Article : Out of the Crisis: Proven Solutions to the Daunting Human Resources Challenges in the Global Call Center Industry

By Dr. Dennis Adsit, VP Business Development, KomBea Corporation

In 1986, Ed Deming published Out of the Crisis, a book which showed how America’s quality and competitiveness problems could be solved systematically. At the time the book was published Deming was already a hero in Japan for the contributions he made to dramatically improving quality across all Japanese industries, but he was almost completely unknown in the United States. The book is considered one of the most important management books of all time for its unique (at the time) approach and for its ultimate impact on industry in the US and elsewhere around the world.

The global call center industry is facing a crisis of its own on the Human Resources front. There’s a shortage of skilled labor, initial training and ongoing coaching are not fully preparing the agents to successfully handle all the types of calls and callers, and even in tight labor markets, the levels of turnover are stratospheric.

What is frustrating is that proven solutions exist to these problems, but most call center leaders are content to live with the problem and to continue to do what they have always done. They have, in the words of another famous quality consultant, Joseph Juran, “unplugged the smoke alarms.”

Let’s examine the effects of each problem in turn and the current solutions that call center leaders seem content to keep trying, though there is little evidence that those solutions are working. Then let’s look at simple, proven solutions that can get us out of the mess we are in.

Labor Shortages. Call centers around the world, especially in Asia, are facing severe labor shortages…they can’t even attract people into the industry, let alone retain them. With billions of people around the world, clearly, the problem is not a shortage of labor. The problem is a shortage of labor with the right skills…technical savvy, problem solving skills, language capabilities, etc.

What do many call center leaders facing this dilemma do? They often do more of the same…more ads in more papers, more job fairs, more perks to try to attract people which drive up costs, but only band-aid the problem.

At the turn of the 20th century, Henry Ford faced a similar problem in the United States. There was a lot of labor available, but the labor often did not speak English, was illiterate and lacked the technical skills to manufacture cars end-to-end as was the practice at the time. He solved it with a process change which broke down theretofore highly skilled work into smaller, well-defined, easy to teach and repeat pieces and moved everything along on an assembly line.

A similar type of solution is being applied in vanguard call centers. Technology can be used to more clearly define the process. When combined with pre-recorded audio and other voice applications, the agents’ jobs can be dramatically simplified. We have seen brand new agents using our tools outperforming experienced agents. Simplifying the agents’ jobs like this reduces the entry level skill requirements; it also lowers language and accent shortfalls the agents may have and thereby instantly expands the available labor pool…just as it did for Henry Ford a century ago.

Inadequate Training. Call center agents are often put on the phones inadequately prepared for what they are about to face. This leads to mistakes, long handle times, call backs, escalations, frustration and terrible word-of-mouth (from the agents and the customers).

What do many Call Center leaders do? They just try to get as many of the agents through the training process as possible and then attempt to shore up the weak effort with the long dead horse of recording-(sample) monitoring-(occasional) coaching, but the efforts and results are laughable. Not only doesn’t coaching work (see Sorry, But Your Big Investment in Coaching and Monitoring Will Never Improve Your Output Measures), the damage, in terms of poor performance, has already been done.

There are four well-known criteria for training success…satisfaction, knowledge, behavior, and results. Most of the time, we are training agents for the first two, with a smattering of the third in the form of a few in-class behavior assessments and a brief on-phone nesting period. Why are we putting agents on the phone that have not been trained to a results standard? Would you like your airline pilots trained to the standards we train call center agents too, i.e., close enough?

Speaking of pilots, that is the well-tested way out of this HR challenge…“flight simulators.” Once we have built a process for agents we can reverse that process and simulate a high volume of calls before the agents ever get on the phones. What the customer says is simulated and the agents have to choose the appropriate responses and execute the appropriate actions with internal systems. They also have to do it within a certain time standard. It also allows you to throw challenging situations at the agent to make sure they can handle the big call drivers and also calls and situations off the beaten path. This allows you to make sure the agents are not released to the phones until they perform to a certain level of quality and at a certain pace.

That we are putting agents on the phone and “working the bugs out” with customers is unconscionable. It puts undue stress on the agents that increases the chances of turnover and it results in a poor customer experience that undermines customer loyalty at an incalculable cost. The worst part is that it does not need to be this way when solutions like call simulators exist that can completely eradicate this problem.

Stratospheric Levels of Turnover. Turnover is perhaps the biggest problem in the industry. It averages in the mid-30% range in the US and is much higher outside the US. It is not uncommon to find centers around the world, even in the US, with greater than 100% annual turnover.

The effect of this turnover in the form of costs for recruiting, staffing, training, coaching and in the form of operational performance (adequately performing agents are replaced by lower performing agents) does not show up on the P&L, but it is scourging the industry and the parent companies.

What do many leaders do? Sometimes they don’t do anything and just redouble their recruiting efforts (see the first HR challenge discussed here). Sometimes they hold more focus groups. Or they put in game rooms.

Let’s face it. Call center jobs are some of the toughest white collar jobs there are. They are repetitive, tiring and stressful. You can spend lots of money fixing everything else about your environment, but until the repetitive, tiring and stressful aspects of the job are reduced, you will still have high turnover.

Just as maddening as the previous two problems, solutions to this problem also exist. The process can be simplified and error-proofed so the agents can relax knowing they are getting the process right. Solutions also exist to reduce the probability that the customer gets upset and argumentative with the agent, further reducing the agents’ day-to-day stress. Finally, the way we leverage prerecorded audio files reduces how often the agents have to repeat the same information over and over again, thus reducing boredom and fatigue and ultimately turnover. In short, there are ways to address many of the most stressful elements of the agent’s job thereby reducing the crippling effects of turnover.

Deming’s book, Out of the Crisis, laid the blame for America’s quality problems right at the feet of management, but then showed them how to fix them and hence the title. It took courage on the part of America’s manufacturing leaders to realize they had a problem and that they could not fix it with the approaches they had been using.

The situation is the same in the call center industry. Today’s call center management practices have not fixed the current HR problems and in some cases have actually made those problems worse.

The question is not can these HR problems be fixed. We know they can. The question really comes down to whether call center leaders are smart enough to realize that what they are doing is not working and whether they are courageous enough to try something new.