Management, Human Resources, and Life in a Customer Focused World

In January 2008, I wrote a post that still brings in a good amount of traffic (KPI (Key Performance Indicators) – Are they what they used to be?). In this post, I defined six KPI that I find to be the ones that are quality and quantity focused. A while back, I was in a discussion with the Manager of Quality Assurance for SupportSoft.com’s new work from home project and he asked me “In your opinion, which is more important for a manager in a call center — quality or quantity?”

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.

A while back,  a contact of mine from an “addiction treatment, publishing, education, research, and recovery support” contact center, asked me a question.  I didn’t have an answer for her since I’d never dealt with headset problems or complaints in the past, but she was able to eventually get the information she needed.

Her question was:

I am wondering if you might have some experience with this….It hasn’t been much of an issue for us, but staff that is making outbound calls have had some problems with sound blasts when calls connect. There is concern that this could actually do damage to their ears. Are you familiar with Sound Shield or any other types of systems or headsets that somehow filter or block noises over a certain decibel?

She was able to get some information that may be of help to people reading here.  What she’s found is below — I don’t endorse any of it as I haven’t actually had any experience with selecting headsets:

I have now been told that acoustic shock protection is now standard in many headsets, so we’ll look into that.  Just as an FYI, I did find a few articles with some information about this.

This article highlights a particular type of headset. and another about the dangers of hearing damage to headset wearers…

This one is about some type of software…

This article specifically mentions a product called Sound Shield.

Four more articles about Sound Shield..
http://www.headsets-australia.com/soundshield-acoustic-devices.html
http://www.polaris.com.au/SoundShield.asp
http://www.stretchnow.com.au/products/clearheadsets/soundshield.html
http://www.acousticshock.org/?id=statements

Historically speaking, call centers have all too often been split — you’re either a selling agent or you’re a service agent. These two hiring profiles were polar opposites and even when sitting together in the same area they held themselves apart by force of personality and title separation. This was the paradigm that most call centers and companies using a contact center were stuck in. Although this is still often the case, there are more and more situations where it is not. The major shift is that more and more centers are being profit centers rather than cost centers. In this sense, the center must look to where they can successfully increase revenue or decrease costs. Generally, this means looking at how to up-sell products to a customer or use affinity sales to branch the customer calling up for a mop into also buying a bucket from your company.

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.

I just reposted a post I wrote with some information about the compensation levels for call center functions at an agent level for 2007.  The same report (the U.S. Contact Center Compensation Survey by the Mercer Human Resources Consulting group) detailed some call center management pay for the same year (2007).

For Team/Group Managers, some of the same exact groups had the following median compensation (includes base pay and annual bonus/incentive):

• Inbound order entry – $61,400
• Inbound with selling – $65,500
• Customer service – $69,200
• Internet support – $63,700
• Collections – $69,900
• Full account management – $73,700
• Technical support – $63,100
• Outbound with selling – $71,900

Compensation levels vary from $61,400 to $73,700 — a range of $12,400.  This equates to approximately from $29.50 to $35.43 per hour, a $5.97 variance.

The areas that I expected to be the highest (outbound with selling) wasn’t — the agents have a much large difference between the highest non-selling and that level (over $3 per hour) but the team/group manager was highest at the Account Management level.  After considering this, it makes sense — full account management requires a much greater level of quality management and focus on standardized processes.  A customer that has assigned account managers will expect greater service and, in turn, a company needs to pay for it at the manager level.

Tom Vander Well’s QAQNA blog had an amusing post today that I wanted to share.  He talks about how you “Dress” your conversation.

Basically, his point is that a company with a physical dress code expects that their employees adhere to it. Coming to work in shorts and a T-shirt when the dress code is slacks and a button down isn’t acceptable.  In the same vein, a company can expect a certain voice “dress code”.  An example of this might be using slang when the company wishes to portray themselves as professional or not including certain phrases that are required by the organization.  The first would equate to the earlier short vs slacks example while the second would be more like wearing a uniform or certain color to work.

I’ll have to use this in the future .. it’s a good way to explain something to an agent that simply doesn’t want to follow the defined guidelines.

