Staffing for peak periods can be stressful because accurate staffing goes a long way toward balancing excellent customer service and cost-effective operations.  You want the right staff on hand to handle calls in a timely manner while keeping staff-related costs within budget.

So then, what does it mean to have “the right staff”? There are two common variables to look at here:

• The number of staff scheduled for shifts.

Overstaffing  can be costly in wages. As well, you may be paying for  more physical space and equipment than you need. Understaffing can be costly in terms of customer service if calls wait too long in queues or you have overtaxed agents trying to deal with customer issues.

• The experience level of agents.

You need to find the appropriate knowledge balance for each shift. More experienced agents can provide support to junior staff, whether it’s regarding  knowledge transfer or issue resolution. However, you don’t want to overweight shifts with more senior staff than is really needed because these are likely your most expensive staff in terms of wages.

In September’s blog, we talked about the benefits of using workforce management software  to assist with both agent scheduling and adherence. Understanding the agent resources available to you is a good start to staffing shifts properly and in a cost-effective way.

However, developing a predictive approach to forecasting staffing requirements is invaluable. Predictive forecasting means basing future staff schedules on well-founded assumptions about expected demand, such that you can accurately estimate future workloads. In our case, this means anticipating call volume and understanding the resources (such as agent experience and queue capacity) available to meet call demand.

One of the best ways to predict future activity is to look at similar periods in the past. Here’s where a reporting solution can provide a wealth of data. Being able to look not just at last year’s data, but several years of accumulated data helps you separate the meaningful call patterns from the true aberrations. Let’s say that call volume increased 25% in December for four of the past five years. On first glance, it would seem reasonable to plan for a 25% increase this year. It’s important, though, to look at the circumstances around call volume in that fifth year.

• If call volume was significantly higher than 25%, find out whether your company took any extra measures to reach new customers or to introduce special promotions. There may also have been external reasons, such as an increase in your region’s population or the close of a competitor’s business.
• If call volume was significantly lower than 25%, try to find whether there is any justification for the decrease. Anything from an economic recession to a shift in the company’s objectives or  executive team should be looked at carefully to understand whether they may come into play this year.

It’s well worth the time to develop a predictive approach to forecasting. When you add up the time between Black Friday and the end of the January sales season, we’re really not talking about a small blip in normal activity. In fact, this time period represents 25% of your annual call patterns. Understanding what happened this year will greatly increase your ability to develop accurate schedules next year.

We hope we’ve given you good reasons to take the guesswork out of staff forecasting, Next month, we’ll look at statistics and techniques that will give you the basis for making accurate predictions.

See you next month.

• Followup service

While we hope that customers are satisfied with the purchases they made leading up to the holidays, it’s best to have plans for dealing with customers who need to return products or request technical assistance. You may also have customers calling to express dissatisfaction over problems with shipping or delivery. Although we try to provide the best service possible, mistakes do happen.

• Continued high call volumes

In an attempt to boost slower post-holiday sales or to clear last year’s products to make way for new ones, your company may offer deep discounts during January. These discounts may result in calls from customers who, having purchased those same products at higher prices a few weeks ago, have questions about pricing guarentees. (Of course, just like special promotions offered in December, these discounts may attract many potential first-time customers for whom you want to provide an efficient transaction experience.)

Regardless of the reason that existing  customers are calling, make sure your call center can turn them into satisfied customers. Here are a few tips for keeping your customer retention rate as high as possible:

• Use self-service methods to resolve the customer issue before even being connected to an agent.

In December’s blog, we talked about using reporting software to “tag” reasons for calls. Continuing to draw from that data, update the information available to customers to make it relevant for new circumstances. For example, your IVR introduction may have provided information about delivery timeframes in December. Now, it may be more relevant to provide details about your return policy.

• Make the time with the agent productive.

As soon as possible after a call is received by the telephone system, let the customer know what information they will need on-hand when talking with an agent, such as the date of purchase or make and model number of a product. This approach reduces the number of customers who wait in a queue, only to find out that they need to call back because they don’t have enough information to complete a transaction. (Don’t forget to keep an eye on real-time statistics in your call center. You may want to adjust the acceptable length of time that calls wait in queues in order to answer calls more quickly.)

