Off Center
 
Last night you were told by senior management to “do less with more” in your contact center.

You can stop celebrating now – it was just an “opposite” dream.

Back to reality.

Contact center professionals have historically had to devise ways to do more with less. The economy being down for the count hasn’t helped matters much. While some managers have resorted to prayer and medication to get through it all, others have rolled up their sleeves and gotten creative.

Especially in terms of contact center staffing. Try as some organizations might, you can’t simply replace agents with machines. The best contact centers have learned to be innovative and resourceful with existing employees – embracing unconventional and progressive staffing and scheduling approaches to get the most out of agents without breaking their backs.

Here are several ways you, too, can get crafty with staffing in your contact center to drive the sort of success that upper management demands, and that customers expect.
      
4 x 10 workweeks. Many centers have introduced 4 x 10 workweeks (four 10-hour days) to the agent scheduling mix, thus enhancing coverage in the contact center during peak periods while simultaneously making agents happy with an extra day off. Schedules can be arranged so that the center has all hands on deck on the busiest days, like Mondays. And since 4 x 10 stints are popular, centers find that they have plenty of senior agents working through the evening, thus ensuring that service quality and efficiency doesn’t go down once the sun does. 

Agent reserve teams. The contact center loses many of its best agents to internal departments like Marketing and Sales all the time. Crafty managers know how to steal them back – at least temporarily. Creating a crew of former agents who can help out on the phones during unexpected call spikes is a great way to meet service level objectives without having to enter into a complicated outsourcing arrangement. It also brings some welcomed job diversity to those who serve on the agent reserve team, who more than likely miss their headset a little. After all, you can take the boy or girl out of the contact center, but you can’t take the contact center out of the boy or girl.

Home agents. I can’t say enough about the home agent model. When carried out with care, no other staffing approach has as big an impact on agent engagement, retention and performance, or on the center’s ability to staff flexibly and cost-effectively. The center is able to attract and keep top talent who rarely if ever call in sick and who don’t mind being “on-call” on occasion if it means getting to work in just their underwear every day. And kicking agents out of the contact center means the contact center facility needn’t be so big – and rent so expensive. Plus it’s all seamless to the customer, except for the fact that they might note a little extra joy in the voice of the agent with whom they’re interacting.
 

To read more about these and other effective staffing/scheduling tactics – as well as lots of other contact center best practices – be sure to check out my comprehensive ebook Full Contact. http://goo.gl/y73U9

4 Comments
 
 
Earlier this week I delivered a keynote presentation at a fun and informative user group event sponsored by Calabrio (www.calabrio.com). Prior to the event, Calabrio posed a handful of cogent questions and asked me to provide some insightful responses.

I provided these instead.

How have you seen contact centers change in the past 5 years?

For one, the contact center now receives much more respect from the rest of the company and the business world in general. What used to be viewed as a mere back-office operation is now highly valued for the critical customer data and insight it gathers daily (and shares with key departments) to greatly enhance customer loyalty and revenue. No longer do contact center managers and staff get beaten up and have their lunch money stolen by big mean bullies in Marketing, Sales or other departments. If you work in a contact center and still do endure such bullying, let me know and I’ll take care of it. I’m tough like that.

Another big and very positive change in our industry is the increased use of home agents. After years and years of contact centers just tinkering around and testing the home agent waters, many are finally fully embracing this powerful staffing model, which studies have shown to improve agent recruiting, retention and performance, as well as decrease facility costs and enhance staffing flexibility. Add in the obvious “green” benefits the home agent model affords, and it’s easy to see why more and more companies are kicking their agents out of the contact center. 

And of course, no conversation about big changes would be complete without mentioning the emergence of social media and its impact – both real and imagined – on customer care. Just when contact centers were starting to get a handle on the phones, email, chat and web self-service, social media comes barreling in and forces managers to return to therapy.  


What are a couple of the biggest challenges facing contact centers now?

