A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking at the annual gathering of the Hampton Roads Contact Center Group in Virginia Beach. I had a great time and I was able to see some old and valued friends.

During the discussion the issue of better hiring practices arose -it always does.

Although hiring well is important across the entire organization for obvious reasons, hiring always seems to have a solid place on the 3 contact centers issues list, so I thought I would comment on it here.

When we don’t hire well, turnover increases and productivity and quality decreases. It all adds up to additional costs, both hard and soft. So, it’s important to find the right match for the job.

A question came up during the meeting: Can a good agent be made as opposed to hired?
We spend lots of time and money looking for the right candidate with the appropriate experience etc. More ofthen than we’d like, after all this effort, we still find an unacceptable level of risk in our hires. So, would we be better off training them from scratch?

My political answer is Yes and No. (I should run for office)

Of course, I think we can train and purposefully develop great agents, however, some people have better aptitute for particular types of jobs than others. We can probably agree that a collections agent is not usually the same person as a customer support agent.

So yes, training is necessary and can be very effective, however, if climbing trees is the goal, I would much rather start with a monkey than a chicken. You know what I mean?

Although I think we can develop much of what is in a great agent, I would still rather start with a person that has many of the key skills, personality traits and cognitive abilities critical to job success. Looking for these candidates from the “get-go”, increases our chances of a better fit.

The right match means the right aptitude, cognitive skills and attitude as well as experience and skills. Given a choice, I’ll pick the first 3 over the experience. When building from an appropriate base, training is more natural and faster, and the results are better and longer lasting.

Of all the problems related to hiring at Contact Centers, the single largest and most costly is Short Term attrition. The majority of agent attrition occurs in the first 90 days and is a direct result of poor fit.

The average cost for an attrition-ed employee in the first 90 days is between $5,000 ~ $8,000. You can do the math yourself, by counting how many people you lost last year iduring this period.

Anything we can do to improve our ability to identify and hire the required skills, personality traints and cognitive abilities, the better off we will be.

Two things that have made a difference in my experience.

1. Improved communications regarding the job.
So many applicants arrive at their first interview (phone or in person) not fully understanding the job for which they are applying. Mostly because of poor communications about the particulars of the position. A full, clear, and honest explanation of the job is very important. Also, a download-able or a stream-able recording of typical calls can make a significant difference.

2. Understand and Look for the characteristics that matter most.
If we could assess an rate the critical characteristics for successful agents across your population, we would be better served to start looking for candidates that more closely match these characteristics in personality traits, cognitive abilities, and the like.

I belive in profiling. It provides the opportunity to identify the key required traits and then allows us to assess new prospective employees against these requirements.

I have found dramatically decreased short term attrition as a result of these two practices.

There are software products out there that can assist in this area: wp_attrition11

Yes, we can create make the agent we want, but the resources and time required are dictated by how close the new hire matches the proven and appropriate profile.

Committed to XCS !

In looking at the activity on the blog, I noticed one of the most popular searches was the phrase “average speed of answer“. So, in the spirit of XCS, I thought I should say a few things about the topic.

First, I should mention that anything I know about managing call center KPIs, I learned from Don Szczepaniak and Lorraine Robbins who managed the Panasonic Consumer Call Center during my tenure there. They are amazing people that know much about the dynamics of call center statistics.

Average Speed of Answer (ASA) is one of the key metrics related to “accessability”, the measure of how easily a customer reaches an agent. Other related measures of accessibility are service level, and abandon rate.

Average speed of answer is defined as the average speed in which a customer is reached by an available agent after being placed in Queue. ASA does not include IVR time (the time it takes for a customer to go through the maze of options).

ASA has a high correlation to customer satisfaction. It is, in fact, an inversely leading indicator of Customer Satisfaction. That is, by managing ASA you are directly and inversely influencing Customer Satisfaction (as ASA goes up, customer satisfaction goes down).

Another interesting aspect of ASA is that it is laterally skewed. That is, if ASA is very high, your customer satisfaction is guaranteed to plummet. However, a very good ASA does not guarantee improved Customer Satisfaction.

