The vast majority of customers we spoke with made the task pleasant and enjoyable.

This is a quote from Tom Vanderwell while he was doing surveys with people at a store’s checkout line.  It applies to every thing you do, honestly.  The majority of your interactions with people are pleasant and enjoyable, but a single bad apple tends to make your day gloomy and dark — forcing you to consider that the rest of the day might suck! This, however, isn’t the case.

In his post, Tom gives a great suggestion:

Each time you have a pleasant, friendly customer – jot down a hash mark or write the customer’s name on your sheet. When one of those negative customers comes along, look down at your sheet and refresh your memory of all the pleasant customers you’ve talked with.

Unless you’re in a truly horrid job and dealing with truly horrid people, I guarantee that you will begin to realize that your day isn’t really that bad.

How can HR be more Customer Focused?

The answer to this is that it, again, depends on your definition of HR.
If it is the first, then there isn’t a huge impact that HR can have on being “customer focused” in my opinion. The biggest area where they can make a difference to the customers is by being responsive and quickly addressing the internal problems.  This, indirectly, helps fix problems that could otherwise negatively impact a customer.
If it is the second, however, a HR professional can be leveraged.  Their skills in training and development as well as performance management can be put to use developing both on- and off-line training for customers.  They can also focus on trying to understand where the current customer offerings are missing opportunities and help identify the best areas of ROI.
Human Resources is, admittedly, a challenging area that is a strong support role for the company with a difficult transition to becoming a leading customer focus role.  Anyone else have thoughts on great ways to turn HR into a customer focused organization?

“When’s the right time to centralize different divisions or receptionists into a centralized center?”

This is a question that a lot of companies struggle with and mirrors the simple question of

“Should I start a contact center?”

The easy answer is: It depends.

I know. It’s a co-out. It is, however, true as well. The fact of the matter is that businesses have different expectations, requirements and designs. Some companies manage their personell through different budgets and are not interested in consolidating the numbers. Others would prefer to have centralized costs that can be evaluated for actual talk costs and values.  Some organizations have a large, matrixed management structure where the agents or administrative professionals handling calls are best managed by the small groups. Others take a different approach and want a singular management section that handles the service fashion.

Not only that, the question becomes what are your goals? Would it make a difference? Are there cost benefit savings? Is there a customer satisfaction improvement aspect? Are you trying to reduce headcount? Improve efficiency?

There are hundreds of reasons for putting a contact center together — and there are probably just as many not to.  You need to evaluate your process goals, your cross training potential, and your concepts.  In my opinion, if you have multiple locations taking calls and any of the groups have downtime where others don’t? You have a very obvious area of efficiency that can be gained.  If you have multiple locations regardless, you should consider looking at a centralized option.

Hire someone to come look at your numbers.  Ask a friend that has experience with this sort of thing if you need to.  It’s worth looking at.

SU feels

that business customers in Argentina either don’t care about customer service and do not let it influence their business choices and/or we can say that business in Argentina provide great customer service and the business customers don’t find it necessary to switch vendors because the service is so good. Both factors are probably at play here.

I’m not so sure that I agree. I believe that, sure, those are partially correct in some areas, however I think that culture and monopolies also have a great deal to do with it.  I started this posting referencing a friend — well, she lives in Belgium.  The entire country has had a single electricity provider for as long as … well .. electricity has been around.  If you wanted electricity, you simply had to purchase it from them.  Somewhat recently, a new company has come into being and is now trying to take away the business.   The monopoly that existed is now starting to crumble, however they still hold significant sway over things.  And their customer service proves it.

Two weeks ago, my friend notified her current electric company that she’d be switching to this new upstart at the end of the contract.  The contract ended.  The new electric company, however, wasn’t quite in place yet to give her electricity.  Belgium’s law states that electricity is a basic right, so the electric company couldn’t completely turn their electricity off but they were able to put a 1500 Kw limiter on the line.  This prevents the simultaneous use of any electricity that totals more than 1500 Kw. I don’t know about yours, but my fridge alone draws somewhere around 800.  This doesn’t count lights, stove, microwave, TV, or anything else.  Basically, this electric limiter prevented her from doing any cooking or laundry until the other electric company could get the service up and running.

Now here comes the crux of things. The new electric company couldn’t, by law, touch the limiter because it wasn’t theirs, so when they were ready to turn the electricity on 24 hours after the limiter went on… they couldn’t.  The monopoly electric company simply kept saying “Sorry, sorry,  sorry”… three days went by, two scheduled technicians didn’t show up… more time without electricity.

