Donna Fluss is the founder and President of DMG Consulting LLC, a firm specializing in customer-focused business strategy, operations and technology services for Global 2000 and emerging companies. Ms. Fluss is a recognized thought leader and innovator in CRM, contact center and real-time analytics. For over 23 years, she has helped end users build world-class differentiated contact centers.

2008 Contact Center Challenges

Contact centers are finally receiving recognition from their corporate peers for the many contributions that they are making to the greater enterprise. Long regarded as merely call handling departments, contact centers are poised to share their wealth of customer information and insights with other departments. We foresee that in the next 5 to 10 years, the contact center will become on of the most important revenue generating areas in a company. This creates new challenges, as well as opportunities, for contact center management.

Contact center managers have to balance many demands and objectives in optimizing the performance of their departments. One of the most important goals for contact center managers is improving productivity. This goal is typical of any staff-intensive organization. It is almost always a priority for North America-based contact centers, and outside of North America, it is often the only goal of contact center management.

Delivering an outstanding customer experience is another important objective for contact centers, as it is a pivotal component of customer retention and critical path to generating incremental revenue. Failure to deliver on this goal can create a vicious cycle of negative effects. Unhappy customers take their business elsewhere; even if they remain with a company, they tend to vent their frustrations when they call or email. This creates a negative atmosphere in the contact center, as agents, like anyone else, don’t like to be the object of constant complaints and harangues. In turn, unhappy agents cannot help but share their own aggravations with customers, which can drive even more customers away. Worse yet, frustrated agents may just pick up and leave a company. Agent attrition represents a tremendous expense for the contact center and the enterprise, as hiring and training can be very costly.

Another important goal for contact centers is to generate incremental revenue. As contact centers begin to play a larger part in overall corporate strategy, this goal is becoming increasingly important. To achieve this objective, contact center management needs best practices and tools to help leverage the wealth of customer information that flows through the contact center and convert it into actionable data for use by the rest of the enterprise. In order to share this information effectively, contact center managers must also make an effort to improve their relationships with peer organizations within the enterprise. Positive interactions with sales, marketing and the executive suite are critical to enlarging the contact center’s role within the corporation.

The growing complexity of contact centers has created new challenges for managers. Multi-site, multi-channel and virtual service environments require new processes for overseeing and managing a large number of transactions arriving from diverse sources. More than ever, it is important for contact center managers to understand why customers are calling, so that they can maintain control and encourage optimal performance, even when they are not personally on-site to oversee the contact center’s operations.

Outsourcing is a major area of concern for contact center managers in North America, who do not want to lose their jobs to offshore competitors. Tight budgets and high labor costs are driving the trend toward moving contact center operations abroad to reduce costs. As a result, managers are feeling pressure to defend their own activities to senior management. Delivering on productivity and revenue generating goals will give companies more reasons to warrant keeping their operations in-house and reduce the pressure on managers to justify their own existence.

Managers who successfully meet or exceed their departmental goals have more opportunities than ever before for career development within their corporations. Growing recognition for the contact center means growing recognition for their managers, as well. As contact center managers diversify their skills, becoming adept at their traditional responsibilities as well as revenue generation and sales and marketing, their skills will be valued across the enterprise, opening up new avenues for advancement throughout the company.

There is a major transition underway for contact centers. 2008 is just the beginning of the evolution of contact centers from call handling departments to essential revenue generating organizations. Contact center managers who excel in meeting the many challenges that they face are poised to raise the profile of their centers, revolutionize the role of their departments in contributing to corporate goals, and to advance their own careers in the process.

Regards,

Donna Fluss
President, DMG Consulting LLC

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Question:

What is the best way to manage a constant flow of hiring and training in the call center? Our call center is on a continuous hiring cycle and our new hire training is five weeks long. How do we manage this and achieve the maximum benefit for both human resources (HR) and the call center?

The situation that you describe, a continual cycle of hiring call center agents and a five-week training program for new agents, is common in many call center environments. Unfortunately, it is also a very costly practice, as it involves a great deal of management attention. Since the entire process begins with hiring the right agents, it would be best to start with a careful review of your recruiting, interviewing and hiring practices.

Here are a few best practices for hiring call center agents:

• Assess the qualities that your top agents possess. Develop an ideal agent profile that encompasses the skills, attributes and behaviors that are required of a successful call center agent. Provide your HR recruiter with the candidate profile.
• Make sure that the recruitment staff completely understands the call center working environment and agent performance expectations. Invite your recruitment staff to spend time in the call center. Have them sit with agents to listen to calls and get a first-hand look at the complexity of the job, the fast pace and structured work environment. This experience will prove invaluable in helping them accurately assess the abilities of candidates.
• Meet with HR to review current recruiting strategies and identify what's working and what's not. Be creative in developing a list of new or alternative recruiting strategies to explore. For example, if at-home agents are a viable alternative for your organization, consider employing them to create a cost effective, high quality, flexible, diverse labor pool with an unlimited geographical reach and no real estate costs.
• Use a competency-based assessment tool as part of the hiring process to evaluate agent candidates. This tool should be able to assess skills as well as personality traits that are a critical to being a successful, happy and satisfied agent.
• Perform the initial job interview in the channel for which the agent is being hired. For example, if an agent is being hired to handle phone calls, the initial screening should be done over the phone. Similarly, for email agents, conduct the initial screening via email.
• Use behavior-based interview questions. Ask candidates to provide specific examples of a time in their previous job(s) where they demonstrated ability and skill in handling situations that they are likely to encounter as a call center agent. For example, questions such as, "Please tell me about a specific time when you had to deal with a difficult or unreasonable request from a customer," will help you obtain important information about a candidate's skill and experience, and also gain valuable insight into how they approach and work through challenging situations.
• Provide candidates with full disclosure about the job, working environment and all specific job requirements, such as non-traditional work schedules, shift requirements, weekend and/or holiday requirements, scheduled lunches and breaks and training requirements. Give candidates an opportunity to listen to simulated calls to be sure that they know what they are signing up for.
• Survey new hires after every step of the process, i.e., recruitment, new hire orientation, training, and three months after training to discover new ways to improve the hiring and training process.
• Conduct exit interviews to understand why agents leave. Track agent attrition to identify trends and opportunities to improve your processes.
• Track and report on the effectiveness of recruiting, interviewing and hiring initiatives. Meet with HR on a regularly scheduled basis to review trends and discuss ways to enhance the process.

Once the hiring process is optimized you'll need to examine your agent training, satisfaction and retention practices. For more information, please refer to Motivating Agents: Respect and Rewards Make a Big Difference and 2007 Call Center Supervisor Best Practices.

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