ICMI's Customer Management Insight - April 2008 - (Page 8)

O P E R AT I O N S things you can get out of the phone system with just a click of the mouse. Understanding the agents’ real expectations allows you to use the ACD reports but find a way to balance them with all of the other nonphone activities required. Too often — though they have the best intentions — leaders of small call centers set ACD goals that end up forcing agents to behave in ways that are actually counterproductive to providing great service. 4. Understand what growth really means to your environment. As the company grows, so does the call center — in fact, once the value of the center is realized, more activities get centralized and the call center begins to grow faster than the other parts of the organization. Small call centers typically have a very tight workplace community — everyone knows each other’s strengths and habits. Change is easy to make when call centers are small and just about everyone can be included. The smallness allows the environment to be managed without a lot of documentation or policies — things just seem to work because everyone knows what’s happening. Leaders of small call centers must avoid becoming victims of compliancy and believing they can cut corners because everything is running fine without all the “formalities, however. Without formal ” processes and documentation, growth becomes difficult, change is harder for everyone and the cleanup effort is painful. A simple way to get started is to approach things from the perspective of a new center. Ask yourself, if you were going to duplicate your activities in another city, what would the new center need to know icmi’s insight to be successful? Create teams to document your standard work processes, agent expectations and scheduling rules. Just getting them down on paper is eye-opening for small call centers, as it allows them to begin to rethink the way things have always been done. Start with understanding the drivers. What are the things that cause customers to call, and how has that been trending? The drivers are the very high-level company activities (sales, shipments, customers, etc.) that will increase or decrease over time. Getting to the root cause of the call (the driver) will allow you to begin to create new opportunities to improve efficiency and is a great way to show the center’s value to others in the organization. For example, if you’re able to reduce the driver-to-call ratio to 40 percent from 50 percent through better training, first-call resolution and leadership, you can easily correlate this to an improvement in satisfaction and support cost savings. Documentation of the ongoing improvements in your processes helps get the attention of everyone in the organization and makes support for new initiatives much easier to obtain. 5. Develop your internal improvement agents. Large companies typically have teams of people that are continually looking for new ways to become more productive and effective. A continuous improvement approach can save large companies millions every year while improving the quality of work/life for the frontline agents. The annual budget of many small call centers is less than a million dollars, so the improvement attention and resources are typically disbursed to the other areas of the organization that have the most potential impact on the bottom line. This leaves the leaders of small call centers trying to balance the day-today running of the business with the challenge of improving the operational efficiencies — and normally, keeping the business running takes priority. A way to help get more “eyes” on the improvement opportunities is to help frontline agents view their job differently. Provide them training that focuses on life from the customer’s perspective and how small internal changes can make the overall experience better. Help them connect the dots between happy customers, improved efficiencies, profitable growth and, ultimately, more opportunities for their careers in the call center. Soon you’ll have an internal team of customer advocates looking for new ways to learn from each interaction. If every agent sees every contact as an opportunity to grow the business, they’ll be more passionate about their job and more aware of their role as an ambassador of improvement. Creating this mindset change must come from the top, and it starts with a continuous feedback and recognition loop that is focused on frontline-generated improvements. Allowing the frontline to create, participate in and actually run a frontline-driven program requires a commitment of time, and if done right, will provide a return on investment in several forms: happier customers, improved employee satisfaction and reduced cost. An easy way to get started is to ask the frontline to identify a “topthree” list. What three things are we doing internally that are causing customers to call? Keep it simple and focused on the opportunity — changing the way something is done or communicated. By allowwww.icmi.com | APRIL 2008 8 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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