change can incorporate them into their daily ritual.  The five simple activities below can be applied to people, processes or entire organizations -- and the first one is by far the most important:

1.    Focus on the drivers – for contact center leaders, this is key. Often, we’re so focused on the numbers that we forget about what is driving the numbers – people and their behaviors.   A good first step is to take each one of your daily metrics and draw a direct correlation to a driver.  The driver could be a single activity or a combination of several – the goal is to have a better understanding of why things are moving and use this understanding as the foundation for change. 

 

2.    Understand the root causes – once you know the drivers, you can begin to drill and document the root causes.  This is where you begin to focus less attention on numbers and look harder at the reasons the drivers have been positively or negatively influenced.   Doing this creates the foundation for conversations that have little do to with any type of metric and helps to focus everyone on what needs to be different.

3.    Develop action plans – the root causes point us in the right direction but moving anything takes planning.  This is one thing that most people know, but for one reason or another, don’t do.  It doesn’t have to be anything formal or scary – simple documentation to use as a reminder/checklist to help ensure you’re on the right track.

4.    Communicate expectations and accountabilities – this is where you start to see the fruits of your labor.  If you’re trying to move a department or organization, you’ll divide and conquer – giving those that can influence change some skin in the game and clear guidelines.  If attempting to move an individual, you’ll want to be clear on what needs to change and ensure they understand their role and responsibility.  Again, keep it simple; it’s less about the formalization and more about the communication. 

5.    Measure results and take action – this is when the process becomes continual – meaning, you know what you’re looking for and if it moves, you’re on the right track.   At this point you may discover many things -- you’re focusing on the wrong cause, you’re expectations aren’t realistic, you’re driving another metric in the wrong direction, you’re on the right track and need to accelerate…lots of potential outcomes.  The key is to not worry about getting it right the first or second time… it’s about continual improvement – in the thing you’re trying to influence and the process you use to measure and track.

Raising The Contact Center Bar:  Moving from a cost center to providing real value to the organization

A common challenge among contact center leaders is advancing the perception of the contact center's value within the organization.  Even managers in contact centers that generate the majority of revenue for their organizations often find themselves struggling to prove the center's worth.  The search for the “secret sauce” in the contact center value recipe is the driver of many of the meaningless and distracting measures we see established in many centers.  

In the contact centers I’ve led and worked with as a consultant, I’ve found myself continually reminding everyone that running contact centers is a whole lot easier than we make it.  Much of the challenge is self-inflected, and it’s often rooted in metrics and measures that seem to provide an answer to that ever-present question: How is the center adding value to the organization?  A simple question, but one for which most contact center leaders fail to provide a clear and articulate response.  When asked this question by someone else in the organization, a successful contact center leader is able to eloquently and accurately highlight the critical role the center plays -- in a way that everyone from agent to CEO can understand.

Start with Redefining the meaning of “The Score”

The first step in being able to form a cogent response to the previously mentioned question is to unlearn many of the common contact center missteps and make sure you have programs in place to prevent them in the future.  Many of the metrics and numbers we often site are about the center's "availability" score – service level, average speed of answer, abandon rate, et. al. All of these are great measures, but they don’t have much to do with “value.” Nonetheless, they’re often at the top of every contact center score card, and the thing that executives frequently question.  Sadly, this focus drives a continual evaluation of the scores along with ways to ensure we get the "right score"  -- with little focus on the drivers or an understanding of the customer impact.  To gain freedom from the “score”, you’ve got to develop ways to help others understand what they’re really looking at when they see the results. 

Your availability scores are the most important numbers in determining many things about your contact center – things like how many people you need by interval, how much time are you planning to take from customers before they get resolution, how much it’s going to cost you to run your business and how you perform against other organizations.  Because it’s one of the main drivers to these important outcomes, they also get a tremendous amount of real-time and historical analysis.   This analysis is often unnecessary, as it’s part of the plan, and done at the expense of looking for new ways to improve the experience from the customer’s perspective.  For example, if you have a service level objective of  90/20 (90% of contacts answered in 20 seconds), and you answer every contact in exactly 21 seconds, your resulting metric is zero.  A zero will typically get everyone excited and cause a lot of people to drop everything to analyze the reasons behind it.   And all of this analysis would be a complete waste of time because your customers only had 21 seconds taken from them – and, they’re not likely to complain about that.

Scores in Contact Centers are about Intervals, NOT Days

 

Prevention starts with educating everyone in the organization and creating an understanding of what these measures really mean and how they’re calculated.   Think about a brick and mortar retail environment; they advertise that the doors will be open for business during a certain time period, and ensure that people can get in during that time. That’s really no different than your contact center availability objectives – you’re basically measuring if you had the door open for people when you said you would.  The difference is that you’re managing it by interval several times a day; if you only look at it by the day, you could actually have the door closed for half the day and extra doors open the other half. The former is bad for the customer, and the latter adds cost to the company.– and neither adds any value to the organization. In a call center, we often try to make the numbers look better by throwing more bodies at the low accessibility numbers in the afternoon – these are often the bodies we pay the most for (supervisors, seniors, etc.) and are, in almost every case, unnecessary and detract from the things that add real customer and organizational value.  When you see an accessibility score recorded for a call center, it means it has already happened, and for those customers that were part of the score, there is nothing you can do to fix their experience.  

The key is to focus on the drivers of the score.  The best contact centers have an ongoing planning focus, and the scores provide insight on new ways to improve the plan – from both the contact center's and customer's prospective. These environments focus little attention on historical results, and pour their energy in ensuring that they have near-term and long-term plans in place to help improve future scores.

 Below is an example of a way to help your contact center learn to view  accessibility scores for what they really are – interval metrics that must be balanced.  It also provides a quick way to understand the drivers of success: Did we get the right number of calls? Did agents do what we expected (adherence)? And did something about the process cause the handle time to be more or less than normal?

The goal is to get everyone who evaluates scores to begin thinking about ways to prevent problems from happening in the future and to focus on the interval treatment of customers and on how much time the company took from them. Once you’ve got this in place, you can reduce the reliance on complex spreadsheets by combining your intervals with the results – focusing on how many intervals of the day you were successful.  Looking at it this way provides internal and external leaders with a much clearer view of daily success, along with an understanding that the center is focused on planning for future improvements vs. trying to over analyze what when wrong.  Below is an example of how to take the spreadsheet above and summarize it in a way that provides single leadership metrics with complete leadership visibility.

82% of the intervals within the service level objective

86% of the intervals within the average speed of answer objective

89% of the intervals within the answer rate objective

82% of the intervals within the abandon rate objective

79% of the intervals within the call forecast objective

50% of the intervals within the AHT forecast objective

90% of the intervals within the agent adherence objective

Quality Isn’t Value – It’s Required

The other value-add that is often cited by contact centers is quality, which is too often determined from an internal perspective. However, more companies are beginning to view quality from the customer's point of view. As with availability measures, quality scores are important to know, track and report, but quality is not the way a contact center adds value – it’s basically the price of admission.   Without quality interactions, customers will eventually leave, High quality must be maintained, which can be a challenge, given the fact that the bar is continually being raised by the ever-changing expectations and demands of customers.   Most customers base their service expectations on their last interaction with a contact center -- and the quality received; they seldom base their expectations against your competition because they typically don’t have a reason to contact them.  Because of this fact, the minimum quality you must provide is a moving target -- what some consider world-class today can become the norm by the middle of next month. 

If quality is the price of admission, at what point does quality become a value-add measure for the contact center?  It’s when the customer’s perception of the service quality has exceeded their expectation at that point in time.  All of the internal quality metrics and scores mean nothing if the interactions don’t exceed the customer’s needs and this is often the part where contact centers fail.  Internal quality programs are necessary in all contact centers, and most centers have some type of program in place.  Unfortunately, the programs are normally built on an internal perception of what defines quality, with little focus on the customer and their continually evolving expectations.   

Once you understand that quality is the price of admission, your program and approach becomes less about metrics and more about improving the value from the customer’s perspective.  Moving the external quality metrics and numbers to a customer-driven and focused approach frees a contact center from the self-inflicted pain of managing internal quality to a number.  You can leverage your internal quality program to improve the customer’s perception, but not with a metrics focus.  Just as with accessibility results, it’s more about what you do with the findings than the numbers themselves.

Quality programs need to be flexible to the customer and focused on agent development. A numerical results-oriented program with potential agent disciplinary actions based on low scores create a distraction for everyone….and have little impact on the customer.  Quality programs that focus on agent behaviors and use quality monitoring as a mechanism for developing critical skills/knowledge provide agents with the tools and feedback needed to truly improve the customer interaction.   This is a tough transition for most contact centers, as it forces frontline leaders to become coaches vs. score keepers – and coaching against a number is much easier than coaching against a behavior.  

This tough transition is at the heart of most challenges in contact centers. As with accessibility objectives, the key is education and ensuring everyone knows their role and is comfortable delivering the message.  To accomplish the quality change (time, flexibility and focus) a contact center must commit to and deliver on the promise, and make it a focused and respected job activity. Without this focus, nothing will move and what you’ve always experienced is what you’ll always get.  

Moving beyond Internal Objectives to Real Value

The best contact centers know that real value happens one contact at a time -- that every contact is an opportunity to add value to the organization.   Just as you would go through a very thorough analysis to justify a new technology investment to land on a true return on investment (ROI), the same applies to every contact.   Every interaction with a customer is an opportunity to learn about their needs, your organization, the competition, and additional growth opportunities. Moving your organization and customers to world-class status starts with an understanding that every contact has a return on investment, and that this ROI is the foundation in developing the true value in the center.  

Contact centers that can make the ROI connection are the ones that easily move the conversation from cost to benefit – adding new information to all parts of the organization. Key to getting buy-in from others in your organization is proactive communication/education -- taking the time to provide new information without being asked to give it. If you operate under the assumption that every call provides something from which others in the organization can benefit, you’re 99% of the way toward moving your center to the next level.  Crossing the finish line requires actually sharing your findings with others. This is the easy part, and something that most people in other parts of the organization welcome with open arms.  

A word of caution, don’t confuse real value with static reports from your end of call drop-down menus or radio button reason codes. These reports simply capture the internal company-driven reasons why people call; they add some value as to "the why" and even what to fix, but are often just reporting the reasons why the contact center exists….or the cause for all the cost. The way to really show value is to find new ways to extract those things that people don’t know.  You’ll need to do a little something extra at the end of each call, but if you get your agents involved, give them the time and provide them a reason, you’ll be rewarded with the information you need to communicate the true value of the center.  It really is about listening – to your customers through your agents

Sharing the value with others is easy.  The key is finding the things that work and add real value, and providing it to others in ways they can use.   Every time your company interacts with a customer represents an opportunity –  make sure you’re able to glean information that can truly transform the organization. Internal accessibility and quality are only the tip of the iceberg.

 Contact Center Leadership

Team Development Series

Week 2 – Contact Center Foundations

All Readings Authored by:

 

Tim Montgomery, Principal, SLG

210.687.2714

timm@servicelevelgroup.com

Communicating Call Center Dynamics to Senior Management

Originally published in Call Center Management Review. Copyright 2008 ICMI,

a division of CMP Media LLC. Reprinted with permission.

“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.

Lay the Foundation by Getting Yourself Up to Speed

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. 

Create Impassioned Call Center Supporters

Once you feel confident that you are fully up to speed, the next step is to get your senior executives excited about call center dynamics. The key is to create a vision – one that you can refer back to when conversations get off course (e.g., when senior managers begin to focus on how to get more efficiency out of every agent while providing the same level of quality).

I once faced this challenge while working with a client. We discussed the fact that many of their internal processes were in direct conflict with call center principles. The client asked me to brief the executive committee on why this was so. The hitch: I had to  make the case in 10 minutes using only four slides.

At first I was a little taken back by the request, but I soon realized that there’s a lot you can do with four slides. The following is an example of how to create a vision for executives using just four slides.

Four Slides to Communicate Call Center Dynamics to Senior Manager in 10 minutes

Slide 1:  Set the foundation

§  Minute by minute, calls arrive randomly, but when broken down to an interval (30 minutes), we can get pretty accurate with the forecast

§  First slide shows this – three internals of 150 calls offered, arriving randomly during a 30-minute period. The message here is we can’t control exactly when they’ll arrive, but we can determine the overall number in a given interval:

Slide 2: Relate it to Staffing 

§  To overcome the challenges with the minute-by-minute unpredictability, call centers use a formula to determine the number of agents required during each ½ hour – Erlang C (or if you have a WFM system, it may use a modified version).

§  Based on our service objective – in this case, 85 percent of the calls answered within 30 seconds and an overall average handle time of six minutes – the program tells us we need 35 agents staffed during the ½ period.

§  What’s important here is to point out the fact that we need 35 people in chairs talking on the phone, in an after-call work state or waiting for the phone to ring.

§  With any fewer than 35 agents, we will not be successful in meeting our objective.  It’s not an average for the interval, it’s from minute one to minute 30, we need to have 35 people.

Slide 3: Explain the Peaks and Valleys Impacts

§  Once you get an understanding of the randomness of call arrivals and staffing requirements to overcome it, the real fun begins. I, personally, use this slide on a regular basis. It goes a long way in explaining the major challenges of managing an inbound call center.

§  When looking at the arrival lines compared to the staffing line, you see there are times when we have more calls then people – otherwise known as a queue. The key here is to explain that this is part of the plan – ACDs are designed to hold calls in queue until agents become available, and any service level objective below 100 percent in zero seconds is planning for some type of queue. Some amount of queuing is planned, but the only way to keep it under control is to ensure that you have the right number of people – in this case, 35 from interval start to finish.

§  The other take-away is the opposite of queues – when we have more people staffed than calls, or idle time. Yes, this is also a requirement in every call center – to overcome the minute-by-minute random arrival, you have to build in some idle time. It’s a reality and it can’t be compromised. The only way to reduce it is to remove some of the staff, which will create queues, negatively impacting service level.

§  This is normally question-and-answer time. You need to be on your toes and prepared to talk about idle times. Being able to effectively communicate this will help you to gain a lot of credibility.

Slide 4: Bring the Concepts Together to Focus on Employees and Agents

§  Bring all of the concepts together with real-life data from your environment. The key here is to get the data out of the typical report format and create a simple, clean, easy-to-read/understand visual.

§  Demonstrate how losing just a couple of agents can have a dramatic impact on the service provided to customers. This also shows how adding more staff doesn’t really add to the overall customer experience.

§  You can also use this slide to show how not staffing the right number of agents impacts everyone on the floor. In this example, losing a couple of people not only reduces the service provided, but makes the agents who are on the phones work even harder.

Use the Vision to Support All of Your Initiatives

So now you can see how, in just 10 minutes with only four slides, you can quickly illustrate how call centers operate and establish a foundation for executives to make better decisions regarding the environment. Once you’ve created this visual for your executives, think about the other points you can make – why fixed productivity measures (calls per hour) don’t work, why your queue size may be causing agent burnout, why the smaller team groupings will require more staff, why you need more staff to focus on workforce management, etc.

The reality is, all of your call center headaches won’t be fixed with four slides and an executive presentation, but without an senior level understanding of how call centers are different, you’ll be stuck with implementing ideas that don’t take into account the challenges of managing in your dynamic real-time environment.

Why Choose Service Level as the Key Call Center Telephone Indicator?

 

Lately, it seems that more call centers are focusing on abandon rate or average speed of answer (ASA) as the primary measures of inbound call success. Not a week goes by in which we don’t receive a request for an "ideal" abandon rate or "industry standard" ASA. Recently, we helped several of our clients work through the operational challenges associated with trying to manage a call center using call metrics other than service level.

