A Spoonful of Sugar helps the medicine go down… (Part 4 of 5)

Forgive me for quoting Mary Poppins, but it’s true! What kind of real-time messaging are you using? Make sure you are taking time to insert a positive ad-hoc message or two, especially if your team is having a tough day.

Sometimes a message that says “You guys are the best!” to a roomful of agents goes a long way, especially when they’ve been told to take more calls or wrap up more quickly. Don’t be afraid to show your personality in your messaging. If you just found out that the local team won a key game, put it up on the board. If the rain is going to stop soon, let everyone know.

Make sure you are also using your instant messaging to its best advantage. IM can help you communicate with agents without interrupting their work-flow. So if you’re looking at an agent’s performance on your performance dashboard, send a quick message to that agent, “Keep it up, you’re doing great!”

These small words of encouragement will pay high returns. You might also try putting an alert metric ribbon with the goals of an agent’s personal best alongside their current ribbon to encourage them to compete with their own goals. If they are ahead consistently for a given period of time, automate a message to tell them “You’re on top of your goals! Great!” Or tie a bonus to the goal. Either way, using performance messaging in a positive way will encourage positive, profitable actions from the team.

Now, get out on the floor! You already have your real time performance system doing the grunt work, so what are you doing sitting in front of your computer? Have your system send a message to your Blackberry or cell phone when something needs attention. There should be little reason to be cooped up in your office.

Get out on the floor and coach! It shows the team that you are all connected to the same goals.

Next post: Effective Reporting (Part 5)

The Revolving Door Syndrome (Part 3 of 5)

Another inefficiency we should discuss involves the workforce itself. Even if you don’t care if your agents are happy, guess what? Your customers do! Just think of the last time you interacted with a contact center agent, how was your experience? Did the agent speak in a monotone voice or was he or she personable and attentive?

Wells Fargo is a great example. Their agents are well-trained and pleasant. As a result, I’ve remained a Wells Fargo customer for years. They are consistent in their approach and professional in conducting transactions. Come to think of it, I’d probably use the same phrases to describe Wells Fargo on the whole, as an organization.

That’s because contact center agents really are the face of the company. Period. If they aren’t happy, they’ll make customers unhappy. Soon, absenteeism will rise, they’ll become less and less motivated and they’ll leave. This revolving door syndrome is an expensive one.

According to a Benchmark Portal study, on average it costs companies over $6,000 every time an agent departs. For financial institutions, the average is over twice that amount.

Hiring, training and motivating are expensive!

The chart on the left shows the average cost of turnover by industry. This chart was produced by the Detroit News in 2005 from a study made by Benchmark Portal, Inc.

Employees need to feel connected to their goals. They need an offset to the stress of customer issues, in addition to sufficient training and, above all, strong communication from supervisors.

People also want to understand what they need to do to move up. That can equate to clear and attainable goals. Without that, especially in the hectic environment of the call center, they will quickly become disillusioned, complacent or downright hostile.

How do you think that translates to the customers? What is the most important to businesses?

Customers!

Okay, how do we squeeze inefficiency out of the workforce without cracking a whip? How to keep the team in place longer? Increasing salaries is not always the solution, by the way. Ever since Maslow’s hierarchy of needs was publicized in 1954, managers have known that “job satisfaction” is the most important factor in employee retention. With real-time performance management tools, providing targeted metrics can be very effective in communicating the here and now of the contact center.

You must start, however, with goals that are realistic. That may mean re-evaluating some of the current key performance indicators, or KPIs, you have in place. Are the thresholds realistic or are these metrics always green or always red? Nothing is more demoralizing to the workforce than the sense that management doesn’t care enough to adjust the performance metrics to meet the ebb and flow of the calling activity! So, take the time to make the adjustment. We have a customer whose agents actually help to create the thresholds for their KPIs. And they’re hard on themselves! They lowered their longest call waiting from 1:47 to :38 seconds!

Goal obtained! It can be and is done all the time.

Look for our next post! "A spoonful of sugar." (part 4)

The Vision Thing --- You Know What You Can See (Part 2 of 5)

Often inefficiencies result from a chronic lack of visibility over the here and now, otherwise known as “real time”. As stated earlier, contact centers are full of great technology. That technology is usually buried within an assortment of applications; contact management, help desk software, and things like IVR and E-mail management systems. A typical manager juggles several systems at a time, using his/her computer to toggle back and forth to check campaigns, revenues, who’s here, who is late, who had an emergency and had to leave early, and so on.

