I'm not one to criticize or judge, except perhaps when I'm around other people. However, I feel I must voice (or, more accurately, write) my opinions regarding some common problems that plague the contact center industry.
Following are what I have found to be among the most common stupid things contact centers do, along with some suggestions to help avoid such idiocy.
Borrowing another contact center’s Service Level or Response Time objective. In choosing a Service Level and/or Response Time objective for their center, many managers simply use the same objective that is in place at centers deemed "best in class." What these managers fail to realize is that their particular customers may very well be bigger pains in the butt than those of best-in-class centers, making them more likely to complain and become irritable if their call isn't answered immediately.
Take for example a manager who, after reading an article about an award-winning pharmaceutical company's contact center with an 80/30 Service Level objective in place, implemented the same goal at his center. What he failed to realize was that 94 percent of the pharmaceutical center's customers were using a leading anti-depressant, and thus thoroughly enjoyed humming along to the centers' on-hold music for as long as possible. Our guy, on the other hand, managed a helpdesk for novice voodoo practitioners, where it wasn't at all uncommon for callers who were forced to wait even just 10 seconds for a connection to start sticking needles in little dolls wearing headsets.
The key point to take away from this ridiculous example is that I am very prone to run-on sentences. Another important point is that, whenever deciding on performance objectives, it's essential to choose the best objectives for YOUR contact center, and to ignore those of respectable ones.
Failing to incorporate customer feedback into coaching. One problem with relying solely on your own QA staff or supervisors to provide monitoring feedback to agents is that your agents don't like your QA Staff or your supervisors. Many of your agents would rather have their gums scraped or read a technology vendor’s whitepaper than take your supervisors' advice. That's why the best contact centers have started incorporating direct customer feedback (taken from post-contact surveys) into monitoring scores and coaching efforts. True, most agents don't like your customers either, but are more willing to accept their input because customers never have coffee breath and rarely if ever order your agents to go home and change out of their cut-off Rage Against the Machine tee-shirt on Casual Fridays.
Research has revealed several key benefits of implementing a direct customer feedback initiative. One study, for example, found that contact centers with such initiatives in place have up to 25% higher customer satisfaction rates, up to 15% higher agent retention rates, and up to 1% fewer incidents of QA staff and supervisors being gang-tackled by staff.
Waiting for bleeding-edge technology to become boring. I'm not saying that all contact centers should take big risks on unproven customer contact tools. I'm merely suggesting that those that don't are totally chicken. Now you may argue that investing in unproven solutions is not an intelligent, well thought-out business move. That's fine, but if you are interested only in things intelligent and well thought-out, then you have no business reading my blog.
Show me an award-winning contact center, and I'll show you a manager who has dared to make some dangerous moves with regard to customer contact solutions. Granted, occasionally such deployments fail at these leading centers, but persistent and progressive managers do not let such events stop them. Instead these managers continue to think about the next advanced technology to revolutionize their center and, once their request to leave the mental health facility is granted, eagerly begin meeting with vendors seeking beta-testers.
Treating agents like employees. If you treat agents like employees, they are going to act like employees, and few organizations can recover from such damage.
A recent study by a leading consulting firm revealed that employees are one of the biggest threats to a corporation's health and prosperity, second only to the CEO. Absenteeism, poor work performance and stapler-theft were among the many harmful acts found to be carried out more by employees than any other living entity.
On the other hand, the report found that such undesirable behavior is almost never associated with grandmothers, infants or lemurs. That's why, as I've been saying for years, contact center managers would be wise to stop spending so much time micromanaging and monitoring agents, and start spending more time providing them with rose-scented perfume, colorful rattles and pictures of Madagascar.
For those who find it insulting that I’ve used the term “Stupidity” in the title of this blog post, don’t be dumb. I was just trying to shake things up a bit and bring about some positive change.
