Insight from Interactions

How many call center managers feel overwhelmed by cutbacks? Continuing economic uncertainty means continuing pressure to cut costs, staff and staff hours. But what about quality? Are cutbacks the only way to manage costs? I say no. In fact, here are some strategies for optimizing your Customer Dynamics – that is, to help you not only maintain but even improve quality of service for increased customer satisfaction, while keeping more staff, improving their morale and lowering costs.

Use more part-time agents. I find it surprising that, according to a survey of contact center managers conducted by the Society of Workforce Planning Professionals (SWPP), nearly half (45%) of contact centers use few or no part-time agents. Specifically, their survey results show that 17% of respondents do not use part-time agents at all and 28% employ only 1 to 10% of their staff on a part-time basis.  Staffing contact centers with up to 25% part-time agents can deliver schedule flexibility and staffing cost savings over using full-time agents alone. By creating flexible schedules for part-time agents you can eliminate most overstaffing and, in many cases, improve customer service during peak intervals as well.

Offer voluntary time off (VTO). Enabling part- and full-time agents to volunteer for time off without pay is a great way to provide the best service at the lowest cost.  Because it is voluntary, the agents that sign up for it actually want the time off instead of the pay, so it can help improve employee satisfaction for a portion of your contact center staff. Plus, it can shave costs off the bottom line. SWPP 2007 Workforce Management Professional of the Year Kim Newkirk (Henderson) of Bluegreen Corporation launched a VTO program for her business, cutting $215,265 in payroll costs and eliminating 17,360 hours during off-peak periods.    

Of course, there are some prerequisites to making VTO work.  You need to have intraday managers who have the time and workforce management tools to determine overstaffing conditions.  You also need change management capabilities, including the means to communicate the program effectively to supervisors and agents. And once the program is in place, it requires ongoing communication regarding time-off slots available, time-off granted, schedule changes and more. There are a lot of moving parts. The good news is that leading workforce management systems can help you automate some or all of this communication between the workforce management team and the agents and their supervisors. 

While employing more part-time agents and VTO initiatives will take some time and effort, the rewards can be great.  If you are faced with layoffs, these programs can help retain a larger workforce because many agents would be willing to work fewer hours if it meant that they could keep their jobs.  These programs also can save the investments you have already made in those individuals.  Then, when the economy turns around, you can easily increase hours without incurring significant hiring and training costs.  In the meantime, you will save your company money while improving customer satisfaction:  a win-win-win, and a way to break away from the cutback mentality.

First call resolution, or FCR, is one of contact centers’ most important metrics. The concept is simple, right? You just measure the rate at which contacts are resolved on the first call, without the customer having to call again, and you have your FCR rate. Okay, sure. But how do you know when the same customer calls more than once regarding the same issue? Here’s a hint: it isn’t by caller ID. Tracking calls by calling number yields too many false positives (a customer might call two times in a row for two completely different issues) and false negatives (a customer might call from home, then call again from a cell phone.) So how can you truly measure FCR?

Hear the voice of the customer. The best way to know a call is a repeat call is to listen to what customers tell you. It does not take a rocket scientist to know that, when a customer says “I called yesterday,” or “this is the second time I’m calling,” you have a repeat call. All it takes is good speech analytics  software. This is the best way to avoid false negatives, and identify repeat calls regardless of the caller ID used in each case.  

Identify the customer, not the phone number.  What about repeat calls in which customers do not mention they already called? To cover these, rather than using caller ID, look for customer ID or, even better, problem or ticket ID. The best way to identify these is to peek at the agent desktop. Agents typically use a CRM application that shows the customer ID, account number or ticket number. This data may be “scraped” from the agent screen and associated with the archived customer call such that it can subsequently be used to identify repeat calls.

Measure first contact resolution, not first call resolution. Do you allow your customers to contact you via email? How about online chat? If you do any of those, you must measure first contact resolution across the different channels. A customer might send an email to address an issue, and follow up with a phone call if the issue is not resolved. Make sure you get a holistic view of the customer experience across all touch points, and that your agents truly do resolve customer issues the first time, every time.

Agent attrition is one of the biggest challenges call centers face today. The reasons are clear – in the current market conditions, when managers are required to cut staff while retaining high productivity and customer satisfaction levels, losing well-trained, skilled agents could have a serious impact on the contact center’s performance. In fact, the operational and financial implications of attrition could be dire, with labor costs accounting for as much as 80% of a typical call center operating budget, and recruiting and training new agents typically taking up to 6 months and costing as much as $10,000 or more per person.