ASA has a precarious threshold upon which it begins to exponentially impact customer satisfaction, your call center’s efficiency and costs. Past this threshold, which differs by industry but is rarely higher than 5 to 7 minutes, customers grow impatient of waiting and begin to abandon (hangup). This is the antithesis of a call center’s mission and should be fought at all costs. Priority number one is always . . . “answer the phone”.

What is an acceptable ASA?: The acceptable ASA for your customers will depend on your industry and the main reason for the call. The acceptable ASA can be estimated by correlating the ASA to average talk time (the time it takes an agent speak with the customer which excludes wrap time), and the abandon rate. You will see in your stats that both, average talk time as well as abandon will suddenly increase at a certain level of ASA, usually in that order. You may want to set the upper limit of your service level standard slightly below this number.

ASA is similar but different than Service Level. Service level measures the percentage of the customers reached by an agent in a certain period of time. For example, 80/30 is the service level where 80% of the customers reach an agent within 30 seconds during a prescribed period.

Service level, as a measurement is not affected by highs and lows, it simply measures the percentage of total calls answered by a certain time. This measure is usually taken every half hour in order to provide statistically meaningful and controllable sampling.

These are some of the ways that ASA affects the call center and your customer (not an exhaustive list).

High ASA is inversely proportional to Customer as well as Agent Satisfaction: After a certain level of ASA, perhaps around 5 minutes for an order taking call center or perhaps 7 minutes of support call center, customers will begin to abandon.

High ASAs affect your efficiency: If the customer stayed on the line even as they grew impatient of waiting, the receiving agent can expect to spend anywhere between 30 to 60 seconds listening to a now difficult customer, who may find it necessary to vent their frustrations. This imposed dynamic on the call usually results in difficult communications and a reduction in First Call Resolution rates.

One should not underestimate a customer’s need to prove their point about waiting too long, as source of dissatisfaction. Once a customer is upset about having a long wait they can (consciously or unconsciously) make it very difficult for the agent to help.

ASA will increase your costs: As ASA increases, you will pay that much more in telecommunication charges as well as the associated costs of the inefficiencies and the lack of Customer Satisfaction mentioned above.

Causes of increased ASA:

Here are some causes (not exhaustive)

Staffing – Lack of appropriate agent staffing will increase ASA as customers wait for a shortage of agents to become available. Where there is insufficient agent staffing levels, any other solution will rarely have large scale affect.

Training - Lack of appropriate training or agent ability will increase Handle Time, and will therefore increase the ASA.

Inefficient processes or system response time- Again, anything that increases Handle Time will increase ASA. Make sure your agents are not distracted away from the call by inefficient processes.

Poor or no skills based routing – The main goal of any call center is to match the customer’s need with the appropriate/knowleable agent. Lack of ability to match a customer’s needs with the right agent skill will increase ASA.

Some technologies that can help manage high ASA:

Workforce Management: Scheduling the appropriate number and skills on half hour intervals through a scientific and consistent methodology is key to staffing appropriately. Depending on the size of the call center and the number of queues, manually calculated schedules and staffing can cause great staffing difficulties and thereby ASA problems.

Skills based Routing: The ability to better match an agents skills with customer needs will improve ASA by reducing handle time and increasing First Call Resolution. (Customers whose problems were solved on the first call don’t need to call back another time!)

Auto Call back features: Although this feature should not be used as a permanent solution to ASA, it can be helpful in managing an ASA emergency. The auto call back feature prompts the customer for a phone number and allows the customer to hang up while keeping the customer’s place in line. When the customer’s turn in Queue arrives, the customer is called and immediately placed with an agent.

Agent Station-based Electronic Training: Increasing an Agent’s skills will help reduce handle time and thereby decrease ASA. Station based electronic training will push training content, as prescribed by a supervisor, during valleys in call volume. This is a cost effective and proven method of focused training.

This post is much longer than I’d like (Sorry), so I will stop here although there is so much more to say.

If there is interest, we can cover management of ASA in a subsequent post.

In fact, I can ask our resident call center operations guru, Dru Phelps, to get deeper on the topic than I could ever hope to do myself.

Let me know.