One of the biggest hurdles is convincing senior management of the benefits associated with adopting service level as the primary measure of success. To many, a focus on abandons or ASA seems logical since, on the surface, they appear to make the most sense and are easily communicated. The typical thinking is that abandons reveal the exact number of "lost opportunities" while ASA tells you the "average" time customers spend on hold. Unfortunately, concentrating on abandon rate or ASA does more long-term harm than good, and causes call centers to run less efficiently. In the sections that follow, we’ll spend a little time revisiting service level and then explore the challenges associated with other call indicators.

Service Level Revisited
Service level is absolutely the best call center telephone speed-to-answer measure (read: you have to have one). It directly measures the accessibility of your organization to your customers and should be used as the primary measure of telephone success, which is defined as answering X percent of calls within Y seconds (e.g., 80% of calls in 30 seconds). Service level is the tried-and-true indicator for call centers and is the basis on which all commercially available workforce management systems are built. Service level is often viewed simply as a performance measure or goal for call centers. It is true that it does provide the best overall indicator of caller treatment, but it also serves a much greater purpose. A call center’s telephone service level objective provides the foundation for the most fundamental activities in a center: planning, staffing and execution. The service level objective you choose will directly influence the number of people you hire, how many people you need to have on the phone in each hour of the day and when you need to implement a real-time recovery plan.

Service Level Vs. Abandon Rate:
Call center abandon rates are influenced by factors that are beyond the call centers’ direct control and, therefore, are typically measured as outcomes of a service level instead of a stand-alone measure of customer service. The widely quoted and published "Seven Factors of Caller Tolerance" was developed by ICMI to help illustrate the role of external influences on a call center’s abandon percentage:

1. Degree of motivation: Callers to airlines wait longer during special price promotions than at other times. Callers with power-outages will wait longer to reach their utility than those with billing questions.
2. Availability of substitutes: The Web, fax, mail, additional phone numbers and selections in the VRU are examples of potential substitutes that callers can use to reach the primary group. If a primary queue backs up, callers may dial other available numbers, choose incorrect routing selections in an automated attendant (press one for this, two for that...) or even call the company’s main number (switchboard). If callers are highly motivated and have no workable substitutes, they will retry many times if they get busies, and will generally wait a long time in queue.
3. Competition’s service level: This factor applies when callers have the alternative of using a competitor’s services.
4. Level of expectations: The reputation that an organization or industry has for service (or the level of service being promoted) has a direct bearing on caller tolerance. For example, callers to catalog companies generally expect comparatively high levels of service and are much less tolerant of queues than, say, callers to utilities or software support centers.
5. Time available: Doctors who call insurance providers are infamous for being intolerant of even modest waits. Retirees calling the same companies may have time to chat.
6. Who’s paying for the call: In general, callers are more tolerant of a queue when the call is free to them.
7. Human behavior: The weather, the caller’s mood and the day’s news all have some bearing on caller tolerance.

The level of caller tolerance will be different in almost every queue or skill group because of the variety of callers and reasons for calling. For example, in the P&C insurance industry, a customer calling to get a duplicate insurance card will most likely abandon quicker than someone who was just involved in an auto accident. Abandon rates are normally viewed as outcomes against a call center’s primary service measure — the service level objective. Service level can illustrate the caller’s experience when other telephone objectives are not met. For example, when an abandon rate is at 10% this measure alone will not reveal how callers were treated – just that 10% chose not to hang on long enough to reach an agent. By contrast, if the service level is at 40% on the day with a 10% abandon, it tells you that 60% of the customers who reached a representative had a wait time longer than 30 seconds. (given an 80/30 SLO). (note: service level in the example is calculated as percent answered in 30 secs/total answered) Furthermore, service level objectives tend to directly correlate with the abandon rate for each queue or skill group. If the service level objective for a skill group has been properly established and is being met, the resulting abandon rate will also be within the acceptable range.

Service Level Vs. Average Speed of Answer:

Average speed of answer is another measure that is reported as a key indicator in most call centers. While it is a good gauge of caller treatment, it is typically used to add perspective to service level results, but should not be looked at as the primary measure of success. In call centers with relatively high occupancy rates (i.e., centers with larger answer groups), the average speed of answer will typically be within 15 seconds when meeting a 90/30 service level objective. In smaller answer groups, a lower agent occupancy is required resulting in situations where the service level objective is met, but the average speed of answer can, in some cases, be as much as 100 percent higher that of a larger answer group.

To help illustrate this point, the table above shows results from five different sized call answering groups. In all three examples, we are assuming the center is staffed to meet the service level objective of 90/30 based on the volume and handle time in the half-hour depicted. As the volume offered and staffing required for each group gets smaller, the resulting average speed of answer (ASA) gets larger even though the service level remains constant. In each group, only 10 percent of callers wait longer than 30 seconds for their call to be answered. The ASA variance between the groups is the result of the amount of time the calls not answered within 30 seconds actually have to wait for an agent to become available. This variance in wait time is generated by the law of large numbers — larger answer groups will have agents available more frequently, thus reducing the hold time when the 30-second objective has been surpassed. Put another way, when comparing groups with the same service level, calls that don’t get answered within the service level objective will generally wait longer in smaller agent groups than in larger ones.

The table also illustrates another important point for call centers to consider when evaluating resource utilization between different skills, queue groups or departments. At the same service level objective, the size of the answer group directly influences the percent of time all agents will be occupied doing work during a given half-hour. Agent occupancy is an uncontrollable outcome based on the number of calls, the average handle time, and the desired service level objective. The direct inverse of agent occupancy is agent idle time — the average amount of agent wait time that must be included to overcome a call center’s random arrival pattern.

Transitioning to a service level objective as the primary indicator will allow every department’s telephone results to be equally compared, as well as answering the following key questions quickly and accurately:

• How quickly can people expect to get through the “door”?
• How many people do we need to meet our customer’s expectations?
• What are we doing compared to the competition?
• Which departments need to adjust expectations for marketing or promotions?
• What will be the occupancy of the front line agents?
• Which levers to pull to when cost or service get’s out of line with expectations?

Originally published on www.icmi.com. Copyright 2007 ICMI, a division of
CMP Media LLC. Reprinted with permission

 Contact Center Leadership

Team Development Series

Week 3 – Staffing

All Readings Authored by:

 

Tim Montgomery, Principal, SLG

210.687.2714

timm@servicelevelgroup.com

Overcoming the Challenges of Small Call Centers 

Originally published in Call Center Management Review. Copyright 2008 ICMI,

a division of CMP Media LLC. Reprinted with permission.

The Service Level Group’s consultants have partnered with numerous small call centers and found many struggling with the same basic issue – gaining an understanding of the dynamics associated with small agent groups.   For the purposes of this white paper, we’re using small call centers to mean centers with  60 or fewer agents or larger centers that have agent skill or routing groups of 60 or fewer.    Over the last few years, there has been more attention on this market segment along with the development of new software tools targeted specifically at small call centers.  What follows are some of our findings from our consulting engagements along with opportunities and recommendations for managers of small call centers.

We’ll start by reviewing the characteristics of small call centers along with the common challenges. The majority of the article is dedicated to overcoming 8 issues that we see causing the most frustration for those managing small call centers.  Our goal is to identify the drivers behind the challenges and provide solutions to assist small call center managers in overcoming them.

Advantages of Small Call Centers

There are several advantages to being small that, when properly leveraged, can make the customer experience more pleasurable.  Below are a few of the benefits we typically find in small call centers:

• Everyone gets to know each other – Agents typically understand their role on the team and have a clear understanding of each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
• More involvement in other departments - Small call centers (single site) have the luxury of being involved in the sales/marketing activities and understand their potential impact.
• Overall understanding of mission and vision – Agents in smaller centers are able to see the entire process and therefore have a clear understanding of their role in supporting the overall operation. 
• Easy to disseminate new information  - In many cases, information can be communicated during informal stand up meeting or memos hand delivered to all agents within minutes.
• Quickly react to real-time changes – Managers in smaller call centers typically have the luxury of being able to view the entire floor and personally control real-time recovery actions.   

Customers don’t know or in most cases care that the call center is small.   

This may sound rather harsh, but it’s reality  - from the customers prospective, they compare experiences and many of them are with larger call centers that have technology and economies of scale working in their favor.  Because of this reality, managers of small call centers have to uncover creative ways  to provide positive customer experiences. That can be difficult, and as a result, many small call centers often find themselves operating in what can be best described  as a constant state of “chaos”.   One key to successfully managing in the small call center environment and providing an excellent customer experience is understanding the challenges and where to focus energy.

Challenges in Small Call Centers

Call centers, in general, are challenging operations and in many cases these challenges are further exacerbated the smaller a call center.  Below are a few of these challenges we typically find small call centers struggling though:

• Everyone gets to know each other – While this can be a benefit, it can also create challenges in environments that do not have fair or balanced agents measures in place.   If left un-addressed, agent mediocrity is quickly noticed by others on the team and negativity can spread quickly.
• Little room for error – Just one poorly planned activity or a couple of agents not following their schedule can significantly impact the service provided to customers and how the agent workload is distributed.
• Significant forecast variances – Call volumes and handle times are, in most cases, less predictable and directly impact the number of agents required to meet a service level objective in every interval.
• Fewer reaction options –  There are typically few, if any,  other places to send the calls during times of crises and real-time recovery routing creativity is typically limited.
• Budgets and lack there of – In many cases, capital spending budgets are limited and there is typically a heavy entry price to obtain the latest technology. 
• Lower agent occupancy rates are required  - Agent occupancy is an uncontrollable outcome and a reality that must be accounted for and understood in small call centers.

Although the challenges seem to outweigh the benefits of being small, by understanding and appreciating a few simple concepts, these challenges can be significantly minimized.  An appreciation for the following eight concepts will help small call center managers improve operating efficiencies and potentially reduce the number of daily “hair-on-fire” events.

1.  Fully Understand Agent Occupancy

The first and, by far, most important concept for small call centers to understand and appreciate is that of agent occupancy.   Agent occupancy is an often misunderstood and misapplied call center concept.    For small call centers it’s the main driver behind many of the efficiency challenges and the most frequently overlooked necessity.   Simple put, agent occupancy is the average time of all agents taking calls in which they are “occupied” talking to customers or in an after call work state.   One way to simplify it is to look at it from the inverse perspective – the inverse of agent occupancy is agent idle time, or the time they are sitting, waiting for the phone to ring.

Idle time is a reality in every call center and the larger the call center the less idle time required to meet a given service level objective.   This is the result of the law of large numbers – in a larger answering group, agents will become available to take calls more frequently, resulting in less idle time.  To help illustrate how occupancy varies depending on the size of the answer group, we created the chart shown in figure 1.  Shown are the results of an erlang program used to determine the number of agents required during a ½ hour to answer meet a 90/30 service level objective.  

(figure 1)

Highlights from the chart are as follows:

• Each row is an example of a different call answer group.
• The objective is to answer 90 percent of calls within 30 seconds in all five examples. 
• Inputs to the program are:

o   Call Volume – The number of calls expected to be offered to the group in the half hour.  (Volume)

o   Call Handle Time – The average of the sum of Talk, Hold, and After call work for each call.  (AHT)

• Outputs from the program 

o   Minimum number of seated agents – The minimum number of agents needed for the entire ½ hour to meet the service objective (Staffing Req)

o   Average Speed of Answer – The expected average call answer speed if the minimum agents required are staffed.  (ASA)

o   Agent Occupancy – The average amount of time agents will be occupied in direct support of customers shown as a percent with the inverse being idle time. (Occupancy Rate) 

• The bottom row shows a need to have 8 agents available for an entire half hour to answer the 25 calls within the service level objective.   The agent occupancy result is 59 percent – the 8 agents will be talking to customers or in an after call work state an average of 59 percent of the time.   Again, it’s easier understood when you look at the inverse – agent idle time -  in this case it’s 41%.   At the end of the ½ hour if you add up the idle time it would be about 41% of each of the 8 agents time or a little over 12 minutes per agent.
• Contrast that with the top row that shows 119 agents are needed to handle 575 calls with an average occupancy of 91%.   Again the inverse is 9% idle time or about 2 ½  minutes per agent.

When expanded to an entire day, the chart shows that the agents in the smallest call center will be idle an average of 2 hours for every 7 hours of phone time compared to only 35 minutes of idle time in the large center.   Agent occupancy is a function of workload size and desired service levels and can’t be increased – for small call centers this means more idle time will always be required to meet the same service level when compared to larger centers.   If you manage a small call center that is meeting telephone answer objectives, you’ll most likely have others in the organization ask why the people are just “sitting” around – the answer is in the occupancy.

2.  A Planning Culture is Critical

Absolutely the best thing you can do for yourself, your customers and your employees is embrace the concept of a planning culture.  A call center planning culture is one in which everything that can impact the call center’s quality and service level are considered in each business decision.  Given the very limited error margin available to most small call centers, this is especially important.

To meet telephone objectives, provide agents with a balanced quality of work life, and allow adequate time for non-phone activities call centers must be properly staffed.  This may seem like an obvious statement, but we often find call centers of all sizes struggling to get it right.  Before trying to improve processes, make agents happier, or introduce new technology, you have to get the staffing part right.   This is the most basic activity regardless of size, but is often the most overlooked.  

What makes this more of a challenge in many small call centers is a lack of appreciation of the value added outside of the center.   More often than not, small call centers are supported by departments that also assist other parts of the organization – listed below are a couple of examples:  

• The telecom department provides ACD support for the call center and all of the other telephones in the company
• The HR department is tasked with screening call center agents, but spends the majority of the time staffing for other parts of the company,
• Manpower standards used in other parts of the company are applied to the call center (FTEs per customers or other static models).  

At the heart of overcoming these challenges is a well understood and appreciated service level driven planning process. Without it, managers spend a lot of time explaining “why”, and those outside of the center are continuously questioning changes.  Bottom line, creating a planning culture is the ticket to everything that makes call centers run better – process improvements, targeted training, coaching, and quality initiatives. 

3.  Nothing Can Be Skipped

We often see small call centers struggling because they’re missing the first, and most basic activity – choosing a service level objective.  In many cases,  small call centers focus on telephone objectives such as average speed of answer or abandon rate in place of a service level focus.    

Service level is absolutely the best call center telephone speed-to-answer measure (read: you have to have one).  It directly measures the accessibility of your organization to your customers and should be used as the primary measure of telephone success, which is defined as answering X percent of calls within Y seconds (e.g., 80% of calls in 30 seconds).  Service level is the tried-and-true indicator for call centers and is the basis on which all commercially available workforce management systems are built.    Service level is often viewed simply as a performance measure or goal for call centers.  It is true that it does provide the best overall indicator of caller treatment, but it also serves a much greater purpose.  A call center’s telephone service level objective provides the foundation for the most fundamental activities in a center: planning, staffing and execution.  The service level objective you choose will directly influence the number of people you hire, how many people you need to have on the phone in each hour of the day and when you need to implement a real-time recovery plan. 

Once you have a service level in place, you must also have a formal process for addressing all of the steps that follow – determine staff, scheduling, implement accountability, continually improve, etc.   A common mistake made by  leaders of small call centers is thinking that being small allows for shortcuts.  Reality is just the opposite – and additional challenges must be overcome along the way.  

4.  Recognize an Agent’s True Capacity

Frequently misunderstood or misapplied is the true productivity available from a call center agent.  It’s not uncommon to have to staff 2 people for every 1 hour of customer support workload in small call centers - and depending on the service level or size it can get as high as 3 to 1.   The first step is to fully understand where all the time is going and we use the table below to help illustrate this point.   

The table shows that once all activities are accounted for, a 40 hour agent will be dedicated to service customers an average of only 19.8 hours per week. The required occupancy rate alone accounts for a telephone reduction of 8.5 hours per week when the expected service level objective is being met.   As illustrated in the occupancy example above, this is a requirement and the smaller the center, more “idle” time must be added to the process.  

