Off Center
 
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.
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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.   
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Show me a call center that does not bother to measure Service Level – and do so correctly – and I’ll show you a call center that likely struggles in practically every key area of customer contact management. Service Level is THE metric for gauging accessibility, and as such it is tied to and has an immense impact on customer satisfaction, workforce management decisions, call center budgeting/costs, and agent sanity.

Service Level (SL) is defined as X% of calls (or chat sessions) answered in Y seconds. A common (but NOT an industry standard!) SL objective is to answer 80% of all customer calls in 20 seconds – typically stated as “80/20”. This means that out of every 100 calls, the call center aims to route at least 80 of them to a live agent within 20 seconds. If the agent to whom a call is routed is not alive, its best to dispose of the body immediately before it affects the health and/or morale of others on the team.

So why doesn’t every call center strive to answer 100% of calls in 20 seconds (or 15 seconds, or 10 seconds)? Well, while doing so would positively delight customers, they would not remain delighted for very long, as the company they are calling would likely go out of business. To deliver on a 100/20 or 100/15 SL objective, a call center would require a daily staffing budget bigger than the CEO’s country club dues. (The exception, of course, is emergency services call centers – e.g. 911 centers – which must answer 100% of calls in a very short period of time by law, and are thus staffed/funded accordingly.)

Such infeasible SL objectives aren’t even necessary; most customers don’t mind waiting 20 or 30 seconds or even a little more before reaching a live agent – especially if they are informed beforehand of the expected wait. That’s why many of the best call centers implement a “visible queue” tool – an automated attendant that tells callers the estimated time until an agent will be available. Studies have shown that call centers with visible queues are 74% less likely to be burned to the ground by a disgruntled customer, and 26% more likely to not be burned to the ground by a disgruntled customer.

Now, an 80/20 SL objective does not indicate that the center ignores or doesn’t care about what happens to the 20% of calls not answered in 20 seconds; it simply means that those callers may experience longer wait times and be given a chance to sing or hum along with the call center’s on-hold music. Top call centers focus on side metrics such as Longest Current Wait Time and # of Customer Curse Words per Hour to ensure that no callers are being avoided like the plague, and to stay abreast of call volume trends that may require real-time action to evade an accessibility crisis and/or customer revolt.


Selecting an SL Objective

So, what is the right SL objective for your call center? I have no idea – and neither does anybody else outside of your organization (except perhaps for an experienced consultant familiar with the ins and outs of your operation). The best SL objective depends on several variables specific to your center: Your average call volume; your customer’s expectations and tolerance levels; your staffing budget; as well as the SL objective of competing call centers in your industry (though, still, you don’t want to just play copy-cat, as other key variables may differ).

That is not to say that there aren’t some common SL objectives shared by many centers – e.g., 80/20, 80/30, 90/20, 90/30. However, just arbitrarily picking one of these objectives without first conducting careful analysis of your call center’s resources and your customers’ expectations will often lead to either very angry callers (and agents) or very angry executives (and stockholders) – or both.


Keep Quality in the Equation  

Of course, no conversation about SL is complete without mentioning quality. You could take the time to carefully select a solid SL objective and consistently achieve that objective (without going too far over, as that indicates costly over-staffing), but it won’t mean jack squat if those calls that are routed quickly are being handled sloppily. Accessibility means nothing without quality. Getting seated immediately at a trendy, popular restaurant is great, but not if the maitre d' laughs at your tie, the waiter spills your wine, and the cook burns your steak.

Leading call centers understand this, and therefore never let efficiency supersede proficiency and professionalism. From the moment a new agent is hired, these centers indoctrinate them into a customer-centric service culture where things like empathy, accuracy and not comparing customers unfavorably to microorganisms are strongly emphasized and coached to. When such behaviors and values are encouraged and embodied, fewer mistakes are made, fewer call-backs are required, and fewer agents and customers burst into flames – thus making it much more likely that the call center (assuming good forecasting and scheduling has occurred) will meet or even exceed its SL objective.

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