Hope this was of assistance.

Committed to XCS !

Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking at a regional gathering of the Contact Center Networking Group (www.ccng.com) in Phoenix, AZ..

I love CCNG meetings because I am always inspired by the common force and unity that Contact Center Professional feel for their craft. They are inherently united and willing to help each other.

I ran out of time at the presentation (not unusual), and could not touch on these basics, so I thought I would cover a couple of them here.

1. Contact Centers Are About People
Although technology, statistics, quality sheets and accuracy are important, contact centers are about people.
- People buy your products
- People call you for assistance
- People deliver the service.

The proper management of contact center is the creation of a conduit that facilitates the efficient servicing of people (customers and employees). Our goal is to exceed both of their expectations in a manner that the human-touch can be noticed. Ultimately, we are transforming transactions into positively emotional events that create the possibility for loyalty.

2. Listen to Customers – Understand Their Expectations.
It is very difficult to exceed expectations we don’t understand.
I often find contact center managers making assumptions about what customers want. Many times we are wrong. The result can be an unnecessary over-extension of resources, or the blatant mis-aiming of our efforts. “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up somewhere else”

Ask your customer what they expect? Build policies and procedures to exceed those expectations.

3. The Customer Wants Only Two Things:
a. Answer the phone Now!
b. Solve my problem Today!

This may sound too basic, but it isn’t.
As we concentrate in areas we know to be deficient, we risk loosing focus. Although ASA, training, calibration, AHT, processes, attrition or any of the hundreds of variables that call our attention play a key role in achieving success, we must make sure we consider and prioritize our activities in the context of how they help us achieve the customer’s expectations.
When deciding on any aspect of our business, we would do well to ask ourselves: “How does this help me answer the phone more efficiently and/or increase First Call Resolution for my customers?”

Which brings me to,

4. Choose the Right Key Performance Indicators

There are two types of KPIs – Leading and Lagging.
A Lagging KPIs point to the past. For example, Customer Satisfaction Results is a lagging KPI. It tells you the level of Customer Satisfaction you’ve achieved. But it doesn’t provide insight on how to improve it.

A leading KPI measures activity that impacts the achievement of the desired result. For example, abandon rate is a leading indicator of Customer Satisfaction. In this case, I would say, make sure you put more weight on Abandon Rate in your balanced KPI set.

Although, abandon rate is leading, and that’s good, it is also passive and that’s not so good. It does not measure actual actions that create the desired goal, and therefore, is a weak leading indicator.

The best leading indicators are active in that they measure actions that lead to the desired results. Here is the perfect example:

McDonald’s needed to increase their average purchase per visit. Naturally, they chose average ticket sales as their KPI. After a year, they saw only marginal improvement. The reason was that their attention was placed on the lagging KPI. So they changed their focus from the lagging indicator to a new and active leading indicator – The percentage of times the host or hostess asked the question: “would you like that super-sized?”. By measuring the percentage of times the host or hostess offers super-sized meals, they are managing action that creates results.

Although Leading vs. Lagging is simple to understand, finding great active leading KPIs is not so easy. One can spend weeks looking for the right leading KPIs, but, they will be weeks well spent.

Keep it simple, keep it basic.

RudyV
Committed to XCS!

All,

First let me say thanks once again for your support and interest in the blog. Since December the traffic and interest has gone through the roof, and your comments continue to inspire better and better discussions(which is the reason for the blog).

I have been thinking about including surveys on XCS topics in order to create even more interesting topics and a testing ground for some of the theories discussed.

I’m not sure if this a good idea, but I thought I would let you decide.

The surveys will be found on the “Surveys” tab on the masthead of the blog.

My Commitment:

• Surveys will be short and to the point. (the title will include # of questions and the estimated time to complete)
• Surveys will always be driven by the topics and the issues being/to be discussed on the blog.
• Surveys and their content will never be sold to, or commissioned by a third party.
• Survey ideas from readers will be considered and accepted according to their merit.
• Survey results will be discussed on the blog.

Please keep in mind, that l will not explain or discuss the purpose of the surveys while the surveys are planned or in progress, so as not to skew the results.