One of the biggest challenges contact centers face now is one that they have always faced: Keeping agents in place and inspired. While with ICMI from 1994-2010, I was involved in several research studies and reader surveys in which we asked managers to list their biggest concerns and challenges. Agent turnover and burnout always topped the list. Fostering agent engagement and retention is especially critical in today’s crazy competitive business climate, where top-notch service and support is often the differentiating factor – the thing that determines what company a customer decides to mate with for life.

I’ve already alluded to what I see as the other major challenge in today’s contact center: Managing the multichannel madness. Have you ever tried accurately forecasting and scheduling for phone, email, chat and social media contacts – and ensuring that customers receive consistent, efficient and effective service regardless of which of those channels they choose? Scary. It’s why I merely analyze and write about contact centers rather than actually RUN one.


You’re a humorist in a unique industry. Can we use a little more comic relief in the world of customer service?

Absolutely. Just look at what we’ve got: An industry full of managers being pressed by execs to constantly do more with less; agents being measured on a multitude of performance metrics while sitting in a cubicle that’s the same square footage as their body; and the entire center having to handle a seemingly endless stream of calls and other contact types from highly demanding customers who are often abusive even though they know that you know where they live. If that’s not an industry begging for comic relief, I don’t know what is.

Managing a contact center is no laughing matter. But if you want to survive in this business, laughing matters. Humor defuses. Humor relieves. Humor inspires. And if we can’t laugh at ourselves, who can we laugh at – besides the guys over in IT.
6 Comments
 
 
There are those in our industry who shy away from answering the most pressing and challenging questions regarding call center management. Then there is myself, who probably should.

But it’s not going to happen today.

Below are three of the most common queries amongst today’s call center and customer care professionals, followed by my comprehensive responses. In composing said responses, I drew from years of call center research, case studies, expert presentations and conversations with industry leaders. But mostly I drew from a bottle of Shiraz.   


1) What are the most important metrics we should measure?  While every company and customer base is a bit different, there are a handful of critical metrics that all call center managers need to embrace. Service Level (SL), Contact Quality (CQ), Customer Satisfaction (C-Sat) and First-Call Resolution (FCR) are certainly among the most important. However, topping the list is probably Manager Sanity (MS), and the closely related Supervisor Sanity (SS).

The reason behind this is you cannot ensure that your call center is accessible and that reps are performing at peak levels if you have completely lost your mind. Studies have shown that all other key call center metrics take a hit whenever a manager or supervisor comes into the center wearing nothing but a propeller beanie and carrying a briefcase full of cheese.    

It’s important to continually gauge your MS/SS level by self-administering a Rorschach inkblot test twice daily. If you find that all the inkblots look like Gregory Peck or a man driving a giant turnip, you are a danger to yourself and others and should be removed or restrained immediately. If you find that all the inkblots look like customers coming at you with a pitchfork and torch, you are fine.     


2) What is the best way to reduce agent turnover? This may come as a surprise, but my thoughts on agent retention tend to go against conventional wisdom. Most experts will tell you that to hang on to staff you need to empower them, continually reward and recognize them for their efforts, and create a highly positive culture in your call center.

Wrong!

Many centers do all those things and still lose their best agents to the Marketing department or an outside company three weeks after training. The best way to reduce – nay, eliminate – agent turnover is through a combination of fear tactics and massive bureaucracy. The next time one of your agents gives you their two-week notice, show them a picture of a workstation with a giant grease stain on the carpet, and tell them: “This is what happened to the last rep who tried to leave.” If by chance, the threatening photo doesn’t shake them and they still insist on quitting, tell them all they need to do is fill out a 20-page “termination request” form in triplicate with their weak hand, in Sanskrit. Then inform them that the processing of such requests takes anywhere from 4-13 years.  


3) Just how big of an impact will social media have on call centers and customer service? Social media is set to have a huge impact on the future of call centers and customer service – unless we do something to stop the onslaught right now. It’s hard enough just trying to manage customer calls, emails, chats and self-service transactions; if we let social customer care plow on through, we will all perish.  

