Thanks to some special medication my doctor prescribed, I haven’t felt the peculiar urge to share any of my signature contact center song parodies with the public in a while.
Unfortunately for you, I’ve skipped my last few doses.
Below are the lyrics to a song I wrote – from the perspective of a contact center agent jealous of a co-worker who gets to work from home. You can hear a sample of the actual song – and even download the whole thing for a nominal fee if you feel so inclined – by going here: http://www.offcenterinsight.com/cc-tunes.html (be sure to scroll down to the third song sample.) Enjoy! (Or, at the very least, try not to get nauseous.) "On the Phone at Home"(to the tune of “Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan) Once upon a time you dressed so fineCame in to work at 9 right on time, didn’t you?Now you’re all alone, working in a robe Chilling on the phone right from home – isn’t you? We used to… talk a heapMade fun of all the customers who… talked to me But now you don’t even sock your feetWorking out of your house there in your boxer briefsPlease tell me, I need to know now – what’s the deal? How does it feel? How does it feel? To work all alone Your facial hair all grown On the phone at home Yes, among us reps, you were the bestI guess you that you deserve to work undressed – lucky stiffYou always got awards with all your scoresThe rest of us were bored, wanted just to roar “enough of it!” But just because we… secretlyAll wanted to beat you up so… frequentlyDoesn’t mean we wanted you to leave the sceneYou never come into the center even just to see the team So, what’s it like going to work without the use of wheels? How does it feel? How does it feel? To work all alone The whole house to roam Your facial hair all grown On the phone at home You brag and brag, but we ain’t so sad The center ain’t so bad, the other day we had… a pizza hourPepperoni grease and extra cheeseThat’s all I really need to keep me pleased and… steeped with power I know that you must miss our… breakroom chatsAnd the overtime snacks that are always… laced with fatThen again at home you get to take a napWhenever on a break from all this agent crapOk, I must admit, a home-based shift sounds quite ideal So tell me, how does it feel? How does it feel? To work all alone The whole house to roam Your facial hair all grown On the phone at home Tell me, ain’t you scared with the fridge right there?Your television’s staring at your chair – tempting youHow do you adhere with your bed so nearThe devil on your shoulder in your ear saying… “Bend the rules” There’s a pool out back – you know you want to… take a dip
Even if it means your stats will… take a hit
Gonna do my best to try to make you slip
Because I want your job and I plan on taking it
Man, I want to work at home – and I’m prepared to kneel
How does it feel?
How does it feel?
To work all alone The whole house to roam Your facial hair all grown On the phone at home Don’t forget to check out a sample of the song at: http://www.offcenterinsight.com/cc-tunes.html
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
Some people are simply blessed with the power of prognostication. They have visions and pick up signals the average person cannot, thus enabling them to provide unique insight into how things are likely to go down in the future.
I am not one of those people, but that has never before stopped me from making bold predictions about contact centers and customer care.
With the aid of my crystal ball and a couple cans of Red Bull, here’s what I see happening in 2012:
A new metric – “Average Speed of Anger” – will take hold. Customers are more demanding than ever. It’s nearly impossible to respond to their calls, emails, chats, and social media comments/inquiries before they start whining or worse. Many companies now find measuring traditional accessibility metrics like Average Speed of Answer (ASA) to be a waste of time. After all, even when the contact center hits an ambitious ASA objective, customers still complain and clamor for quicker service.
That's why a growing number of centers have started secretly tracking a new metric: Average Speed of Anger (ASA grrr), which measures the average time it takes customers to become so enraged they curse your agents/IVR and/or blast your brand on Twitter. By focusing on ASA grrr, the contact center can make training and staffing adjustments that will quite possibly keep customers from killing anybody, and maybe even satisfy a few.
A law will be passed that makes it illegal for a contact center to not have a home agent program in place. Study after study has shown the huge impact home agent programs have on employee engagement, retention and performance, as well as staffing flexibility and operating costs. Nevertheless, three in four centers still don’t have a single home agent in place.
Fortunately, the leaders of these centers will soon be imprisoned and/or fined if they don’t get with the program. A militant but growing group – led by me – has been lobbying Congress about the issue for over a year now. I’ve been told by powerful sources that, thanks to my group’s efforts, Congress now views expanding home agent positions as a top priority, right behind balancing the Federal Budget and bringing down Kim Kardashian.