For those of you who actually stuck around and kept reading, feel free to share what YOU feel is a common stupid thing in our industry. And please don’t say “Greg Levin”. I may be a highly judgmental and critical jerk, but I do have feelings. Moron.
A ‘Voice of the Employee’ (VoE) program is a great way to capture agent feedback and insight and use it to continuously improve the contact center, the customer experience, and agent engagement. Most VoE initiatives, however, fall short because they don’t go deep enough. They entail merely surveying agents a couple of times a year and asking static questions – questions that do little to unlock and harness agents’ collective wisdom and intuition or to uncover how close they are to staging a violent coup.
To capture the kind of agent knowledge and sentiment that drives real change, your VoE program needs to capture agents’ real voice. To do that, you need to think outside the traditional VoE box, push the envelope, and break a few federal privacy laws.
Following are three bold and innovative VoE tactics embraced by contact center leaders who are so committed to continuous improvement and the customer experience, they are willing to risk prison time.
VoE on the Edge
Bug the bathrooms and breakrooms. Agents may provide you with some valuable comments and suggestions via surveys and focus groups, but they generally save what they really know, think and feel for when they’re offline and out of earshot. When chatting with peers in the restroom and breakroom, agents often share their candid views on customers’ intelligence levels and exchange ideas on where management can stick its policies and metrics. By secretly placing a recording device in the aforementioned rooms, the contact center is able to capture a continuous stream of insight (and obscenities) that might enable the organization to rise to the highest levels of mediocrity.
If you’re struggling with the ethical aspect of bugging the bathrooms and breakrooms, you can ease your conscience by thinking of this approach as merely expanding your monitoring program into new and uncharted territories.
Ply agents with liquor. You should be doing this anyway to reward agents for a job well done (or for at least not quitting) and to help relieve job-related stress. The best contact centers don’t stop there, though. After buying staff a round of shots during happy hour (or, in really stressful centers, before their shift), smart managers and supervisors listen up and take notes. After the second round of drinks, most of the smaller agents and those not accustomed to drinking will start sharing the kind of information and opinions they’re too afraid or uncomfortable to share when sober. After the fourth or fifth round of drinks, those agents will have passed out, but your larger and heavier drinking agents will continue where the lightweights left off.
Keep in mind that if you decide to add alcohol to your VoE initiative, you’ll need to find just the right balance. Too little, and agents won’t loosen up enough to share anything revealing or meaningful. Too much, and they’ll develop liver disease, which can negatively impact attendance and significantly hinder agents’ ability to upsell.
Spy on agents while they’re sleeping. This practice is a little controversial. And creepy. But hey, if you’re not willing to be a little controversial and creepy in an effort to improve your contact center and the customer experience, then perhaps you’re in the wrong line of business.
Spying on agents while they’re sleeping – either by hiding under their bed or, for those of you with less time on your hands, placing a recording device in their bedroom – is the best way to capture the subconscious thoughts that agents mumble when snoozing. It’s how the best contact centers discover what’s in the deepest, darkest recesses of their employees’ minds – the kinds of thoughts and feelings that the company could never uncover merely through bugging bathrooms and getting agents drunk. By spying on sleeping agents, the center will learn stuff that may enable it to improve ways to strap agents into their workstation chairs, enhance the colors and themes of the motivational posters the center has on its walls, and decrease the number of customer homicides agents attempt each year.
Don’t let my obvious expertise in this area intimidate you. Feel free to leave your own ideas on how to capture the REAL ‘Voice of the Employee’ in the ‘Comments’ area below.
I grew up in a Jewish family, but have always welcomed and even embraced several Christmas traditions – particularly those that involve getting stuff. Even as a kid celebrating Hanukkah, part of my personal eight-day festival featured a stocking hung from the menorah with care. (Hanging a large fuzzy sock from a lit candelabra does require care.)
To this day, I still insist that my family fill my stocking with little goodies for each day of Hanukkah. As a result, I haven't been invited to my parents' home for the holidays since 1990.