So, we must band together as an industry and “just say no” to social customer care. This includes not only refusing to monitor activity on or offer customer support via social sites, but also helping to kidnap the handful of call center leaders whose organizations are actively engaged in such activities, as they are raising customer expectations and demands for the rest of us.

In addition, we need to silence all the vendors who pedal and promote social customer care-related products/services, as well as stop all the trade pubs and analysts from publishing articles/reports about social customer care. To assist in this matter, I’m working on creating a pill that, when force-fed to a solutions provider, will make them think that they are living in 1998 – when relatively harmless CRM hype ruled the day. 

If we work together and do all of these things, we’ll be able to limit social media to what it was originally intended for: Tweeting about which Starbucks you just stopped at; bitching about the weather, and spreading the word about how my Off Center blog has changed your life.


NOTE: If you are interested in receiving an even higher level of customer care insight, you won’t have trouble finding it elsewhere.
4 Comments
 
 
Sending a new agent straight onto the phones following just a couple weeks of classroom training is the equivalent of sending an aspiring boxer to fight Mike Tyson following just a couple weeks with a punching bag.

In both cases, the rookie is going to get knocked out, and their ear chewed off.

Nevertheless, many call centers continue to throw their new-hires into the customer contact ring well before the reps are ready to do battle – then act surprised that their average rep mortality rate is less than two months. These centers have fooled themselves into thinking that a week or two of lectures, role-plays and e-learning exercises is enough to prepare new agents for the unique demands and challenges that come with the frontline territory.

In contrast, most world-class call centers I’ve worked with have built a “transition training” component into their new-hire training program, thus enabling rookie reps to ease into a life of chaos and panic on the phones rather than diving straight into things.


What Is “Transition Training”?

Transition training entails having trainees handle basic calls in a controlled environment after they have woken up from classroom and other types of didactic training. In some centers, new-hires may enter the transition training bay after one week in the classroom; in other centers, they may not enter the bay until after they’ve completed two or three weeks of classroom instruction. Once agents enter the bay, they are routed a small number of calls that – based on the number dialed and/or the IVR menu option selected – should be relatively easy to handle.

Smart call centers ensure that there are plenty of supervisors or team leads on hand in the transition training bay in case a call turns out to be complex or a trainee turns out to be terrified. Where a typical agent-to-supervisor ratio on the official phone floor of a call center is 15:1 or 20:1, the agent-to-supervisor ratio in an effective transition training bay should be in the 3:1 to 5:1 range. Many small call centers that don’t have the luxury of a large number of supervisory staff to assist trainees often turn to their top agents to lend a hand in the transition training bay. Such an approach is great for building peer camaraderie, and for helping experienced agents learn to be bossy.

In most call centers, trainees return to the classroom following the first transition training period (which may last anywhere from a few days to a few weeks). This enables them to close performance gaps uncovered while in action, and to learn new skills and information that will allow them handle more complex call types – which they will get to do during the second transition training period. By the time they complete the second period of hands-on practice, most agents will be ready to graduate to the official phone floor or, if they have shown a particularly high level of talent, to be stolen from the call center by Sales or Marketing.   


It’s a Win-Win-W… It’s a LOT of Wins

With a carefully implemented transition training program in place, everybody wins: New agents’ gain more confidence and lose fewer lunches; veteran agents (who assist in the training bay) enjoy a vast sense of empowerment and superiority; and the call center as a whole saves a ton of money by reducing early turnover and the number of body bags needed on the phone floor.


If your call center uses a transition training component as part of its new-hire training process (or if you’ve ever helped implement such an initiative), feel free to share some of your experiences in the comment box below. If your call center does NOT do transition training, feel free to share some photos of your trainees crying their first day on the phones.
11 Comments
 
 
When you are burdened with a mind as manic as mine, having your own blog can be dangerous. Fortunately, I’ve trained my internal editor to out-muscle my internal madman, thus ensuring the only posts of mine that make it to the public domain are those that are truly fit to print – at least in my eyes.

