Survey Results Yield Equal Shares Optimism, Pessimisms
By Paul Stockford, NACC
Advisory Board Member
About a month ago we
launched what I hope will be the first of many surveys
this year that will provide NACC members and the readers
of this newsletter with greater insight into what your
colleagues in the industry are thinking and/or doing.
Unfortunately the response to this first survey was less
than stellar and I’m not sure why.
The survey was designed to be completed in less than 3
minutes and as I promised, no respondent to the survey
was contacted by me, vendors, salespeople, charities,
collection agencies, political fundraisers, aliens,
religious groups, non-profits, for-profits, consultants
or other undesirables. In fact, responses were
completely anonymous.
If you’re snapping your fingers right now and saying to
yourself, “Darn, I meant to do that survey,” it’s not
too late. If you click on the link below and give us 3
minutes of your time, we’ll still be happy to have your
participation.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Ao5IAuJge5nJmE39L1mznw_3d_3d.
Reviewing the results
of the survey provided some interesting insights. I’ve
written about some of these findings in the NACC blog
under the title “Smarter than the Average Manager.” If
you’re interested in seeing how your colleagues
responded to some of the survey questions, follow the
link below and please feel free to leave us your
comments on this or any of the previous postings. Your
input and opinions are always welcomed.
http://nationalcallcenters.typepad.com/nacc_blog/.
Walk-in Contact Centre?
A recent newspaper
reported an interesting happening in Swansea. Normally Swansea, which is in Wales, UK, would not
normally grab my attention, however, my sister is
currently working on a Masters degree in this town so
the article intrigued me. As I read the article, I began
to scratch my head in wonder.
This article reported as its title "Swansea 'walk-in'
contact centre proves to be a hit." This was odd to me
for several reasons. One, a contact centre to me is a
location where business is conducted at a distance, via
phone or internet for the most part. Two, why would a
contact centre, which are often in non-descript
buildings, open their office to walk-in business? This
contact centre actually belongs to the city council so
locals go to this site to handle issues such as taxes,
housing repair, street lighting and other such city
services. The article continues to spout out numbers of
service numbers, service level, average wait time, etc.
but all for walk in business. It is almost as if someone
had taken a class in call-centre speak and then just
turned it into a walk-in business. Ms. Cole, one of the
team leaders (also a call centre term) was quoted as
saying, "What our figures also show is that 99% of
people who came to the contact centre in January had
their business dealt with in less than 15% minutes." She
goes on to add the "speed at which we can get things
done is good news for service users."
I cannot tell if this is indicative of the call center
model evolving out of the phone-based contact centre
into walk in services or whether maybe one day we will
be opening many existing phone-only contact centres to
walk in business? Has anyone else heard of any similar
occurrences elsewhere or is Swansea unique?
60 Ideas in 60
Minutes Round VI
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-You
should know your company’s quarterly and annual goals.
And I don’t mean the stuff that is in the annual report,
I am talking about where they sit in the boardroom and
say these are our quarterly goals, these are our annual
goals. There will be two or three and you need to know
what those are and have them printed out and taped on
your monitor. All the decisions you make in your contact
center should be reflected through that lens. You are
part of that organization and the easiest way to align
yourself with that is to know what those goals are and
try to achieve them as best possible through your
contact center.
William (Bill) Durr-Study
after study indicates while internal quality monitoring
scores tend to rise to the mid-90s over time, the actual
customer experience and satisfaction are usually just a
fraction of that. I use a study from Bain in some of my
presentations to make that point. 364 companies surveyed
by Bain, 80% say that they deliver an excellent customer
service experience. They asked the customers. 8% of the
customers felt that the company did. This is a huge gap
in what the company’s though they did and what the
customers thought. The moral of this story is that you
need to start to have more customer feedback surveys and
find out what the customers really value and how they
perceive their experience. Maybe you need to recalibrate
your internal quality monitoring team.
Penny Reynolds-Back
to the averaging thing. You have to look at some
averages, but the thing about service level is that it
masks so many things. So what you have to do, a better
alternative, would be to perhaps look at the number of
contact hours during the day where you hit your goal.
Not over, not way under, but where you hit the goal
within 5%. If service level is 80%, for how many hours
were you between 75%-85%? Give yourself a different kind
of measure a measure that will help you pinpoint where
you have problems. Instead of asking your customer to
call at a different time (I am OK with suggesting the
best times to call) you’ve got o make some adjustments
in your schedules, and in the way you operate, to better
cover. So it is better for your callers, it is better
for your staff, and it is better for your bottom line
and costs. So when you replace those averages with
standard deviations where do you use that number? There
are kinds of places where standard deviation makes
sense. So you want to look at it as you are eye-balling
your data going into your forecasting process so that
you are getting the right forecasts in place for the
schedules to start. That may be where you are going
wrong in the first place. Certainly anyone doing call
calibration and quality processing in your center needs
to have a basic understanding of standard deviation so
when four people evaluate a calling score it is within
an acceptable range of scores. Or do we have a problem
that we need to back in and redefine? So basic
understanding of standard deviation, go back to
Wikipedia, look it up, look at the calculations, and
learn how to use it in Excel.
Garry Schultz-We
talked about Jeff Bezos from Amazon.com earlier and his
company has a wonderful program that he runs every
manager, every executive, contact center agent, everyone
has to go through it. Within the first six months of
employment they have to get on the phones. I believe the
term is two weeks on the phones. So you have a new CFO,
you have a new agent, you have a new logistics manager,
they spend two weeks on the phone talking to your
customers. This probably resonates with everyone out
there. How can you speak to an executive, someone you
are reporting to, who really does not understand what is
going on out there in the real world-people you are
talking to every day? See if you can get them in your
company to do the same. Put them on the phones. If you
can’t do that go to plan B. Plan B is record. Record a
number of representative calls-good ones, bad ones,
maybe an hour. Make them listen to that. It is going to
be hard unless you have the dedication of someone like
Bezos in the CEO title in order to make another
executive sit in a contact center for two weeks.
Chris Crosby-I will
just take ten seconds and comment on Garry’s comment.
When I was in the contact center we required all of our
supervisors, managers, directors, everybody to spend a
day or two on the phones every couple of months, once a
quarter, or something like that. Two weeks may be a bit
hard core but what that does is really opens your eyes
to what your customers are saying but also two, what
your agents go through each day everything like “how the
heck does my telephone work and my computer to navigate
the system.” If you have an in-house software
development team that builds your application, your CRM
whatever that is. Put them on the phones for two or
three weeks. In that case I would put them for two or
three weeks because once they understand the pain that
your agents go through it is amazing the product they
will come out with. When we were developing software for
Latigin, I made my engineers spend time in the contact
center because it is amazing how much more efficient
your software will be when people understand how they
are using it. So, if you not in the software business
kind of take a step back, have a look at how your
customers are using your product, and how your agents
are handling calls and see how you can walk a mile in
their shoes or a while and see what you come up with.
Kevin Hegebarth-Look
at what is going on holistically across your enterprise
from a customer’s perspective. At the end of the day
that is that person who pays the bills around there. Let
me use an insurance example. Failure to process an
insurance claim properly does what? It brings traffic to
the call center. So understanding the different customer
touch points throughout your enterprise whether they are
directly to the customer as you would expect from a call
center or indirectly to the customer as you would expect
from claims processing. Understanding all of those
customer touch points and understanding what customer
expect across all of those touch points and
understanding the failure of any one of those touch
points to meet customer’s expectations is very, very
important to ensuring that you get good customer
retention.
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.
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Copyright 2008 National Association of Call Centers
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