Call Center Strategies 2009
With this in mind, the Ascent Group conducted its third annual call center benchmarking study to better understand how companies are managing inbound customer care. We asked companies to share their experiences to help us identify the practices that make or break a customer contact center. We also asked companies to provide performance benchmarks so we could identify "best performers"-companies providing the best service at the best cost. The results of this research are contained in our report, Call Center Strategies 2009.
Call Center Benchmark Performance
We asked companies to report call center operational data so we could calculate several performance benchmarks. Once we identified the "best performers" for each industry -- above average companies that deliver low cost, high productivity, and high service -- we calculated a "best performer" average for these high performing companies.
What did we learn? "Best Performing" contact centers are more likely to:
- Use behavioral-based screening to select the best candidates,
- Empower employees to make decisions,
- Actively reward and praise employees for superior performance,
- Commit resources to consistently monitor call quality and provide feedback,
- Offer periodic refresher training,
- Actively measure and monitor performance, and
- Use performance results to drive continual improvement.
Best-in-class companies look for motivated and enthusiastic people who demonstrate a propensity to serve. It is easier to teach proficiency than it is to change attitudes. Hire for attitude and train the technical; emphasize potential over experience. Use behavioral-based assessment tools and interviewing techniques to pick the candidates with the personality and attitudes for the job. In a service business, the employees are the company and hiring is critical. Work to strengthen your recruitment process so you start with the right people. Use a series of interviews, peer interviews, group interviews, phone interviews, role-playing and simulation to better understand how candidates react and perform under different scenarios and pressure.
At the same time, it is important to adequately communicate job expectations to candidates as well as better understand candidate expectations. The more a candidate understands about the job, the work environment, performance expectations, and culture, the better the fit. Use job shadowing, peer interviews, or simulation to relay culture and expectations. Rewrite job ads so the appropriate expectations are conveyed. Survey new hires to better understand how to continually refine the process and minimize new-hire surprise.
Emphasize the importance of the customer experience in the recruiting process. Make sure that candidates know up front about your organizational commitment to customer service. Stress the importance of customer service and customer satisfaction in the job advertisements, on your hiring web pages, and during interviews. Rewrite job descriptions to emphasize customers' service expectations.
Recruit for the position and the schedule. Your organization may use a combination of part-time, temporary, and full-time labor. Be sure to recruit for each type of labor separately as the schedule might dictate a different pool of interested candidates. For instance, companies relying predominantly on part-time labor have found a ready pool of qualified candidates in retirees, stay-at-home moms, and college students, who prefer a part-time schedule. Be sure your recruitment efforts target each group differently, using the most appropriate means for that group. Also consider generational differences.
People matter. Engaged employees are the key to excellent customer service. Engaged employees are employees that feel as though they are truly valued at work; that their efforts directly contribute towards the mission and success of the company. Engaged employees are more productive and less likely to look outside of the company for employment. The best approach for a call center depends upon its unique composition.
We've seen a growth in more interactive, hands-on training opportunities for new hires -- role-playing, simulation, and peer mentoring. Hands-on experiences help internalize learning, incorporate more "learning by doing" opportunities into your new-hire program. Hands-on learning can also be used to drive assessment so that trainers can measure both factual knowledge and comprehension. Additionally, training comprehension is increased through individualized training-training tailored to each student's individual learning style.
In this age of changing technologies, industry restructuring, and competitive markets, call center training is one of the call center manager's most vital resources. As customer service, more specifically the call center, becomes a strategic weapon in the competitive marketplace, management must be sure that their front-line is prepared to deliver the most effective and responsive level of service possible.
Recognize the right behaviors and communicate such that the employee's behavior becomes a model within the work group. Sharing information on expected behaviors and rewards will establish trust. Employees will be able to understand what they need to do to be similarly recognized. Reward these behaviors so other employees are inclined to follow suit. Rewards are a better reinforcement of learning and risk-taking than punishment is for failure. Recognition is about acknowledgement and appreciation for a contribution, improvement, innovation, or excellence -- a message to employees that they are valued.
Focus on the Customer Experience.
Find out what your customers expect from your company and your employees. Conduct regular customer research to understand expectations and measure customer satisfaction routinely, and if possible, tie customer satisfaction feedback to individual employees. This will hold your front-line employees accountable for their service delivery. Measure Customer Satisfaction with your services and service delivery. Only 45 percent of our panel routinely measures customer satisfaction.
