ICMI's Customer Management Insight - April 2008 - (Page 7)

O P E R AT I O N S requirements of call center leadership. This knowledge gap makes it harder for new and upcoming leaders to gain a full appreciation of what it takes to effectively navigate the call center waters. You would never expect a fireman to be able to do his or her job without spending a significant amount of time training, learning and practicing. While call centers don’t put leaders in life-or-death situations, several managers say they spend a significant amount of time putting out fires. Every small call center should develop a formal onboarding program for new leaders — a plan that outlines the training programs, policies and evaluation criteria. By documenting the expected activities and holding monthly progress meetings, your new leaders will be engaged in the activity that makes every person (and organization) better — continuous improvement. And, once you’ve done it just a few times, you’ll create the internal mentors with the expertise to transfer the right knowledge to your upcoming leaders. 2. Create flexibility with your schedules and your organization. Schedules in small call centers are typically defined by the open and close time of the environment supported. If the rest of the company works 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., then it only makes sense to have the call center work the same hours. Keeping standard hours can be a source of frustration and challenge in a small call center. Everything about running a call center of any size comes down to managing the interval (e.g., every half hour). If everyone comes in at the same time, the obvious challenge is breaks and lunches — this issue is compounded in smaller call centers. An easy fix is to stagicmi’s insight ger start times and provide the call center more off-phone type work to keep them occupied during the earlier and later times when the phones aren’t on. This approach helps with coverage, but there is an even bigger benefit — happier employees. Because the call center typically isn’t the most desirable job in the company, you can use schedule flexibility to help boost the morale of agents in the center and allow them to do something no one else can. Creating flexibility in schedules also helps small call centers reduce turnover by allowing call center agents to do things not available to other parts of the organization. Once you’ve got the interval challenge completely understood (no small task), you can become creative with schedules — e.g., allowing agents to work consolidated shifts, split shifts, shared shifts — anything is possible as long as the interval requirements are covered. Allowing agents to learn other skills in between calls is another advantage in a small call center — time between calls is almost nonexistent in large call centers, but it’s a requirement in small centers. Use this time to help the frontline learn the skills they need for their next job outside of the call center. This helps to encourage realistic conversations about the agent’s future desires. 3. Consider size in establishing agent measures. Smaller call centers have to overcome the productivity challenge: We really want to keep people busy, but the math in running a small call center doesn’t allow for agents to occupy the same amount of time as those in larger ones. In addition, growth and time of day both have to be considered when setting any type of performance objectives. Conventional wisdom in most call centers is to focus on the things within the agent’s control, such as schedule adherence and quality. This is also true in small call centers, but is often a challenge because of technology and resource limitations. While lack of technology can be overcome to some degree with spreadsheets and desktop recorders, the hard fact that small call centers typically have to be more flexible makes line-in-the-sand agent measures more challenging. In most cases, small call center agents are required to wear several hats that move them outside of the normal inbound measured activities. For example, a lack of internal transfer options will lead to more outbound follow-up calls to complete transactions that require additional coordination. And, don’t forget about the time that has to be taken to actually get to the resolution. There are several other activities that tend to make small call center agents behave differently — fax/printer duties, manual paperwork for internal communication, last-minute break changes to handle the queues, managing backline/voicemail, etc. With fewer resources to manage the customer service processes, smaller call centers have to get creative. This can result in some slight changes to typical agent expectations. An important starting point is really understanding what the expectations should be and dividing them between ACD and nonACD activities. ACD activities are easy to measure and typically are automated — you can get reports on just about everything an agent does from the time they log in to the time they log out. The non-ACD activities are harder to track and are often ignored in favor of the www.icmi.com | APRIL 2008 7 http://www.icmi.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of ICMI's Customer Management Insight - April 2008

ICMI's Customer Management Insight - April 2008 Operations: Small Call Centers, Big Potential Ad Index Contents Editor's Page Contact Center Spotlight People: Assessment Tools Recommended Reading Technology: Speech Recognition Special Feature: Best of Show Strategy: Service-to-Sales Success Expert's Angle - High Volume, High Stakes: A Better Strategy for Hiring Experts Angle - Secrets of Recruiting Success/Job Brands: Changing Applicant Reactions to Your Openings Experts Angle - Speech Analytics: Uncovering the Voice of the Customer

ICMI's Customer Management Insight - April 2008

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