Call Center Supervisors Not Getting Adequate Training, According to Study

Though much of the ‘90s, many industry pundits were predicting that supervisors would become less needed in call centers, and that their numbers would begin to drop proportionally. The conventional rationale – usually couched in discussions of flattened hierarchies and team-oriented structures – was that agents and teams were becoming more empowered, and the need for a layer between management and the front line would decline.

Just the opposite is happening, and in fact supervisor ratios of 10:1 to 12:1 ratios are fairly common today, whereas 15:1 or higher was more typical a decade ago. (Note, significant differences by type of call center remain; e.g., technical support centers may have as few as four or five staff per supervisor, while some order taking environments do fine with 20:1.)

The predictions were wrong primarily and perhaps predictably due to the growing complexity of customer contact workloads. But there are other reasons – e.g., call center supervisors are more involved in process improvement projects, liaison roles, and planning activities. In one sense, agents are increasingly enabled to do what supervisors used to do, and supervisors are spending more of their time in what used to be the realm of management.

It’s surprising, then, that according to ICMI’s recently released Contact Center Operations Report, nearly two in three centers (63.7%) do not provide any formal training for new supervisors before they assume their responsibilities. More than half of respondents feel that new supervisors do not receive enough training in their contact center, and more than two thirds feel that existing supervisors do not receive enough ongoing training.

This is an opportunity for improvement! Supervisors are more critical than ever to running successful operations. Giving them the skills and knowledge they need to face an increasingly challenging set of responsibilities just makes sense.

Brad Cleveland
Senior Advisor and Former President & CEO,
ICMI
bcleveland@think-services.com

Call Centers Missing Opportunities to Boost Business

There’s far more to handling customer contacts than improving the satisfaction and loyalty of those customers – as important as that is. As a primary customer touchpoint, the call center has significant potential to provide other business units with invaluable intelligence and support – e.g., it can help operations pinpoint quality problems, marketing develop more focused campaigns, IT design better systems, and serve as an early warning of competitive developments.

Unfortunately, far too many organizations seem to be missing this opportunity. In its recently released landmark benchmarking study, the Contact Center Operations Report, ICMI found that only 54.8% of call centers are sharing key customer data and feedback gleaned from monitoring with other departments and upper management. “This results in many missed opportunities to improve products and services, marketing, interdepartmental relationships and executive support,” says ICMI’s Greg Levin, one of the report’s authors.

While monitoring is not the only way to capture customer input, it’s a primary source, and when it is missing, that’s usually an indication that other means aren’t optimized either. With the right approach, any organization can better leverage this input to improve performance – which is especially important when the economy is so difficult.

Brad Cleveland
Senior Advisor and Former President & CEO,
ICMI
bcleveland@think-services.com

Job Roles Are a Changin'

One of the recurring themes at the recent ICMI Call Center Demo conference in Miami (which, by the way, was terrific) is that job roles continue to evolve quickly. At the agent level, job requirements are becoming more generalized in most call centers. Agents must increasingly understand the access channels customers use, the interrelated nature of services the organization provides, and the breadth of needs and expectations that customers have. The growth of social media and the enormous capabilities consumers have to access and use information is accelerating this trend.

At the management level, many job roles are becoming increasingly specialized. For example, workforce management is seeing the emergence of forecasting, scheduling and real-time management expertise. Similarly, quality monitoring depends on monitoring and coaching, program design, calibration and data analysis. Technology can also lead to specialization; e.g., individuals specifically assigned to support speech, desktops, networks, quality monitoring systems or workforce management applications. If you manage or support a small call center, you may wear many of these hats—but they are more specialized hats, nonetheless.

The most successful organizations are cultivating development programs at all levels that deliver specific skills and knowledge while reinforcing the call center’s (and organization’s) most important overall objectives. And the best leaders are encouraging collaboration and an appreciation for the diverse responsibilities the call center requires—while keeping everyone focused on the business results that matter most.

Brad Cleveland
Senior Advisor and Former President & CEO,
ICMI
bcleveland@think-services.com

What Your CFO Needs to Know About Staffing Tradeoffs

It’s a pretty safe guess that you’re engaged in some soul-searching discussions – and making tough decisions – on resources and budgets. This is your (hopefully) helpful and timely reminder: be absolutely sure that those making key decisions have an understanding of staff tradeoffs in a call center (read: real-time) environment.

The table is an example of what you might want to create(using your own numbers) to illustrate key tradeoffs. In this example, 34 agents produce a “middle of the road” service level of just over 80 percent of calls being answered in 20 seconds, with an average speed of answer (ASA) of just over 12 seconds. If you have 30 agents, fewer than a quarter of all calls are answered in 20 seconds, and ASA is over 200 seconds. Occupancy is way high, at 97%. And the load on your telecom network has grown significantly (reason: your ACD has to put all of those queued calls somewhere – kind of like putting aircraft in a holding pattern over Chicago O’Hare).

Your objective in budgeting – and in day-to-day management – should be to get just the right number of people in place at the right times, doing the right things for the business. No more, no fewer. That is fundamental in an environment that requires handling the work as it arrives.

Brad Cleveland

Senior Advisor and Former President & CEO,

ICMI

bcleveland@think-services.com

Tough Economies Force Critical Thinking

For all their downsides, bad economies have a way of forcing useful critical thinking across organizations. Common questions begin to surface: How are we really doing? What’s the value we’re creating for our organization and customers? What can we do differently? What should our workload look like? How well are we leveraging resources?