Many small call centers try to account for this non-productive time by scheduling other activities during the “idle” time.   Under the right circumstances, this can be successful. One key is to make sure the assigned activities do not take agents from their desk or cause them to go into a call blocking state (eg, outbound calls,  research, gaining approval, etc).  

5.  Don’t Give up on the Forecast

Small call centers will always be challenged to get accurate forecasts – it’s never as easy as in large call centers.  The more samples you have, the easier it is to predict the future and with fewer calls in smaller centers, improving forecasting accuracy is a constant struggle.

There are several approaches to forecasting call load (call volume x handle time).  For small call centers, historical based forecasting normally works pretty well.   Here you look at what happened in the previous weeks to forecast what to expect in the next.    The data is typically available from the phone system and can be easily trended in a spreadsheet or database application.

Unfortunately, many small call centers tend to give up, because they’re never able to achieve the single digit interval variances commonly referenced in industry journals as “best practice.”    My advice is not go give up because you’ll most likely find that there will always be some type of volatility present – keep tracking it and look for ways to reduce the average .  For small call centers, the key is to determine how close you can get and then develop schedules based on the range.

Let’s say that history shows you’re normally within a 12% absolute interval staffing variance – the difference between the number of people you think you need versus the actual need.  As you’re working to find ways to reduce the 12% variance, it should be accounted for in your schedule just as your required occupancy and actual telephone adherence rates are.   Not planning for this reality will result in missing service level in many intervals, eventually creating more challenges for the center.

6.  Get Creative With Schedules

Once you have an understanding of your true daily interval staffing needs, getting creative with schedules becomes easier.   For small call centers, this is one way to reduce some of the inefficiencies introduced with a lower required occupancy rate.  Below are some ways to help improve departmental efficiencies by ensuring your workforce is properly aligned with the workload:

• Transition static start and stop times to more flexible shifts.
• Conduct departmental training or team meetings outside of traditional hours.
• Provide agents the option to combine breaks and lunches to take the combined off time during a non-peak period.
• Train back-office personnel to handle routine inquires during peak time or lunches.
• Consider allowing agents to swap “return” breaks for early release time.
• Transition the routine/common inquires to a part-time or temporary workforce. 
• Reward agents that are open to daily adjustments to schedule changes
• Share a resource or two with a department outside of the call center and rotate non-phone tasks through out the call center
• Move additional (simple) responsibilities to the call center to take advantage of the required “idle” time.

7.   Plan to React in Advance

Real-time management is thought by many to be a call center savior, but it often drains the energy of everyone involved.  Typically larger call centers have people running an “intra-day” desk, continuously monitoring activities and adjusting call routing and agent skills based on internal and external changes.

Small call centers normally don’t have the resource availability or the reaction options of larger centers.  Because of this, formal recovery plans are a necessity and everyone needs to understand their role.  It is also important that you have a way to communicate the current state to the entire organization.  This can be accomplished through the use of wall mounted reader boards, terminal alerts, or agent phone displays. 

Bottom line, the best way to prepare for real-time management is to plan to “react in advance”.  This may sound like an oxymoron, but it is exactly what we do in call centers  - use historical information to predict future needs.  If the planning process has been followed correctly, a call center will have an accurate picture of the interval staffing that is required compared to the staff scheduled.   

Your ability to react in advance starts with creating a way to perform an interval gap analysis.    This is your daily plan that shows how many people you need by interval balanced against the staff scheduled.  Everything that impacts the staffing requirement or staff availability must be continuously updated and reflected in the plan.  This provides the opportunity to anticipate service deficits and do something about them in advance.   The table below is an example of a tracking tool that can be created to illustrate this opportunity:

In the example, the intervals from 7:30am through 9:00am are expected to have enough staffing to meet the service level objective, but the two subsequent intervals lack the minimum required staffing.   By having this information available when the day starts, the call center can implement plans to avoid queues several hours in advance. By not doing anything to address a known staffing deficit, a call center is essentially planning for failure.

No matter how much planning you do, there will be times when things don’t go as anticipated and you’ll have to react on the fly.  A common mistake in small call centers is to implement their recovery plan too quickly.   It is important to remember that queues aren’t necessarily a bad thing and when managing to a service level are actually part of the overall plan.  Another consideration is the fact that small call centers typically have longer hold times for those calls not answered within the service level objective.  If a  real-time recovery plan is implemented too often and too quickly, those tasked with reacting will soon loose faith in the process and operational efficiencies will be negatively impacted. 

The first step in setting the right real-time queue reaction thresholds is to understand how your volume and service level impact the number of calls and length of a planned delay.  Getting it right does involve some trial and error, but you can get a good feel for where to start by spending some time reviewing the output available from a simple Erlang C calculator.

8.  Focus on Adherence and Quality

Just about every one of the small call centers that we’ve partnered with have one thing in common – opportunities to focus their agent’s attention on measures that are within their direct control.   These measures are also at the heart of running efficient, effective call centers – quality and schedule adherence.

Regardless of size, you must have a formal process in place to monitor and measure the quality of the service your call center is providing.   The table below outlines the basics needed in every call center:

Just like your formal planning process, you won’t realize the full benefit if any of step is left out.   Even when formal processes are in place, there are typically opportunities to add to the frequency or items evaluated.  We also run into call centers that don’t do this because they don’t have automated technology.   Don’t wait – you can do this by adding basic radio shack type tape recorder to a manager’s telephone and begin the monitoring program. 

We also frequently find call centers driving the wrong agent behavior by focusing on call volume based “productivity” measures such as:

• Total calls per hour
• Transactions per day
• “Normalized” or “Occupancy adjusted” calls per hour
• Defined talk or wrap time
• Telephone availability
• Individual agent occupancy
• Telephone state utilization

Using any of these measures to drive agent performance calculations can ultimately send the wrong message – provide quality, but hurry.  Even when call centers get creative with an overall ranking, we typically find elements that are outside of an agent’s direct control and therefore result in comparisons that are not quite apples to apples.

The way to overcome promoting unhealthy behaviors and unfair comparisons is to set goals around the one telephone measure that is directly within an agent’s control – Schedule Adherence – Did they follow their schedule the way we expected.   Call centers can also set goals around items such as attendance and punctuality, but any of the other telephone indicators (handle time, calls, etc.) should be “managed” without defined departmental goals. 

When working with centers to improve performance reports, we often get questions regarding how to “control” agent behavior without specific goals.   We encourage call centers to start by adopting an operating philosophy that assumes agents are always doing the right thing to provide service to the customers.   If for some reason, a call center isn’t comfortable with this mindset, there should be some self-reflection and evaluation of current processes that don’t allow this type of  thinking.  This is often difficult, but in most cases points out the fact that measures and rewards currently in place may be driving the wrong behaviors in agents and in some cases the management team. 

 Running call centers of any size can be a challenge, but as outlined in this paper, the smaller the center, the larger the operational efficiency challenges.   To overcome these challenges, mangers of small centers need to have a clear understanding and appreciation of call center dynamics.   More importantly, they must be able to clearly articulate their challenges and operating dynamics to everyone in the organization to obtain the support needed to operate efficiently.  When this understanding is firmly entrenched in the organization, small call centers can meet – and sometimes surpass – the operational results recorded in larger centers

 Contact Center Leadership

Team Development Series

Week 4 – Agent Occupancy and  Rediscovering the Basics

All Readings Authored by:

 

Tim Montgomery, Principal, SLG

210.687.2714

timm@servicelevelgroup.com

The Truth about Agent Occupancy

 

Agent occupancy is the most important concept for call center managers to understand, appreciate and be able to clearly explain to everyone in their organization. Unfortunately, it is also a concept that is often misunderstood and misapplied. Even if you have a full appreciation for occupancy, it can be difficult to pass along to the rest of the organization.

We often get requests for an "optimum" occupancy rate or for ideas on how to "improve" agent occupancy. Although, vwe typically shy away from providing "one-size-fits-all" call center goals, in this case, it’s easy – there isn’t one. To better appreciate this, it is important to understand that agent occupancy is a direct outcome of several call center inputs. It’s like using simple math (2+2=4) – if you make even the slightest change to the inputs (the "2s"), your result will not equal the original "4."

Before we jump into exploring the details behind the inputs, it is important to understand the definition. Simply put, agent occupancy is the average amount of time agents spend on calls either while "occupied" talking to customers or in an after-call work state.

The inverse of agent occupancy is agent idle time – or the amount of time agents spend sitting, waiting for the phone to ring. Sounds simple, and it is, but sometimes something is lost during the translation, and goals or expectations around occupancy are developed.

Idle time is a reality in every call center. The larger the call center, the less idle time required to meet a given service level objective – in a larger answering group, agents will become available to take calls more frequently, resulting in less idle time. We developed the tables below to help illustrate how occupancy varies depending on the size of the answer group. The tables show the results of an Erlang program used to determine the number of agents required during a half-hour period to meet the service level objective in the upper left-hand corner. Details on the table’s categories are outlined below:

• Inputs to the Erlang program are:

1. Call volume: The number of calls expected to be offered to the group in the half-hour. (Volume)
2. Call handle time: The average of the sum of talk, hold and after-call work (AHT) for each call.
   • Outputs from the Erlang program are:

2.    Minimum number of seated agents: The minimum number of agents needed for the entire half-hour to meet the service objective (Staffing Req).

3.    Average speed of answer (ASA): The expected average call answer speed if the minimum agents required are staffed.

4.    Agent occupancy: The average amount of time agents will be occupied in direct support of customers shown as a percent with the inverse being idle time. (Occupancy Rate)

• Occupancy related results from Table 1:
  • The bottom row of the chart reveals a need to have eight agents available for an entire half-hour to answer the 25 calls within the service level objective. The agent occupancy result is 59 percent – in other words, the eight agents will be talking to customers or in an after-call work state an average 59 percent of the time.
    • It’s easier to understand when you look at the inverse – agent idle time (in this case, it’s 41 percent). At the end of the half-hour, if you were to total the idle time, you would find that each of the eight agents were idle 41 percent of the time, just over 12 minutes per agent.
  • In contrast, the top row of the chart shows that 119 agents are needed to handle 575 calls with an average occupancy of 91 percent. The inverse is 9 percent idle time or about 2.5 minutes per agent.
  • When expanded for an entire day, the chart shows that the agents in the smallest call center will be idle an average of two hours for every seven hours of phone time compared to only 35 minutes of idle time in the large center.

(Table 1 — 90/30 SLO)

The above example clearly illustrates the impact size has on a call center’s occupancy rates – the larger the center the higher the occupancy. Holding handle time and service level constant, smaller call centers will ALWAYS require more idle time (lower occupancy) when compared to larger centers. This same dynamic exists in large centers with segmented teams or skill groups – the smaller the volume the more idle time is needed (required) to meet the same service level objective. If you manage a small call center or team that is meeting its call-answering objectives, you’ve probably been asked by others in the organization why agents are just "sitting around." The answer is in the occupancy.

Another "input" that influences a call center’s occupancy result is the service level objective chosen (answering X percent of calls in Y seconds). The next two tables have the same inputs as Table 1, but the outputs are reflective of the adjustments made to the service level objective:

In Table 2, the service level objective is adjusted to become more aggressive and the resulting occupancy rates are lower. More idle time is now required to be built into the process to accommodate for the increased objective.

(Table 2 — 90/10 SLO)

In Table 3, the service level objective is adjusted to become less aggressive and the resulting occupancy rates are higher. Less idle time is now required to be built into the process because of the lower objective.

(Table 3 — 70/30 SLO)

In both examples, the required occupancy rate is directly influenced by the desired service level objective. Because of this fact, it becomes challenging for call centers with different service objectives to effectively benchmark things like agent efficiency rates and even agent turnover rates. When staffed properly, call centers with more aggressive service level objectives will ALWAYS have more idle time when compared to the same size center with a lower service objective. The chart below is a summary of all three table’s occupancy results:

In summary, the agent occupancy you can expect in your call center will be directly influenced by the call volume, the call handle time and your desired service level objective. The only way to influence the occupancy rate is to make a change to the inputs or put another way, if you’re managing to an occupancy objective, it’s most likely at the expense of one of the inputs (another objective). An environment that attempts to manage to objectives that are actually in contention often finds itself unnecessarily reacting to things that are, in fact, beyond its control.

Originally published on www.icmi.com. Copyright 2008 ICMI, a division of
CMP Media LLC. Reprinted with permission

Agent Occupancy — Revisiting the Basics

Originally published on www.icmi.com. Copyright 2008 ICMI, a division of
CMP Media LLC. Reprinted with permission

In the article “The Truth about Agent Occupancy”, we focused the importance of understanding and appreciating the role of occupancy in call center management. Since that article was published, I’ve received numerous emails with additional questions about occupancy — many of which focused on the more foundational elements around the calculations. While answering these questions, I realized that one of the best ways to gain a better understanding of agent occupancy is to break down the math behind the Erlang calculator.

If you’re running a call center, it’s essential to have some type of Erlang calculator available for quick "what-if" analysis, which can help to paint an accurate picture of the true impact of the workload or service level adjustments being considered. An Erlang calculator is also a great tool to help you better understand and communicate the dynamics of managing an inbound call center. Yes, this simple little tool can take you a long way toward solving a problem we hear on a regular basis: "Senior management just doesn’t understand."

The Erlang model used in the previous article is ICMI’s QueueView staffing calculator, which is available at www.icmi.com.  This version automatically generates the agent occupancy for the different inputs and provides several what-if type outputs on a single screen. There are also other versions available for download on various Web sites — some stand alone, while others are part of the Web page itself. With most of these, the resulting occupancy is not part of the output so you’ll have to manually account for it each time. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing — actually, I recommend spending some time manually doing the math if occupancy is automatically calculated for you. Recreating the output will provide you with a new appreciation for occupancy and call center dynamics in general.

The good news is, it’s pretty easy — and once you set it up in a spreadsheet, you’ll quickly get a feel for how changes to any of the inputs will impact the resulting occupancy. To illustrate this, we’ve created a couple of examples.

The inputs used in the Erlang calculator are:

80/20 SLO — goal to answer 80 percent of the calls within 20 seconds

50 calls in a half-hour

200 seconds Average Talk Time

50 seconds of Average After-Call Work Time

Based on the above inputs, we’re able to manually calculate the following outputs:

Handle Time is 250 seconds — Talk plus After-Call Work

Call Load is 12,500 seconds — After-Call Work x Calls (Total amount of work that needs to get done — 250 x 50)

At an 80/20 SLO, an Erlang calculator will give a requirement of 10 agents. This tells us that we need 10 agents plugged in and available for the entire 30-minute period.

All you need to do now is multiply the number of agents (10) by the total number of per-agent seconds available in a half-hour (1,800) to get 18,000

The occupancy percentage is the call load (12,500) divided by the available seconds (18,000), or 69 percent for that half-hour. In this example, the 10 agents on the phone will be occupied (on the phone talking or in an after-call work state) about 21 minutes in the half-hour. The inverse of this is agent idle time (sitting waiting on the phone), resulting in a requirement of about nine minutes of the half-hour.

To help illustrate the relationship between size and occupancy, we’ll increase the number of calls in the half-hour to 75 and keep the handle time the same. As expected, with the increase in call volume, the work that needs to get done (call load) will also increase. The new call load is 18,750 seconds (75 calls x 250 seconds).

When we use the Erlang calculator to determine the number of agents needed to meet an 80/20 service level against the new call load, we get a requirement of 14 for the half-hour. Using the same adjustment as above, we can multiply the agents needed by the number of available seconds in the half-hour (14 x 1,800) to get 25,200.

Determining the occupancy for the new call load is simple as dividing the work by available time: 18,8750/25,200 = 74 percent. This tells us that, by increasing number of calls, the agents on the phone will now be occupied a little over 22 minutes per half-hour. In this example, the required idle time is reduced to just under eight minutes.