However, despite the clear focus on attrition and efforts made to retain agents in call centers worldwide, many studies (such as the recent reports from UK Contact Babel and Dimension Data) show that agents are leaving centers in ever greater numbers. Common explanations for this trend include relatively low salaries, increasing levels of stress at work and limited opportunities for career progress. No doubt, all these factors have a major impact on agent satisfaction, however they cannot be easily changed.

So what can be done to retain agents? There is, in fact, another way to drive agent satisfaction and retention – through agent empowerment practices. Various studies, such as the one conducted by the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI), indicate that agent empowerment in areas such as training, quality management and coaching practices, can lead to increased agent satisfaction, engagement and eventually retention. The idea is to allow agents to have more responsibility, involve them in more processes and provide them with more knowledge and better tools.  Do that, and they’ll be happier, more productive and more engaged—for longer—in their work.

Workforce optimization solutions provide a ready-made platform for agent empowerment practices, while still keeping managers in control. Sounds promising, but does it work? According to some NICE customers, yes, absolutely. Here’s what they’re doing to empower their agents:

• A leading financial services organization involves agents in the quality management process. The call center provides agents with personal dashboard, enables agent playback and self-evaluation of calls, peer-evaluations by experienced agents, and allows agents to review customer surveys that pertain to their interactions.
• A large healthcare organization enhances the agents’ training and coaching practices through a bi-directional, on-line coaching process that provides them with the most relevant information tailored for their individual needs. The coaching uses rich content – real examples of calls, evaluations and quizzes, and allows agents to be part of the overall process, as they can send their ideas and insights back to their managers or the training team.
• Companies are also starting to look into the emerging and exciting capabilities offered by real-time guidance tools.  These tools provide agents with information based on the actual call flow and a simple, fast access to relevant data with which they can quickly resolve issues.

Following the adoption of these agent empowerment practices, each of the companies cited above made noticeable gains in agent satisfaction and retention.

Most people like to feel valued. And most workers prefer a career to a dead-end job. Empower your call center agents with knowledge and responsibility and they’ll likely stay with your center longer, and feel more invested in its results. Give it a try!

I decided to buy a new TV. Not that I really needed one, but my 32’’ set seemed awfully small next to my neighbor’s slick 50’’ panel. I had done my necessary online homework, went through the dazzling selection of brands, then narrowed it down through display sizes, high-definition (HD) technologies, resolution, contrast and a dozen other terms I’ve since forgotten. Of course, I researched price as well.

Happy with my final selection, I went to purchase the TV, only to find a bunch of other costs completely neglected during the selection process. Basic service, subscription to my cable provider’s HD service, upgrade to my audio system.… My budget was quickly surpassed. And that was a simple commodity purchase. When it comes to companies purchasing an enterprise-grade call recording system, it’s no surprise to find 100+ page RFPs, covering the bits and bytes of every technical and functional component. Yet I ask, have you considered the entire big picture? Or was the long-term total cost of ownership (TCO) cliché brushed aside in favor of getting the best price today?

When it comes to call recording systems, there are many soft or hidden ownership costs that, if neglected, will lead to greater IT costs or unmet business requirements down the road. These can include server-related costs such as maintenance, power, cooling and floor space; the IT personnel needed to manage your call recording system; future needs for higher-capacity recording or changing telephony technology and architecture design, to name a few.

Industry best practices suggest that there are five key initiatives that can lower the TCO of IT systems:

• Standardization – imposing a standard, consistent operating environment and procedures for infrastructure resources
• Centralization – concentrating servers, data, applications and other infrastructure resources within a single location or a single point of access
• Consolidation – merging multiple infrastructure resources such as servers, storage, applications and databases into fewer systems
• Virtualization – running multiple physical resources such as servers or storage devices on a single, physical resource as virtual services
• Downtime Minimization – reducing costs associated with restoring IT services after failure, lost revenue and lost employee productivity due to outages

If a call recording system you’re considering can enable even one of these capabilities—for example, if it enables you to record calls across branch locations from one central server—the big-picture cost over the life of that system may be substantially lower than the price tag might suggest.

In the recently published paper “Reducing TCO of Call Recording Systems”, we elaborate on applying these five concepts. The conclusion? When comparing two systems, don’t settle for the easy-to-measure metrics that apply only to your recording environment as it is today. Try as much as possible to explore the less tangible cost factors and how the capabilities of the system you purchase impact your IT ecosystem over time. Whether it’s a TV or a call recording system, the results might surprise you.