Chugging Through
a Recession
By Paul Stockford, NACC
Advisory Board Member
In this issue of In
Queue we continue to review the results of the
readership survey that was launched in February. After
the last issue was published, many more readers decided
to add their input to the responses already received and
we thank you. If you would still like to give us three
minutes of your time and respond to this brief survey,
we'd be happy to have your participation. You can find
the survey at the link below:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Ao5IAuJge5nJmE39L1mznw_3d_3d
In this week's posting
of my NACC blog, I ponder the question of whether
contact center professionals are optimistic by nature,
or if perhaps learned optimism is coloring operational
intentions for 2008. In either case, I was pleasantly
surprised at the relatively positive outlook of many of
the survey respondents and was pleased to see that the
attitude of many of the respondents was to meet economic
challenges head-on rather than hiding in the shadows
until it's all over.
If you'd like to see how economic conditions are
affecting your industry colleagues' attitudes and
intentions, join me at the NACC blog by following the
link below:
http://nationalcallcenters.typepad.com/nacc_blog/
I'll continue to report
on the survey results in future issues of In Queue. In
the meantime, your comments and opinions are always
welcomed.
Update Your Contact Center to Meet New Demands
Richard Snow, NACC
Advisory Board Member and VP and Research Director for
Contact Centers Ventana Research
Richard.Snow@ventanaresearch.com
Contact Centers are much
maligned, and in many cases for good reasons. Customers
are still frustrated by long queue times, complex
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
menus where more often than not customers have to repeat
the information when they get through to an agent
anyway, being put on hold while agents try to resolve
their issue, being transferred because the agent is not
empowered to resolve their issue, and after everything
else not having their issue satisfactorily resolved. But
the news is not all bad; a small minority of centers are
getting right. So what are these centers doing which if
others followed they too could boost their performance?
Research carried out by Ventana Research during mid-2007
points to four things: adoption of a multi-channel
customer service strategy, deployment of more
intelligent call routing, deployment of a smarter
desktop, and adoption of customer-focused operational
performance management.
Creating a multi-channel communication platform has
never been easier. Voice over the internet protocol
(VoIP) has become
the foundation platform for a number of companies and
there are now many vendors such as Interactive
Intelligence, Noble Systems and Touchstar that provide
software only applications that sit on the top of VoIP
and provide full multichannel communications. Even cost
need not be an issue as companies will now provide these
services through an on-demand or software-as-a-service
model. The biggest challenge for most companies is
creating integrated services to ensure customers get a
consistent experience regardless of channel. This involves revamping the customer interaction process,
where vendors such as Graham Technology provide an
application that is fully focused on these complex
processes.
There is a lot of talk in the contact center industry
about the "virtualization" of contact centers, which is
no more than saying interactions are going to be routed
to more destinations across the enterprise than just the
contact center. The Ventana Research studies show this
has been happening anyway with many, if not all,
business units in companies handling customer
interactions. The core challenge lies in deciding where
interactions should be routed and what technology is
available to make it possible. The good news is that
vendors such as Genesys and the other VoIP vendors
mentioned above have upgraded the call routing
applications so they can route all types on interaction
based on a single set of rules, and the rules can now
include agent availability, agent skills, and the
profile of the customer.
One of the biggest challenges for agents handling
interactions has been the desktop they are forced to
use. These have been highly complex; requiring agents to
login to several applications, navigate between several
screens (within and across applications), enter data in
more than one system, and they have not been configured
to match interaction processes. The really good news is
that this no longer needs to be the case as there has
been an explosion of vendors such as Cincom, Chordiant,
eglue (Autonomy), Instranet, Jacada, Openspan,
SmartPoint, and Teradata that in different ways support
a smarter, more intelligent desktop. These can go as far
as replacing the desktop with a new user interface that
is interaction handling-centric, or providing easy look
and linking to applications, to providing proactive
prompts to the desktop to help the person as they
interact with the customer.
The hardest thing companies face improving the
performance of their centers, or interaction handling in
general, is finding tools to show anything much more
than basic throughput information. For many years they
have had to rely on the reports provided by their
infrastructure providers and not very many vendors had
overcome the basic challenge of getting data out of
complex, proprietary, and disparate systems to enable a
fuller view. Again this is another area where there has
been a considerable breakthrough with some of the main
stream Business Intelligence (BI) vendors such as Business Objects and Cognos
providing solutions alongside several specialist vendors
such as AIM Technology, Clickfox, Enkata, HardMetrics,
Inova, Informiam, Latigent, Merced Systems, and
Symmetrics. And the breakthroughs continue as vendors
such as Nice Systems and Verint add the ability to
included unstructured data such as recoded calls into
the mix.
There is no doubt centers still face significant
challenges meeting the needs of the business and
customers, not the least they still operate under severe
budget constraints. But as a slow down of the economy
begins to bite then some judicious investment in some of
the technologies identified above, supported by a change
in processes, is likely to pay dividends and result in
lower going costs, higher levels of customer
satisfaction, and more business.