The most important take-away from this exercise is the understanding that occupancy is a result based on the workload in the half-hour and the service level objective you set for your center. Attempting to manage to a specific occupancy number creates more frustration than benefit, and it’s often a battle that can’t be won.

If you’ve struggled to get others in your organization to understand the call center’s dynamic real-time environment, I recommend developing several what-if scenarios based on agent occupancy. When company decision-makers truly appreciate this concept, running the call center becomes a lot easier for everyone involved.

Take Your Call Center Back To Basics


 

During a recent call center manager focus group, one of the participants made the following statement: "Running a call center isn’t rocket science – the key is understanding and paying attention to the business you’re in." At first, I thought this proclamation was much too simple – call centers are dynamic real-time environments that require us to continuously contemplate, innovate and update. I then began to ask myself: Could it be that, because we keep trying to reinvent the queue, we actually make it harder on ourselves than it has to be?

While mulling over this question, I realized that a lot of the work we do in our consulting practice actually focuses on turning internally created complexity back into basic call center principles. Put another way, often we are called into centers to make the "rocket science" seem simple.

To take a call center "back to the basics," processes need to be added or adjusted based on the level of internal complexity that has been created. Often, the most difficult part of improving a process is knowing where to begin. To help get you started, consider the following 15 questions and suggestions regarding call center procedures.

The Call Center Complexity Quiz

Do you have an established service level objective that drives your planning and staffing decisions?

Service level is often viewed simply as a performance measure or goal for call centers. It is true that it does provide the best overall indicator of caller treatment, but it also serves a much greater purpose. A call center’s telephone service level objective provides the foundation for the most important activities in a center: planning, staffing and execution. The service level objective you choose directly influences the number of people you’re going to hire, how many people you’re going to have on the phone in each hour of the day and when you need to implement a real-time recovery plan.

Are you comfortable with the information you are receiving from the reporting systems used to measure your center and agents?

Reporting systems provide the information needed to efficiently manage a call center, but, in many cases, this information can be misinterpreted and influence the wrong behaviors. Be sure that everyone receiving call center reports understands the calculations and definitions of each item. Call center systems use the same headings for different things, so never assume a meaning until you have checked its exact calculation with the telecom department.

Can you measure agent quality and schedule adherence?

Only two things are within a call center agent’s control – quality and schedule adherence. Any productivity measures outside of these (i.e., calls per hour; telephone availability) can encourage the wrong behavior and negatively influence a center’s results. To measure schedule adherence, you first have to have a process in place that allows for continual schedule updates. This is a major challenge unto itself, but well worth the effort.

Have you developed a plan for your center in the e-enabled world and updated your telephone-only procedures?

Many of the well-documented principles of running an inbound call center apply to the e-enabled world and everything starts with establishing a service level objective. In the e-enabled world, this is typically in the form of a response time objective (how quickly are you going to get the answer to the customer?). Although the planning and managing processes are similar, to take full advantage of the efficiencies offered in the e-world, you must update your procedures. First, develop procedures for each type of work and then determine the best way to integrate them into your center. Don’t make the procedures fit the call center’s current structure.

Do you fully understand the importance of forecasting call load, as well as how to accurately measure and continuously improve this process?

Forecasting is often the forgotten or misapplied element in improving a call center’s efficiencies. Forecasting should be done for the call load (volume and handle time) and accuracy measures need to include the total staffing variance. A total staffing variance helps to provide the big picture (how many people did I actually need vs. how many people did I say I needed?).

Has implementing your real-time recovery plan become a typical part of every work day?

A real-time recovery plan should not become part of a call center’s daily operating procedures. If managers spend a significant part of each day "managing" the queue, it is normally a sign of a breakdown in the forecasting and scheduling processes. Updating processes to make this the exception instead of the rule helps to improve the overall feel of the environment, can dramatically improve performance measures and can reduce agent frustration.

Is your planning and budgeting process challenged because those who make staffing decisions just don’t understand call center management?

One of the most challenging parts of running a call center is securing the people and resources needed to meet customer and organizational expectations. Many times, those making the decisions have never been exposed to basic call center fundamentals and, therefore, don’t understand the difference between call center staffing vs. traditional workload staffing. Education is the key. A good place to start is to ensure everyone understands the relationship between service level, staffing and occupancy. Spending the time to educate in advance almost always makes the budget process less painful.

Are you able to comfortably answer "what-if" questions regarding the impact of additional workload/process changes? Can you do this in a matter of minutes?

Establishing and continuously updating a capacity planning model reduces a call center manager’s frustration and also improves the perception of the call center throughout the organization. Once established and tested, capacity planning models can be used to quickly answer the tough question: How much is it going to cost? Capacity planning is the first step in creating a true call center planning culture, which is the most basic and necessary element of running an efficient call center.

Can you identify where all of the time is going, and are all of these elements included in your short-term and long-term planning?

Tracking agent activities is done in most call centers and generally provides valuable information on how agents spend their days. Unfortunately, in many cases, the activities measured are only the ones that can be easily captured at the ACD level. For planning processes to be effective, all agent activities must be measured, tracked and trended. Call center managers are often surprised to find that in well-run, efficient centers, agents spend half of their scheduled time dedicated to activities other than directly servicing customers.

Do you have a way to effectively measure first-contact resolution?

Call centers manage to service levels because they don’t want customers to wait for service. Basically, any time a customer is placed in a queue, a call center is taking time away from the customer. This same thinking should also be applied to the activities that take place once the call is connected. Any time a customer has to inquire more than once or repeats a request, time is being taken from him or her. First-contact resolution results should be placed right next to the service level on the call center’s performance scorecard.

Are you comfortable with your current telephone technologies? Are you taking full advantage of their capabilities?

Call center telephone technology is continuously improving and many call centers follow this trend by upgrading with each new release or update. In many cases, call centers do see improvements with additional technology, but not everyone can afford to upgrade as quickly as the market is changing. Before taking the plunge and moving to the latest version or throwing out your old ACD all together, be sure to fully understand your current system’s capabilities and how you’re taking advantage of it. You just might find that, by being creative with call flows or processes, your current system still has some life left in it.

Have you established key performance indicators at the agent, team, department and company levels? Are you comfortable with the results?

It is an unwritten rule in many call centers that, if you can think of something that can happen, it should be measured and reported upon. Ultimately, you end up with an entire department that does nothing but track, trend and report all types of call center information. Having lots of data on your call center is not a bad thing, but there should be a focus on those key indicators that, if improved, can directly affect the business. Once these key indicators have been determined, work backward and identify each department that can directly or indirectly influence each measure. You will then be able to develop manageable goals and objectives to departments outside of the call center.

Does your entire call center management team have an understanding of call center dynamics and how they influence the results?

If operations managers and supervisors are not trained on basic call center dynamics, it can lead to behavior that negatively influences the overall results of the center and creates frustration at the agent level. All leaders in an inbound center should be able to explain agent occupancy – how it’s calculated, how it relates to service level and why it exists.

Have you communicated what it means to work in a call center to your frontline staff?

Call centers are different from most other working environments for several reasons of which agents should have a basic understanding. A simple presentation that outlines what it means to work in a call center is a good way to get the ball rolling. One thing you should do before the presentation, though, is to develop a communication about your organization’s service level objective (i.e., definitions of the inputs, expected queue lengths, average answer speed translation, the impact of one agent, etc.).

Do you track interval staffing variances and continuously update schedules to account for unplanned activities (such as sick days, volume spikes, media, etc.)?

It all comes down to the interval – you want every one of your customers to have the same chance to get the same level of service. If, at the end of the day, you have met your objectives, however, there were two hours during which customers had a significant wait for service, you might be patting yourself on the back while those customers are looking at your competitors. The key to managing call centers is breaking everything down to each interval, every day. This allows you to create plans that identify potential gaps, include alternatives for service recovery and establish expectations in advance.

These questions and recommendations are not meant to be the complete solution. They are simply suggestions to get you started moving your call center back to the basics.

After a recent brain-storming session with a colleague regarding scheduling opportunities, the client summed up the challenge in one sentence: "Wow, that sounds like a lot of work." Yes, it is initially a lot of work, but ultimately, it proves to be time well-spent. Running a call center isn’t rocket science – and we shouldn’t make it any harder than it has to be.

 

Originally published on www.icmi.com. Copyright 2007 ICMI, a division of
CMP Media LLC. Reprinted with permission

 Contact Center Leadership

Team Development Series

Week 5 – Real-time, Agent Engagement and Quality Monitoring 

All Readings Authored by:

 

Tim Montgomery, Principal, SLG

210.687.2714

timm@servicelevelgroup.com

Real-Time Recovery Should Be the Exception, Not the Rule

Originally published in Call Center Management Review. Copyright 2008 ICMI,

a division of CMP Media LLC. Reprinted with permission.

Every call center is unique, but they all have a common thread – the way the work is delivered. Calls emerge in a continual, random pattern and must be answered within seconds of arrival. To address this challenge, many call centers have implemented creative forecasting, planning and scheduling processes. No matter how effective this process is, at some point, the incoming calls will outweigh the workforce and calls will queue. Typically, this is when the fun begins and everyone’s life seems to change a little. When calls are in queue, the smiles are gone, the pizza gets cold, the bathroom passes disappear, and the executives start shining the bat signal from the 20th floor.

During my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work with numerous call centers and have witnessed the many ways companies react to queues. In most cases, this reaction often happens too quickly and is unnecessary. A commonly overlooked fact is that queues are part of the plan and not necessarily a bad thing. Unless you have a service level objective of 100 percent in zero seconds, you’re planning to allow a certain number of calls to enter the queue. Managing queues is what your automatic call distributor (ACD) is designed for – it grabs those calls that can’t be answered immediately and holds them until an agent becomes available.

An effective real-time queue management program is essential to running an efficient inbound call center, but it’s often the piece that’s left out of the planning process. Following are a few considerations for establishing or updating a real-time recovery program.

Continually Update the Plan

Your ability to institute a successful real-time recovery program starts with an effective planning and scheduling process. This process must include the ability to look ahead to the coming week and identify the intervals that lack the minimum number of phone agents required to meet your service level objective. This capability is a common component of most workforce management systems and can be manually tracked via a spreadsheet or database application. If you do not have a process in place that allows you to look ahead and review staffing gaps by interval, you should implement one before moving forward with a real-time recovery plan.

Once you have a process that allows for ongoing staffing gap analysis by interval, it is important to keep it updated. If you create schedules several weeks in advance, they need to be continuously updated with all changes that will affect the number of employees planned for incoming calls. This includes changes to the volume forecasts, last-minute agent training/meetings, short-term disability, etc.

Last, and most important, your plan must be updated with the last-minute changes first thing in the morning (i.e., sick leave, broken-down cars, sick children, etc.). This will give you an accurate picture of the workforce availability and will provide you with ample time to review alternatives for any intervals that look hopeless. Your current day planning does not end after your initial morning update. Additional unexpected events will influence your workforce throughout the day and the plan must be adjusted accordingly.

Communicate Expectations to the Front Line

The key to a successful real-time recovery program is the communication of expectations. The first step is to develop a process of communicating the expected workforce variances and any last-minute changes to the plan. This can be accomplished by consolidating the expected workforce variances by interval for an entire week on one spreadsheet. The spreadsheet, along with the ongoing updates, could then be emailed or posted on an intranet site. Providing this continual "snapshot" of the workforce and workload distribution by interval will eliminate many of the queue surprises that tend to catch everyone off guard. If the snapshot shows fewer people staffed than needed to meet the minimum service level, the odds are that you’re going to have calls in queue and everyone should be prepared.

Once the plan is communicated to the front line, expectations should be clear as to what actions are to be taken. If you have cross-trained agents who can handle response time activities (i.e., email, fax, etc), you may have them log onto the phone once your queue threshold has been exceeded. Better yet, in the intervals when the plan is at a significant deficit, you could have them log onto the phone in advance and avoid the painfully long process of driving down the queue. You’ll need to recover the time lost against the response time activities and move phone agents into non-inbound modes during intervals when the plan illustrates excess capacity.

Don’t Set a Reaction Based on a Static Number

Once you’ve defined and communicated the actions to be taken, you will need to determine when the program should be implemented and when to escalate to the next level. Using static indicators as criteria for implementation will result in over- or under-reacting in many cases. For example, let’s say the first phase of your plan is to begin when your expected interval-staffing shortfall is at negative five. A staffing deficit of negative five will result in significantly longer hold times when the required staffing is 20 than it will when the required staffing is 40. Using a single number as your threshold tends to mask the urgency in your lower volume intervals. A good method for setting your proactive adjustment threshold is to use a percentage approach – plan to invoke different phases based on the deficit percentage and not a static number.

This same approach should be used for those intervals when the calls don’t arrive as planned and you need immediate help. You’ll first have to work with an Erlang program to get a feel for the "planned" number of calls in queue based on the expected volume for the time of day. Next, determine how long the threshold can be exceeded before enacting the plan. It’ll take a few attempts to get this right but, once established, it will definitely reduce the number of "hair-on-fire" events.

Monitor By Skill Group, Not Team

Your real-time recovery program and ongoing gap planning should be done at the skill level or the highest level of group overflow. Managing this activity at a team level, when calls are shared with other groups or sites, becomes a coordination nightmare. This activity should be monitored at the same level in which the volume is forecasted – your schedules are created against this forecast, so all real-time updates and actions should follow the same process.

With the addition of new media, many call center agents have moved from call handling to other interactions, such as chat or email. In some cases, their workload has shifted to handling only the new media. It’s a good practice to keep an updated list of all people who have been trained in telephone skills and who can be called upon on short notice. You should also have an alumni list of people who have migrated out of the call center to other parts of the organization and who can be counted on during emergencies.

Educate to Eliminate the "Attack the Queue" Philosophy

As discussed earlier, queues are a necessary part of the plan to take full advantage of the efficiencies gained by implementing an ACD. As call centers evolve and establish service level objectives, rewards and punishments based on these objectives quickly follow. To ensure these objectives are consistency met, many call centers establish what is best described as an "attack the queue" approach to meeting service level. When fully implemented, this approach has everyone in the organization panic-stricken when calls are in queue, and all other activities in the center are put on hold until the queue is driven down to zero. Typical results from this approach are higher-than-desired service levels, lower-than-expected workforce efficiency, agent/manager frustration and continuous non-telephone event rescheduling.

Overcoming this mindset is not an easy task, and to sustain it, you must have buy-in from the top of the organization. This requires educating everyone who influences the call centers results – from front-line agents to the senior executives. Don’t worry, you don’t have to train everyone to be a call center expert – a simple presentation that outlines what it means to work in a call center is a good way to get the ball rolling. One thing you should do before the presentation, though, is to develop a communication on your organization’s service level objective (i.e., definitions of the inputs, expected queues length, average answer speed translation, impact of one agent, etc.).

By making just a few changes to your real-time recovery program, many of the unpleasant tasks associated with running and working in call centers become much easier.

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 representative or manager understands how thankless it can feel being in the trenches. Showing a little appreciation goes a long way toward improving agent morale, which then quickly finds its way into higher levels of customer service being provided.

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 of CSRs to focus on those issues they can directly influence 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 reps.

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 reps take each day that involves questions so common or basic, they don’t even need to look up the customer’s information to provide an answer? If this happens twice per rep, 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 no one 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 an "avoidable calls" team:

• This team belongs to the frontline representatives 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 person should be at a high level and have 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 agencies to join the team, such as marketing, finance, telecom, billing, staff, Web site, mail room, etc. This is an important component to the team’s success. Having the supporting agencies 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 frontline call center representatives, you’ll have increased visibility for the center, plus companywide respect for your staff. Help your company to discover the hidden talents and skills possessed by your agents – leadership, project management, teamwork and more.