• Give agents the authority to deal with issues, as appropriate for their individual skills and experience.

No matter how hard you try to please your customers, some customers will have unreasonable expectations about what you should do for them. Make sure that agents understand what authority they have to offer solutions to customers and be clear about when they should contact their managers for input on difficult situations.

Look at issue-resolution as an opportunity to increase the loyalty of customer for your business. A really positive issue-resolution experience shows your customers that you’ll honor your customer satisfaction policies without hassle. Not only will those customers come to you first for future purchases, they may even recommend you to others.

Next month, we’ll talk about how you can use the data you’ve gathered over the last few months to plan for future call volume peaks and for changes in your business that affect call center forecasting.

See you next month.

Given our current economic climate, this seasonal peak can bring some interesting challenges. Let’s look at three that we see frequently.

First-time Customer Experience

Your business may try to reach out to new customers during this the gift-giving season by introducing new products, fresh marketing strategies, or special promotions. If these campaigns are successful, your business may have the “good” problem of handling potential first-time customers. You don’t want to be caught off-guard, as many businesses were this past Black Friday, with wait times 139% higher than normal.

Making a positive first impression during your busiest season may require some extra effort or processes. Agents may be under more pressure dealing with higher call volumes and impatient or frustrated customers.  Give your agents scripts to start the call, customized for greetings that are appropriate. If possible, try to find out early in each call if this is a potentially new customer, and make agents aware that it’s OK to spend more time with these callers because you want to ensure all their questions are answered before ending the call.

Of course, all customers should get great service, but paying special attention to first-timers is a good way to turn them into long-term, loyal customers.

Fewer Discretionary Spending Dollars

It’s no secret that consumers are being more cautious with their discretionary dollars. Many are choosing to cut back on the number of gifts they purchase, social events they attend, or organizations they donate to.  With fewer dollars available, you want to capture as much of the spending as possible.

Simple solutions probably aren’t realistic given the cost-controls in effect for many businesses. For example, you could increase your sales force, but the near-term cost may be prohibitive. As well, what do you do with your increased sales force after call volumes return to normal levels?

There’s another solution that may cost you some time, but the return on the investment may be significant. Provide cross-training for staff to broaden the types of calls they can respond to. A good example is to train your support agents to answer questions and take orders related to upgrades or product accessories, resulting in fewer transferred calls to other departments. This means sales agents can stay focussed on first-time customer inquiries and take fewer calls about upgrades. Not only does a cross-training strategy increase the productivity of various departments in your business, but customers are happier. Regardless of the original purpose of the call, a customer dealt with a single point of contact in your organization for guidance through one or more issues.

Overtaxed Agents

As we mentioned earlier, higher call volumes can be a burden on agents. Adding to the busier workload, agents may resent that they have to work at all. It wasn’t long ago that Thanksgiving and Christmas were “guaranteed” statutory holidays. Now, you may have to explain to employees that not only will they be working those days, but they may need to take on additional shifts or extended hours. Overtime pay itself may not resolve negative feelings about lost personal time.

You can at least mitigate some of the negativity by implementing tools and processes to help alleviate the burden. Identifying trends or common issues among calls may allow you to direct callers to other resources, such as videos on your online storefront, FAQs on your website, or self-service options in the IVR. One useful way to track commonalities among calls is to ask agents to “tag” the reason for each call, such as “Return Policy” or “Warranty”. If your reporting software supports tracking these tags (often referred to as reason or account codes), you can report on them. Even answering the most-frequently asked question as part of the IVR introduction may help to reduce call volumes, and allow agents to deal with a broader scope of issues.

Good luck with your holiday season. Keep tracking those key metrics and, if you haven’t already, start collecting data related to the seasonal peaks you may be seeing now. Over the next couple of months, we’ll look at how you can use this information to look ahead and anticipate factors that affect the performance of your contact center.

Happy holidays.

The Challenges

Healthcare is expensive. Whether you’re a supplier of products or services, or a patient in need of them, there’s no question that costs in this industry are becoming prohibitive. Unfortunately, demographics show that our aging population will just increase the burden on this industry over time. The U.S. Census Bureau projects that the proportion of the population 65 years old or more will increase to 19.6% by 2030. In the U.S., the problem is more complex given that there is more choice than ever for clients who are able to choose their healthcare. This industry has become extremely competitive with a variety of organizations and services vying for clients in the same marketspace. Passing costs on to the customer is not an option.