To cut an even longer story short(ish), it boils down to the fact that the company didn’t have to do anything. They had no perceived incentive to offer good customer service.  They were losing the customer anyway.  They could simply cause the end user some trouble for their efforts.

Customer service shouldn’t be painful.  It should be good.  Maybe if this company gave their customers good service all the time, even in the face of adversity, my friend wouldn’t have switched.  Maybe.

Support is the least involved and consulting is the most involved, with account management in the middle.

Based on his descriptions, I agree with those definitions. That having been said, all too often, these roles are blurred and not nearly as defined.  At the organization that I’m currently consulting at, the overall call center comprises of over 150 employees that have some with defined roles (you’re Software Support; you’re outbound Sales; you’re Account Management) and others without.  One of the key teams that I’m involved with manages outbound sales, inbound technical support, in and outbound billing, inbound customer support, and inbound/outbound technical consulting.  Based on the three definitions, they’d do all three at the same time, although the Account Management is not a 1:1 ratio.

My experience differs somewhat from Douglas’. I’d separate the roles as follows:

Client Services: This comprises of both technical support and customer relations support. This role may be support or it may be account management, but it takes on the entire realm of responsibilities for helping the customer through.  This role would be required to work with the customer’s to solve any immediate problems as well as identify possible areas of opportunity for future sales or immediate up-sells.   This plays into the shifting focus from sales or service to sales and service. If the customer requires a higher level of knowledge than they’re able to handle, they would pass it over to the other roles.

Pre-Sales: The pre-sales role would be the role in which agents are responsible for working with the customer’s to identify what the best solution is and then helping them purchase it.  In part, this falls under Douglas’ “consulting” role, but is more limited.  They need to understand the customer’s needs well.

Consulting: In this role, I agree with him.  The consulting role, if taken to the level that it should be, is extremely complex as it requires the understanding of your customer’s needs, a comprehension of sales and balance, and also the capabilities of what products might work with your systems.

The structure would be the same as Douglas, though, in order of difficulty.  Client Services, pre-sales, and then consulting.

The answer I gave him was pretty straight forward – neither.

A center simply can not provide enough service if the focus is 100% on quality unless it is very over staffed, but at the same time, focusing solely on quantity, results in a significant decrease in customer satisfaction and loyalty.  Because of this, there needs to be a good balance struck.

The center where I’m currently consulting, for example, blends this. Although there are agents who say “I was hired on to do service and I can’t (won’t) do sales”, they work side by side — and in conjunction with — those that are more sales oriented. Another organization I used to work for was the same way. In both cases, management decided to allow the agents their personal preference. If you felt you were only service, then you wouldn’t have to do sales. For those that had the personality, interest or skills in doing sales, they were given that opportunity and rewarded accordingly. New hires were expected to do both. This new change was conveyed in the interview process.

Salaries are tied into this as well. Those agents who are truly service only will, in time, lag behind. This is already evident in the differing salary ranges. Those that generate revenue for the company have a higher payscale than those that don’t. If one considers that, in general, the skills for customer service are the same as taking orders, then the diference in range is $1.01 per hour. Add outbound sales to the mix and the increase shoots up an incredible $4.33 per hour (over $9000 per year!).

I don’t forsee that this will change. The more you can offer the company in terms of revenue opportunity, the better off you are and the more valuable your skills are. If you’re just service right now, look at learning how to sell .. the sooner the better.

Some suggestions:

• Cold Calling for Women: Opening Doors & Closing Sales (Useful for men as well as women!)
• Telephone Sales For Dummies

Those are two books that some of my agents have found to be quite useful. The other that I often suggest to people because it is quite interesting is Baseline Selling: How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know About the Game of Baseball, but it doesn’t apply to a normal contact center environment. If you’re an account manager and can work through a longer cycle time, then it might be worth reading.

What is KPI?

“Key Performance Indicators” (KPI) are financial and non-financial metrics used to quantify objectives to reflect strategic performance of an organization. KPIs are used in Business Intelligence to assess the present state of the business and to prescribe a course of action.” (Wikipedia)

Wow! That’s a mouthful. What does it really mean? What is the use of them? The fact of the matter is that KPI measurements are crucial, but only if you’re gathering the right data and, more importantly, can act on the data. Without KPI being a catalyst for change, they are nothing but numbers. Currently, contact centers use a wide variety of information as their KPIs.  Contact Centers are, as Bruce Belfiore from Benchmark Portal stated in a class I attended, “one of the top industries to be able to benchmark against. Everything is logged, tracked and stored as data.”