Originally published on www.icmi.com. Copyright 2008 ICMI, a division of
CMP Media LLC. Reprinted with permission

Quality Monitoring Revisited

In every call center, providing a high-quality interaction should be just as important as meeting telephone accessibility objectives. The benefits of an effective quality assurance system are many:

• It enables you to leverage recorded calls to identify opportunities for service improvement within the center, as well as organization-wide improvements.
• It offers an excellent way to identify customer needs and potential long-term service issues.
• It provides another way for the call center to show the value it provides to the organization.
• If you don’t already have a quality program in place, you need one; if you have one, even a good one, consider the following ideas to get more from your time and technology investment.

Factors that Influence Agent Performance

We recommend developing a formal process for saving caller comments that identify opportunities, such as uncommon complaints, new customer challenges, feedback about competitors, and anything else that might help your organization improve a process or clarify information for customers. Once captured, this feedback can be analyzed for trends and shared with company executives, as well as the appropriate internal areas that can improve the processes to enhance the customer’s experience.

The results should also be correlated with call center activities to identify additional training opportunities. It’s a good practice to take into account factors that influence agents’ attitudes and monitoring results, such as:

• The agent’s experience level.
• Call center metrics and call volumes. Factors like service level or time of day have an impact on agent performance and, ultimately, quality metrics (e.g., agents may not use the correct greeting during high call volumes; they may sound rushed; lengthy call queues may result in irritated customers from the onset of the call, etc.)
• Customer satisfaction level as measured against the call center and the other products supported (which can identify issues directly within the control of the call center).
• Operational changes within the call center.

Quality Monitoring Options

There have been very positive advancements in call center quality monitoring technology — we’ve seen many of our clients realize significant improvements after implementing new technology. However, as with any type of technology, keep in mind that it’s only a tool and shouldn’t be relied on as the only way to improve quality. Whether or not you use QA technology, it’s important to continuously review alternative methods of monitoring call quality and providing feedback. Following are three monitoring processes to consider:

Agent self-monitoring is gaining popularity in call centers that have invested in silent monitoring systems. Agents appreciate being a part of the evaluation process, and we’ve found that they’re often more critical of their own performance and more open to improvement opportunities. There are several different approaches — the key is to find the one that makes your agents and managers feel most comfortable. One method is to allow agents to self-score their calls and compare the results with their team leader or the QA team. For example, schedule agents for 30 minutes a month to sit in an evaluation room and listen/evaluate five calls. The agent then shares the results with his or her team leader or supervisor and, together, plan improvements based on the session.

Peer monitoring is also becoming more frequently used. It is most successful in environments that have established quality monitoring programs. Although some organizations dismiss peer monitoring for fear of potential HR issues, we suggest it as an option for those centers that have an effective quality monitoring program that has been in place for several months, and with which both agents and managers are comfortable.

Traditional coaching techniques are still effective. Methods like side-by-side coaching allow supervisors and QA staff to spend time on the floor, providing direct, informal, timely feedback. This creates a highly visible and effective way to reinforce the quality commitment to the entire workforce.

Motivate Agents to Provide Quality Service

Because quality is one of the few performance measures that is within an agent’s control, it should become a regular part of the call center’s reward and recognition program. There are several ways you can focus agents on the positives of quality monitoring. Following are a few recommendations to help move your program forward:

Make quality goals a job promotion requirement. Once your staff is comfortable with the program, consistent high scores can be a requirement to gain the next skill or job level.

End team meetings by listening to a great call. Spend the last few minutes of every team or staff meeting celebrating an agent’s achievement as a group.

• Throw "Call of the Month" celebrations. Establish a formal program for identifying and rewarding top calls that is recognized and supported by the senior executives.

• Make it a part of your existing programs. Add a quality measure to all of your existing reward and recognition programs.

• Promote the "control" angle. Educate agents the on the fact that they are in direct control of quality objectives, and how they can improve their performance. Take an inventory of your existing performance indicators and replace those that are not within agents’ control (e.g., calls per day, handle time, etc.) with quality measures.

Set Measures that Drive Quality Behavior

Developing performance measures that agents have control over will help you to get better results from your quality program. If you want to ensure your agents are focused on quality, any external pressures and metrics must be applied in a way that allows agents to be successful.

Although many organizations promote quality, often the real frontline focus is on speed — emphasizing measures like calls per hour or availability drive this behavior. Without a doubt, any measure that encourages speed or a reduction in handle time will end up negatively impacting the quality provided to customers.

Call centers can modify performance metrics to encourage efficiency without discouraging the right behaviors.  We are a proponent of the phone adherence calculation that tells management whether or not the agent is "in the right place at the right time." More information on driving the wrong type of agent behavior through metrics can be found in other articles available at www.ServiceLevelGroup.com

Originally published on www.icmi.com. Copyright 2008 ICMI, a division of
CMP Media LLC. Reprinted with permission

 Contact Center Leadership

Team Development Series

Week 6 – Performance Metrics

All Readings Authored by:

 

Tim Montgomery, Principal, SLG

210.687.2714

timm@servicelevelgroup.com

Revisiting Accessibility Objectives

Just about every organization with an ACD to route calls also has some time of accessibility measure – service level, average speed of answer, abandon rate, etc.   These measures are important to contact center leaders and are often what we look to in determining what to change in our organization.  Just like with how  most view customer service, it’s often difficult to separate the internal needs from what it means to the customer.    What follows are three views of accessibility objectives: How companies traditionally view them, and two new, more effective ways. 

Accessibility objectives are often viewed from the company or department perspective with a very inside-out focus.  In many cases, those tasked with responsibility for meeting the objectives had little input into the development of the goals and their understanding has been passed from previous leaders.   Some of the common internal views of accessibility objectives include:

• How few people do I need to staff?   Many times we make decisions with the end result in mind, and in contact centers this typically means how many people do I need to be successful – or how close can I cut it without missing the mark. 
• What’s it going to cost me?  Although most contact center leaders know the value provided to customers, it’s often a difficult thing to quantify.  Without the value buy-in from other departments, the focus becomes cost, and contact center leaders are forced to think of service from a minimum expectation perspective.
• Meeting it is managing the contact center.   With so much focus on accessibility metrics in a contact center, leaders often find themselves so consumed with the numbers that meeting them is what running a call center is all about.
• Some don’t even give us a chance.   When setting metric expectations, many times centers begin to blame the customer for things like hanging up too quickly, and begin to adjust the excuses out of the metric.
• Zero abandons is an unrealistic expectation.   Abandons are such a misunderstood result that we end up creating excuses and rationalizations when we see them on a report.  

While the accessibility objectives and their corresponding goals are often predetermined, contact center leaders can refocus their organization to gain a better connection between the accessibility goal and the customer.   Doing this requires leaders to rethink everything they know about their accessibility metrics and look at what it really means to the people they are there to serve.   Because the accessibility metrics have become so engrained into the day-to-day life in a center, it’s often difficult to make this connection.   The points below are from the customer’s perspective and what accessibility objectives mean to them.

• Is the door open when promised?  A service level or ASA objective is the price of admission – if you advertise your hours of operation, you’re going to want to have the doors open at those times.   Anytime there is a delay, it’s the equivalent of making people stand outside waiting for admission. 
• How much of my time are you willing to take?  Your accessibility objectives really measure the amount of disrespect you’re providing to a customer.  When someone says they need service, every second that you make them wait is taking time away from their life.
• Should I begin to look for an alternative?  Making people wait on hold in a contact center allows them to reconsider their relationship with the organization.  And, with the fingertip alternatives available via the Internet, an extended hold time can result in a new opportunity for a competitor.
• I’m too busy right now.  When people hang up, they are sending a message about what they’ve decided to do instead of waiting –  and that is do something else.  The message can be as simple as “I don’t have tolerance for wasting time” or “I have alternatives.” Either way, by hanging up once placed in queue sends a message -- one directly from the customer.  

While looking at your accessibility objectives through different glasses provides a nice perspective, it can leave some of the reasons open to interpretation.  Key to getting everyone involved is to set some foundational standards associated with each objective that make it clear to everyone the importance to the customer and the contact center:

• It’s the price of admission.  You can not succeed in providing centralized contact center support without having the door open when promised.  This is something that more customers openly talk about, and it can dramatically reduce the front line agent’s job enjoyment.  It’s important to understand that it’s not a goal – it’s one of the reasons contact centers exist – to provide service when THEIR customers want it.   Not getting this part right isn’t an option and can’t be viewed as a daily goal or measure – it’s something that must be there, period.
• Impacts everything down the line.  When you don’t get it right, everything else down the line is impacted and the next customer will also suffer.  It’s a combination of a vicious cycle and domino effect – the first time you start to lose control, it begins to negatively impact the next one…and those customers who are negatively impacted call back and the entire frustration starts over again.
• Must be measured and “managed” by interval.   Every customer has the same chance to receive the same level of service, regardless of when THEY choose to contact you.  Remember, the customer is in charge. They contact you throughout the day, when they have a need.  In every contact center, the workload needs to be managed and measured in every interval of every day – that’s how the customer expects service.
• Impacts everything about the plan.  If you don’t get the accessibility measures managed as they relate to the customer’s needs, all of the subsequent activities will suffer.  Many contact centers get caught in a world focused on real-time management and recovery…and in most cases this is self inflicted.  The key is to handle the customers needs when they arrive -- if you don’t, you lose control of all the subsequent events. This creates further challenges with accessibility down the line, and consequently drives up the contact center “chaos” factor. 
• An early signal of customer frustration.  If your customers are hanging up or have to wait, it's a bigger deal to them than it it is to those running the department.   Making the connection between your accessibility objectives and the customer means looking at the world through their eyes. If they’re waiting a long time in line or self-selecting out of line, it means they’re not happy.  And it’s historical -- meaning you could have already pushed them over the edge and they won’t be coming back.
• Different based on customers and products.   A one-size-fits-all approach to accessibility objectives is a mistake – not all customers are the same and your products provide different value.  With that in mind, you should have as many accessibility targets as you do customer types and products supported.  The customer’s expectations are forever evolving, so you’ll want to continuously revisit them as part of your planning process.  

Revisiting Agent Quality and Productivity Objectives

Because we can measure just about everything in a contact center, we often do -- and we also find ourselves converting things into metrics just because we need a way to balance the score card.  As with accessibility objectives, quality and productivity are developed from the inside out to meet the organization’s definition of quality and productivity.  Even with the best intentions, these internally focused measures can make the environment a lot more challenging than it has to be.  As we did with the accessibility objectives above, following are three views of agent quality and productivity – how companies traditionally view them, and two more effective ways: 

From the customer’s perspective, it’s pretty simple – do what you said were going to do and make it quick and accurate.   Keep it simple for everyone involved and don’t waste my time.   The best service is that where the customer doesn’t have to waste an ounce of energy being engaged in the process – they tell you want they want and you go do it.  Sounds simple, but we often make it a lot harder than needed.  Many times, the challenges are self-inflicted. Below are some examples of how companies tend to approach agent quality and productivity metrics:   

• It’s the resulting score on the monitoring form.  Quality becomes a number that is an output of an internally designed monitoring form and internally designed point program.  And, in a lot of companies, there are people whose job is to do nothing other than keep score against the forms, and quality becomes even more about the resulting numbers.
• Team and group comparisons of the score. When quality and productivity are focused on numbers, there are new ways to compare results.   Companies are often proud of the group and team comparison displays and reports.  In some cases, there is internal competition to be better than each other against the internally created metrics.
• Number of audits completed.  A quota approach to the number of audits completed is something that exists in the majority of contact centers.  Again with good intentions, but often at the expense of those that really need help in getting better.   This approach moves more (and often unnecessary) audit attention to the agents that do a great job of providing wonderful service on a regular basis.
• How much time was focused on customer work?  Trying to ensure people are busy through metrics leads to a focus on how much work they are doing.  With measures like this in place, centers are continually looking for the definition of “work” and tweaking the inputs to the calculation.  As with quality, there are teams dedicated to tracking, trending and updating a number that most working in the center know has flaws.  
• A way to reward and punish.  These measures can be used as punishment or incentives; either way, they motivate a behavior in agents.   In many cases the behavior that is being elicited isn’t in the best interest of the customer, the agent or the organization.  Rewards and punishment create fear – of looking bad or getting fired -- and result in agents focusing on things outside of their customer service mission.

As discussed earlier, customers are, for the most part, simple.  And with that in mind, our quality and productivity measures, processes, reports and improvement initiatives should also be simple.  It may sound strange, but making it simple is really easy. Just look at your world through the customer’s eyes and make the connection with agent quality and productivity.

Start by reviewing the questions that customers ask, and see if they’re addressed by your current agent measures and focus. Looking at the world from the customer's standpoint will immediately highlight the opportunities for your current productivity and quality metrics.   In many cases, companies discover they’ve built too many internal perceptions into what is reported as an external view.

§  Was it right and do I feel comfortable?  This is the easiest of all – was the right solution provided and did the customer feel good at the end of the call.  Sounds simple, and is.   Something that should be included in every discussion on quality: Did you leave the customer feeling comfortable? This is easily assessed, but often overlooked.   

§  Do I feel valued?  At the end of every interaction, the customer asks themselves if they moved forward with a feeling of value.  This is easy – did you make them fell good about calling on their terms or did they hang up feeling like they cost you money?

§  Did I get everything I needed?  Well documented are the companies that don’t get it and shortchange the customer…leaving them with a desire to contact you again to get the rest of the solution.  When customers call back it’s frustrating for everyone – particularly the customer.

§  How much time was taken from me?  In most cases, the customer looks at every interaction from their own time perspective.  This isn’t a bad thing and is something that every contact center must embrace. When customers are interacting with you, it’s their time….and their life – be respectful from every angle.

§  Did I feel rushed?  You want to take as little of the customer’s time as possible, but you don’t want anyone to feel rushed and/or leave the transaction feeling like they were an inconvenience. 

§  Was someone available when I wanted?  You have to make the connection with productivity and the customer requirement. In real-time contact centers, the customer wants service when they choose.  Adherence to schedule is a key indicator of how much you care about being there when the customer wants you to be.  

Moving an organization closer to achieving admirable quality and productivity metrics starts with self-reflection.  This is often the most painful part of change, and is the thing that can move contact centers to the next level.   The alternative views described below are the enablers to change – those things that call center managers can ask their leaders to consider as they interact with their teams. These are simple statements with very powerful outcomes that have the ability to move organizations to the next level.

§  Scores don’t change behaviors.  Racking, stacking, ranking and displaying – none of these change an agent’s desire to improve.   In many cases, a focus on the score makes people uncomfortable, leading them to focus on removing the discomfort by moving the results without considering the customer. 

§  Trends indicate opportunities.  Outcomes are your view into the future, and the only way to make and informed decision is to understand the drivers to the trend.  Key is to realize that the trend is driven by something…so the focus should be on something…not the resulting measure.

§  The goal is to improve service, not manage agents.  Often forgotten is the reason we have quality and adherence measures – it should be more about the customer than the service center.   Many times the agent measures become the focus and call center agents and leaders lose sight of the connection with the customer.  These are more than numbers, they are a key competitive advantage when fully understood and applied. 

 

§  Without the reality, the planning process is flawed.  Something critical that is missed in most centers is that you MUST know the reality of the behavior to schedule effectively.  Without this knowledge, the schedules will always be flawed and customer service will be a moving target.   The key is to get your arms around the reality of the environment -- no goals, no desires, no targets; it’s all about what’s really happening.  

 

§  Numbers are merely indicators of opportunities to coach new behaviors .  The best leaders don’t react based on a few metrics, they use them to identify trends and focus on behaviors that need to be addressed.  When plotted over time, leaders find that most agent metrics are really noise and a natural variation in a process. It is critical to focus on the agent metrics that fall outside of what everyone else is doing – those are the real opportunities. 

§  All metrics and measures need to be flexible and change as often as the underlying process does.  One thing is certain in a contact center – change.   It is paramount  to appreciate the external changes and the impact they have on the internal agent quality and productivity measures.  Always keep in mind that if the inputs move the agent’s expectations, the inputs MUST change as often as the process that drives them. 