It's not just me – everybody loves stocking stuffers. So why not carry the tradition over to your contact center? Just imagine the positive impact it could have on agent morale and retention; agents might even remain on the job through January. That said, agents shouldn’t be the only ones getting goodies. Consider implementing a center-wide stocking strategy, where everyone – agents, supervisors and managers – all get a stocking filled with stuff to help them do their job better.
Here are some stocking stuffing suggestions for the various roles in your contact center:
For Agents
Ibuprofen. These lovely anti-inflammatory pills will help each agent minimize the common aches and pains associated with sitting and typing for long periods, shaking one's head vehemently in disbelief, and jumping from atop one's workstation with neck in noose. The little plastic bottles the pills come in can double as mini-maracas, which agents can shake during slow periods to celebrate the brief reprieve from customers.
Headset Barbie. I believe that this version of the popular anorexic doll is set to hit the market any day now. In recent beta tests with agents, the talking doll got rave reviews, particularly for her ability to overcome rejection and to think outside the box. Your agents will have a blast playing with Headset Barbie between calls – picking up valuable tips on how to continue smiling through adversity and how to maintain a golden tan despite working nine-hour shifts in a room with no windows. Headset Barbie comes with several replaceable parts, including wrists, lower back and larynx.
For Supervisors
Coaching Ken. Headset Barbie's suave supervisor – complete with monitoring form, distressed facial expression, and a Kung Fu grip to assist in agent retention – is currently being piloted in a contact center in Malibu. He promises to be a hit with real supervisors, as well as with frustrated agents who are into voodoo. Additional accessories include a miniature helium dispenser for blowing up tiny morale-boosting balloons, an ugly Hawaiian print shirt for casual Fridays, and more tiny morale-boosting balloons.
Safety flares. The same little devices that alert fellow motorists of a roadside accident when visibility is poor are great tools for supervisors, who can use them in several ways. First, whenever call volumes spike, supervisors can light up a flare to alert agents who are on break or outside playing with their Headset Barbies to get their butts back to their workstations. Flares can also be used to publicly recognize staff for outstanding performance/commitment. For instance, supervisors can light one up next to an agent who just achieved a perfect quality monitoring score, or next to an agent who just surpassed the three-week period of consecutive employment.
For Managers
Contact center camouflage. What manager wouldn't be thrilled to find in their stocking special materials that enable them to remain unseen? After all, to last as a true leader in the challenging contact center environment, one needs the courage and ability to hide at critical moments. Properly applied body paints and other camouflage material enable managers to remain unseen not only by brash executives seeking explanations for the center's exorbitant operating costs and lackluster performance stats, but also by pesky agents who feel they have a right to know why their standard cubicle has been replaced by a much smaller one constructed of styrofoam. The best contact center camouflage materials include clothes made entirely out of gray industrial carpet, hats with plastic ferns growing out of them, and blue or black paint, which blends in nicely with the morale of frontline staff and supervisors.
A pocket-sized Acronym-English/English-Acronym dictionary. Very few managers are fluent in Acronym, which can truly hinder their ability to know what the hell vendors, consultants and authors of white papers are talking about. Acronym is already the official language of contact center elitists, and several studies suggest that any manager serious about succeeding and/or looking cool in this industry will need to become highly proficient in this new language. An Acronym-English/English-Acronym dictionary, which can be found in the abbreviated language section of most major bookstores, makes for a perfect gift. Go for the pocket-sized version, as the standard version will never fit inside a manager's office let alone his or her stocking.
Feel free to share some of your ideas for contact center stocking stuffers in the comments section below. Oh, and one more thing...
HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
The best managers realize a contact center cannot succeed without skilled, motivated and mostly sober agents manning the phones (and other contact channels). These managers work hard to develop and sustain hiring programs that ensure the front line is forever staffed with service stars who stick around for longer than the first pay period.
But I’m not here to talk about hiring success. When it comes to agent recruiting, assessment and selection, success is much less common than failure... and it's more fun to talk about the latter.