The fact is that managers get caught up managing a lot of programs, and are often stuck behind a PC instead of out on the floor coaching and motivating.

In the marketplace today, there are many useful tools that integrate information and provide a real time single view of performance. There is no reason any manager should be without one!

Call them “dashboards” or “digital cockpits”, they present a far more efficient way to gauge performance and contact center conditions with a single glance.

Think about it.

If you could instantly pull up a screen that you’ve already personalized and see individual agent performances, groups, graphs on performance against goals and last week’s score, how much time would you be saving? Three minutes? Five? An hour?

Because the contact center never stops, neither can the manager. By having real time visibility over the entire center, managers can more quickly gauge what needs to be done --- before the next morning. If they have a Blackberry, they can set it to alert them when building conditions might result in a problem, well before it happens. Visibility at all times is achievable and will put the manager out on the floor for a much greater percentage of time, not putting out fires, but helping their team avoid them!

Imagine if you could put a refined information set with inspiring messaging in front of the team? I don’t mean a string of statistics with “work harder, please” scrolling along. Nor do I mean a congregation of digitized pink elephants leaping across a plasma display. [More on this subject in our white paper “Questions to ask before purchasing a wallboard”.]

What the team needs is a targeted set of metrics reflecting personal performance and that of the group with support messages like “Almost there, Nancy. Keep it up!” How does the manager know how close Nancy is to meeting her goal? He just saw it on his desktop dashboard! Finally, if you have a cell phone, pager or Blackberry, you can set it to alert you, wherever you are, as soon as contact center conditions require action.

You may be thinking that putting these concepts into action might only shave a few minutes of inefficiency off of each agent’s day, so big deal. Think again. An article by Penny Reynolds of Call Center School calculated that saving only 20 minutes per day leads to a pretty impressive result: 20 minutes per day x 5 days per week x 52 weeks / 60 = annual lost hours. Annual lost hours x fully loaded wage rate x number of agents = cost of lost time. You can do the math for your contact center. It all adds up!

Look for the next post on The Revolving Door Syndrome (Part 3)

Squeezing the Inefficiency Out of Your Contact Center Using Performance Management Part 1 of 5

But we’re already as efficient as we’re going to get!

Today’s contact centers are equipped with some of the most sophisticated technology in the marketplace today. That’s because companies are waking up and responding to customers’ “right now” expectations. These customers are using web-based or IVR-based self-service to retrieve information, answer questions and conduct transactions, all without interacting with a live agent. Instant gratification is king and companies are deploying technology like never before to satisfy their customers using as few live agents as possible.

So many contact center managers believe they can’t possibly squeeze out any more inefficiencies, at least not from a technology standpoint. Perhaps that’s true, but we need to remember that there comes a time when just about everybody must talk with a live person in a contact center. That is the point at which technology and human skills intersect. People represent the greatest expense to the contact center, not the technology. Performance improvement is aided by technology but it is the people who close tickets and put numbers on the board, and it’s the people the customers will remember when conducting a transaction.

As soon as people are added to the mix, inefficiencies abound. It’s unavoidable. People get sick, run late, daydream, have problems, become angry and even quit. So there will always be a certain level of inefficiency to deal with.

The question is how to use real time performance management to squeeze as much out of the profitability equation as possible and not impair the effectiveness and the motivation of your workforce.

The chart above illustrates typical improvements in efficiency when performance management is introduced into a contact center, using a unit of '1' as a benchmark.

Stay tuned for tomorrow's post on how visibility affects efficiency!

Social Networking for Work at Home Agents

Knowlagent recently conducted a study of work at home agents. They found that almost half of work at home agents were not as engaged as those in center agents. Not surprising when the study goes on to report that email remains the number one method of communication between work at hom agents and their centers. Social networking is used in only 19.5% of centers. Why aren't they using secure IM/chat? Does anyone have more data on this? In many instances work at home agents are only communicating 1 x daily with their peers. You don't want them chatting it up, but some interaction could be beneficial.