ICMI's Customer Management Insight - April 2008 - (Page 9)

O P E R AT I O N S ing the front line to meet and discuss these opportunities, you quickly have a laundry list of “avoidable” call activities. And, you’ll find that many of them are easy fixes with immediate return. 6. Be careful to not go overboard with WFM and quality. The majority of workforce management (WFM) and quality “how-to” books and papers are written from a large call center point of view. The reason for this is simple: Larger call centers typically have the budget and challenges that make automated WFM and quality monitoring tools a requirement. These tools help larger call centers ensure that they have the appropriate number of people available and that they’re saying and doing things that are consistent with the organization’s policies and customers’ expectations. Larger call centers often have dedicated teams to manage both programs and some even have sub-teams under each, creating a more granular focus on what’s scheduled and said. These processes allow larger call centers to continually redefine the way work is routed and how agents are trained, leading to more specialization and efficiencies. Small call centers typically don’t have the luxury of segmenting callers to specific agents in ways that make them more efficient. As a result, all calls eventually end up being handled by the same pool of agents — any specialization efficiency gets lost in the generalist overflow. When agents are required to wear many hats, there has to be more flexibility in the expectations — a quality program that is too focused on scripts and exactness can quickly lead to frustration and conflict. With a smaller agent pool, the icmi’s insight scheduling process must be flexible enough to overcome last-minute changes or unexpected call fluctuations. A WFM process focused on always having the exact number of bodies in chairs can quickly backfire in small call centers, creating environments of continuous push and pull. With less workload predictability and fewer frontline agents required to handle more transactions, smaller call centers must be more flexible in how they approach the documented best practices in quality and WFM. Both are key enablers to success in call centers of all sizes, but leaders of small centers need to spend extra time outlining the potential pitfalls of becoming too inflexible. Quality programs should be focused more on improving the environment than on managing agents. In smaller call centers, it’s easy to know who isn’t providing quality — in some cases everyone can hear it, and in others, agents find themselves cleaning up after the same people. When the opportunities surface, a quality score isn’t going to change the behavior; however, more attention and feedback will help identify the root cause. The real opportunity is to take the quality program and evaluate every call from the customer’s perspective and ask yourself what you (the company) could do better next time. The same is true on the WFM side — adherence to schedule as a score isn’t effective if it doesn’t reflect the reality of the environment. Because agents in small call centers are often pulled to do a lot of other things during the day, the adherence score isn’t as important as spending time helping agents understand what the appropriate behaviors should be and allowing agents to apply more ownership to their daily activities. Accomplishing this starts with creating an awareness of the difference between the real-time customer service requirements of a call center and delayed queuing environments. Call centers require a more immediate response, and there is a science to making these responses happen within seconds at every interval of the day. Everyone plays a role in the success, and leaders of small call centers have to spend time explaining the impact of a single agent and how all the pieces fit together. These leaders should first become students of call centers by learning the foundational skills very well. Then, they must evolve into teachers — helping everyone in the organization remain focused on the value of every contact with every caller. 7. Unaddressed issues are more visible to all. Everyone gets to know each other in small call centers — this can be both good and bad. On one hand, it helps to make it feel more like a team and agents are able to pitch in and help everyone improve. On the other hand, everyone is able to see who isn’t pulling their weight or trying to improve for the good of the team. When you have a group of people all sitting in the same room and talking to each other every day, they’ll eventually run out of personal stories to tell and focus more attention on the activities of the “other” team members. These conversations quickly evolve from the activity itself to the leadership’s ignorance of the issue and lack of responsiveness. Once teams start to blame the leadership, everything becomes “their” fault and is the reason nothing gets improved. With small call centers becomwww.icmi.com | APRIL 2008 9 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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