A contact center in a healthcare organization faces some special challenges. Your agents are the first point of contact for your organization. No matter how good your healthcare team is, customers will quickly become frustrated if they can’t get through to make appointments. Furthermore, if your contact center handles emergency calls or triages healthcare inquiries, the environment may be highly stressful. The wrong decision has life-threatening consequences. Lowering patient care is not an option.

On top of these considerations, social media plays a role in your ability to compete. Whether it comes from government watchdogs or individual patients, the viral nature of online communications means that word – good or bad —spreads instantly. Unfortunately, you may lose potential customers just based on one poorly handled call.

One Organization’s Solution

In our blogs, we don’t talk about our own products and customers as a rule. In this case, though, we’d like to share the success of one of our customers in the healthcare industry. As the largest employer in North and South Dakota, Sanford Health provides an integrated healthcare system through its network of service facilities, which include many hospital departments, clinics, long-term care centers, and research centers. It’s the largest, rural, not-for-profit healthcare system in the United States, with a presence in 111 communities in 8 states. Through its dedication to the work of health and healing, the organization is building international clinics in Belize and Ireland.

Sanford’s success is based in the organization’s dedication to improving customer satisfaction through strong customer service. Here’s one example. Given the severe weather conditions in the geographic areas of their call centers, agents are not always able report for work on time. Calls to any agents who did not log out the previous evening are suspended in queues the next day, rather than being routed to afterhours services. Through innovative use of real-time reporting, the organization can now automatically log out all agents who are not able to report for work, resulting in better handling of customer calls. Check out the case study for more information about Sanford’s innovative use of real-time monitoring and reporting in their contact centers.

Every industry has its own challenges when it comes to providing quality customer service. Understanding those challenges and addressing them within your contact center goes a long way toward contributing to the overall success of your business. If you’ve found unique ways to meet challenges in your industry, we’d like to hear from you.

See you next month.

We all hope that our employees find meaning in their work. Interest and engagement are great ways to keep employees invested in their jobs, which in turn, leads to lower turnover and higher ROI for your business. In many cases, however, the nature of contact center employment means that staff works regularly in highly frustrating or stressful customer interactions. Depending on the type and size of a contact center, many agents may be simply working for a paycheque, with plans to move on to other careers or opportunities. More often than not, reducing employee turnover is a fulltime endeavor, let alone finding employees who are interested in contributing to higher-level business objectives.

Here are some suggestions that may help you increase buy-in from your contact center staff on key metrics.

Make the Value of the Metrics Real

Try to find ways to show your agents the value of their efforts in a way that makes it personal to them. Each day, agents talk to clients about specific issues, whether they are trying to resolve product breakdowns or sell a new service. This can lead to a somewhat limited view of the end-user. If you can provide a bigger picture of who that customer is, agents may be reminded that they are offering a valuable service. For example, a contact center working for clients in the medical industry may need to be reminded that while they may be selling bandages and stethoscopes, their work contributes to health and safety in their community.

You may also be able to show agents the value of the products or services they are supporting. Encourage staff to use the products or services you provide, and, if possible, offer some free usage or samples. Similarly, if your company sends a percentage of sales or some other contribution to a charitable organization, show agents the improvements or effects of that work. You may even be able to give agents time off to volunteer with the organization, further increasing a personal connection between employees and your company’s outreach efforts.

Any way that you can make an aspect of your business relevant in a personal way is going to go a long way toward the way agents approach their work.

Make the Value of the Metrics Profitable

Incentive programs are the obvious way to increase the interest that agents have in meeting service levels. Be careful, though, to understand what rewards are important to your agents. Financial incentives may be well appreciated, but tend to provide only short-term results. You may see better results over a longer term by incenting employees through additional time off or the public recognition of awards.

Depending on the individuals, another great way to increase commitment and investment is to delegate more responsibility to those who have shown they make extra effort in customer satisfaction, operations, or team performance. Agents may start in your contact center with an eye to move up or laterally within your organization. Offer senior agents who have excelled the opportunity to become coaches to junior staff. These agents will appreciate that you’ve acknowledged their experience and the value they can offer by sharing what they’ve learned.

