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Article : Flip Your Contact Center Switch: Move Your Team To A Customer Service Mindset

The role of inbound contact centers is rapidly changing: fluctuating economic conditions are compelling them to support business strategy and profitability in addition to delivering their regular customer-facing service. Performing such a balancing act only ends up putting even more pressure on already stretched resources.

To win on both day-to-day and strategic fronts, contact centers need to redefine the way they assess agent effectiveness. As customers hold the key to a company's survival in today's economic environment, assessing agent effectiveness by traditional call performance metrics alone is no longer enough. Contact center managers need to start factoring in an essential business driver - the voice of the customer - as an ongoing key performance indicator to move their team from pure call metrics to a holistic customer service mindset.

This article provides a step-by-step approach on how best to leverage customer feedback to initiate a pivotal team shift towards enhanced customer service.

Review Your Technical Metrics
Based in Boston, Mass., Laureen Morrison has spent 22 years in contact center management, 15 of which as an industry consultant. She explains: "Today's contact centers strive for more accurate, real-time performance metrics. However, most companies still don't see the value in investing in new technology and continue using ACD and switch measurements. Dropping technical metrics altogether is not the issue: it's about leveraging customer service ratings as complementary key performance indicators."

Not all technical metrics lend themselves to providing powerful insights into customer service performance. The first step is to review the ones you currently measure to make sure they include the following six:


Villette T. Nolon
President And CEO
NetReflector Inc.


Paul Berton
CEO
Genticity Inc

Service Level
Service typically shows improvement if the service level goal you have set is to be met in a shorter timeframe, such as hourly or at least daily Contact centers should also define and track the percentage of time that they meet service level. Wait time reports produced by the ACD telephone system typically show the number and percentage of calls that were answered within specific time frames, distributing calls into columns for 10 seconds, 20 seconds, etc.

Enhanced Service Level
Enhanced service level is typically made up of three tiers of goals, such as 80% of calls handled within 45 seconds; 98% of calls handled within 90 seconds; and 100% of calls handled within 120 seconds. The main questions here are: what are you doing about the remaining 20% or 2%, and is it acceptable for a customer to wait five minutes for their call to be answered, which could lead them to hang up and call a competitor for service?

Abandoned Calls
If a contact center's abandoned call rate is high, but it meets service level 100% of the time, the service level goal may need to be more rigorous to lower the abandon rate.

Productivity Indicators
Employed to measure staff productivity in most inbound contact centers, and expressed as a percentage of sign-on time and in minutes, these are compiled by the ACD telephone system for individual agents and the entire operation. Reports are typically printed for each hour, day, week and sometimes month, and include talk time, available time, idle time, after-call work or wrap-up time, work time and sign-on time.

Sales Indicators For Sales-Oriented Inbound Contact Centers
Contact centers making sales or taking orders often use some or all of these metrics to manage staff performance: sales/calls conversion ratio, ($$)/sale revenue, ($$)/call revenue or ($$)/hour revenue.

Customer Service Indicators
Finally, contact centers devoted to customer service should compile and monitor these key indicators:

  • Customer complaints/sales ratio

  • Customer issues and counts of calls for each one

  • Customer call-backs

  • First call resolution

  • Resolution percentages - overall and per issue

  • Customer will buy/buys again

  • Customer satisfied

  • Customer lukewarm

  • Customer unhappy

Measure What Your Customers Think
After optimizing your internal technical metrics to assess customer service performance, the next step is to measure quality indicators by gathering customer intelligence, an invaluable source of information already leveraged and harnessed by successful global service and support organizations.

Paul Sutherland is Global QA Manager for Accenture's Help Desk Services. Its six contact centers located on four different continents handle more than 4,000 phone, email, web-based and chat support inquiries daily. Paul explains: "Our organization provides technical support to more than 100,000 Accenture personnel in 48 countries as well as 12 external customers around the world. The bottom line for me is that the customer, no matter who he is, has immense information to share. Measuring customer satisfaction is a great way to tap into that valuable resource to implement effective change and tangibly measure the impact of any changes we make in terms that matter most."

Customer satisfaction feedback is only as good as the value it provides, and this value mainly resides in how well your organization can leverage this intelligence to achieve its specific business objectives.

Esteban Kolsky is Research Director at industry analyst firm Gartner based in Stanford, CT. He explains: "The key aspect of moving from 'organization-centric' to 'customer-centric' customer service is in shifting metrics from efficiency-based (how well we do what we do) to effectiveness-based (how well we serve the customer.) This is a concept that is still not well-understood by most organizations that end up changing their vision or mission statement, but continue to monitor old, efficiency-driven metrics, such as number of calls per hour. This ends up evolving into an ever-widening gap between objectives and results, which actually increases the attrition rate and decreases customer satisfaction since none of the objectives are incorporated into the metrics measured."

