Setting Accurate Thresholds

Martin Spence, Centergistic's Director of International Operations, will be hosting an informational webinar on the importance of setting accurate thresholds to optimize overall performance in contact centers. Performance metrics are key to an efficient and effective contact center!

Centergistic's AgentLink provides individual agents with their personal real-time performance metrics that allows them to view and manage their own progress against the team, a peer or a previous personal best. Martin will discuss how to set the best metric framework using AgentLink.

This is a great opportunity to learn how to increase performance in your contact center!

Join us on Wednesday, April 28, 2010 at 8:30 a.m. PDT for a valuable webinar with Martin Spence.

Sign up today at http://www.centergistic.com/session.htm

Reporting --- Too much data, not enough actionable information.

Another inefficiency comes in the form of reporting. We’ve interviewed hundreds of call center managers over the years and still find many of them complaining about the inordinate time spent hand-assembling reports. Why is this? In this day of automation and instant access to information, it’s hard to believe we still have managers cutting and pasting data often from several sources. We even find some managers having to manually enter data!

Part of the problem is that every system in the contact center produces reports, dozens of them. There is no lack of data, there is simply too much.

Most vendors take a “one size fits all” approach, providing a canned set of reports to their customers. So, what the manager ends up doing is stripping out data from a number of separate reports and compiling a new report, usually using an Excel spreadsheet. Some of our customers have told us that they need to re-key the data by hand because they can’t get reports in an interactive format.

This is probably the number one waste of time in a contact center. It’s a shame because it is a relatively easy area to improve efficiency. How?

You can probably answer this yourself, but perhaps you rely upon an IT department, already overworked, to provide you with performance reports and every time you want to make a change you need to go back to them.

Usually a reporting module is included with the ACD you purchased. The problem is that these systems are locked alongside the ACD, behind closed doors and out of your reach. Even if they were accessible, there are security issues that make it difficult to get the kind of nimble reporting you need in the contact center. So, managers resign themselves to spending hours each week creating reports, repeating the process because someone else needs the information with a slight variation. Those “slight variations” can be a nightmare.

How can you create a nimble reporting structure that will adjust to your needs? First, do a little research on independent reporting vendors. Ask them where their software sits in terms of the ACD itself. Also ask how flexible their system is. Is it easily adjusted for those on-the-fly variations? What is the reporting structure? Excel? Crystal? Make sure it is standards-based and easy to maintain. A good independent reporting vendor can save your company thousands of dollars in time and energy, not to mention headaches!

The sample report above is for a collections department. Data has been taken from an ACD, a predictive dialer and from a collections database. Once created, reports should be easy to maintain and fine tune.

This is just the beginning

There are many more areas where inefficiencies can be squeezed out of a contact center with a little planning and input from the team. Remember that each inefficiency you identify may seem harmless by itself. But inefficiencies in one area will impact other performance areas.

Where there are people there are inefficiencies! However, these are also great opportunities to improve! Once you begin to identify areas where improvements seem possible, watch your team rise to the occasion. We mentioned earlier about the company whose employees actually created their own goals in terms of performance metrics. This is an opportunity to use your people to attach real numbers to those goals. That, along with a strong performance management and reporting system will take you a long ways towards achieving goals you may have thought impossible before. Isn’t that worth doing?

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)