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)