The first survey can be found here.

Thanks again for your support.

Look forward to your involvement in the survey and to the discussion of results.

Thanks

Rudy Vidal

Committed to XCS !

While discussing XCS and the importance of timing with Mr. Paul Jarman/CEO of UCN, a simple thought arose which encompasses 3 important tenets of the XCS philosophy:

• Speed
• Power of Recovery
• Empowerment

I thought I would share.

A customer looking for recovery from a challenging situation offers a limited window of opportunity in which our action will be considered honest and forthcoming. It is during this window that the customer will associate your actions to XCS and deposit the resulting emotion in their Loyalty account.

If we wait too long, making the customer jump through hoops while we deliberate on our decision, the customer will not see our efforts and accomodations as the result of our XCS culture, but as the result of their persistence and tenacity. In this case, our considerations and accommodations will yield nothing, except costs in time and money.

As management, we must learn to assess a situation and quickly see if we are likely to end up accommodating the customer. If the answer is yes, then we must act quickly ensuring we receive the credit and benefit of our consideration.

Waiting too long will cause a degradation of the XCS effect over time; ultimately leaving us with nothing except an unrecovered customer on whom we have spent much time and money.

By the way, teach your staff to do this as well and push it as close to the customer as possible. Empowerment, brings with it two large benefits. Speed and Customer Perspective.

Committed to XCS !

When you go to an authentic Mexican Restaurant, are you surprised if the front door has a Japanese design on it? What if if the bathroom had a Jamaican landscape on the wall? What if the menu offered sour kraut?

Being aligned with your customer expectations is a basic business requirement, but the real secret is being consistent.

XCS is a mindset. As a mindset, it becomes possible to show XCS in all we do.

When we are inconsistent in our intention across touch-points, we create doubt.

Doubt can never create positive emotion.

Find all your touch-points and sprinkle some XCS on them. Then find all the paths that lead to those touch-points and sprinkle some more.

Consistency is the key.

Try it

Do you remember that horrible prank bullies played on weaker kids where they would twist your arm until you shamefully cried “UNCLE, UNCLE !” .

I just found an older post form The Bank Channel which reminded me of that.

Although insightful it brings to light issues in banking that make my head shake uncontrollably.

Here is a quote from the first paragraph:

“Nearly 60% of customers of the 10 largest retail banks indicate high levels of satisfaction with their primary bank – but fewer than 40% of these same customers believe their banks meet their expectations of what a bank should do for them.” (The rest of the post is here – it has lots of good areas and thoughts on where we can put our attention.)

I think this is the first time I have seen this phenomenon outside of government services, where the lack of customer satisfaction has beat the customers into submission and acceptance. Sixty percent of the customers are satisfied but less than 40% of these feel their expectations are being met. What?

I wonder if we hold banks to a different standard?

It’s possible, because if a car company were to mail my son the keys to a car he could not afford I would be much more upset than I am when he receives unsolicited credit cards he can’t afford.

Although the posting is quite interesting (Kudos to our friends at McKinsey), I wish they could have been a little less politically correct and called it like it is: “Shame on you Mr. Big Bank, that you have convinced the consuming public that less than they expect is the best you could or should do.

This post is in response to Chris’ comment regarding the power in turning dissatisfied customers into extremely satisfied ones.

Our research shows that recovery is the most powerful driver to XCS (Repurchase propensity of 89%). It is more powerful than the effort of creating XCS with a customer who hasn’t had a poor experience (Repurchase propensity 76%).

The phenomenon is powered by the same engine as XCS, emotional events. Since a dissatisfied customer is more emotionally charged than a person who has not had a problem, and since the recovery is often unexpected, the resulting positive emotional charge is greater.

The problem is that extremely dissatisfied customers are usually relatively small in numbers. So, if we’re searching for large gains in loyalty, then probably dissatisfied customer is not the place. However, knowing this characteristic is HUGE.

This is not to say that we should look for ways of dissatisfying customers so we can then save them, but is good to know that in every dissatisfied customer is a loyal customer looking to break through.