With that in mind, following are 15 signs your contact center’s hiring practices need work:
15) A common question among new-hires is whether their work schedule will interfere with their dog fighting competitions.
14) Your contact center recently underwent renovations to expand the exit interview room.
13) Candidates typically celebrate a job offer by firing off a few rounds of ammunition out back.
12) While playing hide-and-seek in your contact center, your eight year-old kid secretly answered several customer calls – and outperformed all your agents.
11) You’ve implemented a work-at-home agent program because most of your job candidates are under house arrest.
10) Your average agent tenure is measured in minutes.
9) Your two most critical selection criteria when assessing agent candidates are “has a pulse” and “wears clothes.”
8) Your most effective recruiting method is begging.
7) Your best agent is your IVR system.
6) The final stage of your agent selection process involves a coin toss.
5) The top candidate from your last recruitment effort applied from federal prison.
4) You promoted the aforementioned candidate to supervisor his first week on the job.
3) Your most valuable applicant assessment tool is a drug-sniffing dog.
2) You hired the aforementioned dog as a team lead.
And the number one sign your contact center’s hiring practices need work is…
1) While reading each item on this list, you thought to yourself, “It’s funny because it’s true.”
For those of you looking for (slightly) more serious and insightful resources on agent recruiting and hiring, check out the following links to previous blog posts:
Active Agent Recruiting: Take Hiring by the Horns
Separate the Reps from the Replicas: Improving Your Pre-Hire Assessment Process
The First Key to Agent Retention? Your Hiring Program
There’s also an entire chapter dedicated to the topic of recruiting & hiring in my Full Contact book.
Customer Service Week is once again upon us (starting Monday, Oct. 7), and contact centers everywhere – at least those that actually care about customer service and their agents – are getting ready to celebrate.
The key to an effective CSW celebration is to party just hard enough to show agents how appreciated and valued their work is, but not so hard that it interferes with the very service you are celebrating. Rewarding staff with tequila shots can greatly diminish service levels and cause agents to pass out during customer interactions before first-contact resolution is achieved.
Following are 20 fresh ideas that are almost but not quite guaranteed to make your Customer Service Week celebration a success:
1. Officially change the name of the contact center to “The Customer Love Hut”.
2. Give each agent a special comb that fixes ‘headset hair’.
3. Get rid of all the shackles, cattle prods and any other devices used to enforce agent adherence.
4. Replace “Dress-Down Friday” with “Undress Monday”.
5. Pay some actors to play your company’s executive team and have them visit the contact center to thank staff for their great work.
6. Install a Xanax dispenser in the breakroom. And in the restrooms. And at agents’ workstations.
7. Offer agents free treatment for Xanax addiction.
8. Walk up to each workstation and personally tell every agent how extremely important they are to the organization. If you have too many agents to do that, just tell your top performer.
9. Let agents work in their underwear or pajamas for the week to make up for senior management rejecting your proposal to implement a home agent initiative.
10. Remove the ‘Calls in Queue’ display board from all the bathroom stalls.
11. Give each agent one “Get Out of Call Free” card for use during an interaction with a highly annoying/abusive customer.
12. Permit agents to take one free swing at their supervisor during a coaching session.
13. Give out an “I’m Dedicated to Service” badge to any agent who has stuck with the job for more than 48 hours.
14. Install thick padding on all workstation desks, walls and computer monitors to protect agents against head injuries.
15. Wait till the week after CSW to tell everybody the center is being outsourced.
16. Give each agent a fresh new supply of the paper clips they use to cut themselves on paydays.
17. Instead of hanging pictures of your top-performers on the wall, hang your actual top performers on the wall to give them a well-deserved break from the phones.
18. Give each agent three baseballs to throw at a senior manager perched in a dunk-tank. Better yet, forget the dunk-tank.
19. Present each agent with a commission check for all the revenue they’ve saved the company by not telling customers how they really feel.
