Need Your Help
We need your help please.
Let me tell you why. You have probably received some
industry "white papers" in your inbox from time to time.
In most of the cases if you look deeply enough into the
methodology used to collect the data you will find that
the responses received were few in number and often
skewed (biased) toward certain groups of call centers,
and the person collecting the data collects the data
only from people s/he knows in the
industry personally. This is not a good methodology
because if the sample is skewed then the extrapolation
to the industry as a whole cannot be done with
precision. This usually does not stop people from doing
it anyway. So we have launched our own survey, asking
for your response, since as a reader you are a random
and stratified sample. This means that if enough of you
participate, then we can with some level of confidence
extrapolate to the call center industry or particular
sectors. However, we need for you to participate in
order to get our response rate up. I know you have
survey fatigue. I know that you have filled out surveys
in the past only to receive a year or two worth of
advertisements from those folks making you wish you had
never filled out the survey to begin with. Not here. No
sir no ma'am. We just want you to share your information
with us so we can provide good information right back to
you in this newsletter. It is anonymous and it is that
simple. No advertising, nothing like that. And the
survey is just one page long and takes about 3.287
minutes to complete it. So I am asking for your
participation, please, so that we can begin to provide
you and the rest of the fine folks in the industry with
some good, solid, reliable and trustworthy data without
a bunch of back end in advertising. Just click on the link
below to fill out the survey. I thank you.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Ao5IAuJge5nJmE39L1mznw_3d_3d
Bad Apples
I was completing research
on a project recently and ran across an article from
February 2007. Researchers from the University of
Washington were looking at group dynamics. They found
that if one person in a group was a "bad apple" the
whole group suffered. This finding came about when a
group which was normally disheartened had one member of
their team out sick for a week or so. During the absence
the team morale increased, people were polite, happy and
productive. Once the worker came back, everything
quickly slipped into the former bad environment.
Interestingly, the researchers also found that for every
good apple you have does not counteract the bad apple.
It takes three or more positive, uplifting, and team
players to counteract one bad apple. So what do you do
if you have a bad apple in your organization? The
researchers suggest that you isolate them away from a
group where they can do little or no harm and if
that fails and there are no other alternatives, you let that person go.
Does this ring true for your call center? My
recommendation is slightly different from that of the
researchers. First you try to work with the person, if
they fail to respond then isolate them, do not give them
a raise or any sort of bonus, and then if improvement
fails, in short order fire them. Nothing will boost the morale of the total call center operation than when they
hear that the bad apple has been asked not to return
from lunch. Or better yet, pre-screen your employees
before hiring them (see FurstPerson Ad above and to the
left for example) so that you get good fruit to begin
with.
60 Ideas in 60
Minutes Round V
For an introduction to the
"60 Ideas in 60 Minutes" essays, or to read previously
published rounds, please visit our archives and start
with
Volume 2, Issue 22 of In Queue.
David L. Butler-Besides
creating a career path for yourself you should career
path everyone in your contact center. I have been doing
research in contact centers for 13 years now and the top
three reasons agents give for why they work in call
centers in priority order are the following: benefits,
pay, and then a career path. If you don’t career path
your agents then the best ones you have that can and
will promote up fast are the ones that you will lose the
fastest. This means then that your total call center
performance will go down. So find a way to get the best
people, even if they become your boss later on, move
them up and around and keep them within the organization
if they are good.
William (Bill) Durr-So
how many workforce management people are in the audience
this morning? This one is kind of for you, even though
you may not like it. How many contact centers, after you
have had a couple of bad hours, or even a couple of bad
days, of service level attempt to make the numbers look
better by over overachieving on service level for the
remainder of the day? Or the remainder of the week? Oh
boy. Even when the volume spike goes away, the workforce
management team beavers away cancelling training and
one-on-one coaching in order to post very high service
level numbers. You know the game they are playing. They
are trying to make it look good for the executives. You
cannot make up on bad service level. The customers that
experience the bad service level are not in the queue
later on in the day or the next day experience
sub-second response times. You can’t make it up; you are
only playing games with yourselves. Stop it!