You’ve seen how quirky some of my previous Off Center pieces have been, so you can only imagine how unsettling and odd some of the posts that didn’t make the final cut were.

I have neither the space nor the gall to include the actual text of the aforementioned scrapped posts, and you haven’t the time or the stomach to read them. However, I thought you might be interested in knowing some of the titles.          


Blog Bits that Died on the Chopping Block

-Ensuring Effective Self-Service: When You Care Enough to Not Talk to Customers

-Three Tweets to the Wind: How Social Customer Care While Under the Influence Can Enliven Your Brand

-Whatever, YOU Are: Dealing with Abusive Callers

-Micromanagement Is the New Black

-The Art of Coercion in Agent Coaching

-I’m Okay, You’re Okay – the Problem Is Those Freaking Callers: How Customers Ruin Things for the Rest of Us

-Enhance Call Center Aesthetics by Letting Your Ugliest Agents Work from Home

-Agent Diapers: An Innovative Approach to Increasing Call Center Productivity  

-Rev-Up Employee Retention: Make Agent Attrition Grounds for Termination

-Laughing at Irate Callers: The Intrinsic Power of the Mute Button

-Best Practices in Best Practice Practices

-We’re All Going to Die Someday: Putting Low Service Levels into Perspective

-UFATEC: Using Fewer Acronyms to Enhance Communication


I’m always looking for blog topic suggestions from outside contributors that I can reject. Feel free to leave some of your more intriguing ideas for future posts in the comment box below.

7 Comments
 
 
If you stick a human being in a cramped cubical, tether them to a desk and pay them $9.50/hr to handle calls from demanding customers for 8-10 hours each day under fluorescent lighting…

…bad things are bound to happen. Bad things like burnout, poor performance, turnover, substance abuse, and most commonly of all – supervisor kidnappings.

Ever since the invention of the call center, companies have struggled mightily with keeping agents inspired and in place. What’s truly disconcerting is that, in many organizations, low agent retention and engagement is in some ways part of the plan. That is, they view burnout and turnover as the “nature of the beast” in the call center – accepting it as inevitable due to the repetitive, restrictive and stressful “nature” of call center work.

Of course, not everybody has such a defeatist attitude. In the best call centers, management strives to change (or at least tame) the nature of the beast. While they do acknowledge that frontline work is challenging and potentially monotonous, they also recognize that there are countless ways to counter that – to inspire agents not just to show up to work but to excel at it, and to relinquish any spray paint, drugs or weaponry in their possession before coming through the door.

I know this because I have seen it first hand, time and again – at leading customer care organizations during my nearly two decades sneaking into call centers and conferences.

So how exactly DO the best call centers achieve high levels of agent engagement and retention? Let me count the ways – seven of them, at least:


1) Put your metrics where your mouth is. When your company tells everybody in the world that it’s a highly customer-centric organization focused on quality and issue resolution, you can’t then tell your agents (whom you attract with such proclamations) that their main performance metrics are Average Handle Time and # of Calls Handled per Hour. Doing so will quickly sap staff of their enthusiasm and trust, thus resulting in high turnover, poor customer satisfaction and your head getting mounted on the CEO’s wall.

2) Provide meaningful rewards and recognition. When it comes to motivating agents, you don’t have to break the bank, but if you write off rewards and recognition entirely – or go at it half-assed – agents may break their computers, or your legs. There are plenty of fun, affordable and meaningful ways to reward/ recognize individuals and teams when they achieve key goals or come to work sober more than two days in a row. I talked about a few of these in a previous post: http://bit.ly/loEORC

3) Empower agents beyond the phones.  Your agents possess a wealth of skills, knowledge and experience – assuming your center’s hiring and training programs don’t blow. Empowering staff to use their expertise and experience to come up with better ideas and approaches than you can think of yourself is a great way to better the center while simultaneously making agents feel like they didn’t make a mistake by dropping out of high school. In addition to improving processes and employee morale and retention, having agents help out on committees, task forces and special projects frees you up to spend more time on things like coaching and online poker.      