A new type of cancer caused by over-exposure to acronyms will plague the customer care industry. This is one prediction I hope doesn’t come true; however, I don’t see how it can be averted. Medical researchers have strong evidence that excessive absorption of acronyms radically alters brain cells and can cause severe vowel deficiency.
A recent landmark study showed that lab mice placed in a cage lined with shredded ACD reports were 17 times more likely to develop malignant growths than were mice whose cage was lined with shredded long-winded speeches free of any abbreviations. The study led medical researchers to conclude that excessive exposure to acronyms may be more dangerous than smoking two packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day while standing next to a Japanese nuclear power plant. The researchers implore contact center and customer service professionals to start using fully spelled-out terms as much as they can, and to do so ASAP.
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.
With call centers and customer care evolving so rapidly, it’s only natural that new types of jobs should start to emerge. Back in the 1980s and early1990s – when call centers were dungeons where supervisors whipped reps whose AHT was higher than desired – nobody could have pictured that centers would one day have an entire team dedicated to quality and customer satisfaction, or that it would be illegal to line cubicles with electric fencing.
These are exciting times for call center professionals who are serious about carving out a career -- one that doesn’t involve day-trading and/or exotic dancing on the side to make ends meet. A whole slew of new and rewarding customer care opportunities are on the horizon. Let’s take a peek at some of them, and then get our resumes ready:
Chief Customer Silencer. I’ve always been a big proponent of “Voice of the Customer” initiatives, but some customers just need a little assistance in shutting up. That’s where the Chief Customer Silencer comes in.
The person in this high-profile, low-patience position is responsible for monitoring all contact channels and community sites, identifying frustrated and problematic customers, and reminding those customers that their health could take a sudden and dramatic turn for the worse if their incessant public complaints about the company don’t cease.
Ever wonder whatever happened to that guy who made the viral video about how United Airlines broke his guitar? My guess is that United got smart and hired a Chief Customer Silencer.
When selecting a CSS for your organization, look for somebody with ample knowledge of social media monitoring and service recovery techniques, and who lives in New Jersey, Chicago or Sicily.
Virtual Agent Secret Agent. Home agent programs are currently all the rage. And while most call centers that have embraced the virtual agent model have a solid selection process in place, there is no guarantee that their remote staff is abiding by all the rules and haven’t at least tried removing their house arrest ankle bracelet. That’s where the Virtual Agent Secret Agent comes in (though you may not know they’ve come in – they’re stealthy).
The VASA’s main objective is to gracefully gain access to a home agent’s house and secretly watch their every move – with the exception of bathing, which few home agents do anyway. VASAs aren’t there to micro-manage performance; that’s the job of the agent’s supervisor. Instead, they take special note of such things as whether or not the agent has changed their pajamas in five days, how often they make their little brother take calls while they nap, and how much they earn daily from selling customer account information to neighbors.
To be effective, VASAs should be small, agile and have the innate ability to go completely unnoticed in a room, thus the ideal candidate is a life insurance salesperson with a ninja or jockey background. Check craigslist.
Textpert. With text quickly catching up to voice in terms of how customers interact with companies, call centers need to seriously panic. Centers that are not adept at panicking do have a second option, which involves accepting the aforementioned shift in communication preferences and doing something about it. That’s where the Textpert comes in.
The Textpert is tasked with responding quickly, accurately and courteously to all customer emails, chats, SMS messages, social media comments/inquiries, hate mail and ransom notes. Exemplary spelling, grammar, professionalism and eloquence are all key requirements for this position, which rules out all human beings of working age in the modern era.
Service Saboteur. Numerous studies have revealed what has come to be known as “The Service Recovery Paradox,” which basically states that an effective recovery process following a bad service experience often results in higher customer satisfaction ratings than if the bad experience had never occurred in the first place. In other words, first you have to screw up before you can really impact customer loyalty. That’s where the Service Saboteur comes in.
The person in this important position is responsible for intentionally and strategically providing poor customer service so that the center’s Recovery Team can then swoop in and sweep customers off their feet. It shouldn’t be difficult to find qualified Service Saboteur candidates from you existing staff. Just pick from among your rudest, most apathetic and most incompetent agents, give them a new business card, and instead of reprimanding them every time they alienate or offend a customer, give them a pat on the back and a slight raise in pay.
10 Reasons Your Call Center Should Use Home Agents 1) Better employee retention. Most agents who plan on quitting to take a better-paying job – such as janitor or migrant farm worker – will reconsider if given the freedom to handle calls naked.