What the Best Companies Know

The best companies understand the following and apply it daily:

1. It’s all about the interval in advance – if you’re not doing it, you’re not taking full advantage of your contact center.  And, if you’re not doing it, you’re most likely struggling to meet performance objectives and have frustrated agents and customers.  The key is to keep it simple and look at things from a coverage gap perspective -- green is okay and red is bad….never let your center embark into an interval of red.  Not only is this bad for customers, agents feel it and change their approach to service in subsequent intervals.  Sounds harsh, but if you don’t have daily view of the agent need/gap similar to the one below, you are flying blind:
   Don’t  try to outsmart the reality.   Queuing environments are real time, and when we apply service level objectives, the need to get to customers quickly becomes more of a challenge.  The reality is that the 80/20 rule applies. This ISN’T service level -- it’s the simple fact that when meeting a service level object, most of the calls will be handed immediately – in no time with no queue.  So, if the frustration is the queue, and only 20% to 30% should even queue, why is so much focus placed on the queue?  The best companies know that queues happen – the key is to understand and appreciate the queue and educate others on the potential impact and the reality.

2. The "power of one" in a contact center.  Something that is known but hard to articulate is the way everyone in a center impacts the results of everyone else.   And results include the workload of all, the customer experience, and the overall cost to service.   Although many people will disagree, contact centers are essentially the same.   Yes, some people focus on the difference as it relates to customers service or product supported, but the reality is that all centers are in the business of providing service when an external source (the customer) want s it.   The need to service requires a focus on getting the customer served when THEY desire and ensuring that agents are available to meet the need.   The impact of each individual is significant – if just one person doesn't do what was planned, the customer experience for all can be negatively impacted.   The best contact centers don’t dwell on the power of one to create fear; they use it to educate others and, more importantly, leverage it within their planning process.
   
    

Help others connect the dots

As you know, if it can be measured, contact centers will find a way to measure it.  The question is often what to measure. The answer is easy – it's the application that is hard.  You have to relate all of your agent performance metrics to what each means to your customers. Focus on those things an agent can control and improve.  If any of your agent performance metrics include something beyond the agent's direct influence, revisit those metrics.  An easy rule of thumb: If you’re not focusing your agents on quality and schedule adherence, you need to be. I’ve found that many contact center leaders will agree with this statement, but most don’t fully appreciate the true impact these metrics have on everything that happens to their customers, their agents and their careers.

Below is a visual display of how to gain a better understanding of the impact that quality and schedule adherence have on just about every critical element of your customers' experience.  

In the middle is schedule adherence and quality. You can make the connection with the elements together or individually – the story is the same.   For example, if your schedule adherence is lower than planned (i.e., agents aren’t available when you planned for them to be available), your service level will be lower than planned during an interval.  When this happens, everyone’s workload is impacted because they’re working harder.  This leads to lower customer satisfaction, longer calls, forecast inaccuracy, additional staffing needs in subsequent intervals and, ultimately, lower quality.  Agents become frustrated by customer dissatisfaction, get sloppy in providing necessary information, pass on time to customers to get breaks, leading to an increase in staffing needs to meet service level.  Throwing bodies at the problem is often the remedy – hiring more people, cancelling necessary activities, moving leaders onto the phones, etc.   With this approach, the root cause is never addressed and underlying problems will continue to escalate, ultimately resulting in higher agent turnover and lower customer satisfaction. This vicious cycle will continue until everyone realizes the importance of measuring and managing schedule adherence and quality.

The question then becomes which should you focus on more – adherence or quality?. The answer? Both.  What’s more important is how you implement the focus and how it’s perceived by the frontline staff.    As discussed earlier, it should be less about a number and more about behavior.   Your leadership team must have a conversation about improving a behavior without mentioning an actual numeric goal – no easy task.   It starts with making an investment in the leaders and helping them fully understand the connection between the metrics, agent behaviors and customer satisfaction.   Coaching in general isn’t natural to most, and coaching without metrics is even more of a challenge.   To positively move call center agents in the right direction and focus on the right things, a quality/adherence behavior-focused coaching program is a necessity.  

Moving away from a metrics conversation is simple – get the agents involved in identifying their own “why” and “what”.   For quality, focus on three things: 1) what was good about the call; 2) what could have been better; and 3) three things to work on (behaviors) before the next quality coaching session.  This focus is done by the coach and by the agent – the agent identifies the behaviors to address and the actions are mutually agreed upon by the coach and agent.  

Use the same approach with adherence: Without talking numbers, focus on the behaviors and agents' approach to their job – e.g., understanding of new policies, application of phone usage, external life events, etc.  The object is to gain a better understanding of why there is an adherence challenge, and to get the agent to focus on the underlying behavior and develop action plans for improvement. 

A key to making this transition is documenting the behavior agreements – the things agents will work on to improve.   Just as important is the leader agreement – documenting the support that will be provided to help the agent improve.   And there must be follow-through that includes regular coaching sessions that specifically focus on the plans with documentation of improvement and development.  For agents that aren’t successful in changing their behavior, this documentation is the catalyst for quickly finding a position (inside or outside of the company) where they’ll be more successful.    It’s actually easier to move people with a behavior focus than with a metrics focus; with metrics, creative agents will always find a way to come in under the radar screen.  Again, this is more work for leaders, but in the long run, it’s better for the contact center as the bad apples are weeded out and the people that want to improve are given the proper attention.

A Leader's Next Steps

Leaders typically agree with the concepts, but often find difficulty in finding the starting point.   This is actually the easy part. It starts with anyone who realizes the need to make a change.   Many of you aren’t in a position to make the final decision and look for ways to get senior management engaged.   Again, that starts with you. The best leaders know it takes creativity and hard work to convince upper management.   Here are some ideas to help get leaders moving forward with making a transition from metrics to actions:

Start by making sure you’re armed with a complete understanding of contact center fundamentals and why a change in focus is important.  Read about the basics of how centers operate. Even if you’ve been working in them for years, you’ll want to start over to ensure you’re saying the right things with confidence and in a way that will pique others' interest.   Keep in mind that running contact centers isn’t rocket science, and most of the pain is self-inflected.   By helping others realize the need to move back to the basics, you’ll engage them and inspire them to take a different look at metrics.

Take the time to walk through the experience from the customer’s perspective.   Start with calling your own number and walking through the prompt options looking for quick wins. How quickly can you get to an agent? Do the options make sense to someone not familiar with the company? Are the voices the same?  

Once you’ve  made it easier to get to reps, move to the interaction and evaluate calls – not based on your internally developed quality form, but focused on what the customer is really telling you about their needs, your company's ability to meet those needs, and how the customer really feels about interacting with you.   You’ll find several examples that will help reinforce the need for change – and, you’ll be able to let others hear it directly from the customer.

Continually ask "why?" along with "why not?" – by doing this, you’ll have a clear understanding of the roadblocks hindering positive change in others.  Focusing on the organizational barriers and looking beyond the conventional wisdom will highlight even more opportunities, as most companies have several processes in place without a clear understanding of how they started or why they exist.  Your job is to get people outside of their comfort zone and to see the possibilities.

Pulling the Pieces Together

Moving metrics into action takes time and a commitment from all levels of the organization.   You’ll need to connect with external departments to ensure that they have an appreciation for a behavioral focused performance program that is more closely tied to what the customer has defined as a need vs. what the company has developed as measures of success.   The best contact centers know that metrics are simply an indicator of opportunities, and that real positive change happens when leaders focus on the right behaviors that help the voice of your company get better.

 Contact Center Leadership

Team Development Series

Week 7 – Active Work Force Optimization 

All Readings Authored by:

 

Tim Montgomery, Principal, SLG

210.687.2714

timm@servicelevelgroup.com

Seven Actionable Tactics for Critical Contact Center Improvement

We’ve all been there: Struggling to find a way to get more out of our contact center agents; looking for new ways to get calls out of queues; begging other departments to pitch in during peak times; and finding new ways to point the finger at other internal departments. Bottom line is that many of us have a difficult time doing business with ourselves, and it’s no wonder that customers find their experience frustrating. Good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way. The bad news, however, is that you’ll have to move your organization to get there…and that is 99 percent of the challenge and solution.   

Every contact center is unique, but they all have a common thread: The way the work is delivered. Calls emerge in a continual, random pattern and must be answered within seconds of arrival. To address this challenge, many contact centers have implemented creative forecasting, planning and scheduling processes. No matter how effective these processes are, at some point, the incoming calls will outweigh the workforce, and calls will queue. Typically, this is when the fun begins and everyone’s life seems to change a little. When calls are in queue, the smiles are gone, the pizza gets cold, the bathroom passes disappear, and the executives start shining the bat signal from the 20th floor.

During my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work with numerous contact centers and have witnessed the many ways companies react to queues. Unfortunately, many centers respond with what can best be described as an "attack the queue" approach to handling customers. When fully implemented, this approach has everyone in the organization panic-stricken when calls are in queue, and all other activities in the center are put on hold until the queue is driven down to zero. Typical results from this approach are higher-than-desired service levels, lower-than-expected workforce efficiency, agent/manager frustration and continuous non-telephone event rescheduling.

Opportunity #1 – Embrace queues!  A commonly overlooked fact is that queues are part of the plan and, thus, not necessarily a bad thing.

Unless you have a service level objective of 100 percent in zero seconds, you’re planning to allow a certain number of calls to enter the queue. Managing queues is what your automatic call distributor (ACD) is designed for – it grabs those calls that can’t be answered immediately and holds them until an agent becomes available. And keep in mind that, depending on their need, most customers will give you some time to "open the door." Of course, if the wait is too long, they may soon be looking for a new door to a new company.

Overcoming the overly aggressive and often counter-productive "attack the queue" mindset is not an easy task. It requires educating everyone who influences the contact center's results – from frontline agents to senior executives. Don’t worry, you don’t have to train everyone to be a contact center expert – a simple presentation that outlines what it means to work in a contact center is a good way to get the ball rolling. Be sure to clearly communicate your center's service level objective (i.e., definitions of the inputs, expected queue lengths, average speed of answer translation, the impact of each agent, etc.).

Impact:  Getting everyone on-board will not only save you time in explaining results, it also creates a new “calm” in your daily management routine.  And, doing it right, you’ll lay the foundation for making additional positive changes move much easier and faster.  This is such a vital part of getting the support you need, there is a special section at the end of this paper with ideas to help get you started. 

Opportunity #2 – Breakdown the organizational silos that have found their way into your call routing strategy.

Once everyone is educated on the dynamic nature and the realities of the contact center, you’ll want to revisit your approach to providing customer support. Companies often get stuck in silos (products, divisions, activities, reporting relationships, etc.), and this is transferred into the contact center and the way customers are handled.

Begin by asking yourself a few questions:

 

1)    Do you force customers to wait in specific silos for service when often times there are people available in other silos who can help?  

2)    Do you have an organization with multiple call centers that don’t all report to the same leader?

3)    Can your customers receive a different level of service depending on the reason (service, sales, technical, etc) or segment (business, consumer, partner, etc) of the call?

4)    Does your center dedicate more time and effort to making real-time adjustments than they dedicate to their forecasting activities?

5)    Do you spend more time coordinating internal changes to shared systems than you do implementing the change?

6)    Is there one executive that truly owns the entire customer experience…both on and off the organizational chart?

Companies that begin to look at their call routing strategy from a customer-centric vs. company-centric perspective normally find several holes in the way the customer is treated, differences in the way results are interpreted and gaps in who is really accountable.  This confusion helps adds fuel to the ever-present internal finger-pointing exercise that results in more internal initiatives to help reinforce the customer-centric strategy.   Unfortunately, these initiatives often end up addressing internal reporting, communication and organization chart issues, while the customer is still receiving the same “luck of the draw” experience.  Regardless of how your organization tackles these issues, you should start with the following approach – give every customer the same chance to get the same level of service, regardless of when or why they contact you. Ultimately you are one to them, and every contact is an opportunity to    overwhelm them with delight.

Impact:  If done correctly, you’ll immediately gain capacity to handle more calls with the same number of agents and dramatically reduce your queue times.  Don’t confuse this with moving skills or giving authority for other departments to have access to agents – both are signs of a flawed planning process.   This is a real-time balancing of customer needs with company service capability – and if you do it right, it doesn’t require any real-time changes.

Opportunity #3 – Stop trying to solve problems by making your customers do your agent’s work.

Again,  look at the operation from the customer’s perspective -- not just the company's. Much of the technologies available to contact centers are focused on how to become more efficient – not a bad thing, but keep in mind what “efficient” means.  It’s a point-in-time improvement based on history (e.g., reducing handle time, thus reducing the number of agents needed).  A common approach to creating a more efficient contact center is to focus on reducing the amount of “agent engagement” time by moving responsibility to the customer (e.g., hiding the agent prompt in the IVR; forcing all of the up-front information-gathering via speech; and not providing phone numbers on a Web site).  While such approaches seem to make good financial sense, they all make the customer work harder to do business with you.   And companies that adopt this approach quickly find that by passing on time from agents to consumers, loyalty drops, customer attrition increases and once valuable business intelligence is no longer available.

In many cases,  company-level contact center “efficiency” initiatives are born from  misguided agent level measures that that focus on reducing the time interacting with customers to decrease headcount.  Conventional company wisdom goes something like this: If the contact center can save headcount by reducing agent talk time, then every new technology needs to be an enabler. Then everyone outside of the contact center gets involved and handle time becomes the root of all evil, and reducing it is the way to save money and improve the quarterly cost numbers.  Soon you lose site of the customer, they’re doing more of the work, and ultimately they migrate to the competition – but you’ll never know when or why because no one talked to them.

 In the customer service world it’s real easy to get caught up in an ongoing “penny pinching” exercise to improve the bottom line.   Customers quickly feel the pinch, followed by the pain -- and look for  ways to ease it, which typically entails defecting to the competition.   

Move your center from an efficiency-focused organization to a customer-focused one.   Agent performance can be measured in many ways, but be sure the inputs are within their direct control – quality, adherence to schedule and procedures, first-contact resolution, initiation of cross-selling and upselling opportunities, etc. No matter what performance measures you choose, you want agents to be empowered to focus on helping customers get the information they need, and not just looking to reduce the time spent to meet an efficiency goal. Strongly emphasize this with agents; help them understand the transition, the metrics for which they will be accountable, and what’s in it for the customers they serve.  

Impact:  Removing these pressures from agents and allowing them to focus on service ensures the right thing is done the first time.  With this you’ll see a reduction in volume, improved customer results (revenue, retention, etc.), and, most importantly, you'll have better information to plan your day.   Without an accurate view of what it takes to serve the customer, you’ll never get the planning part right -- and if you don’t get the planning part right, you’re doomed to a life of continuous real-time management.  

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.

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.

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

As mentioned earlier, 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.   

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

As discussed earlier, 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. The table below provides a comparison between a 5 percent talk time reduction (in a mid-sized contact center) and a 5 percent reduction in call volume:

*assumes calls arrive in the same amount over 16 intervals a day

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.

While challenging,  managing a contact center isn’t rocket science. Don't make it any harder than it needs to be.  The best contact centers start with getting everyone on the same page and provide them with the basics of how centers are different but, at the same time, not too complex. (see example below for quick tips on getting the word out).   Once your management team is on the same page,  begin the process of removing the self-created silos where customers get placed (queued), then start to rethink the ways you deliver service. 

Many of the tips and recommendations described in this paper were the result of asking “why?” and “why not?” Try new things and challenge the way things have always been done.  You don’t have to wait on your vendors to provide you with new solutions that automate everything for you.  Expose everyone to the quick wins staring your center in the eye – this isn’t low hanging fruit; it’s already on the ground.  Once you prove that thinking differently works, getting buy-in for technology that allows you immediate access into the wealth of real-time information you have right at your fingertips becomes a “no-brainer” for everyone.  And, if you do it right, the chaotic (and unnecessary) activity of continually “attacking” the queue will quickly become a thing of the past.