Another way to delegate responsibility is to provide appropriate agents with the opportunity to take part in working groups involved in the strategic directions of the business. Agents are your first line of contact with clients. One who has demonstrated a particularly good understanding of issues or techniques may have insights that other working group members don’t have the perspective to provide.

Whatever your incentive program is, make sure that the employees it’s offered to see value to them. This may mean that the program offers different levels of incentives or customized incentives for certain individuals on the team. The effort in creating a program of this type will pay off when agents have a reason to work toward business objectives, rather than simply putting in their hours.

Make the Value of the Metrics Understood and Measurable

It seems almost too obvious to state because we all understand that communication is important. However, it is always a good idea to make sure that the message you think you are communicating is actually the one being received. First, communicate to agents why the metrics are critical to the success of the business and the relationship to the call center’s work. As a followup, it’s critical to check in on a one-on-one basis with supervisors and agents about their understanding of that information to ensure it’s accurate.

For example, make sure that not only is there an understanding of the metrics themselves, but also, how the contact center performance will be measured on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. As well, let agents know whether meeting targets is acceptable or whether they are encouraged to exceed them.

Give agents a way to see whether they are making progress, and communicate the status on an ongoing basis. Some organizations provide wallboard displays of real-time statistics, with summaries of how they roll up into the higher-level metrics. Other organizations install software on individual agent computers for monitoring progress and customizing the information that’s displayed.

Regardless of how you communicate and measure progress, keep in mind that consistency is important. A variation in understanding across teams or individuals within the contact center can put efforts out of synch, and cause disruption in activities and performance.

When looking at ways to increase employee commitment to business objectives, don’t forget about those who aren’t on the front line in your contact center: the support personnel who keep your telephone system in operation, the IT staff who maintain your computer infrastructure, and the subject matter experts that your agents turn to with inquiries. Without the buy-in from these employees as well, the systems and knowledge that your contact center relies on can become barriers to your agents’ abilities to do their jobs effectively, no matter how motivated they are.

Without employee buy-in on your business objectives, there’s a problematic gap between those objectives and the people most important in meeting them. If you have other ideas or programs that increase the engagement of your employees in meeting key metrics, open a comment for discussion. We’d like to hear from you to share experiences.

See you next month.

Now, let’s take a look at a few processes underlying many common key metrics: agent scheduling and adherence. Staffing is probably the most significant, ongoing expense of running your contact center. To remain cost-effective while meeting expected service levels, effective scheduling means making sure that the right number of agents with the right level of knowledge are available to meet expected call volumes. Yet, no matter how effective or streamlined your schedules are, they are of little value if agents don’t follow them.

Agent Scheduling

Few contact centers are fortunate enough to be able to use static schedules on an ongoing basis. Most contact centers employ numerous agents, and handling vacation time, rotating shifts, and full- versus part-time availability can be daunting. To make matters more complex, call volumes can increase dramatically with the announcement of time-limited promotions or the introduction of new products or services. The nature of your business may also mean that call volumes are affected seasonally, such as a slowdown over the summer months.

The ability to schedule agents in advance while forecasting call volume peaks or decreases is critical to the performance of your contact center. Being caught off-guard by an unexpectedly high call volume means that wait times may become excessive, resulting in high abandon rates due to customer frustration. Over-staffing during slower periods is expensive, with agents waiting for calls that don’t come.

Agent Adherence

The best schedules can’t offset the effects of agents who don’t follow them. Even with the “right” schedule, a shift can have poor phone coverage if agents are absent or need extra time to wrap up calls. Real-time monitoring of agent activity lets you take corrective action, if necessary, showing you instantly when agents who should be logged in and taking calls are not doing so.

Reports on past agent activity can assist with future scheduling needs. For example, new processes or tools may mean that agents take longer to research issues or close calls. Historical data helps you identify this trend, and adjust future schedules accordingly.

Consider Workforce Management Software

Workforce management (WFM) software can assist with both agent scheduling and adherence. Many WFM solutions are available, with the features and technical capabilities to handle even the most complex business requirements, which may include: inbound and outbound call centers, inhouse and outsourced services, as well as centralized and satellite work environments.