4) Kick agents out of the call center. Other than threatening agents with serious physical violence if they quit, giving agents the opportunity and the freedom to work from home is the best way to retain them. In fact, in a study on call centers with home agents in place that I conducted this past spring, nearly every participant (93%) reported that the use of home agents has had a “very positive” or “positive” impact on agent retention. If you think I’ve been drinking and am just making this up, check out the key findings from the report – or better yet, purchase/download a copy of it – by clicking here: http://bit.ly/jlKUxP

5) Invest in agent wellness. I blogged about this a few months ago (http://bit.ly/h3ezQ5), but feel compelled to mention it again here after visiting several call centers recently and witnessing incidents of repetitive stress injuries, insanity and cannibalism among agents. Fact: If you show agents you care about them by providing things like fitness amenities, healthy food options, de-stress areas and wellness courses, they will not only stay healthy and perform better, they will feel highly valued by and committed to the organization. If, on the other hand, you make no effort to improve wellness in the call center, agents WILL eat one another, thus making it difficult to schedule enough staff during peak periods.

6) Covet community service as much as customer service. People are inspired by and want to work for companies that care about all human beings – not just customers and employees. You are much more likely to hang on to talented staff if you can show them the reason their wages are so laughable is that half of what they should earn goes toward feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, and rehabbing former child TV stars. Also, be sure to give agents a few paid days off each year to volunteer for their favorite charity/non-profit organization; the time off the phones will help to minimize their whining about back pain and Carpal Tunnel flare ups.      

7) Administer formal engagement surveys – and act on the findings. The very act of measuring agent engagement can help to increase it – but only if agents see that the 15 minutes of their life they wasted filling out the engagement survey actually leads to some positive changes. You can’t ask a child if he wants a piece of candy and then not give him a piece after he says “yes” – as tempting and fun as doing so might be. When gauging agent engagement, be sure to use a reputable third-party surveying specialist or, if you don’t have the funds, just use the Ultimate Agent Engagement Survey I created and shared in a blog post a few months ago: http://bit.ly/gRlJka


Regardless of what my wife says, I DON’T think it’s “all about me.” I’d love to hear about some of YOUR ideas for increasing agent engagement/retention in the call center. (Use the comment box below.) Just don’t write too much – I refuse to be overshadowed.   
6 Comments
 
 
If you are looking for a way to engage your agents and improve performance without having it interfere with your nap time, have I got the solution for you:

Peer mentoring.

It’s one of the most effective and affordable agent development tools around – one that empowers your best and most experienced agents while simultaneously keeping your newer agents from getting laughed at too much by the quality monitoring team.

Most call centers that have implemented a peer mentoring initiative report shorter learning curves, increased performance, and lower turnover among new hires, as well as delusional feelings of importance and superiority among experienced staff.   

 
Agent-on-Agent Education

Peer mentoring typically involves pairing up a rookie rep (protégé or “mentee”) with a veteran one (mentor) for several weeks or months after the former completes their initial training. In some centers, the mentoring relationship begins during training, thus giving the protégé a dedicated shoulder to cry on even before getting screamed at by their first caller.

Protégés sit with their mentor and practice the tactics they have recently learned in training or during a coaching session, or on the show Outsourced, and receive invaluable feedback and tips from their experienced colleague. In addition to gaining insight and skills from the most knowledgeable people in your call center – excluding you and the night janitor – new agents often form a strong bond with their mentor, which helps to cut down on early attrition and assaults on supervisors and schedulers.     

As already alluded to, it isn’t just the new agents (and the call center) that benefit from mentoring; mentors themselves truly appreciate that management recognizes the value of their skills/knowledge. Mentors also enjoy the job diversity and time offline that mentoring provides, not to mention having somebody to fetch their coffee in the morning. 


