Next Generation Call Centers

Kathleen Peterson

Call centers need to mature and move onto their next phase of development before the customer – business-to-business and consumer - gives up on us. Here are the seven hot topics, common to call centers across the world, you need to get right to make that bridge to the new world of customer-friendly contact centers. I hope you will find this list of use as a skeleton framework on which to construct your own transformational plans.

1. Turnover Around the world in call centers this issue comes up over and over. Consider the fact that human resources represent between sixty-five and seventy-five percent of call center budgets. Up to fifteen percent or more may be used for recruiting, interviewing, testing and training. The estimated cost of hiring a new agent ranges from $5,000.00 on the low end to $15,000.00 on the high end.

Turnover is certainly expensive. It is also dangerous for the customer. Customers do not want to be part of your training program, but if you can't retain staff, the result is agents who may not meet the needs of the customer. From the customer view, whether your turnover is caused by internal or external factors, high turnover leads to a degradation of the quality of interaction with your agents, as the customer does not have access to the knowledge he or she expects from your agents.

In the customer-focused world, call centers must measure turnover from the customer perspective not the enterprise perspective. If the call center is the breeding ground for people to move onto other departments, as is often the case, we must keep a focus on percentage of agents with zero to three months experience, three to six months, six to nine, nine to twelve etc.

Determine what is a logical configuration and plan accordingly. Needless to say, what you don't want is a call center with all agents having less than six months experience. So, if 'length of tenure' is not yet a measure that you associate with the center's performance and is not presented among your management figures, there is a strong case for making that information visible so you can identify problems and act on them.

Recruit for the specific needs of your center. Spend some time defining competencies. Understand the type of transactions you handle and what skills are required to perform those tasks. Study your best performers and create a model for ongoing recruitment.

In today's reality of record low levels of unemployment we must become increasingly creative in our recruiting practices. Look to your existing staff. If your operation is well run and successful, your existing staff must act as advocates in the marketplace. If the existing staff is not referring others to your employ you must ask why not? You must act on overall improvement strategies to create an appealing environment and career path, which takes us to point two.

(Editor's note: Borrow ideas from non call center environments. For example, Southwest Airlines employees carry 'people like us' cards with them. When they meet people who they feel reflect the right values and personality for the organization - honesty, integrity, supportiveness, fun, dynamism etc.- they hand them a card and suggest they try for a job at Southwest).

2. Career Path One method of reducing turnover is creating a career path. A career path is something that keeps staff in the center and creates opportunities for advancement. It may begin simply by creating levels within agent positions.

Agent level one may still be at a trainee level, handling only certain call types. A competency audit, assessment or test must be passed prior to moving to level two. Compensation is adjusted according to ability to contribute. Use of tools like skill-based routing can further the development of these programs.

However in many of these models agents are taking calls sooner in the training process and may require trainers to be able to take over the calls. In the career path model the trainers are part of the call center and serve some number of hours monthly on the phone to keep their skills honed.

The career path may lead to roles as supervisors, managers or expert agents. When the program is well defined, the agents have the opportunity to participate in designing their destiny within your organization. Human resources must partner with the call center when developing the plan, because often we will need to change existing limitations on compensation plans. When you calculate the cost of lost resources, the expense of additional compensation is in most cases actually minuscule.

The set up of the operation may also be a limitation on establishing a career path. Call centers that have moved to cross-functional teams have more control over the transaction and more opportunities to serve and develop. Take the case of a bottled water company that combines customer service, inside sales and collections on the same team. Ultimately each team member can function in each capacity. The team size is six people, so there are also clear opportunities to advance to management. However, some people don't want management. For those folks there is a clear path to expert agent with equally attractive compensation packages.

3. Performance Measurements This is another hot area and interestingly enough one that in many cases also contributes to high turnover rates. The days of the metric-driven, productivity-based performance models are over...or should be!

The call center has a huge amount of data to evaluate, everything from calling patterns to individual agent performance. What are we really looking for? In the words of my good friends, Brad Cleveland and Gordon MacPhearson from the Incoming Call Management Institute (ICMI): "What we want is people doing the right things at the right times."

This is true on the center level as well as the individual level. Are we sending the right messages to our frontline staff about doing the right things - "call that quality", as Brad would say. What is involved in that? Managers must send the right message.

A classic conflict is: does the agent do the work now or do it later - thereby avoiding any after call work. Avoid the old-style call center management error of equating number of calls with productivity. Quality must always take priority over quantity, otherwise we will increase our errors and rework and productivity goes down even though quantity may be going up.

Management sends the message so be careful to ask for the right things. If you ask for fifteen calls per hour, guess what will happen? You will get it! Even if it means hanging up on callers to deliver the metric. Nevertheless managers actually celebrate "catching" agents hanging up on callers, firing them and then righteously carrying on as if they have changed something. You only fixed the symptom. Take another look; in most cases the agents are actually only attempting to give you what you requested. Demand quality.

Understand that the metrics from the telephone system cannot measure quality, they are purely quantitative measures. The metrics will certainly help us determine if our people are available; that is their log on time - the "at the right time" - part of the equation. "Contribution to Capacity" is a better term to describe adherence.

We must communicate to our staff they are a critical part of a capacity model, a team pulling together, and they must be present to make the model work. Most agents respond positively when it is explained to them this way: They are not simply an individual taking calls; they create a model. When the model is corrupted, delays increase, so the customer suffers, but occupancy also increases so the other staff members must handle more calls than were defined in the plan. This, in turn, causes staff who are where they are supposed to be to suffer. So this is a team measure as well as an individual measure.