Keep in mind that a good WFM solution should

• give you the flexibility to choose from a range of forecasting and scheduling methodologies, so that you can use the one that works best in your environment.
• provide features for alerting you in real-time of changes in contact center conditions that you should be aware of (such as a sudden increase in call volume).
• generate reports based on historical data on which you can refine your forecasting efforts and determine areas where further agent mentoring or training would improve performance.

While it’s important to choose a WFM solution with the features and capabilities you need, always check the integrity of the processes that pass telephone system data to the WFM. Many solid-value WFMs, including NICE IEX Workforce Management and Verint Impact 360 Workforce Management, integrate with TASKE solutions, a combination that provides customers with a strong WFM feature portfolio based on proven data extraction and provisioning technologies.

If you’re using a WFM solution and have any tips or experiences about how it has improved your ability to schedule resources or monitor agent adherence, let us know. Feel free to comment on this blog and we’ll join you in a discussion.

See you next month.

Now, we’ll look more closely at KPIs for more specific contact center service models. In general, contact centers provide inbound or outbound call services. (Some contact centers may provide both types of service models, but for our purposes, let’s look at them independently.) In the case of inbound call services, callers initiate contact. Customer service and product support are common examples of contact centers for inbound call services.  For outbound call services, agents initiate contact, such as for product sales or charitable donations.

Although KPIs are all based on specific business objectives, KPIs for these models should be different. Inbound call services are generally measured on customer satisfaction while outbound call services are measured on revenue generated.

To help understand the relationship between business goals and contact center services, let’s look at a fictional business with an objective to maintain their current market share. This business has two contact centers:  one handles inbound calls for product orders and one handles outbound calls selling extended warranties for products.

Inbound Calls Contact Center

To maintain market share through increased customer loyalty and satisfaction, agents handling customer calls for product orders want to provide a positive experience.  KPIs for this contact center might include measuring how long customers waited before being answered and how long calls were put on hold after being answered. These KPIs are good indicators of whether customers may be frustrated because they are waiting for service. This contact center may not use KPIs related to cost reduction if the business sees investment in the contact center as a way to maintain customer satisfaction.

Outbound Calls Contact Center

For warranty sales, agents are responsible for selling extended warranties to customers who have already purchased products. To maintain market share through retention of existing customers, these agents want to sell as many warranties as possible. For the contact center, this means contacting customers before the manufacturers’ warranties expire. Here, a KPI may be the number of calls made, assuming that the number of warranties purchased is a percentage of the number of calls made. Another KPI may be the call duration. Agents need to keep customers on the phone long enough to explain the benefits of extending a warranty, answer any questions, and complete the warranty purchase. Short call durations  may indicate that customers are hanging up on the agent. Long call durations may indicate that callers have many questions because agents aren’t presenting information clearly. Longer calls may also be an issue because they reduce the number of calls an agent can make during a shift.

KPIs provide an ongoing measure of activity in your contact center. Occasionally, KPIs may reflect values that are not inline with acceptable targets. For example, wait times may temporarily be longer than you’d like because call volume increases for some unexpected reason. However, as long as KPIs over time are consistent with defined targets, you know that your contact center is contributing to the success of your business.

We’ve covered quite a bit of information about KPIs. We hope you’ve learned something new. If you have any questions about KPIs or you want to share your experience, feel free to comment on the blogs and we’ll join you in a discussion.

See you next month.

Let’s look at an example. A business in a very competitive market wants to keep as many customers as possible while giving new customers a positive experience.  One of the objectives for this business, then, is to maintain a relatively high customer satisfaction rate.  While this business objective affects all of its organizations, customer-facing units such as sales and support need to be particularly aware of changing conditions that could decrease customer satisfaction. Responding quickly and appropriately to these changes can mitigate any short-term concerns before they become long-term headaches.

The contact center for this business is using KPIs to monitor activity critical to customer satisfaction. Obviously, customers will be frustrated if they wait too long for an agent’s time, either before or after being answered. Recognizing this, the contact center uses two KPIs for keeping wait time and on hold time under one minute. Using these metrics together provides a better picture of customer service than each statistic on an individual basis. While wait times can easily be minimized by answering calls quickly, customers are no less frustrated if they are then put on hold while the agent answers other callers.