The Mentoring Scheduling Conundrum

One of the biggest challenges involved in running a successful mentoring program is scheduling. Since mentors are typically among the center’s best agents (if you’re doing it right), it’s critical not to have too many of them working offline with their respective protégés, or to have any of them offline during peak volume periods.

This problem can often be solved by having a solid workforce management (forecasting/scheduling) process in place, and by instilling a “queue is king” mentality among mentors. Make sure they know to keep an eye on the queue whenever offline, and that it’s ok to knock over even elderly managers or visitors while sprinting back to their workstations whenever certain queue thresholds are reached.


Choosing the Right Mentors

When selecting who will serve as mentors, it’s important to note that the most talented and experienced agents don’t necessarily make the best teachers. For example, studies have shown that many of the highest caliber tech support reps carry knives and collect human teeth.

Call centers with the most successful mentoring programs have a formal mentor selection process in place. These centers typically have candidates interview for the position, take behavioral tests, or even complete some form of certification program. Each candidate’s results are compared against an “ideal mentor” profile to ensure that those selected are skilled, dependable, personable, autonomous, and have never punched a colleague in the throat.


I’d love to hear some of your experiences with peer mentoring, but only the positive ones that support my points.  Otherwise, people will start to figure out that I really don’t know what I’m talking about.

5 Comments
 
 
In trying to keep agents motivated, many call center managers rely a little too heavily on helium, sugar and saturated fats. “We truly appreciate you and the big impact you have on the customer experience and our business – here are some cookies and colorful balloons to prove it.”

Often, I can’t tell if I’m visiting a call center or attending an eight-year old’s birthday party – until I notice that nobody is smiling. I understand that most call centers face daunting budget constraints and thus can’t afford to send top-performing agents to Hawaii or pay them a four-figure quarterly bonus. The good news is that they don’t have to. Effective agent rewards and recognition programs aren’t about money or material items; they are about demonstrating authentic respect for the freaks on the phones and the critical role they play as customer advocates.

The best call center professionals realize this, and thus strive to perpetuate lasting engagement and retention – and customer loyalty – by providing deserving staff with the following things:

 
Public recognition that packs a punch. While “Thank You” notes and “You Rock” stickers are all well and good, they are typically dropped off at agents' workstations rather than handed out in front of all their peers, thus giving recipients little to no chance of making others feel inferior. If you truly want to inspire continuous high performance, you need to give staff a chance to rub their notable accomplishments in everybody’s face.

To help with this, many leading call centers have implemented a “Wall of Fame” that features the photo of agents who have recently achieved excellence in key areas like call quality, C-Sat, sales and attendance, or who have decided against suing the company for repetitive stress injuries. To ensure the highest visibility, be sure to place the Wall of Fame in an area of the call center that gets a lot of traffic, such as inside the room where exit interviews are held.

To add more oomph to the Wall of Fame approach, consider hanging actual agents rather than their photo on the wall. They will truly appreciate the hard-earned extra time off the phones, and will surely enjoy gloating about their achievements to all passersby.   

Another effective way to publicly reward and recognize agents is to hand out awards during a department party or happy hour. Doing so provides top-performers with the high-profile praise and attention they deserve while allowing all the losers to ease their pain with the free white zinfandel wine that’s on hand.

Nominations for external industry awards recognizing outstanding customer service/support. Many call centers hand out internal awards like “Agent of the Month” or, in centers struggling with rampant turnover, “Agent of the Minute.”  Such accolades are nice, but why not “go bigger” and nominate your top reps and teams for industry-wide customer service awards?

Examples include ICMI’s “Spirit of Service” awards, and Customer Relationship Metrics’ “Elite Customer Experience Awards” (the latter has an “Agent of the Year” and “Team of the Year” category). Another notable though lesser-known award is the “Agent Least Likely to Get Punched by a Customer” prize handed out by Big Bob’s Contact Center Consulting & Taxidermy Shop out of Tuscaloosa.   