The answers can help you get through a heck of a rough patch in the economy. They can also position your organization for quick and strong recovery.

Making the right decisions requires both intuition and discipline. Although you can’t boil leadership – that’s of course what we’re really talking about – down to a simple checklist, there is something powerful about focusing on the things that matter most. So… what to do now? Here are some suggestions on high-level priorities:

· Develop a global view of your organization’s mission and principles. Then take steps to ensure that every person understands the “why” behind what they are doing.

· Recognize that “best efforts” or trying harder isn’t enough. Instead, look for true innovation opportunities – processes are where the most leverage will be.

· Analyze and understand every facet of your role and responsibilities. Then do the same for every position in the call center.

· Don’t make decisions based on assumptions — insist on having and using accurate and timely data. Use performance measurements, monitoring and coaching as a means of learning and improvement at the process level.

· Remember that those who know processes and customers best are those closest to the work – continually seek their ideas and input, and create an atmosphere of trust and open communication.

· Don’t sacrifice training – that will come back in the form of more expensive problems later. Training people to do their jobs is an enabler to sustainability and growth.

· Communicate openly, candidly, and often the value of call center services to customers, and in sharing customer intelligence that helps improve products, processes and services across the board. This just may be the time to invest in call center services – not cut them.


Brad Cleveland,
Senior Advisor; Former President/CEO ICMI
bcleveland@think-services.com

My New Year's Resolutions for 2009

I’m continually looking for ways to improve my credibility and reputation as a contact center journalist and researcher, and not just because of the court order to do so. I enjoy setting ambitious goals for myself, working toward them, and then blaming the fact that I didn’t achieve them on global warming and the economy.

What better time of year to set personal and professional goals than right now – when all the alcohol from holiday parties makes me feel brave and invincible. So, here are my career-related New Year’s resolutions for 2009:

1) I will only quote actual people in my articles. It’s inevitable that, as a contact center journalist, you start to develop some strong opinions and ideas about what are the best practices in customer care. The trouble is that it can be challenging to find respected sources who support the opinions and ideas that you want to espouse in your articles. To overcome this challenge, I’ve become very adept at making up fictitious experts and quoting them in my feature stories.

While this practice makes for better reading and helps to drive home my brilliant points, I realize it might be considered a tad unethical, even if only by people with a pulse. So, from this point forward, I vow to stop citing fictitious sources and, instead, will pay real sources to let me attribute my groundbreaking ideas and suggestions to them.


2) I will learn how to tie a tie. Having worked from my home since 1994, and being obnoxious enough to not get invited to any weddings, I have lost all tie-tying capabilities. This, I have found, has hindered my ability to garner the level of respect I feel I deserve in the contact center industry. Regardless of how much insight and wisdom I provide while presenting on expert panels at conferences, being seated next to peers who are dressed to the nines while I’m wearing my flannel robe and Winnie the Pooh slippers sometimes costs me in terms of positive recognition.

I wish people could just see past my pajama bottoms (well, not literally) and rate me based on the sharpness of my mind and full understanding of all things related to contact centers. However, if all it takes is for me to put on a collared shirt, a non-clip-on tie and some pants without a drawstring to earn a place among the customer contact elite, then I’m willing to go to Target today.


3) I will stop hurting people who are in search of “industry standards” for everything. If I had a dime for every manager who has asked me for the (non-existent) industry standard for service level, abandonment, handle time, cost per call, or (insert the name of any other metric you can think of), I’d have enough money to finish building the dungeon I’m currently constructing to house all such managers.

Am I proud of my aggressive and often violent treatment of these well-meaning professionals who are under the impression that complex performance objectives can be reduced to a simple, universal figure or formula? Well, I don’t know if proud is the word, but it does feel good to go ballistic on an unsuspecting soul who is looking for me to tell him what his and every other contact center’s email response time objective should be. Nonetheless, I acknowledge that verbally and physically abusing relatively innocent managers and supervisors is not only wrong, but ineffective, too; most continue their futile search once they recover from the insults and/or injuries.

So, I promise to stop taking it upon myself to teach these poor contact center novices a lesson through violence. Instead I’ll have a trained and certified goon from Chicago’s South Side deliver the lumps that have for years left my hands swollen, thus hindering my typing efficiency.


Publisher’s Note: Greg is of course exaggerating in this article for entertainment purposes. He is not building a dungeon to house inexperienced nor incompetent contact center professionals – it’s more of a large cage.

Building Stronger Organizations

Every customer contact that we handle provides implicit or direct insight into processes, products, policies, services, customers and the external environment. We are capturing intelligence that can pinpoint manufacturing or operational quality problems, contribute to better marketing campaigns, help to design better information systems, and serve as an early warning system for potential publicity troubles or competitive challenges.

But for this information to be useful, our colleagues must accept and act on it. Will they? Yes—if we include three essential steps in these efforts. First, we must develop good working relationships with the individuals who run other areas of the organization. Second, our role is to serve, not to point out flaws—while that may be obvious to us, we need to emphasize it from the start. Third, the data that we share must be useful and usable, based on an ongoing commitment on our part to understand business requirements and how to turn mounds of call center data and “call center-esque” codes into actionable information.

We have an opportunity to play a central role in building a stronger organization with better services and products across the board—but it’s a role we must earn.

Brad Cleveland,
Senior Advisor; Former President/CEO ICMI
bcleveland@think-services.com.