Emphasize the importance of Customer Service in the performance management process -- Make sure that front-line employees, supervisors, and managers know about your organizational commitment to customer service. Stress the importance of customer service and customer satisfaction throughout the new hire training program and supplement with ongoing refresher training.
Commit the resources to adequately monitor, evaluation, and discuss results. Effective call monitoring is all about commitment of resources. If providing regular, fair, and timely feedback is a challenge for your organization or if your supervisors are always pressed for time, consider setting up an in-house quality assurance group. There are also outsourcing options available -- companies that specialize in agent behavior analysis. Contracted monitoring services can be provided on-site or remotely, based on your specifications and standards.
Recognize behavior and reward results in a timely manner so that employees know exactly why they are being recognized. Be specific, clear, and communicate so that others will take notice. Consistency is Key. Organizations reporting more highly engaged workers actively promote a culture of engagement by ensuring that organizational leaders, including immediate supervisors, are skilled in the area of engagement improvement. After all, having a good relationship between employees and immediate supervisors is a top driver of employee engagement. Yet, many frontline supervisors are lacking in basic supervisory skills, much less tactics for engaging employees.
Many customer service organizations have not taken the time to establish a formal supervisory (coach) training program. As a result, employee development, performance and morale suffers. Our research shows that 60 percent of participants expressed no process for training coaches or supervisors. Of those reporting a coach or supervisor training process, most rely on internal training resources to provide formal coaching or leadership training.
Others rely on management-led training, peer training, webinars, or outside training. Call monitoring is inarguably one of the best methods of improving call quality and service delivery. While companies can measure customer satisfaction through customer focus groups, customer contact follow-up telephone surveys, and written satisfaction surveys, the results are often not timely enough or detailed enough to help individual agents understand their impact or contribution. A call monitoring session on the other hand, if done correctly, can instantly deliver a wealth of customer satisfaction information, gauge individual agent performance and reveal a lot about your business processes and policies. However, only half of our participants monitor call quality, and monitoring quality of email, letters, faxes, video, and chat is much less practiced. Only 26 percent of participants monitor email quality and 11 percent monitor correspondence quality.
To ensure successful continuous improvement, encourage your training group to work closely with your quality assurance and operational excellence groups. This will encourage the link between learning and performance -- making sure the training group is equipping employees to successfully perform as well as making sure any operational changes are reflected in training. At the same time, underperforming employees can receive targeted training.
Get it right the first time. First Call Resolution is perhaps the most powerful call center metric. A focus and improvement in FCR brings the best of both worlds -- an improvement in efficiency and effectiveness. You don't have to worry that you are sacrificing quality because you are reducing costs, or vice versa. When you improve FCR you're improving quality, reducing costs, and improving customer satisfaction, all at the same time.
Less than a third of our panel measures FCR performance. Institute a program to measure, track, and manage FCR performance. It's a key driver of continuous improvement and a key determinant of customer satisfaction. If you don't measure it you can't improve! Our research identified four primary ways of measuring First Call Resolution-customer surveying and three other approaches that deliver internal approximations of First Call Resolution.
Measure your performance. A family of these measures should be selected to accurately measure performance. Establish goals and objectives for your organization based on defined missions, end products, and activities. Identify key result areas where results must be achieved if goals are to be obtained (Critical Success Factors). In most organizations there are usually three to six factors that determine success. Consider outcome as well as output.
Revise training content so the appropriate expectations are conveyed. Communicate performance routinely and look for ways to make your performance results more accessible to employees and supervisors. Online performance measurement tools and dashboards improve communications of performance results to front-line employees. It also can make this information accessible when supervisors are unavailable.
Take advantage of a service or tool to actively test and monitor your IVR applications. These services can point out application, network, and system inefficiencies and failures that you may not recognize or hear about from customers. These tools can also track transactions, system availability, and system reliability, and even test your applications under varying degrees of stress and at varying times of the day, week, month, and year.
Comparing your company's call center performance against a representative peer group can provide tremendous benefits. Not only can you learn more about how your peers approach similar work tasks, you often learn more about your own organization simply by participating in the measurement process. You may confirm what management already knows as well as confirm the belief that there really is a need to change. It may provide the "proof" that management has been struggling to uncover. When conducted properly, employees actively participate in the process and become part of the solution.
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