Reposted from early last year — I’m still trying to find a similar survey done for 2008 compensation to see how things have changed.

The amount that a call center agent is paid makes a big difference to them and to the company’s success. In general, the median total cash compensation varies about $3 dollars depending on job role until you start to include the selling aspect of things. Many people don’t enjoy sales and aren’t good at it, so cash incentives are used to defray this. Median total cash compensation includes base pay and annual bonus/incentive.

Here’s a select list of functions with their median compensation for an intermediate-level representative. All wages are in hourly rates.

• Inbound order entry – $13.99
• Inbound with selling – $12.69
• Customer service – $12.98
• Internet support – $12.86
• Collections – $14.09
• Full account management – $14.56
• Technical support – $14.37
• Outbound with selling – $17.31

Taking the Outbound with selling outlier out of things, the range is $12.69 – $14.56 as the median compensation for a call center agent with some experience.
For Team/Group Managers, some of the same exact groups had the following median compensation (includes base pay and annual bonus/incentive)

• Inbound order entry – $61,400
• Inbound with selling – $65,500
• Customer service – $69,200
• Internet support – $63,700
• Collections – $69,900
• Full account management – $73,700
• Technical support – $63,100
• Outbound with selling – $71,900

Compensation levels vary from $61,400 to $73,700 — a range of $12,400. This equates to approximately from $29.50 to $35.43 per hour, a $5.97 variance.
The areas that I expected to be the highest (outbound with selling) wasn’t — the agents have a much large difference between the highest non-selling and that level (over $3 per hour) but the team/group manager was highest at the Account Management level. After considering this, it makes sense — full account management requires a much greater level of quality management and focus on standardized processes. A customer that has assigned account managers will expect greater service and, in turn, a company needs to pay for it at the manager level.

In November 2008, I wrote about six “crucial” scores to look at in my  Quality v Quantity (recovered 2/18) entry.  These six scores are what I’d call a “next generation contact center’s KPI”.

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.

Ask a Manager is a blog where people write in and ask questions of the writer.  The latest post is about scheduling — a very pertinent question in a call center environment.  The questioned asked, in summary, was

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.

Back at the end of January 2008, MSN published an article called “10 Ways to Get Fired From a Home-Based Position” by the CEO of VIPDesk. (I can’t find the link anymore).

Here’s a few that I want to stress.

• Having customers hear your kids playing in the background

Working in a noisy area or with the TV on is distracting and no way to excel. A quiet workplace is the key to success when working from home – it is essential for concentration and for receiving business calls. When customers can hear kids, dogs, TV and other noises in the background, they most likely will assume you are not devoting your full attention to your work. If your customer can hear the noise, there is a good chance that your supervisor could hear the noise as well. A good home office sounds just like a good office environment – silent.

• Using “ancient” technology

Frequently losing Internet or phone connection while working from home will prevent you from doing your job and ultimately lead to losing it. Most companies that allow you to work from home will have specific technology requirements to ensure that their applications function effectively – not adhering to these could be grounds for termination.

• Not understanding the definition of multitasking

Doing laundry or other household chores while on the clock are not perks of working at home. Work time is work time and should be dedicated to professional duties. Mixing personal and professional duties will lead to unfocused work, unsatisfactory performance and a potential job hunt in the near future.

• Spending your work time shopping online

Just because the boss cannot walk by your desk at any moment and see what you are working on does not mean you don’t have to work. When working from home, it is important to be able to prioritize and work efficiently. Goals still need to be met and dedicated work time should be spent doing just that … work.

• “Showing up” late or consistently “leaving” early

Just as your co-workers and supervisors expect you to arrive on time in an office setting, they expect the same when working from home. Responsibility and dedication are extremely important. You must be able to motivate yourself to keep on schedule to succeed when working from home.

To me, the rest are common sense and even apply to a standard office job. Things like “Don’t mouth off to a customer” should be logical and a part of your professional career.

Working from home, as an employee, is a luxury that shouldn’t be abused.  The company is hiring you to do a job effectively, so do that.  Be professional.  Those that don’t? They’re the ones that make life difficult for the rest of the people that want to work from home.. they’re the ones that make the managers go “Why should I?”