Contact Center Convictions

I have recently focused some of my efforts around quality management (QM.)  We want to deliver QM tools to our clients, and I have been tasked with determining our strategy to do that.  As part of this “focus” I visited ten call centers to get an up-close look at how they manage quality.  These were inbound call centers that have a reputation for good service.  Some were larger and some smaller, with the average size around 75 agents.  And just so you know… this was a blast!  I love this kind of stuff; for me it was like going out on a vacation.

The end result of my call center visits was a reminder that call centers are broken and we still have a long way to go.  When I say “broken,” I mean that while many managers are making an effort to improve the customer experience, most lack the tools to do so.  I did find good ideas and practices in every call center I visited, but overall I was reminded that several areas are broken. I’ll start with the top three:

First-contact resolution (FCR.)  Not being measured accurately and thus not able to trend if the call center is  getting better or worse.  Not able to diagnose issues fast enough that impact FCR.  Not able to attribute or link new efforts in the call center to FCR improvement (such as training strategy, hiring, coaching, incentives, etc.)  Of course most centers recognize that FCR is a key indicator of quality; they are just not using this indicator correctly today.

Customer satisfaction.  Like FCR, not measured accurately.  Not able to trend.  Not able to tie back to a specific agent and give instant feedback.  Not used to drive change and improvement.

Incentives for agents.   I discuss this in an earlier blog entry. We need to explore this further because it is an issue in many call centers.  What I found was too many centers not able to pay for quality and performance.  The result was low-performing agents who make nearly the same amount of income as high -erforming agents.  This is a HUGE issue.

I will stop there because these items are the fundamentals.  If we are unable to measure and impact these indicators, then there is a landslide that negates the potential impact of other indicators (e.g. service level, average handle time, etc.).

Okay… enough with the negative stuff.  I did see heroic efforts at many centers to improve quality.  I found people passionate about customer service.  I found many managers giving an honest effort to make a positive difference for the agent and the customer.   What was lacking were the tools, the techniques, and the practices leveraging the tools. 

I’d like to introduce what I plan to be a long-running topic in this blog: performance-based compensation.

Should we compensate agents based on their performance?  Well… I would guess that about half of you will not only say yes, but say that you are already doing it.  I’ve heard stories of success and just as many stories of failure in this endeavor.  I’ve experienced success and failure in my own call centers.  So, let us surmise that incentives are a tricky business.

Thomas Jefferson once commented (regarding the Boston Tea Party), “So inscrutable is the arrangement of causes & consequences in this world that a two-penny duty on tea, unjustly imposed in a sequestered part of it, changes the condition of all its inhabitants.”

In one of my favorite books on economics (Freakanomics) the authors proclaim, “An incentive is a bullet, a lever, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation.”  They go on to share many impressive examples of how an incentive, even a small one, can change the dynamics of any situation.  The subtitle of the book is the “hidden side of everything.”

What about in the call center? Will agent performance change based on incentives?  Yes, my experience is that incentives can motivate agents to do more of a good thing or less of a bad thing.  But again, it is a tricky business.  Where do we start?  What do we measure, and how often?  What about service level?  No.  Average handle time?  Uh… maybe.  Think about ways we measure quality (e.g. customer feedback or first-contact resolution) and ways to measure effectiveness (e.g. unit of accomplishment per hour of work). We can drill into this in future entries on this blog.  For now, I will ask you - how do you measure an agent’s contribution?  What has worked or has not worked for you in motivating agents with incentives?  Can you tie key indicators of the agent’s performance all the way back to the goals of the company?  (With any input, please let me know if you operate a customer service contact center, technical support, or sales, as these three categories require different strategies.)

The next question is how do we make it fair?  How often should we change it? What percentage of the agent compensation will be based on these metrics?  What about supervisors, managers, quality assurance staff, workforce planners, and training personnel?  We need to explore these questions.

Finally, while talking about compensation we should also be aware that recognition and rewards (non-cash rewards) are also powerful incentives to motivate agents.  The question is how do we balance performance-based incentives between recognition, rewards, and cash?

Let me finish by sharing another example from Freakonomics.  Some economists studied the behavior of parents arriving late to pick up their children at a chain of 17 day care centers.  They found there was an average of eight late pickups per week per center.  Then they implemented a penalty of $3  to anyone picking up their child late.  What happened?  Late arrivals more than doubled to 20/week.  Why?  I would suggest if this interests you then read the book… the authors go on to say that the economists failed when they substituted an economic penalty (and too small of one) for a moral penalty (guilt for being late).

I’m asking a lot of questions here and hope that as a community we can find the right answers. Please send me your thoughts on this topic, and watch for additional entries in the future.