Depending on the size and level of sophistication of your contact center, you can measure customer satisfaction feedback in a variety of ways:

Score Sheets
Used in many contact centers to assess agent call and email quality, these are calibrated by contact center supervisors and total five to 12 contacts per month – a good sample, but one that is largely hit or miss, often includes bias and doesn't necessarily reflect customer perceptions of the interaction.

Paper-Based Surveys
Conducted weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually, paper-based surveys provide aggregate data, making individual agent-level reporting difficult. Expense, logistics and timeliness are issues that prevent real-time learning opportunity for the agents, and you can't necessarily identify which particular agent or customer was involved in the interaction.

Phone-Based Surveys
Many contact centers survey their customers by phone with the help of Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) systems, a fast, cost-effective way of sampling a large population. The data collected is often not specific or timely enough to be meaningful for immediate agent training purposes.

Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
IVR systems have become very popular for quality monitoring, helping find patterns and trends early to address problems before they affect other customers. Because of storage issues, however, companies should only record all conversations if they are mandated by law. Otherwise, they can use samples from different hours, days and events.

Online Surveys
Both timely and cost-effective, online surveys are rapidly gaining ground in the contact center world. Customer satisfaction is measured right after the service interaction and can be linked to a specific case ID, making that intelligence immediately actionable for agent coaching. In addition, automatic trigger alerts can notify designated personnel of any dissatisfied customers in real time, so timely action can be taken to save that customer before they defect to a competitor. The online collection of aggregate data also enables trending over time, which in turn ensures informed corporate decision-making in tangible business areas, from outsourced partner management to product strategy.

Figure 1: Sample Online Survey

Denis Pombriant, Managing Principal at industry analyst firm Beagle Research Group, explains: "Today's customers are more savvy and demanding than ever before, and for corporations to become more customer-centric, the voice of the customer needs to be captured in more efficient ways. Online survey technology not only enables corporations to survey a market faster and respond in real time, it is fast becoming an essential complement to the business processes of mission-critical parts of an organization, such as service and support, which need to stay in touch with customer needs in real time."

Following these considerations, the next step is for you to evaluate the effectiveness of your current customer feedback system, if you have one already in place. To do that, ask yourself the following question: is the knowledge I gather from my customers timely and actionable enough, so I can immediately coach my agents on specific interactions and enhance customer service performance in real time? If you don't have such a program currently in place and/or are thinking of implementing one, two options are available to you, depending on your budget and internal resources: developing a homegrown solution or partnering with a third-party vendor. While a homegrown solution is an attractive proposition at first sight, the latter can be very helpful for three main reasons: you don't have to reinvent the wheel, saving valuable time and resources; your customers would be dealing with a separate organization, therefore be more likely to provide more honest answers; and you would benefit from years of expertise in customer feedback program implementation.

Get A True Picture of Your Agents' Performance
Now that we have covered both technical performance metrics and customer satisfaction measurement, how do you combine the two to paint an accurate 360-degree picture of your team's overall effectiveness? Figure 2 below shows how you can drill down into summary-level results by agent with a sample balanced scorecard featuring both categories of performance indicators.

Figure 2: Sample Balanced Scorecard

Compared to her Performance vs. Satisfaction workgroup averages, agent Gail's call metrics indicate that she is technically competent: fewer calls escalated to the second level, and very thorough and accurate in providing customers with the information they need. Yet, her quality scores are below workgroup average when it comes to overall customer satisfaction and professionalism. Effectiveness metrics shed some additional light: Gail seems to handle her calls a lot quicker than her workgroup, yet she is not effective in terms of sales. Where Gail needs to be trained is on how to take the time to be friendlier on the phone to up- or cross-sell customers and increase her order volume.

Change Your Agents' Behavior
Armed with these new insights about your team's performance, you are ready to start initiating the desired change in your agents' behavior, so they become more customer service-centric. To be successful, you need to act on two levels:

Training
Balanced scorecards will help you identify which areas each of your agents excels at and where they need to improve. You may find that some of your slowest performers, who struggle to keep up with call performance metrics, are actually delivering outstanding customer experience and scoring high on customer satisfaction. On the flip side, like Gail above, some may be very technically competent, but need a little coaching in customer service etiquette. By leveraging concrete customer interaction examples (provided you can link customer feedback to specific support case IDs,) you can make your agents better understand what is expected of them moving forward. Knowing that the average turnover rate within contact centers in 2003 was 33 percent, with turnover most often occurring within the first year of employment (Mercer Human Resource Consulting's 2003 Call Center Compensation Survey,) these 'personalized' training programs will show your agents that you have a vested interest in their professional development. This, in the long run, will motivate them, reduce staff attrition and save on repeat hiring and training costs.