60 Ideas in
60 Minutes Round VII
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-I would like to reiterate the idea of
sitting on the phones. Every single one of you sit on
the phones. This is not a matter of trying to handle the
call demand. It is not debasing yourself. It is not you
saying to yourself, "I started there and I don't want to
ever go back there again." It is a matter of building
trust from your reps. They will respect you. You do not
have to do it publically; you don't need to have a
three-piece band out there, just go out there, take
calls, and then walk away. They will talk about you in
the break room. It will build huge esprit de corps more
than you will ever realize. Secondly, invite your
executives to your call center. Obviously they can come
anytime they want, they sort of own the place, invite
them. Let them know that you know who they are and let
them know who you are. Continue inviting them. Bug them
slightly. They will eventually show up. And then when
they do, get them on the phones. Most of them are scared
to death of the phones. You may not realize it, but they
are. Let them be uncomfortable, that is not a bad thing,
let them understand. Then you have an advocate for you
within the company. Stay in contact with them,
informally if they are not in your chain of command.
Keep those lines of communication and networks open.
William (Bill) Durr-That is a good idea. I met an
executive who spent a day in his contact center on the
phones and the first phrase that he got down pat was,
"let me put you on hold for just a second." It was
great. He was truly humbled by the experience.
So everybody's budgets are tight, right? And I know a
lot of call centers really like to have some benchmark
information to compare themselves to other
organizations. Similar industry and size and that kind
of thing. So, in the face of tight budgets how do you
get the benchmark information? Got a real simple way.
You call your competitors and time it with a stop watch
until you get to an agent. You do that a couple of times
a day, at random times during the day. What do you say
when the agent says "hello?" Nothing. You say "thanks"
and hang up. They will be really happy for the short
call; their stats are going to look better. Now you are
probably wondering, "is that why I am getting those
short calls in my contact center?" Well, yeah, I have
talked about this around the world.
Penny Reynolds-To take that benchmarking idea one step
further, stop worrying so much about industry standards.
I get probably an email a day on average with some
question like, "what is the industry standard for 'fill
in the blank industry' for after call work time?" How
long is a piece of string? The answer, as always is "it
depends." So if you are again short on budget dollars I
would not go spending my money on benchmarking studies.
Again, call and see what other people are doing. But the
other thing is delve into your own numbers if try to
find out where to improve. Delve into your own numbers.
The story is there. Another math thing that you need to
understand is how to calculate correlation coefficients.
If we want to track what has the biggest impact on
customer satisfaction. What in my numbers has the
highest correlation with that? Is it handle time? Is it
first call resolution rate? Is it employee satisfaction
scores on our internal surveys? So delve into your own
numbers to see where the best possibility for
improvement are and stop worrying so much about
benchmarking studies. Most of them are garbage anyway.
Garry Schultz-Growing your employees. Career growth.
Real simple. You all know about "to do" lists.
We started
a program where we took an agent to supervisor or
supervisor to manager and we had them construct a
standardized "don't do" list. With the "don't do" lists
we found had more credibility than the "to do" lists.
What the "don't do" list does is to keep the person in
the new position from going back to their comfort zone.
From agents who go to supervisor you find that they go
back onto the phones, helping out agents and
that sort of thing. They go back to their comfort zone.
So have them do a "don't do" list and the first thing
they "don't do" in that scenario is don't get back on
the phones. You are coaching now. Simple.
Chris Crosby-Take out the garbage, and I am not talking
about employees or customers, but I am actually talking
about reports. One of my pet peeves, and I could go on
for hours but I will go on for 45 seconds, is when you
walk into a call center and you see these reports that
these supervisors are looking at every day and the first
column you see is calls answered, calls offered, and this
is for an agent. Johnny had 27 calls yesterday and was
logged in for 15 hours, bla, bla, ba, bla. Step back and
ask yourself what value you are getting out of this
information. So take your 30 column report and pare it
down to four or five columns that you can actually
impact that you can actually take action on. So if you
can't impact whether an agent is logged on for six hours
or seven hours, get rid of it. Just say, you know what,
what was their schedule adherence, what were their
values that you can impact? Then write out a business
value for each column on that report. Are you going to
see service level on there? Write down why you need to
see that so you can articulate that back to the people
that are looking at that every day and why that is
important.
Kevin Hegebarth-I want to talk about something that
Penny talked about and go on record here by saying that
I am a math geek by training. So all of this statistical
analysis is near and dear to my heart. I thought I had
forgotten it long ago. We run our centers on averages
because it is the easiest thing for us to get our arms
around. You know bell shaped curves, standard
deviations, and where people fall on a curve, and where
calls fall on a curve and things like that are really
tough for us to get our arms around in general. And then
when we add coefficients to that and sensitivity
analysis and all kinds of other things managing a call
center can become an extremely complex mathematical
problem as opposed to just a human resource and
operational issue. But my tip here is to get somebody
who is a math geek to get their arms around this stuff
because you will be surprised at some of the
improvements you can make by doing things like
sensitivity analysis, by doing standard analysis, and a
10 second increase in average handle time may have an
50% increase in sales rate or closure rate.
Call Center Comics
Next issue we announce our
winners of the call center comics and show you the comic
ideas they generated and Ozzie drew from their ideas. I
think they are great and cannot wait to show them to
you.

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.
If you would like to contribute to
In Queue, please reply to this email with "Contribute" in the subject
line.
Copyright 2008 National Association of Call Centers
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