Beware of establishing performance measures that actually cause quality problems. Use metrics wisely as part of a bigger picture with quality as the primary goal. I am not suggesting we do not utilize data for individual measures, I am suggesting we do not use "targets". Define acceptable ranges for performance, utilizing statistical control charts, and hold these measures up to the quality and accuracy scores. Keep a balanced scorecard for the center and the agents.

4. Customer Relationship Management The customer relationship management "craze" will provide the software solutions to creating better quality measures. Call centers equipped with one of these applications will be able to measure, on an individual basis, the quality of transactions. How many of the customers handled by a particular agent result in a second or third call? What is the individual's accuracy percentage, how often do errors occur within their calls etc. This will help us identify our true best performers, while sending a clear message about what is really important within the contact center.

As managers we must be prepared to allow the time required to build these systems properly, train the staff appropriately and allow the time it takes to enter the information that will drive the engine. These tools are going to revolutionize the approach we take to measuring call center performance.

5. Morale Morale: call it employee satisfaction, call it energy, call it culture. Whatever you call it, good morale is the result of a well-run center and poor morale is the result of a poorly-run center. If you want a motivated work force you must look beyond the parties and prizes. These routines and activities are most effective in the best-run operations. In a poorly run center attempting to improve morale with games and parties will often fuel a cynical response, not a positive one. It is not the job of management to motivate people. It is the job of management to create an environment in which people can be motivated.

Look to the organization: are we functioning in a way that allows people to learn and contribute? The upcoming generations will require that jobs offer learning opportunities. Once people are learning more it enhances their ability to contribute. Contribution has often been defined as a basic human need. If we meet the needs of our staff, morale goes up and that can only be good for our customers. How well is your organization addressing these issues? Many people conduct surveys to analyze levels of staff satisfaction. If you conduct these types of surveys be sure you are prepared to act on the data, or you will simply be generating a further morale problem. Communication is central to good morale. Even when times are tough a solid open communication strategy will serve the morale of the environment very well.

6. Technology We are in the age of explosive technological developments. Many are aimed at the customer service/call center industry. This is good news and bad news. We must always be clear on what type of problem we are trying to solve. Is it a people problem or a technology problem? People can't solve technology problems and technology can't solve people problems. If our handle times are off the map because system response time is slow, no amount of incentives or efficiency gains on the part of the agent can correct this. The problem must be attacked at the source.

When attending trade shows for this industry, I am amazed by the claims vendors make. There are claims of improved productivity, slashing costs, and reduction in turnover rates. They are claiming to do everything better, faster and cheaper. The really bizarre thing is you can visit the booth of a telephone system vendor, workforce management vendor, customer relationship management software vendor, computer telephony integration vendor - all making the same claims. It is scary.

Take the case of the insurance company examining a very expensive, very intelligent call distribution system to move calls between ten sites. All of this for the small sum of around five million dollars. The agent positions in these call centers were utilizing green screen (dumb) terminals. They had no customer record to speak of, an insane number of calls were repeat calls because claims had not been paid or had been paid incorrectly.

When the executive committee was asked what they hoped the new five million dollar distribution system would accomplish, they hesitated then responded - "Quality, it will improve quality". Interesting - how will it do that? A panicked executive shot a look at the chief technology office and demanded "Bob - how will it do that?" No offense, this is scary. What they managed to accomplish was: Smart Distribution to Dumb Terminals.

Who cares? Customers don't care how intelligent your distribution is if, when the customer gets to an agent, they have no record of customer activity, have to scroll through deep archives of data with little ease and lots of frustration. Never mind if the repeat calls were eliminated and the requirement for ten centers may be eliminated. Remember no distribution, no matter how intelligent, will mask poor systems. If I had the five million I would spend it on the desktop. However the desktop is infinitely more complicated a task to undertake and not nearly as sexy. Beware of the seduction of claims of technological quick fixes; you could end up with simply a more expensive response, not necessarily a better one.

Just for the record, I am not anti technology. I recognize that we have great tools available to us and to our customers. However, I have seen enough in this marketplace to know it takes time and thoughtful consideration when acquiring technologies to be certain they will actually solve the problem or enhance the experience of the customer.

7. Management Finally, the topic of management in call centers is the new frontier. The requirements of management are changing dramatically. The operations are becoming more sophisticated as well as more visible in the enterprise. All the hot topics we examined are ultimately influenced by the way management responds.

Customer service managers and call center managers must begin to stretch up and across the enterprise. Managers of front line operations often adopt a victim mentality. This behavior must be eradicated. We complain that executives don't reach down to the front line operations. Well, we must also be stretching up.

Managers of front line operations must link the operation to the success of the enterprise; link the call center objectives to those of the enterprise as a whole. Study compensation, planning staff and span of control. Practice making a business case for changes that will enhance your ability to run the operation.

We must review the selection and development process for new managers. In many cases on Friday you're a rep. Your manager informs you: on Monday you will be a supervisor and somehow we hope the "management fairy" visits over the weekend, because we offer no training for this position. This is all too common. Often we get lucky; it may be just as often we don't. Formalize the promotion process, invest in management training and be certain the candidates understand the call center operation.

We could continue this discussion onto organizational design and span of control, but alas space does not allow. Remember, almost all issues are management issues - we must finetune our skills, groom our up and comers, and prepare for the higher levels of opportunity that await us. We do not want to wake up one day and find the company has gone outside for the first vice president or director of customer service, never having even considered an insider because you hadn't demonstrated readiness at the enterprise level.

Kathleen Peterson is a leading call center consultant and visionary who has helped organizations on both sides of the Atlantic improve their call center's performance. She is Chief Vision Officer, PowerHouse Consulting