Call centers have been my life for nearly twenty years.  I started out young and eager as an agent for Franklin Covey (known as Franklin Quest when I was there.)  Over a six year span I played many different roles in the 300+ seat operation (training, scheduling, recruiting, supervising, etc.)  My final year at Franklin I even helped develop the software used in the call center. (I had graduated from college with my computer science degree by that point.)

A good friend (at Franklin) convinced me to leave and help start a company with him.  Cumulus was a call center technology company and the two of us started developing a server-based IVR and ACD product.  Nine months into development with version one ready, we also opened up an outsource call center using our own technology.  Somehow, over the next couple years, we managed to sign up 30+ companies and took their calls, and often even shipped their products from our warehouse.  The IVR/ACD product was a huge success and we sold it all over (NY, LA, Argentina, China, Germany, etc. etc.).

We caught the attention of then telecom giant Harris Corp (digital telephone division), a fortune 200 company.  And yep, you guessed it.  POW!  They bought the software rights from us, and a team of Cumulus folks (including me) went to work for Harris.  We set our sights on conquering the world with Harris.  Then POW again! For reasons I still don’t understand, Harris closed the entire division overnight.  Amazingly, a few months later we struck a deal to get the source code back (just code and not the customer base).

So, in late 1999 and we had plenty of time and money and we still wanted to conquer the call center world.  We thought… wouldn’t it be cool if call centers could leverage an ACD, IVR and CTI in the cloud?  What if managing multiple locations or putting agents at home was easy?  Better yet, what if a small or medium call center (under 500 seats) could access the best skills-based routing engine out there that traditionally only the large call centers have (because they invest millions of dollars).  So we formed MyACD, LLC and began an aggressive and complex redesign of our Cumulus ACD/IVR/CTI infrastructure.  We wanted multi-tenancy, resiliency, great reporting, and web-based management and administration.  

We joined up with a local VoIP telecom provider to offer the technology in the cloud.  We then partnered with a Utah-based company (UCN) to leverage their agent sales channel and found good synergy between the companies.  We started selling some nice accounts and again found ourselves operating a very profitable company.  UCN was excited about the technology and we found ourselves in acquisition discussions with them.  

After UCN purchased MyACD (and the product was renamed to inContact) I decided it was time to step away for a while and take a break.  I took 24-months off and it was awesome.  I introduced myself to my wife and four kids and did a lot of skiing, travelling, and coaching. I wrote a book, built a house, and generally had a blast.  One enjoyable activity was donating time to a few non-profit organizations to consult their call center operations (guess I couldn’t get completely away from it).

Again I had time to think about what was next.  After working in a call center, owning a call center, and then selling call center software to hundreds of companies, I was ready to jump back into the call center market.  Workforce management (WFM) always interested me because I saw so many companies struggle with the schedule optimization process.  So, I started ScheduleQ, LLC, an on-demand (SaaS) WFM.  I hired some talented developers and within a year we were ready to roll out version one.  But before we launched, UCN stepped in and said hey- we want your new software and we want you.  They made a good offer and… POW!  So, the dream lives on… I am back to conquer the world.

Thanks for all the feedback on the at-home blog.  Several of you posted online and I received a lot of email directly. 

I have been thinking about call center agents, or more accurately- I have been worrying about them.  I recently came across this list of the most common criticisms of call center staff:

• Restrictive working practices and repetitive job tasks
• High stress: common issue with front-end jobs where employees deal directly with customers
• Low compensation (pay and bonuses)
• Poor working conditions (e.g. poor facilities, poor maintenance and cleaning, cramped working conditions, management interference, lack of privacy and noisy)
• Close scrutiny by management
• Rude and abusive customers

Many of us can sympathize with items on this list.  As I thought back to the call centers I’ve been in that struggle with these issues, I contrasted it with the experience of at-home agents.  Call centers with an at-home workforce have told me before that their agents are happier.  I sent an email to a few of them to confirm … and the response was a strong YES.  One call center even quoted my previous blog and said, “we found at-home agents are happier and more productive”.

We all like to see people be happy.  By employing at-home agents we can feel a sense of satisfaction that they are happier working from home.  But, why should companies care if their call center employees are happy?

There are a bunch of reasons, but let us consider just the following one for now.  I’ve read several articles over the last year claiming that customer satisfaction is directly proportionate to agent satisfaction.  They claim that centers with happy agents have happy customers – and they back up the claim with data and evidence.

Now, we know there is more to customer satisfaction than simply putting agents at home.  But, I would like to propose that it is a giant step in the right direction.