The great thing about these big-time front-line awards is that your agents don’t even need to win to become inspired and engaged. Just knowing that the company thinks they have a shot in hell of being named the best of the best is enough to make most agents postpone their decision to join the rodeo or circus.  


Recognition for recognition’s sake. To ensure that all the agents in your call center feel appreciated – not just the agents who deserve it – it’s important to occasionally recognize and honor everybody who shows up most of the time and has a pulse. Let’s face it, handling demanding customers day after day is no easy task, thus staff who manage to do it without harming themselves or others should get a little love.      

While recognition for recognition’s sake can occur whenever,  a great time to do it (if you are a U.S. operation) is during National Customer Service Week (first week of October each year.) This is a time to celebrate agents’ ability to continue breathing on the job, as well as their service successes – both real and imagined. It’s also an ideal time to get rid of the year-old candy from the previous Halloween. 

But don’t just wait until October to celebrate customer service and agent servitude. Host your own employee-appreciation days to show staff that you cherish them even though no outside organization looking to sell balloons and banners is telling you to.     


Opportunities to humiliate superiors. Few things motivate agents more than having a chance to make an executive suffer. I’ve seen entire teams of bottom-rung reps suddenly transform into customer service superstars after being told they’d get to shave a VP’s head if they met an ambitious quality objective for the quarter. I’ve seen similar boosts in performance and engagement in centers where agents were told that, if successful, they'd get an opportunity to throw baseballs at a dunk-tank containing a senior manager.

If your center decides to try the latter approach, just keep in mind that dunk-tank rentals can be expensive. To save money without sacrificing the powerful motivational effect, get rid of the dunk-tank and simply let agents chuck baseballs directly at executives. Many agents actually say they prefer this method. It’s a ton of fun for everybody involved – except for the executives, who will finally experience a pain similar to that of an agent working a Monday morning shift in an under-budgeted call center.

Don’t let ME do all the talking. Let’s hear about some of the affordable rewards & recognition tactics that YOU'VE seen work well in the call center. Those and other comments welcomed below.
8 Comments
 
 
Employee engagement has been all the rage among people management experts for years. More than  just a term that the folks at Gallup invented to make “employee satisfaction” seem obsolete and to get filthy rich, employee engagement is a metric to help determine who on your front line would likely continue working for your company even if you stopped paying them.

In today’s competitive business climate, creating customer advocacy requires call center staff to be more than just “satisfied” with their job. Satisfied agents like what they do and want to provide good service, but what’s needed are people who love what they do and feel compelled to provide great service. That’s right – agent engagement is so crucial today that it requires sentences featuring three separate italicized words. 

I know plenty of call centers that report agent satisfaction rates in the 90% range but still struggle with turnover, graffiti and arson. Centers with truly engaged agents, on the other hand, find that their staff remains loyal and committed for the long haul – right up until the center is outsourced to the Philippines.

To help you accurately track the level of agent engagement in your call center, I have developed a concise yet comprehensive survey (see below) that you can administer to staff. In creating the survey, I considered the latest best practices in engagement survey design, but got confused by all the science and psychometrics, and thus decided to come up with my own approach. 


The Ultimate Agent Engagement Survey
 
1) On my way to work in the call center, I usually…
a) Feel very excited and empowered about helping customers.
b) Pop a Xanax and then I’m fine.
c) Throw-up a little in my mouth.

2) If the call center were to catch fire, I would…
a) Risk my life trying to extinguish the flames.
b) Run like a frightened cheetah.
c) Hide the gasoline can and the matches.

3) I feel valued and respected at work.
a) Strongly agree
b) Agree
c) Neutral
d) I earn $8.50/hr and work in a cubicle the size of a bathroom stall – what do YOU think?

