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The Call Center’s Most Valuable
Resource: The Agent
By Theresa Hull-Clarke
Contact Centre Solutions Consultant
Bell Canada
This economic downturn has hit everyone. Analysts in every field are sharing their thoughts and their predictions on what is going to take place over the course of the next eight months to eight years. Businesses are being forced to re-examine their structure and see how they can decrease costs and improve productivity and efficiency. This is a smart move. Surely companies will find ways to save money and will be able to improve a certain percentage — but at what cost?
The employees of these companies worry as they watch the job losses mount and companies continuing to close down. Everyone intuitively understands why this is happening; we all manage budgets even if it is just our home expenses. In order to save money, what do you have to give up or cut out?
Eliminating the labor pool is the quickest and easiest way to hit your bottom line and bring it back into the black. Knowing this fact and understanding that certain steps must be taken to create the business structure that you are looking for takes creative leadership. However, this does not mean that the only way to increase profits is to decrease head count. There are many ways to do more with less within companies. Process and technology are a large part of that.
Forming collaborative teams to work through processes and determine how they can streamline these processes can be a definite decrease in the time it takes to perform a job function. There are many businesses that offer services to come into a company and perform these types of reviews and conduct process mapping sessions. The reason external companies are usually more successful at completing this task is because they are not caught in the circle of “we do it this way because we have always done it this way.” People habitually are afraid of change for many reasons and one of the most common is in case the change does not do what they expect and they may portray this as failure.
Look at the many contact center technologies that are helping companies save internal dollars by producing results on organizational levels. It has been proven that a good percentage of agents can be self motivated with the right tools in front of them. The tool must be user-friendly for both the agents and their managers.
I spent some time speaking with Kim Cooper in 2008 discussing contact centers and how they were managing agent attrition and productivity increase demands. Kim has a wealth of knowledge when it comes to contact centers and how certain methodologies can be applied and work in your contact center to make it a proficient, efficient and a lean working machine. Kim has spent many years creating award-winning applications that combine the best theory and practice from the marketing/sales side as well as the contact side to create a solution that is user friendly and allows everyone in a company to understand exactly where they stand.
The application is called Agent00, which stands for Agent Own Optimization. This application monitors standard contact center metrics and what contributions are being made by the agent. What this does is show the value of the agent with respect to their job. What Agent00 is the missing link between regular reporting and performance improvement: If an agent understands how much money it is making for the company, and also knows how much they cost the company, it certainly puts a different perspective into that agent’s brain. It will also create a motivation in that agent to strive to make the reports they are viewing fall into a recognition category. The agent knows when the targets that are set out for them are met or exceeded and they start to move into rewards and recognition segment.
Another company to which I have spent quite some time with is Merced Systems. They are another Performance Management company that utilizes a behavioral conditioning process; however, they do it a little differently. Performance Management has a large focus on measurements, which allows for detailed reporting, and they add the coaching side. This allows for the agents to be aware of their metrics in real time and for coaching sessions to take place immediately if required. Coaching sessions can be identified within the system to recognize any trigger you set up.
The graph below offers a peek at how the process works. Within each of these segments a definition of how-what-where-when-who-why creates the end result for each individual company.
More and more companies are realizing that the face of their company lies in the hands of their agents and that the “added people touch” is necessary. It isn’t just a reward anymore, it is a requirement. The old ways of doing things — of capturing data and delivering it to managers on their desks — is long gone. We are looking at more and more automation and more incentives to keep our talent in house. And what the agents are looking for is more empowerment and accountability over their own improvement and being able to monitor and adjust their behaviour to do the best they can do.
Gen Y is coming into the business world expecting that they will be able to create their own job, or at least be able to contribute, always knowing where they stand and what is expected of them.
“Doing more with less” isn’t really the phrase that we need to be looking at. “Doing more with what we have” can be just as profitable and allow you to restructure your business how you want — because your business will be able to form a new way of functioning.