20. Officially change agents’ title to “Customer Engagement Officer”. Tell your company’s actual CEO to deal with it.
I’d love to hear YOUR fresh ideas for celebrating Customer Service Week. Feel free to share them in the 'Comments' area below.
Special ‘Customer Service Week’ Offer from Off Center
In the name of all that is customer servicey, from now through Customer Service Week I’m offering a whopping 50% off the regular price of my Full Contact book on contact center best practices, as well as all of my ‘Contact Center Tunes’ song parodies. To receive your discount, be sure to type in the following code in the ‘Discount Code’ box provided when you are making your purchase: csw13
This offer will end at midnight ET on Sunday, October 13, so act soon! (Now would be good.)
The next time your contact center is in need of a consultant, look no further than your phone floor.
The best centers I have worked with in my 20 years in the industry don’t view their agents as merely ‘the folks on the phones’ but rather as highly insightful internal consultants – individuals who know better than anyone what processes, practices and improvements are needed to provide optimal customer experiences and increase operational efficiency.
Such contact centers get better and better – and retain agents and customers longer and longer – by empowering staff to serve as…
Recruiting & Hiring consultants. Nobody knows what it takes to succeed on the contact center firing line better than the people who man it everyday. Smart centers solicit agent input to enhance recruiting and the applicant selection process. This may entail having them help develop ‘ideal agent’ profiles, provide suggestions for behavioral-based interview questions, interact with and evaluate candidates, and/or create job preview descriptions or videos (that give applicants a clear view into what the agent position is really like). It may also involve having agents sneak into neighboring contact centers to kidnap top talent.
Training & Development consultants. Agents know what skills and knowledge they need to create the kind of customer experience one usually only reads about in corporate mission statements or sees in dreams. Creating a training & development task force and including on it a few experienced agents – as well as a couple of not so experienced ones – is a great way to continuously close knowledge gaps and shorten learning curves. Agents will gladly tell you what’s wrong with and missing from new-hire training, ongoing training, one-on-one coaching and the center’s career path (assuming one even exists). Only by actively involving frontline staff in the training & development process can a contact center become a truly dynamic learning organization.
Quality Monitoring consultants. One of the best ways to keep agents from being afraid of or resistant to your quality monitoring program is to actively involve them in it. Agents will hate monitoring and you a lot less if you…
- ask them to help develop/improve the center’s monitoring form and rating system
- let them self-evaluate their performance prior to having a supervisor provide feedback/coaching
- allow them to take part in a peer monitoring & coaching initiative
- collaborate with them when creating development plans during coaching sessions
- give them a chance to “coach the coach” by asking them to evaluate how effective their supervisor is at rating calls and providing feedback.
Technology consultants. While you probably don’t want to have your agents designing the actual systems and software your center uses, you definitely do want to have your agents sharing their ideas and suggestions regarding what tools they need to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the service provided to customers. Agents’ two cents on desktop applications, knowledge bases, scripts and workflows can be invaluable for decreasing handle times and increasing first-contact resolution rates. In addition, agents often know what’s wrong with the center’s IVR system and web/mobile self-service applications (because customers constantly tell them), thus they can provide input that leads to a reduction in the number of unnecessary calls, emails, chats and death threats agents must contend with.
Rewards & Recognition consultants. Empowering agents to enhance the rewards and recognition they receive may be akin to letting your partner pick out her/his engagement ring, but hey, it’s all about making people happy and keeping them from running into the arms of another. I know of a lot of contact centers that ask agents for input on incentives and contests, individual and team awards, and how they’d like to be recognized. Many centers have even implemented peer recognition programs where agents themselves get to decide who is most deserving of special accolades and attention. Managers and supervisors still need to show plenty of their own initiative with regard to rewards and recognition, but collaborating with agents in this area goes a long way toward elevating engagement and performance.
Do you treat YOUR agents like consultants? Feel free to share some of your experiences and suggestions in the Comments section below.