Choosing or reassessing the KPIs that are appropriate for your contact center will take some time and input from several stakeholders. To help you get started, consider three KPIs that are generally accepted as core measures of service levels in a contact center:

• First call resolution.

Are customers satisfied with the outcome of their first contact with your contact center? Do they need to call back more than once about the same issue? A customer with repeat callbacks on the same issue is not only an unhappy customer, but one may consume significant amounts of agent time and  system resources. While this KPI is a good measure of customer satisfaction, it can also indicate where agent training may be needed, as well as other opportunities to improve productivity or operations.

• Telephone service factor.

Are agents answering calls in an acceptable timeframe? For example, you may want calls answered in less than 30 seconds to be as responsive as possible to your callers and to minimize the number of abandon calls. The TSF gives you the percentage of calls that were answered within a specified duration. If you see a low TSF value, you may want to investigate why calls are ringing longer than you’d like. For example, a queue may be short-staffed or call volume may have increased unexpectedly.

• Abandon rates.

How many callers are hanging up while waiting to be answered? Typically, long wait times are the reason behind high abandon rates, and can lead to a negative impression of your contact center, and probably the business overall. If you see high abandon rates, take a look at your call volumes. If they’ve increased, you may want to reassess queue staffing requirements.

Whether your KPIs measure revenue generation, cost control, operations, performance, or customer and employee satisfaction, the most important thing to remember is that you want to assess whether your contact center is contributing to the success of your business.

Check out next month’s blog, when we’ll discuss KPIs for two specific contact center models: inbound call handling versus outbound call handling. In the meantime, we’d like to hear about how you use KPIs, particularly if you’ve developed any best practices around your KPIs or have a success story you’d like to share.

See you next month.

Attendees who dropped by our booth had a great opportunity to see a demo of our products and to meet Dan Campion, who recently joined our sales team. Dan’s enthusiasm for providing the right solution to our customers comes from over 25 years experience in various strategic roles in the telecommunications industry. Dan says that “after seeing the excitement in a customer’s eyes once they saw a demo of a TASKE solution, and then after selling TASKE and hearing how much they loved the product and how it changed the way they ran their call centers, I decided I had to join the team.”

We also had the opportunity to share a customer success, presenting our solution for LogistiCare, a leading manager within the U.S. of medical transportation programs for a diversity of public and private organizations. The problem that LogistiCare faced was how to obtain accurate and usable data from 14 individual sites. These sites work together across time zones to manage more than 1,500 transportation providers and to coordinate over 25 million trips for more than 8 million people each year. Our solution gave call center supervisors real-time monitoring and reporting of their agents in each site, as well as summary reports for operations across all sites. To help the organization meet evolving requirements, we provided the company with tools for continuing to produce new reports, customized to their exact specifications.

Now, let’s talk about what we heard at the conference. The theme of the week was about the changes affecting our industry, which, more than ever, are driven by consumer demand. One speaker reminded us of a time not so long ago when many IT departments resisted allowing smartphones to be part of their communications infrastructure. Today, end users expect to be able to communicate using the devices of their choice, and we’re seeing an explosion in the diversity and number of those devices.  As well, the growth of social media presents challenges in meeting expectations for instantaneous and spontaneous client interactions.

It would be easy to conclude that voice communication alone no longer offers the best service to customers. However, “The US Contact Center Decision-Makers’ Guide” reports that voice (via telephone communication with an agent) remains the channel of choice at 71.6 percent of all inbound communication channels. Other options, such as email, text chat, SMS, and web collaboration are used in relatively equal proportion across the remaining 28.4 percent.

With customers showing little preference for options other than voice, moving into other service offerings without the proper planning and resources can be risky. Customers themselves are changing. Generally, the “Millennial Generation” doesn’t give second chances. One speaker at the conference indicated that 73% of users in this generation will abandon after one bad experience and of that group, 85% will turn around and air their dissatisfaction in social media. On top of the bad PR, you risk that a poor customer experience is literally going to cost you financially. Adam Mandelbaum reports that a recent Harris Interactive and RightNow Technologies poll shows that “the customer experience does more than just determine who your repeat customers are. It also determines how much they spend.”