Encourage your best performers to participate in cross-training your team through a mix of formal training sessions and informal meetings, and you will foster a healthy team environment. The resulting positive change in agent behavior will immediately resonate with customers, as Esteban Kolsky from Gartner further explains: "Aside from selecting the proper metrics, a change of culture and/or behaviors in agents is critical for the organization to convince their customers that there is a customer-centric focus. Without the change, organizations are guilty of talking the talk, but not walking the walk, and customers can sense that when dealing with agents on the phone."

Rewards
Improved training alone is not enough. For these changes in culture and agent behavior to stick, it is critical to also reward your agents with monetary incentives. Last May, the Call Center Learning Center, a resource web site sponsored by Prosci Research, published their 2004 Call Center Best Practices Report after surveying 240 contact centers about best practices in operations and management. Research findings indicated that the average agent base wage in the United States is $14.16 per hour. The same report revealed that over 75% of participants monitor their agents less than 10 times per month, with most of them doing it only once or twice monthly.

As Chris Selland, Vice President of Sell-Side Research at Boston-based industry analyst firm Aberdeen Group, rightly points out: "As long as companies continue to run their contact centers as cost centers, and by association pay their agents to hang up the phone as quickly as possible, they will always wonder why their investments in technology didn't pay off. To foster a customer-centric environment, companies need to start rewarding their agents to satisfy the customers, and the best source of information to benchmark agent performance against is the customer!"

Prepare Your Business Case
Now that you have a better understanding of how to shift your contact center team to a customer service mindset, your next step is to seek executive buy-in to support your initiative and make it a top priority for the near future. Winning half the battle resides in the preparation of a solid business case to get the budget and resources you need for a successful implementation. Position your case in such a way that you clearly link contact center performance to company profitability. Feel free to ask solution vendors you are in conversation with to help you determine ROI, cost savings as well as the amount of additional revenue you could potentially drive per customer once such a program is in place.

Under every daily challenge lies a long-term opportunity. Show your executive team how integrating the voice of the customer into your business processes in real time will address the former while leveraging the latter.

At The Agent Level
Recognize agents for who they really are: front-line company ambassadors constantly in touch with changing customer attitudes, and a readily available asset that can be capitalized upon to secure customers as long-term sources of recurring revenue. Using the voice of the customer as a quality metric will encourage agents to become more customer service-driven and deliver on the company's promise because they now have a direct stake in what they are being measured against. This more accurate evaluation system will in turn result in implementing better-targeted training programs and opening up advancement opportunities that directly address any existing productivity and motivational issues.

At The Manager Level
Empower managers to do what they do best: coach their teams to become better contributors to the company's success. Investing in systems to monitor the voice of the customer in real time will provide them with the actionable information they need to train their agents to become more customer-centric performers. These metrics will enable them to identify both internal trends (systemic training and motivational issues) and external trends (changes in customer behaviors and preferences) early enough, so they can play a more proactive role in making recommendations to their executive team as to what corrective action needs to be taken, and when.

At The Executive Level
Arm executives with what they strive for: priceless, actionable customer intelligence for mission-critical corporate decisions. Better-trained, motivated agents will impact all the issues that keep executives awake at night: reduce customer churn, increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, and sustain enhanced profitability and market share in today's competitive economy while operational costs are kept in check.

Switching your team's mindset from call metrics to customer service is a major culture change that won't happen overnight. Jim Skjeveland, Senior Vice President of Contact Centers for award-winning Communication Service for the Deaf (CSD) based in Sioux Falls, SD, knows all about commitment to quality and customer service: over the past eight years, these values have helped him grow his contact center to over 1,000 seats. "Organizations involved in customer care not only need to move from a cost to a revenue model, but also change both agent and customer behavior," he explains. "Incorporating the voice of the customer into business processes in real time, as well as giving customers the choice of how they want to do business with you, are the determining factors that will take contact centers to the next level of corporate contribution."


About Villette T.Nolon:
Villette is President and CEO of Seattle-based NetReflector, Inc., a provider of automated customer satisfaction and loyalty measurement solutions for the contact center industry.

About Paul L. Bertin:
Paul is CEO of Genticity, a provider of customer interaction management software solutions based in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada.

About NetReflector:
Following its incorporation in the fall of 1997, NetReflector was one of the companies to successfully use the Application Service Provider (ASP) model with its online survey application InstantSurvey in 1998. We have come a long way since then, with more than 5,000 fielded online surveys to our credit. Our cost-effective, enterprise-level online satisfaction assessment products and services include fully hosted self-service packages, full-service programs and custom integration solutions. We combine leading-edge, robust online data collection and reporting technology with market research design, project management expertise and high-quality service. From initial program planning and design considerations, to survey development, through final analysis and reporting, NetReflector provides the services and technology a corporation needs to gain real-time strategic customer intelligence.

Today's Tip of the Day - Keep Cost In Perspective

Read today's tip or listen to it on podcast.

Published: Friday, April 1, 2005

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