(A slightly different version of this piece originally appeared as a guest post on the ‘Productivity Plus’ blog
put out by the very good people at Intradiem.)
When it comes to social customer care (providing service and support via social media channels), there are two key practices that contact centers must embrace: 1) monitoring; and 2) monitoring.
No, I haven’t been drinking, and no, there isn’t an echo embedded in my blog. The truth is, I didn’t actually repeat myself in the statement above.
Now, before you recommend that I seek inpatient mental health/substance abuse treatment, allow me to explain.
Monitoring in social customer care takes two distinctly different though equally important forms. The first entails the contact center monitoring the social landscape to see what’s being said to and about the brand (and then deciding who to engage with). The second entails the contact center’s Quality Assurance team/specialist monitoring agents' 'social' interactions to make sure the agents are engaging with the right people and providing the right responses.
The first type of monitoring is essentially a radar screen; the second type of monitoring is essentially a safety net. The first type picks up on which customers (or anti-customers) require attention and assistance; the second type makes sure the attention and assistance provided doesn’t suck.
Having a powerful social media monitoring tool that enables agents to quickly spot and respond to customers via Twitter and Facebook is great, but it doesn’t mean much if those agents, when responding…
- misspell every other word
- misuse or ignore most punctuation
- provide incomplete – or completely incorrect – information
- show about as much tact and empathy as a Kardashian.
- fail to invite the customer to continue his/her verbal evisceration of the company and the agent offline and out of public view.
All of those scary bullet items above can be avoided – or at least minimized – when there’s a formal QA process in place for social media customer contacts. Now, if you’re thinking your QA and supervisory staff are too busy to carefully monitor and evaluate agents’ Twitter/Facebook interactions with customers (and provide follow-up coaching), then what the Zuckerberg are you thinking even offering such channels as contact options? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (and again, and again): If your contact center isn’t ready to monitor a particular contact channel, then it isn’t ready to HANDLE that channel.
Customers don’t applaud organizations for merely being progressive. If Toyota came out with a new automobile that ran on garbage but that had a 20% chance of exploding when you put the key in the ignition, customers’ response wouldn’t be, “Deadly, yes, but I might make it across the country on just banana peels!”
Social customer care is still new enough where organizations offering it are considered progressive. If your contact center is one such organization, are your customers applauding the strong and consistent social service and support your agents are providing, or is your center overlooking the quality component and losing too many customers to explosions?
For more insights (and some irreverence) on Social Customer Care, be sure to check out my blog post, “Beginner’s Guide to Social Customer Care”. Also, my book, Full Contact, contains a chapter in which best (or at least pretty good) practices in Social Customer Care are covered.
“Smile, you’re on Customer Camera.”
Such a statement isn’t quite as silly or absurd as it sounds. Video calls are no longer just a whimsical fantasy. The technology that drives video interactions with customers is ready for prime time, and has been for a while.
Not a lot of contact centers have experimented with video calls to date, but some have and even report success in the visual medium. These centers claim that video calls aren’t just a gimmicky trend but rather something that many customers want – particularly those who are voyeurs and/or exhibitionists.
Video calls break down the barriers that exist with faceless phone conversations (and emails, chats, tweets), thus enabling companies to establish stronger rapport and more personalized relationships with customers. And because video lets customers put a face with a name, it makes it much easier for a disgruntled customer to find the exact agent he wants to slap after driving (or flying) to the contact center site, thus saving innocent staff members from any harm.
Achieving success with video calls, however, requires careful planning and strategy. Easy to overlook when implementing video are the unique performance metrics the center needs to measure in association with this new contact channel. While many of the metrics used for traditional phone calls also apply to video contacts, there are a few new measures that are particularly essential for success with video, including…
Food Particles In Teeth Per Shift (FPITPS): Agents who handle traditional voice-only calls can get away with having a piece of spinach or broccoli caught between their teeth, even if it does disgust their coworkers. For video agents, however, such a common occurrence can cause a customer experience disaster. In fact, a recent study found that video callers are 87% less likely to continue doing business with a company whose video agents fail to floss effectively.