4) The key performance objectives in place in the call center…
a) Are fair, feasible and focused on the customer experience.
b) Push productivity somewhat at the expense of the customer experience.
c) Push me to drink and listen to death metal music.   

5) Training and development in the call center…
a) Is comprehensive and eclectic, and prepares me for continuous success.
b) Is lacking somewhat, but what are you gonna do? 
c) Ended right after my job interview.

6) Rewards/recognition in the call center…
a) Is frequent, meaningful and inspires me to perform at my best.
b) Is high in sugar and saturated fats.
c) Would be lovely.

7) Compensation and benefits in the call center…
a) Is highly competitive and alluring.
b) Is standard and acceptable.
c) Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

8) Please tell us what we can do to make the call center a better place to work.
(Kindly limit your response to 10 characters or less.)



4 Comments
 
 
For most contact center managers, the battle against agent attrition is a long-lasting and losing one. It seems that no matter how hard they try to keep agents in place, no matter how creative they get with their motivational tactics, their staff end up splitting for better, higher-paying jobs as a pamphleteer or migrant farm worker.

But the battle against agent turnover needn’t be such a bloody one. There are a number of highly innovative agent retention tactics that managers can implement but rarely do for fear of being too unconventional, or of being institutionalized or arrested.

But hey, if you want to truly tackle turnover, you need to not only think outside the box; you need to collapse the box and cut it up into cardboard confetti that you throw whenever celebrating agents’ fifth year with the contact center. 

Here are a few highly creative ideas that will almost definitely help you dramatically reduce turnover in your center and that will most definitely make you wonder why I am aloud to walk freely among society. 
 
Fake a contact center reality TV show. Everybody these days wants to be a reality TV star, but only about 75% of the population will actually ever get a chance to be one. You can play off of the current reality TV craze to retain your agents and ensure that they perform at optimum levels. All you need to do is tell your frontline staff that one of the big networks is piloting a new show called  “So You Want to Be a Contact Center Agent?” and wants to feature your contact center in it. Explain to your staff that each week, any agent who doesn’t meet his or her quality and adherence to schedule objectives will be kicked off the show, and that the agent with the best stats at the end of the season will get to move their cubicle near a window. 

Naturally, you will have to invest in some fake TV cameras and cameramen, a fake producer and a fake director to trick agents into thinking the show is for real. And whenever agents ask you when the show is going to start airing, tell them not until 2012, but that it is guaranteed to be a huge hit, so they should really do their best to stick around until then.

Implement a true remote agent initiative. Study after study has shown that letting agents work from home can greatly increase retention and engagement. The trouble is, with the economy being in the state it’s in, many agents are homeless. But you can’t let things like employee home foreclosures and bankruptcy get in the way of your center’s retention efforts. Instead, you need to implement a truly remote agent model that allows staff to handle customer contacts from wherever they live – be it a cardboard box, a cave, or a van down by the river.

With today’s virtual technology, the walls have come down; anything is possible. Managers and supervisors in the contact center can view the real-time performance of an agent who is handling calls from an abandoned train boxcar just as if that agent were working onsite. Regardless of where they are working, you’ll be able to tell if the remote agent is logged in and handling contacts with quality. And, if they are not, you can send somebody out to make sure the agent hasn’t succumbed to hypothermia or a severe rat infestation. 

It’s a true win-win. The contact center wins because it is able to retain talented staff regardless of how destitute they have become, and the agent wins because they get to have a job without walls – or, in some cases, even a floor or a ceiling.

Make quitting grounds for termination. If all else fails, you can crack down on voluntary agent turnover by creating serious repercussions for such actions. Nobody wants to be fired and be forced to deal with the shame and loss of self-confidence that goes along with it. By making quitting grounds for employee termination, agents will seriously think twice before grasping for freedom. 

I know of one center that implemented a strict “quit and you’re fired” policy, and was able to reduce annual agent turnover by nearly 85%. The center did see a spike in anonymous graffiti and arson, but to this day still boasts one of the highest agent retention rates in the industry.
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