Getting Yourself Up to Speed

If you’re reading this, you’re looking for new ideas, which is a great first step. Make sure that your knowledge of contact 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 contact 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 Service Level Group’s Web site.)  Another way to keep abreast of the latest trends is to subscribe to – and READ – as many industry publications as you can. There are lots of free contact center publications available, and most provide weekly email updates.

Once you feel confident that you are fully up to speed, the next step is to get your peers and executives excited about contact center dynamics. The key is to create a vision – one that you can refer back to when conversations get off course (e.g., when senior managers begin to focus on how to get more efficiency out of every agent while providing the same level of quality).

Creating Your Vision

Step 1:  Set the foundation

Minute by minute, calls arrive randomly, but when broken down to an interval (30 minutes), we can get pretty accurate with the forecast

First slide shows this – three internals of 150 calls offered, arriving randomly during a 30-minute period. The message here is we can’t control exactly when they’ll arrive, but we can determine the overall number in a given interval:

Step 2: Relate it to Staffing 

To overcome the challenges with the minute-by-minute unpredictability, contact centers use a formula to determine the number of agents required during each ½ hour – Erlang C (or if you have a WFM system, it may use a modified version).

Based on our service objective – in this case, 85 percent of the calls answered within 30 seconds and an overall average handle time of six minutes – the program tells us we need 35 agents staffed during the ½ period.

What’s important here is to point out the fact that we need 35 people in chairs talking on the phone, in an after-call work state or waiting for the phone to ring.

With any fewer than 35 agents, we will not be successful in meeting our objective.  It’s not an average for the interval, it’s from minute one to minute 30, we need to have 35 people.

Step 3: Explain the Peaks and Valleys Impacts

Once you get an understanding of the randomness of call arrivals and staffing requirements to overcome it, the real fun begins. I, personally, use this slide on a regular basis. It goes a long way in explaining the major challenges of managing an inbound contact center.

When looking at the arrival lines compared to the staffing line, you see there are times when we have more calls then people – otherwise known as a queue. The key here is to explain that this is part of the plan – ACDs are designed to hold calls in queue until agents become available, and any service level objective below 100 percent in zero seconds is planning for some type of queue. Some amount of queuing is planned, but the only way to keep it under control is to ensure that you have the right number of people – in this case, 35 from interval start to finish.

The other take-away is the opposite of queues – when we have more people staffed than calls, or idle time. Yes, this is also a requirement in every contact center – to overcome the minute-by-minute random arrival, you have to build in some idle time. It’s a reality and it can’t be compromised. The only way to reduce it is to remove some of the staff, which will create queues, negatively impacting service level.

This is normally question-and-answer time. You need to be on your toes and prepared to talk about idle times. Being able to effectively communicate this will help you to gain a lot of credibility.

Step 4: Bring the Concepts Together to Focus on Employees and Agents

Bring all of the concepts together with real-life data from your environment. The key here is to get the data out of the typical report format and create a simple, clean, easy-to-read/understand visual.  Demonstrate how losing just a couple of agents can have a dramatic impact on the service provided to customers. This also shows how adding more staff doesn’t really add to the overall customer experience. You can also use this slide to show how not staffing the right number of agents impacts everyone on the floor. In this example, losing a couple of people not only reduces the service provided, but makes the agents who are on the phones work even harder.

 Contact Center Leadership

Team Development Series

Week 8 – Getting Creative  

All Readings Authored by:

 

Tim Montgomery, Principal, SLG

210.687.2714

timm@servicelevelgroup.com

 Creativity - the Key to Small Call Center Success

Managing a small call center brings big challenges – and big opportunities. While it’s true that all call centers -- regardless of size, industry, function or location – share several core commonalities, small call centers (50 or fewer FTEs) often must contend with unique issues and obstacles that rarely if ever impact larger centers. 

For instance, whenever one or two agents in a large call center don’t show up to work or don’t come back from their lunch or break on time, the effect on customer accessibility and satisfaction (and the center’s costs) is often negligible. The same scenario, however, in a center with a frontline of just 25-30 agents can prove positively devastating.

And that’s just one obvious example of the challenges and issues that small call centers face. There are numerous others, which we will touch upon in this article. Now, I am by no means suggesting that small centers are impossible to manage effectively. Truth is, countless managers of small centers have achieved great success and transformed their diminutive operations into  powerful, influential entities that are highly respected within the larger enterprise.

All it takes is a solid grasp of the essentials of call center management, and an ample amount of creativity and insight. Following are 10 key tactics and approaches that will help you achieve very big things in your small call center.

Don’t skimp on the people -- leaders are the key.

 
This sounds obvious and it is.  A common mistake made in small call centers is not investing in the growth of the leaders.  Call centers in general do a significant amount of internal promotion – moving frontline reps into supervisor or management positions.    Larger call centers typically have the luxury of formal development or mentoring programs to grow new supervisors.   Smaller call centers often find themselves at the lower end of the maturity model -- few people in the organization with a formal understanding of the foundational requirements of call center leadership.   This knowledge gap makes it harder for new and upcoming leaders to gain a full appreciation of what it takes to effectively navigate the call center waters.  

You would never expect a fireman to be able to do their job without spending a significant amount of time training, learning and practicing.   While call centers don’t put leaders in life and death situations, several managers say they spend a significant amount of time putting out fires.   Every small call center should develop a formal on-boarding program for new leaders -- a plan that outlines the training programs, policies and evaluation criteria.   By documenting the expected activities and holding monthly progress meetings, your new leaders will be engaged in the activity that makes every person (and organization) better – continuous improvement.   And, once you’ve done it just a few times, you’ll create the internal mentors with the expertise to transfer the right knowledge to your upcoming leaders.  

Create flexibility with your schedules and your organization.

 

Schedules in small call centers are typically defined by the open and close time of the environment supported.   If the rest of the company works 9 am to 5 pm, then it only makes sense to have the call center work the same hours.    Keeping standard hours can be a source of frustration and challenge in a small call center.  Everything about running a call center of any size comes down to managing the interval (e.g., every half hour).   If everyone comes in at the same time, the obvious challenge is breaks and lunches – this is even more compounded in smaller call centers.   An easy fix is to stagger start times and provide the call center more off-phone type work to keep them occupied during the earlier and later times when the phones aren’t on.   This approach helps with coverage, but there is an even bigger benefit – happier employees.  Because the call center typically isn’t  the most desirable job in the company, you can use schedule flexibility to help boost the morale of agents in the center and allow them to do something no one else can.

Creating flexibility in schedules also helps small call centers reduce turnover by allowing call center agents to do things not available to other parts of the organization.   Once you’ve got the interval challenge completely understood (no small task), you can become creative with schedules – allow agents to work consolidated shifts, split shifts, shared shifts – anything is possible as long as the interval requirements are covered.   Allowing agents to learn other skills between calls is another advantage in a small call center – time between calls is almost non-existent in large call centers, but a requirement in small centers.   Use this time to help the frontline learn the skills they need for their next job outside of the call center.  This helps to encourage realistic conversations about the agent’s future desires.  

Consider size in establishing agent measures

Smaller call centers have to overcome the productivity challenge; we really want to keep people busy, but the math in running a small call center doesn’t allow for agents  to occupy the same amount of time as those in larger ones.  In addition, growth and time of day both have to be considered when setting any type of performance objectives.    Conventional wisdom in most call centers is to focus on the things within the agent’s control – e.g., schedule adherence and quality.   This is also true in small call centers, but is often a challenge of because technology and resource limitations.   While lack of technology can be overcome to some degree with spreadsheets and desktop recorders, the fact that small call centers typically have to be more flexible makes line- in- the-sand agent measures more challenging.

In most cases, small call center agents are required to wear several hats that move them outside of the normal inbound measured activities.  For example, a lack of internal transfer options will lead to more outbound follow-up calls to complete transactions that require additional coordination.  And, don’t forget about the time that has to be taken to actually get to the resolution.  

There are several other activities that tend to make small call center agents behave differently – fax/printer duties, manual paperwork for internal communication, last-minute break changes to handle the queues, managing back-line/voicemail, etc.    With fewer resources to manage the customer service processes, smaller call centers have to get creative -- resulting in some slight changes to typical agent expectations.  

An important stating point is really understanding what the expectations should be and dividing them between ACD and non-ACD activities.   ACD activities are easy to measure and typically are automated – you can get reports on just about everything an agent does from the time they log in to the time they log out.    The non-ACD activities are harder to track and often ignored in favor of the things you can get out of the phone system with just a click of the mouse.   Understanding the real expectations of  agents allows you to use the ACD reports but find a way to balance them with all of the other non-phone activities required.    Too often, small call center leaders set ACD goals with the best intentions that end up forcing agents to behave in ways that are actually counterproductive to providing great service.    

 Understand what growth really means to your environment

As the company grows, so does the call center – in fact, once the value of the center is realized, more activities get centralized and the call center begins to grow faster than the other parts of the organization.    Small call centers typically have a very tight workplace community – everyone knows each other’s strengths and habits.   Change is easy to make when call centers are small and just about everyone can be included.   The smallness allows the environment to be managed without a lot of documentation or policies -- things just seem to work because everyone knows what’s happening.

Leaders of small call centers must avoid becoming a victim of compliancy and believing they can cut corners because everything is running fine without all the “formalities”.     Without formal processes and documentation, growth becomes difficult, change is harder for everyone and the clean-up effort is painful.    A simple way to get started is to approach things from a new center perspective.  Ask yourself, if you were going to duplicate your activities in another city, what would  the new center need to know to be successful?  Create teams to document your standard work processes, agent expectations and scheduling rules.   Just getting them down on paper is eye-opening for small call centers, as it allows them to begin to rethink the way things have always been done.  

Start with understanding the drivers – what are the things that cause customers to call, and how has that been trending?  The drivers are the very high level company activities (sales, shipments, customers, etc.) that will increase or decrease over time.   Getting to the root cause of the call (the driver) will allow you to begin to create new opportunities to improve efficiency and is a great way to show the center’s value to others in the organization.   For example, if you’re able to reduce the driver to call ratio from 50 percent to 40 percent through better training, first-call resolution, and leadership, you can easily correlate this to an improvement in satisfaction and support cost savings.   Documentation of the ongoing improvements in your processes helps get the attention of everyone in the organization and makes support for new initiatives much easier to obtain.

Develop your internal improvement agents

Large companies typically have teams of people that are continually looking for new ways to become more productive and effective.   A continuous improvement approach can save large companies millions every year while improving the quality of work/life for the frontline agents.     The annual budget of many small call centers is less than a million dollars, so the improvement attention and resources are typically disbursed to the other areas of the organization that have the most potential bottom line impact.    This leaves the leaders of small call centers trying to balance the day to day running of the business with the challenge of improving the operational efficiencies – and, normally keeping the business running takes priority.

A way to help get more “eyes” on the improvement opportunities is to help frontline agents view their job differently.    Provide them training that focuses on life from the customer’s perspective and how small internal changes can make the overall experience better.  Help them connect the dots between happy customers, improved efficiencies, profitable growth and ultimately more opportunities for call center job opportunities.    Soon you’ll have an internal team of customer advocates looking for new ways to learn from each interaction.      If every agent sees every contact as an opportunity to grow the business, they’ll be more passionate about their job and more aware of their role as an ambassador of improvement.   

Creating this mindset change must come from the top, and starts with a continuous feedback and recognition loop that is focused on frontline generated improvements.   Allowing the frontline to create, participate in and actually run a frontline driven program requires a commitment of time, and if done right, will provide a return on investment in several forms: happier customers, improved employee satisfaction and reduced cost.  An easy way to get started is to ask the frontline to identify a “top-three” list – what three things are we doing internally that are causing customers to call?   Keep it simple and focused on the opportunity – changing the way something is done or communicated.  By allowing the front line to meet and discuss these opportunities, you quickly have a laundry list of “avoidable” call activities.  And, you’ll find that many of them are easy fixes with immediate return.  

Be careful to not go overboard with WFM and quality

The majority of workforce management (WFM) and quality “how to” books and papers are written from a large call center point of view.    The reason for this is simple: larger call centers typically have the budget and challenges that make automated WFM and quality monitoring tools a requirement.    These tools help larger call centers ensure they have the appropriate number of people available and that they’re saying and doing things that are consistent with the organizations policies and customers’ expectations.   Larger call centers often have dedicated teams to manage both programs and some even have sub-teams under each, creating a more granular focus on what’s scheduled and said.   These processes allow larger call centers to continually redefine the way work is routed and how agents are trained, leading to more specialization and efficiencies.

Small call centers typically don’t have the luxury of segmenting callers to specific agents in ways that make them more efficient.   As a result, all calls eventually end up being handled by the same pool of agents – any specialization efficiency gets lost in the generalist overflow.    When agents are required to wear many hats, there has to be more flexibility in the expectations – a quality program that is too focused on scripts and exactness can quickly lead to frustration and conflict.    With a smaller agent pool, the scheduling process must be flexible enough to overcome last minute changes or unexpected call fluctuations.   A WFM process focused on always having the exact number of bodies in chairs can quickly backfire in small call centers, creating environments of continuous push and pull.    With less workload predictability and fewer frontline agents required to handle more transactions, smaller call centers must be more flexible in how they approach the documented best practices in quality and WFM.    Both are a key enabler to success in call centers of all sizes, but leaders of small centers need to spend extra time outlining the potential pitfalls of becoming too inflexible.

Quality programs should be focused more on improving the environment than on managing  agents.  In smaller call centers, it’s easy to know who isn’t providing quality – in some cases everyone can hear it, and in others, agents find themselves cleaning up after the same people.   When the opportunities surface, a quality score isn’t going to change the behavior; more attention and feedback will help identify the root cause.   The real opportunity is to take the quality program and evaluate every call from the customer’s perspective and ask yourself what could we (the company) do better next time.   The same is true on the WFM side – adherence to schedule  as a score isn’t effective if it doesn’t reflect the reality of the environment.   Because agents in small call centers are often pulled to do a lot of other things during the day, the adherence score isn’t as important as spending time helping agents understand what the appropriate behaviors should be and allowing agents to apply more ownership to their daily activities.  

Accomplishing this starts with creating an awareness of the difference between the real-time customer service requirements of a call center and delayed queuing environments.   Call centers require a more immediate response, and there is a science to making these responses happen within seconds at every interval of the day.   Everyone plays a role in the success, and small call center leaders have to spend time explaining the impact of a single agent and how all the pieces fit together.   Small call center leaders should first become students of call centers by learning the foundational skills very well.  Then, they must evolve into teachers – helping everyone in the organization remain focused on the value of every contact with every caller.

Non-addressed issues are more visible to all

 

Everyone gets to know each other in small call centers – this can be both good and bad.   On one hand, it helps to make it feel more like a team and agents are able to pitch in and help everyone improve.   On the other hand, everyone is able to see who isn’t pulling their weight and not trying to improve for the good of the team.    When you have a group of people all sitting in the same room and talking to each other every day, they’ll eventually run out of personal stories to tell and focus more attention on the activities of the “other” team members.     These conversations quickly evolve from the activity itself to the leadership’s ignorance of the issue and lack of responsiveness.   Once teams start to blame the leadership, everything becomes “their” fault and is the reason nothing gets improved.   

With small call centers becoming like a family, it’s easy for leaders to get caught up in a new kind of parent trap – being too close to the people to see and address the real problems.   Small call center leaders need to develop a formal coaching regiment that ensures every front line agent is receiving improvement feedback at least once a week. With small groups and teams, there is a tendency to eyeball the results vs. spending the time to document results in a scorecard format that ensures all opportunities are addressed and visible.  