2) Expanded recruiting reach. When seeking candidates for agent positions, you will no longer be limited to dropouts from just local high schools/colleges.
3) More flexible staffing/scheduling. Such immediate access to their workstation makes it easy for off-duty home agents to work odd shifts and to save managers’ butts after inaccurate forecasts.
4) Higher productivity and quality. The extra sleep and not having to suffer through rush-hour traffic enables home agents to stay focused and energized throughout the entire first half-hour of their shift.
5) Decreased facility expenses. You can grow the call center without expanding walls, the parking lot, or the toilet paper budget.
6) Improved attendance. Absenteeism and tardiness will drop, assuming you select reliable agents who don’t suffer from long-distance sleepwalking.
7) Enhanced disaster recovery. No longer will closed roads brought on by blizzards or Justin Bieber concerts bring employees and the call center to a standstill.
8) Increased ability to tap “alternative” labor pools. Going virtual provides job opportunities to qualified candidates who might otherwise be unable to consider call center work – e.g., individuals with physical disabilities, older workers, or people deathly afraid of cubicles and industrial carpet.
9) More environmentally responsible. Using home agents reduces vehicle pollution and gasoline/oil consumption; also conserves water since agents will no longer need to bathe, brush their teeth, wash their clothes or clean their wrist brace.
10) Improved call center aesthetics. You can rid the center of the least-attractive and worst-dressed agents without losing their valuable skills and experience. For more on home agents (not “moron” home agents), be sure to check out my previous playful posts on the topic:-“Making Home Agents Feel ‘At Work’” http://bit.ly/eSyctW-“Home Agents: A Call Center Game-Changer” http://bit.ly/hXI62g In addition, you can see what real home agent success looks like by reading the following “Contact Centerfold of the Month” article:-Veterinary Pet Insurance (VPI). http://bit.ly/gCzLRT You can also hear how much I don’t sound like Bob Dylan in my home agent song parody, “On the Phone at Home”. http://bit.ly/8X3uQj (After clicking link, scroll to the third song sample on the page.)Don't forget to check out my recent research report, "The State of Home Agent Staffing", in which I surveyed dozens of contact center leaders who have already gone the remote agent route: http://goo.gl/XoDAH Finally, my ebook – Full Contact – contains ample info on home agent programs, as well as a comprehensive sample work-at-home agent agreement donated by a real call center. So be sure to buy about 12 copies. http://bit.ly/cl745j
Take it from a guy who has been a telecommuter since 1994, there is nothing as inspiring as having the freedom to work in just your boxer briefs. (Actually, my habit of working in just my boxer briefs started even before I started telecommuting, which is why the company I was employed by at the time sent me home to work in the first place.)
Giving deserving agents the opportunity to handle customer contacts from home gives them a whole new life: No more soul-crushing commutes during rush hour; better work-life balance and more time with family/friends; cost-savings associated with not having to buy clothes, shampoo, shaving cream or deodorant; and the highly empowering feeling that the company values and trusts them enough to work so autonomously.
Home agent programs inspire and engage not only the employees who get to actually work from home; they also motivate many of the onsite employees, who will typically work very hard in the call center to earn the opportunity to work outside of it.
And it’s not like agents are the only party that benefits from a work-at-home arrangement. Call centers stand to reap big rewards from a business standpoint: Higher retention of the best agents; better recruiting results (due to employee demand for home-based work, as well as the ability to expand your recruiting reach outside the immediate region); improved productivity and quality; better attendance; increased staffing flexibility; and decreased facility expenses.
To ensure that your organization experiences such success with its home agent program or pilot, consider embracing the best practices below – but not too hard, as some may be brittle.
Select the right reps for remote work. I have interviewed many home agent managers in my years posing as a call center expert, and just about all of them look for the following criteria when choosing which staff to kick out of the building:
• Consistent high performance
• Stellar attendance record
• Ability to work independently, with minimal supervision
• Ability to work in an environment offering no live social interaction with peers
• A quiet home office environment with few distractions
• A home with a jacuzzi and/or swimming pool that you can enjoy when visiting
To ensure that there will be minimal noise and distractions in the home, it’s a good idea to select home agents who have no friends and whose only family members are cats. But not too many cats, as studies have shown that constant meowing in the background during phone calls causes a 56% decrease in customer satisfaction.
Use a formal written telecommuter agreement. Once they select their home agents, top call centers make sure that these lucky stiffs carefully read and sign a formal telecommuter agreement before beginning to take calls naked.