See a white paper on recovery, here: servicefailureandrecovery.pdf

One of the things I learned long ago about business in general and about contact centers in particular, is that you can’t do everything at once.

Concentrating on the key issues that could address 80% of the customer’s problems will give you enough payoff, to buy you time to get to the next twenty.

In all the customer research I have consumed over the years, it is clear that customers value two aspects of the customer support experience over any others:

1. Answer the phone/chat/mail/ now.

2. Solve my problem today.

These two criteria correlate directly with Average Speed of Answer (ASA) and First Call Resolution (FCR).

All aspects and variables in a call center have been identified or created in order to better manage these 2 issues.

I believe if you cannot manage these 2 aspects, very little else will matter.

Once you do these, let’s work on the accents !

As we move towards customer loyalty through great service experiences the issue of Contact Center Staffing always arises as a major issue.

In my experience many Contact Centers accept the difficulty of “Staffing for Success” as insurmountable. It is not.

The mantra for any contact center manager is:

The Right People in the Right Seats at the Right Time

let’s split it into two sections . . . . .

1. Right people in the right seats (a reference to Good to Great-if you haven’t read it, I recommend it) and

2. At the right time.

1. Right People in the Right Seats- Although we value exceptional service as critically important, not all people have the mindset or the inclination to provide it. Customer Centricity cannot be faked, or imposed. Therefore, finding people with the “Right” aptitude is vital. If our people do not derive pleasure from exceeding customer’s expectations, they can become more of a liability than an asset.

Employee attrition is at epidemic proportions, often reaching over 50%. Most of these occur in the first 90 days, after we have spent time and funds to train them. Did you know that the cost of attrition is between $6,000 and $8,000 per employee? How many do you loose every year? Do the math.

Countermeasures for ensuring a good fit are: Make sure your prospects fully understand the scope of the job. Do not oversell the position as a “sales executive position” when in fact it is an entry level customer support position.

A prospective employees psychological profile is also important. A collections agent must be less empathetic than a customer support agent, for example. It is important that the prospective employee fully understand the job and be the type of person that will derive pleasure from assisting customers with their needs. it may sound unlikely to those not in our field, but there are people that actually enjoy helping others (sorry for the sarcasm)

I suggest the use of professional recruiters who utilize profile testing in order to ensure the right fit. The benefits will be lower attrition rates, increased customer satisfaction and a more easily manageable culture.

2. At the Right Time - Making sure we are ready for the customers when they need us is equally important, but not easily done.

Reasons for this shortfall may be, lack of forecasting ability, unpredictable employee compliance to work schedules, lack of budgets,etc. Whatever the reason, creating dissatisfied customers because we are not ready to support our business is not good for anyone.

Take a look at what is negatively affecting your efficiency so that you can reduce the insatiable need. The answer to more people is not always people, but better processes. How many times do your agents need to get up from their stations to complete necessary processes? Are the agents properly trained to find the necessary answers easily or they fumble in their attempts. Are you providing them with the information they need?

If processes are not the problem, consider self help solutions in your phone queues as well as on your website (1 agent can handle up to 3 simultaneous web chats).

When customers don’t need to call back multiples times becuase they reached the right person and had their their problem addressed on the first attempt, beautiful things begin to happen to your volume and customer satisfaction. Volume usually goes down as customer satisfaction rises (satisfied customers don’t call back and don’t take 2 minutes ranting at the start of each call).

If you measure the First call resolution rate of your support staff you can calculate the savings in volume you will get from having the right people in the right seats at the right time.

Things to consider:

Integrated Workforce Management systems – will help you forecast the volume as well as the type of people you will need per Queue.

ACDs with Skills Based Routing – pay for themselves in no time, by bringing together the right customer with the right agent.

Integrated Training solutions – providing the appropriate training for your agents based on their customer’s satisfaction levels is critical to reducing Average Handle Time and increasing First Call Resolution.

Survey your customers – As quickly as possible after the experience and feed the results back to your agents. Agents tend to listen to the customer’s comments much more than they do to your QA staff.

The biggest determinant of Customer Satisfaction is First Call/Visit Resolution. To do this we must have the “Right People in the Right Seats at the Right Time”