 

It takes more than just on-the-job training

A formal training program is a luxury for most small call centers, and because of the low turnover, most new hire training is done one-on-one.  Many small call centers find an additional agent on the phone is more valuable than a full time training resource that can’t be fully occupied because the people that need to be trained will have to be on the phone most of the time.    It’s very difficult to find an hour for a team meeting, much less a week off the phone for a formal class.  This approach leads to a lack of documentation of the standard operation procedures or even an update of the internal knowledge base.  Over time, several ways of doing things will evolve and the internal best practice will be based on who influenced the new person the most.  

Training starts with something that was described earlier – standard processes in place and documented.   The lack of a formal training department or dedicated trainer is not an excuse for not having a clearly defined “on-boarding” program.   These programs can be a combination of one-on-one meetings, private computer-based role plays, agent monitoring and individual testing.   All of these can be easily created from the formal process and documented against an expected time line.     And, the rest of the organization can be an incredible training resource for new front line telephone agents.   A program focused on allowing new agents to spend time with the other departments “walking in their shoes” will reduce the learning curve time and improve their overall confidence when addressing customers.    And, it’s a great way to continually connect with other areas of the organization and facilities an environment of on-going improvement.

 

Create a road map for senior management

One thing small call centers don’t have is a way to overcome the mathematical inefficiency that requires  a significant portion of the  center’s agents  be “sitting around”.   While we can do things to help fill some of the gaps with other types of work, there is nothing we can do to make everyone take a call when senior management ventures through the center.    Senior management is often left with an unsettling feeling that money is being wasted because “half” of the people aren’t on the phone.   Overcoming this mindset starts with educating yourself in queuing theory and using this knowledge to create a simple example of the “why” for senior management.   Spending a couple hours creating some what-if scenarios in an Erlang calculator  will provide you with several new ways to engage executives in appreciating the real complexity of running a small call center.  

Numbers alone won’t get you all of the support you need to move your small call center forward.   Spend some time creating an understating and appreciation for the role you play in the organization’s success.  In every business there is a critical path to profit or fulfillment - -  simply put, the most efficient way for the organization to reach its goal.  For example, for an on-line retailer, the most profitable path would be the customer placing the order on-line, paying online, receiving the exact product when promised and being happy with it.    Any deviation from this path costs the company more money in support as the customer falls off the most efficient way for them to make money.  In this case, every call to the call center costs the organization profit margin.  This is true, but if every one of those calls is viewed as a way to help improve the path for future customers, it’s not all money wasted.  Being able to connect the value of every interaction with the organization’s critical path is key to getting additional support and investments.

 

Technology is becoming easier to obtain, but still never an excuse

Call center technologies are continually evolving and larger call centers are normally the initial beneficiaries of the latest features.   Customer’s expectations also continually evolve as the larger call centers implement the new tools to improve service or internal efficiencies.   This puts smaller centers at somewhat of a disadvantage because the newer technologies are typically priced out of reach, and the center’s limits how much advantage it can ultimately receive.    The good news for small call centers is that a lot of technology companies are paying attention to the largest segment of the market – centers employing fewer than 50 agents – and developing tools that fit these centers’ unique needs.   And, there is resurgence in the hosted solution approach  that allows you to pay as you grow. 

In centers of any size, the technology won’t change anything by itself; you’ve got to create the foundation for success, streamline the processes and have the right people doing the right things.  If done right, technology will make you more efficient, but if done wrong, it can become the crutch and is the scapegoat for everything.

 An advantage in small call centers is being able to create a community of help where agents continually share ideas and tips with others.  Your knowledge base and improvement can come from the interactions and learning that agents have on a daily basis.  Spend time with agents to get a better feel for their special skills and desires – you might just have someone that can create an internal Web-based knowledge tool that everyone can update and share.   Once you begin the path of internal automation, the ROI for external tools becomes much easier to explain and achieve.

Pulling it All Together

Leaders of small call centers must not only master the fundamentals of running call centers, but must also develop creative ways to do those things just a little differently.    There is never a single-size solution – even small call centers can’t do everything exactly the same.  As described above, small call center leaders must spend the time to develop organizations that don’t see themselves limited by size.   If done right, the opposite will evolve – an organization that is only limited by their service imagination.  

 Contact Center Leadership

Team Development Series

Week 9 – Taking the Call Center to the Next Level  

All Readings Authored by:

 

Tim Montgomery, Principal, SLG

210.687.2714

timm@servicelevelgroup.com

Moving Beyond the Queue – Focusing on the Real-Time Customer

Customers are now in control of business, and today’s call centers have the unenviable task of  meeting and managing  customer expectations that are moving at a lightning-fast pace. The shift in control began with companies’ increasing reliance on the Internet, which has given birth to a whole new host of customer complaint (and accolade) tools – e.g., blogs, audio files, YouTube videos, and customer-powered Web sites that focus on satisfaction and dissatisfaction with specific products and services.

Many companies lack the ability to keep up with the new pace of change, and the old ways of establishing yourself as a service leader are no longer effective. Companies now must be sure to establish a culture of customer-centricity, with everyone in the organization trained to understand and appreciate the value of great service – no small feat. In addition, world class companies of today include customers in determining their real-time service expectations, and realize that customers are their new marketing vehicle.

The shift to customer control is so well positioned that many companies have moved away from celebrating survey success to focusing more on critical real-time indicators, such as the customer blogs, Web sites, discussion forums, etc., already alluded to.  By paying more attention to these forums, forward-thinking companies are connecting their processes with the ever-changing expectations of those they serve.  Gone are the days where a 95% satisfaction rate is something to brag about – in fact, if you’re an eBay seller, anything below a 98% satisfaction rating will push people away.   We’re in an era where consumers expect multimillion dollar companies to  be able to provide service that is just as friendly and personalized as that provided by the small mom and pop shop down the street. Thus, the new challenge for call centers is getting everyone in the center to think of themselves as providing “mom and pop” type service.  This may sound like an unrealistic endeavor, but the fact is, top companies are doing it and using it to create additional competitive advantage with every interaction. 

What follows are ideas on ways companies can refocus themselves on the new “real-time” customer and use customers in new ways to provide the organization with valuable information on what’s really happening.   By appreciating the real-time customer and understanding the right things on which to focus, companies can position themselves for success in this new era of service.   Best of all, the call center is well positioned to be the key enabler of success in this new era of customer control. 

Five Attributes of the Best “Real-Time Customer” Call Centers

1) They are proactive in providing resolutions – no complaint required.  

Let’s face it, most customer service activities are not generated by a customer that just wants to commend you for providing a wonderful product or service.   The call center is generally the place the customer looks to issue or problem resolution.   Armed with this realization, the best call centers are finding new ways to get out in front of the issue – using real-time information to generate proactive resolutions.  

Something we’ve all experienced at one time or another is the loss of a cable signal or a power outage.  Our first reaction is to contact the company to let them know there is a problem, and most of the time scores of other people have already done so – the recording tells you so.    Every call center can learn something from the utility companies – when you see trends from a certain customer profile, do something in advance.  Don’t wait for an issue that impacts a small portion of your customers to become a problem for all of your customers. If you do, everyone will suffer because of the increase in volume.   

2) They are focused on employee loyalty as much as on customer loyalty.  

It’s amazing how many times the same story gets written – happier employees provide better service.    Unfortunately, many call centers forget this and spend their time focused on increasing customer satisfaction scores while trying to control the agent efficiency metrics.   This often results in a vicious cycle that features a lot of finger pointing with very little improvement in either customer satisfaction or agent efficiency; in fact both often move in a negative direction.   

Let’s face it, the call center rep isn’t the most glamorous or desired job in the company.  Our industry turnover rates prove this. Often agents’ plans involve “doing their time” then moving to a job off the phones.

 The best companies treat the agent position with the respect it deserves – viewing agents as “voice of the company.”    It’s no surprise that organizations that are known for providing great service have lower turnover rates and happier employees.  You have to spend the time understanding what your employees want; you’ll find that call center reps are pretty simple.  They’d love to come to work and have some expectation of their daily workload, be provided the tools to be successful and have more flexibility.   All this can be accomplished by moving from managing the queues to managing the process. Every call center can do this, but the reality is, most make it a lot harder than it has to be.

3) They are visual in their dedication to customer service and the people that provide it.  

Celebrating a win is normally reserved for a sports team, but it is also a key enabler to successful customer service.  The reality is that call center agents have several “wins” every day that should be discussed, documented and rewarded.   It starts with helping agents to see things from the customer’s perspective, then, empowering them to make decisions and make a difference. Let agents know that it is okay to make mistakes as long as the best interest of the customer is the root cause.    Be sure to reward the effort, and to share successes with others.

Meetings with agents are often driven by a new initiative or a desire to “educate” them on everything that has happened since the last meeting.   A great way to create a “visual” dedication to service is to schedule quick daily or weekly “win” meetings, where the entire team can tell others about the wonderful things they did for customers since the last meeting. Everyone learns and starts to see the value of going above and beyond.  The leadership team can reinforce this by making wins a part of their daily discussions – followed by rewards and celebrations.   The best part for agents is that they’ll quickly realize they are in control of their own wins and that they have several opportunities to win every day.    Everyone benefits – the agents, the organization and, most importantly, the customer.

4) They are in-touch with their customer’s real feelings and involve them in products and solutions.

As mentioned earlier, top call centers pay more attention to what their customers are saying on blogs, YouTube, discussion forums, etc.   These customers used to be dismissed as “complainers” and not the “target” audience; today, however, they are now viewed as the real influencers.  Their postings often point out the real problems and opportunities that don’t show up in customer satisfaction survey results.   

One of the best ways to really understand how your customers feel is to send them a three-question survey:  1. What did you like about the last interaction; 2. What didn’t you like;   3. What can we do better next time.     Then, once you hear back from customers, follow-up and do something….real-time.

5) They are fanatical about leadership and provide the tools for success.

 A common mistake in call centers is not investing in the growth of the leaders.  Call centers do a significant amount of internal promotion – moving agents into supervisor or management positions, but few call centers have the luxury of formal one-on-one development or mentoring programs to grow new supervisors.   Most call centers often find themselves at the lower end of the maturity model -- few people in the organization with a formal understanding of the foundational requirements of call center leadership.   This knowledge gap makes it harder for new and upcoming leaders to gain a full appreciation of what it takes to effectively navigate the call center waters.  

You would never expect a fireman to be able to do their job without spending a significant amount of time training, learning and practicing.   While call centers don’t put leaders in life or death situations, several managers say they spend a significant amount of time putting out fires.   Every organization should develop a formal on-boarding program for new leaders -- a plan that outlines the training programs, policies and evaluation criteria.   By documenting the expected activities and holding monthly progress meetings, your new leaders will be engaged in the activity that makes every person (and organization) better – continuous improvement.   Once you’ve done it just a few times, you’ll create the internal mentors with the expertise to transfer the right knowledge to your upcoming leaders.

Communicating the “Real” Value of the Call Center

Don’t just measure – create action.

The majority of call centers are very metrics-oriented – measuring everything because they can.  Metrics reporting is one of the fasting growing segments of the call center technology industry.     Many times we overload call center agents and leaders with numbers to the point that no one really knows where they are or what to improve.   Call centers need to make it easy for everyone to understand what’s really happening now and what needs to change, and to provide such information on a real-time basis along with the required actions.   Given the number of disparate systems, pulling everything together is no easy task. However, the best companies are findings ways to make this happen.

Clearly defining the desired behaviors is especially important at the agent level, as their behaviors are what the customers’ experience.   Metrics are simply indicators of opportunities that something needs to change.    Leaders in the best call centers know they must connect with agents on a level that makes them want to change their behavior, not just the metrics.    Often the hardest part of making this transition isn’t getting the agents onboard, but changing the mindset and behaviors of the leadership team.   The entire leadership team must have a complete understanding of the basics of call center management activities that drive results – queuing theory, forecasting, planning, staffing, occupancy, quality and adherence.   And, they have to know this like the back of their hand -- it’s the price of admission to becoming world class.

Focus on First-contact resolution 

Improvements in first-contact resolution (FCR) rates can be directly correlated to improvements in customer loyalty, employee delight, operational efficiencies and sales growth. In other words, FCR hits both the top and bottom line.   Some companies struggle with this because they say it’s hard to get the real numbers – not so, just ask your customers that have called.   This can be done via post-contact IVR surveys, email surveys or phone surveys.    Make it simple by just asking them if they got what they needed the first time they requested it.   

More important than the FCR metric itself is understanding the success drivers   and foundational elements that must be in place.   If you’re not meeting your service level on a regular basis (by interval), you’ll never see improvements in FCR, as frustrated callers will hang up and call back later.  They’ll rate you low because you didn’t solve the issue on their first call to you.    Even if you get the service level part right, if you’re not providing quality, customers will be forced to call back because they don’t feel comfortable with the resolution, or because what was promised didn’t happen.   Ultimately, the lack of quality will negatively impact service level and vice versa – resulting in no actual FCR improvement. 

Look beyond up-selling and cross-selling to create enterprise wide value. 

Conversations about creating value in a call center are often limited to the amount of new revenue opportunities the center can create. Centers then start to focus on cross-selling or up-selling activities.   It’s true that call centers can become sources of additional revenue, but not without getting the foundational things right.    Many companies have invested heavily in agent training to give them skills to “sell”, but fail on creating an environment where the customer will be receptive to the offering.   If the customer doesn’t feel valued, offering them new opportunities will just drive them further from the organization.

The best call centers know that the real value of the call center is in every interaction.   .   After each call, train agents to ask such questions as “How can we avoid making customers call us about this issue in the future?” and “Who else in the organization would benefit from hearing the real voice of the customer?”   These two simple questions will unlock a tremendous amount of value for your call center. Your customers are telling you what they really want hundreds of times a day.   The key is to create a way for your agents to pass along critical information that can lead to quick and meaningful action.

Create a roadmap for everyone.

One thing call centers don’t have is a way to overcome the mathematical inefficiency that actually requires a portion of the center’s agents to always be “sitting around”.   While we can do things to help fill some of the gaps with other types of work, there is nothing we can do to make everyone take a call when senior management ventures through the center.    Management is often left with an unsettling feeling that money is being wasted because some of the people aren’t on the phone.   Overcoming this mindset starts with educating yourself in queuing theory and using this knowledge to explain things in laymen terms to senior management.   Spending a couple of hours creating some what-if scenarios in an Erlang calculator will provide you with several new ways to engage executives in appreciating the real complexity of running a  call center.  

Numbers alone won’t get you all of the support you need to move your center forward.   Spend some time creating an understanding and appreciation for the role you play in the organization’s success.  In every business there is a critical path to profit or fulfillment - - simply put, the most efficient way for the organization to reach its goal.  For example, in the case of an online retailer, the most profitable path would be the customer placing the order online, paying online, receiving the exact product when promised and being happy with it.    Any deviation from this self-service path (i.e., phone calls) costs the company more money in support. .     This is true, but if every one of those phone calls is viewed as a way to help improve the path for future customers, it’s not all money wasted.  Being able to connect the value of every interaction with the organization’s critical path is key to getting additional support and investments.

How to Make Others Want to Move Forward

“Senior management just doesn’t understand.” That’s a battle cry 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. The recommended response is always the same: It’s the job of call center leaders to get them to understand, and you can’t stop until everyone appreciates the value and dynamics of our real-time inbound environment.  The easiest solution is making it happen in targeted, digestible chunks. I’ve worked with many smart people who, for one reason or another, have adopted a “keeping your head above water” approach to call center management.

The truth is that many senior executives with call center responsibilities have never run a call center. In many cases, they’re focused on 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.

Lay the foundation by getting yourself up to speed

First and foremost, you need to be on top of your game. Make sure that you are able 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.   

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 current as well. 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)  Another way to keep abreast of the latest trends is to subscribe to – and actually read – as many industry publications as you can. There are lots of free ones 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, look 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