A comprehensive agreement typically covers such things as workspace requirements, appropriate use of business equipment, overtime/on-call policies, and nap times. As part of the agreement, many companies ask home agents to state in writing where they keep a spare house key and their good liquor.
Tap the power of virtual training and communication tools. Call centers with the best home agent programs utilize e-learning apps, instant messaging and email to ensure that home-based staff stay in the loop and receive the ongoing coaching/training they need. IM and email also enable home agents to interact with their peers and rub in their face the fact that they aren’t wearing any pants while handling calls.
Some centers also use web cams for home agent coaching and meetings, thus adding a nice face-to-face feel to such activities and ensuring that remote reps brush their hair occasionally.
Invite them in every so often. Most call centers don’t rely solely on technology to communicate and bond with their home agents; many centers occasionally invite home-based staff to the facility for training, meetings, events and celebrations. The frequency of such invites often depends on how far the agent lives from the call center, how frequently they bathe, and whether or not they usually bring donuts.
Welcome Home
Quite simply, home agents represent the future of call center staffing and customer care. No other trend stands to have as huge a positive impact on call center performance and employee satisfaction – except for perhaps agent cloning, which has yet to be perfected and requires expensive lab equipment that can make it cost-prohibitive.
Want to see what real home agent success looks like? Read about how VPI has improved virtually everything by adopting a virtual staffing model: http://bit.ly/gCzLRT
Those of you familiar with my writing know that I am a big proponent of telecommuting. A work at home arrangement fosters high employee engagement and productivity, is a “greener” staffing method than traditional approaches, and for years has enabled me to work naked in July and August without upsetting anybody except my wife and, occasionally, the UPS guy.
While telecommuting brings with it many potential benefits – especially for contact centers – it also entails several challenges, not the least of which is defending against feelings of isolation and alienation on the part of the home worker. True, a careful selection process (i.e., choosing employees who have a proven ability and desire to work with minimal supervision and clothing) will help to minimize such problems; however, even some of the best telecommuting candidates can struggle to make a successful transition from the contact center to the home.
To help ensure that your home agents remain happy and productive in their underwear without pining for the office environment, follow these leading practices:
Recreate key physical components of the contact center environment in the home. There are several simple and effective ways to simulate the office environment to help wean home agents from the physical contact center site. First, install a water cooler in each telecommuter’s home office surrounded by life-size cardboard cut-outs of three or four of their peers with whom they can pretend to discuss current events, sports and office politics. Such a simulation tactic not only helps home agents avoid feelings of isolation, it gives them people to punch when they are stressed out during peak periods without risk of disciplinary action or dismissal.
Other effective ways to “contact center-ify” telecommuters’ homes include replacing all lamps and light fixtures with overhead fluorescent lighting; adorning walls with motivational posters featuring a person in a business suit standing atop a mountain peak; removing all windows; filling their office with helium balloons; and placing a “please wash hands before returning to work” sign in the bathroom.
Make a video of their onsite peers. This is a great way to keep home agents in the loop and to remind them that they are not alone in handling call after call after call. After call.
In the video, be sure to capture the general malaise, anxiety and depression so prevalent in your center to ensure that home agents don’t feel like they are missing out on anything by working remotely. A shot of an onsite agent cutting himself following an abusive customer call, or a shot of one crying following a feedback session will do wonders in terms of keeping your home agents from feeling alienated from the rest of the team.
Hold monthly supervisor/agent sleep-overs. While there is a vast array of communications technology – i.e., phone, email, IM, Facebook – that supervisors can use to stay connected with home agents, nothing beats quality face-to-face time. Some centers invite their home agents into the contact center on occasion to foster such human interaction; others send supervisors directly to the home agent. But the truth is, having a supervisor spend a couple of hours with a home agent once a month or so simply isn’t enough to make up for lost time.
That’s why I highly recommended frequent supervisor/agent sleep-overs, during which remote staff and their immediate superior can truly connect and compensate for all the days they have worked apart. This tactic may sound completely insane to you, but that is simply because my progressive management sensibilities are more finely tuned than yours.
For the best results, supervisor/agent sleep-overs should last two to three days and nights; anything less makes it too easy for agents to hide in the linen closet. In addition to observing home agents while they handle contacts, supervisors should spend time offline with their agents to really get to know them – their hopes, fears, aspirations, dreams and, importantly, where they keep their cereal.
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