CCs gain huge amounts of data from every angle — how long was the agent on the phone, how many times (and how long) was a customer placed on hold, how long did the customer wait before the call was picked up, how long did they wait before giving up, how many calls come in per timeframe, how many agents are staffed at any particular juncture, what’s the oldest call waiting, what was the oldest call waiting, etc etc etc. You could gather mounds of data upon mounds of data. But can do DO anything with it? That’s the question.

Most centers focus on a handful of choices, depending on their need. As an example, an inbound center often looks at : number of calls taken per agent, average length of on call and after call work, abandon rate, abandon time, service level measurements, average speed of answer, number of times and length of time that a person was placed on hold, and maybe number of dials out. Can you imagine a manager looking at a center with 100+ agents and trying to figure out how to improve? It is no wonder that many centers just coast along where they are and simply try to flounder and keep from drowning. The truth of the matter is that KPIs are extremely important.

Without focusing on KPI (and this, really, goes for any industry), one has nothing to measure themselves against and are simply arbitrarily choosing this or that to fix a problem. A sales group has quotas or dollar figures, manufacturing has defects, professional athletes have stats, call centers have theirs. It is, however, again a question of picking the RIGHT KPI to look at. A professional NFL linebacker, for example, isn’t going to try to have a higher YAC (yards after catch) than the wide receiver. Instead, they focus on number of tackles and number of sacks per game. In a call center, I believe there are six KPI that are what you need to focus on. These six will give you a strong indicator of the overall health of your center.

• Average Speed of Answer
• Abandon Rate
• Service Level
• Overall Customer Satisfaction
• Professionalism
• How well was the issue resolved

Together, they paint an extremely detailed picture of whether the customer’s questions are being answered correctly, whether they are being handled in a timely fashion, and whether the center is staffed appropriately. If you have to pick one, pick “Customer Satisfaction”. All of the others, if boiled down to the core, drive this one single KPI. In addition to this, if your Customer Satisfaction is high, then you drive loyalty, return business and have made a positive impact on your organization’s success.

my boss has written me in for shifts without asking me if I am available.

Almost everyone in a call center environment has probably run into this. I don’t believe that the person asking the question works in a center, but the concept still exists.  The answer given is, basically, talk to your boss and gives a general script of how to go about doing so.

The writer’s answer applies to a center as well as it does to any other business, so if you’re curious, take a gander.

Contact centers tend to be at the core of this arguement. Quality vs Quantity. What is truly the most important? Does a person’s Average Speed of Answer (ASA) mean more than their customer feedback score? Is the abandon rate the key or does customer satisfaction play a role? In truth, the answer is not a simple one. One thing does hold true regardless of your company’s size, situation, or industry.

Contact Centers are the primary point of contact for your company and have an immense impact on customer loyalty, satisfaction, and retention.

A contact center for a small company may be the only employee, programmer and owner — it is still the place where customers come. Larger companies, more obviously, have call centers that have an impact on the customer. Ranging anywhere from 5 to 500+, these customer support organizations (including billing, customer service, technical support, returns, etc) are crucial.

There is a simple reason that the QvQ quandry is not easily resolved. Both are important; Neither can be sacrificed. If your customer satisfaction rating, of those customers spoken to, is through the roof but 20% of your customers abandon before speaking to them, you’ve alienated 20% of your customers. More than likely, these 20% would also rate your customer satisfaction extremely low — you just can’t easily survey them as they’ve hung up before speaking to someone. At the same time, if you’re able to reach a 1% abandon rate and your customer satisfaction is on the floor, the center is not doing your organization any favors.

It takes a strong team who understands client support and call center management to put together metrics that are appropriate for your organization. This team can be a consultant company or an in house team — its irrelevant, but it is important to make sure that you have someone measuring the right data.

Some crucial scores to look at:

• Average Speed of Answer
• Abandon Rate
• Service Level
• Overall Customer Satisfaction
• Professionalism
• How well was the issue resolved

One pitfall to avoid while looking at these numbers — it ignores the outliers. An average abandon rate of 5% per day (fairly industry standard) when measured over the course of a month may show that 4 days a week has a rate of 2% and one day a week has 20%. This is an extreme example, but all too often, contact center agencies and management tries to expand over a month — days do matter. ]]> http://www.mesritz.us/blog/2009/02/quality-v-quantity/feed/ 0