Video agents should be coached and trained not only on proper pre-call flossing but also on the use toothpicks and hand mirrors to ensure that their FPITPS numbers remain very low. While there is no industry standard for FPITPS, the best video-enabled contact centers aim for between 0.0 and 0.2 food particles in teeth per shift for the entire center. The exception is suicide prevention hotlines, where higher FPITPS numbers are not only tolerated but encouraged, as studies have shown that agents with food caught in their teeth on camera helps emotionally distressed callers feel a lot better about their own lives.
Agent Smile Radius (ASR): Agents have historically been told to “put a smile in your voice” (and your emails/chats/tweets). Despite being an annoying and ambiguous command that makes agents feel like punching their supervisor, this practice has been shown to increase customer satisfaction. Now, with video, agents must learn to put an actual physical smile on their face when interacting with customers – no easy task when you consider the long hours, verbal abuse, physical confinement, low pay, and corporate motivational posters that agents must contend with each day.
To ensure that agents smile widely on a consistent basis during video calls, it’s important to hold them accountable and reward them for achieving an ambitious yet feasible Agent Smile Radius (ASR). ASR is the distance from one corner of an agent’s mouth to the other when forcing a smile during customer interactions. When choosing an ASR objective, select one that requires agents to smile big enough to make customers feel warm and special, but not so big that the customer mistakes the agent for Julia Roberts or Mick Jagger.
If you have some agents who simply cannot force a smile onto their face during video calls, consider using some strategic tools and props to help elicit genuine grins from these grumps. Possible smile-inducing tactics include having a supervisor stand off-camera wearing a pinwheel hat, and investing in workstation chairs that tickle.
Average Eye-Roll Rate (AERR): For traditional phone agents, the rolling of eyes while speaking to bothersome customers is as common a practice as sobbing alone in the break room or beneath a workstation. However, video agents must strive to keep such insulting actions in check. If customers see an agent rolling his/her eyes, they will feel the company doesn’t value them – thus increasing the likelihood of them taking their video contacts to a more caring company where agents merely have food particles stuck in their teeth.
Given the idiocy of some customers today, it’s unfair to expect video agents to completely refrain from rolling their eyes. Still, it’s important to keep eye-rolling to a bare minimum. Establishing a strictly enforced Average Eye-Roll Rate (AERR) objective and educating agents on said objective will help in this endeavor.
For best results, reward and recognize video agents who maintain a low AERR over time, or who last more than 10-15 minutes without rolling their eyes even once during a shift. And be sure to deal with problematic eye-rollers swiftly and sternly, either by docking their pay or by telling them that if they don’t stop rolling their eyes, their face is going to stay that way.
Got any good (read: funny) metrics for video-enabled contact centers you’d like to recommend? Please share them in the comment section below.
In this age of social media, sound bytes and ADHD, people love quick and catchy stats. Unfortunately, in the contact center and customer care space, there seem to be only a handful of snazzy stats in circulation. The same ones just keep getting regurgitated over and over (yes, that’s redundant), especially on Twitter.
This is perplexing considering how dynamic customer care is and how much contact centers have evolved. It’s actually worse than perplexing – it’s depressing. Every time I see someone tweeting the old chestnut , “Satisfied customers tell only 3 people about their experience, while dissatisfied customers tell 8-10 people” (or some variation of this), a part of my soul dies. I even wept a little just now while typing that stat.
Rather than just complain about the lack of statistical variety being promoted by self-proclaimed customer experience experts in the Twittersphere, I aim to remedy the situation. Following are several fresh and captivating stats about customer care and contact centers that I believe you and everybody else will feel compelled to talk and tweet about:
- 86% of customers would be willing to pay more for better customer service. 100% of contact center managers would be willing to pay more for even mediocre customer service.