Penny Reynolds-I
agree with Bill. And if you don’t have time to go back
and get your MBA (in reference past issue of newsletter), at
least brush up on some math skills and understand where
to apply what math function where to what numbers. And
one of the dangers in the call center is just using
averages. Taking all of the numbers, adding them all
together and there is your average and here is your
performance. We do that with service level numbers
throughout the day and we are trying to get to that
magic number at the end of the day and you may have
periods that are horrible, others that you are cheating
on to balance out the early part of the day, and you are
relaxing because you get an average at the end of the
day. Or even worse the end of the week or the end of the
month. So be aware of averaging that is an approach that
is overused maybe because it is easy and you don’t know
any higher math, but looking at doing that with service
levels over the day or looking at quality scores or it
may be that a rep is doing fine on three different areas
but one area really sucks and their overall quality
score is OK so we are not going to worry much with them.
Or you are looking at team scores or team performance
and there is one individual who is bringing down the
group yet the average is OK. So be wary of overusing the
averaging approaches. My next two ideas will give you
different math approaches to try.
Garry Schultz-I am
not getting to many of my points because they are saying
things that I need to respond to. That is all fine and
dandy, but in a real operation you have to use averages.
When you are dealing with millions of calls and
thousands and thousands of contacts per hour you’ve got
to go to averages. And yes, you occasionally get into a
situation where you are under-serving your customers. I
think what needs to be done then is to pay attention to
the averages because that is the broad scale that is
going to tell you how you are doing but then consider
some way to handle that traffic. So some of the things
we have done are traffic calming techniques. Getting
customers to call at times that are more opportune for
us. We’ve changed our business hours for instance. We
have put messaging on the IVR and on the internet saying
“look don’t call us Eastern Standard Time noon to 2,
call us at this time.” We put in priority queues, that
sort of thing. So averages are your friend, you need to
listen to them, but what you really need to do is
respond to the averages and take corrective action and
try and get your customers to call you when you can best
serve them.
Chris Crosby-We
actually did a newsletter the other month highlighting
why service level is the epitome of all evil in a
contact center. Things like ASA and service level when
you look at the math they really don’t tell you much.
And like Bill said, then you overstaff to meet service
level. Then the real question is if service level sucks,
then what do you look at? What we did, and I can thank
one of our customers for this, is they said they wanted
to see an outlier report. We want you to look at our
customer’s call detail and put together what that
customer’s call experience looks like. And what we came
up with is what is something that looks like, you
probably can’t see this in the back, but it is a bell
curve. So imagine across the bottom here is your number
of calls answered in X number of seconds. They also did
this with AHT. So instead of looking at average handle
time you if have customers that spend two hours on the
phone it is going to skew your average. So look at your
distribution of the calls versus trying to set a number
or an average and hit that target. Look at your
outliers.
Kevin Hegebarth-I
want to riff on the vendor thing for just a minute
because as a vendor it is something that is very
valuable to me. Where we can actually serve our customer
community much better is host us in your call center for
a day. Host all of your vendors in your call center for
a day. Have a vendor day, a vendor fair. Call it
whatever you want. Let us come in and observe your
operation. Not in a sales environment because when we
come in we want to sell you stuff, we want your money,
that is part of our job. Your job is that you want your
customer’s money, right? This is an opportunity for us
to really learn about your operations and if we go to
each one of you and learn about your operations we
become much more responsive as a vendor, we develop
products and services and capabilities and support that
better satisfies you as our customer. Host us in your
call center. Invite us in for a day, all of us, all of
us that supply products and services to you.
Honest People
I was recently in
Dallas-Ft. Worth meeting with an new NACC Underwriter
(oops, did I disclose that) and had my car parked on top
of the parking garage. When I came out after storm with
high winds, I found a note under the windshield wiper
that is shown below.

If you cannot read it, the
note says
"The wind blew my door
wide open as I was opening it & it put a small ding in
your door. Call me (214.207-****) if you'd like me to
contact my insurance
company to take care of it."
The then note was signed. Most of the dents in my car
and truck from parking lots have no notes left.
Interestingly, I could not find the dent the person was
referring to on either side of the car. They did not
have to leave the note, there were no cameras watching
them. They just left the note because it was the right
thing to do. And I applaud them for it. I called them,
thanked them for their honesty, told them it was
refreshing, that I could not find the damage on the car,
and don't worry about it. If more people were
forthcoming as this person was, life would be much nicer
and easier I think.
Call Center Comics

If you like this comic and
would like to see more write Ozzie at
callcentercomics@yahoo.com and visit his website at
http://callcentercomics.com/cartoon_categories.htm
or just click on the comic to take you to his page. The
NACC appreciates Ozzie letting us use some of his comics
in our newsletter.
To view past issues of In Queue, please
click here.
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Copyright 2008 National Association of Call Centers
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