Let’s go back to basics and remember that the goal of a contact center is to provide accurate and timely information. So what does all the recent change mean to your contact center? Offering a service just because it’s available doesn’t necessarily mean your organization will benefit. Unless you do something well and have sufficient resources to ensure it actually makes a difference to your customers, there’s the potential that you’ll lose more than you’ll gain.

Voice has been around for a long time, and while it may not be “the latest thing”, it works. Focus on doing it well, and you’ll continue to benefit from satisfied customers.

See you next month.

In the article “Getting Beyond the Contact Center“, Nagendra Kumar talks how the social web has empowered consumers to interact online about the companies with which they do business. Kumar proposes several categories of response, from doing nothing to proactively engaging with customers. While it has become important to develop strategies for managing what customers are saying about you on the Internet, ideally, you don’t want to give customers a reason to share negative comments in the first place.

When assessing customer interactions with your contact center, the place to start is always with your agents. You hope that your company’s hiring practices have employed talented individuals who are committed to providing the best possible service. But on a day-to-day basis, how do you know what any agent is doing at any given time?

If you have a centralized, onsite call center, you can look around the floor. Most likely, you want to see most agents on the phone, with enough agents available to take calls so that customers aren’t kept waiting in queues. The problem with visual assessments is that they don’t work for virtual call centers and, more importantly, even if you can see  agents, you can’t ”see” who they are talking to. A few personal calls over a shift might be reasonable, but you don’t want agents tying up phone lines just to kill time or avoid working. To find out who agents are really talking to, you could monitor calls in real-time or record them for review at a later time. Depending on the size of your contact center, though, it may not be realistic to monitor calls with enough frequency to be effective.

What you’re really looking for is not a minute-by-minute tally of what each agent is doing, but a measure of overall agent productivity. There are two excellent ways to get this information, both of which should be provided with any call analysis and reporting software purchased for your phone system: call metrics and real-time monitoring.

Call Metrics

Call metrics are based on historical reports about agent activity. The metrics you use, of course, depend on the nature of your contact center and what type of activity makes an agent productive. Let’s look at a few simple examples.

• A contact center that generates sales leads may choose to measure agent productivity using the number of calls placed. An agent who repeatedly  places fewer calls than expected over a shift may need to be monitored more closely. As a first step, compare the agent’s numbers to other agents on the same shifts. If all agents are placing fewer than expected calls, there may be external reasons for the discrepancy in expected values.
• A contact center that receives product orders may measure agent productivity using the average call duration. An agent who takes significantly longer than other agents to close calls may need more training. For example, the agent may have difficulty entering orders into your system.

Obviously, one call metric won’t give you all the answers you need. It’s important to understand the nature and lifecycle of calls in your contact center before choosing the set of metrics that will provide the most value.

Real-Time Monitoring Software

While call metrics give you insight into historical agent activity, real-time monitoring software shows you what’s happening in your contact center right now. At-a-glance graphs may be available showing which agents are on ACD calls versus non-ACD calls, or which agents have calls on hold or are waiting to take calls.

Knowing the real-time status of agents can help you identify and deal with minor issues before they become big headaches. Say that an agent has been on a non-ACD call for an unusually long time. A great feature to have in your real-time monitoring software is the ability to compare current activity to the same activity over a recent period of time. If the agent’s non-ACD time has been relatively low over the shift, you may decide to give the agent the benefit of the doubt. The agent may be returning a customer call for a relatively complex issue. However, if the non-ACD call time is significant over the shift, you may want to chat with the agent about whether there is some reason for the overly long calls. If you find out that the agent is calling friends or a spouse instead of taking customer calls, identifying this problem as quickly as possible means that you can deal it in the short-term, before it starts affecting customers.

There’s one final point to make about measuring agent productivity. Regardless of the method you use to measure productivity, make sure that you

• set realistic activity targets. Agent motivation is strongly based in whether they believe they can be successful in achieving goals.
• communicate your expectations. Agent activity should always be aligned with specific objectives. Ensuring that agents know what these objectives are makes them accountable for their own productivity.

There are many innovative ways to measure and assess agent activity. Feel free to comment on the thoughts in this article, or post your own success stories to share with us.

At the end of May, we’ll be at the IAUG conference at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas. Drop by the booth and see us. If you can’t make it to the conference, check out next month’s blog, where we’ll be talking about what we saw and learned at the conference.

See you next month.