- 70% of contact centers list Average Handle Time among their key performance metrics at the agent level. Of those centers, 100% need a clue.
- Only 17% of contact centers really mean it when they say “Your call is very important to us”. Of the remaining centers, 38% feel “Your call is somewhat important to us”, 24% feel “It’s surprising how unimportant your call is to us”, and 21% feel “It’s hilarious that you are still holding for a live agent.”
- 73% of contact center managers claim to know how to accurately measure First-Call Resolution. The remaining 27% of managers are telling the truth.
- Engaged customer service agents are 35% more likely to provide a positive customer experience than are customer service agents who are already married.
- The top three criteria contact center managers consider when selecting work-at-home agents are: 1) Past performance; 2) ability to work independently; and 3) body odor.
- Every time a caller must provide his/her name and account number to an agent after having just provided that exact same information via the IVR system, a puppy dies.
- 97% of contact center agents fantasize daily about sending a hungry Bengal tiger to the home of abusive callers. The remaining 3% of agents fantasize daily about sending a hungry Siberian Tiger.
- 81% of contact center agents are empowered to do exactly what their managers and supervisors tell them.
- Each year, over 150 customer care professionals die from overexposure to acronyms.
- 50% of managers feel their contact center is highly unprepared to handle social customer care; the remaining 50% do too.
- The three people that satisfied customers tell about their experience are Sue Johnson, Dave Winthrop, and Bud Carter. All three are tired of hearing about these experiences.
- 42% of contact center managers say they will not hire an agent applicant unless said applicant has a pulse and/or can work at least one weekend shift a month.
- Four out of five agents represent 80% of all agents. In contrast, the remaining agents represent only 20% of all agents.
- The average agent-to-supervisor ratio in contact centers is 20:1. The odds that this is enough to provide agents with the coaching and support they need to succeed is 2000:1.
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100% of managers destined for greatness and wealth purchase a copy of the Full Contact e-book. 0% of managers understand why the author of said e-book looks so angry and aggressive in the photo on the book cover.
If the key call center metrics were to form a rock band, Forecast Accuracy would most likely be the bass player – less flashy and famous than its fellow members like C-Sat, FCR and Service Level, but no less critical for an effective performance.
Forecast Accuracy is sometimes referred to as “forecasted contact load vs. actual contact load”, but only by managers who like to make things more painful than necessary. The metric shows the percent variance between the number of calls (or chats) predicted to arrive during a given period and the number of contacts that the call center actually receives during that time. Most managers consider a 5% variance to be acceptable, though they naturally shoot for better (a lower %) than that. Those that regularly achieve a 15% variance or worse are sent directly to workforce management prison.
Missed it by That Much
So how exactly does one go about tracking Forecast Accuracy?
I’m glad I asked.
Call centers can retrieve data on forecasted contact load from whatever system or tool they use for forecasting (e.g., the center’s WFM system or Excel spreadsheets), then compare that to the data on the actual contact load received, which comes from the center’s ACD, email/chat management system as well as other report sources. The best call centers report forecast accuracy at the half-hour or hour interval level, rather than across days, weeks or months, as interval-level tracking gives a much clearer view of how horribly you botched the forecast.
Accurate forecasting is paramount in any call center that gives a darn about customers, agents and cost efficiency. Without a measure in place to gauge the effectiveness of the center’s forecast, under-staffing can often occur, causing queues to fill with furious callers, furious callers to verbally eviscerate innocent agents, and innocent agents to throw fists through expensive equipment. Of course, all of this adds expensive seconds and minutes to wait and handle times, causing irritated executives to cut budgets and rescind their promise to add a window in the call center.
Inaccurate forecasting may result in costly over-staffing, as well. And while this may make customers happy, it will certainly ire senior management -- as well as give agents too much free time between calls to think and figure out that they could probably earn more money making balloon animals for children in the park.
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