Performance Management
1 Mar, 2007
By: Rob McDougallFirst call resolution (FCR) has far-reaching affects in the contact center, and a world-class contact center will focus on this as a key performance indicator out of business necessity. Believe it or not, 50 percent of contact centers in one study indicated they were not measuring FCR in any way. Of the 50 percent that were measuring FCR, many had simple measurements that they felt were not very indicative of the actual FCR rates achieved in the contact center.
What was more telling is that call centers are only now beginning to consider and measure FCR rates. Nobody is yet talking about the more important issue – once you know the rate, how do you improve on it?
Improving your first call resolution rate is key to improving your business'' profitability, both through decreased costs and increased revenues. And nobody has more control over your FCR rates than the agents who deal with your customers all day long.
Let's face it – without agents you wouldn''t have a service center.
In an increasingly competitive job market, ensuring that your staff turnover is low is one of the most important things you can do to improve your overall contact center''s performance. Some businesses focus primarily on the bottom line. Many believe that the customer is king. But another school of management thought says that if you take care of your employees, they will take care of the customer.
In a contact center, the frontline staff is often treated as if they were easily replaceable. Management might focus on reducing overhead and ensuring that cost per call is kept low. It's becoming increasingly visible to managers now, however, that the high cost of training and hiring is only outweighed by the fact that contact center agents are becoming increasingly in demand, and they are just simply hard to find. If you throw in multilingual language requirements, finding staff becomes even more problematic, especially for some of the larger call centers exploring secondary and tertiary markets worldwide to meet their language needs.
What is still missed is the single biggest asset that is brought to your company by an experienced agent --- their experience! Agents who know how your customers think; who know how your business works, and who can deal with calls quickly and easily are not simply valuable to the contact center. They are the contact center.
In speaking with some very successful call center managers, I found that they actually focus more on first getting the right staff on board and then making sure they are motivated, rewarded and happy with the job. That means getting the right demographic for the job, providing a career path or other intangibles that keep people motivated. Call center staff ultimately needs to enjoy where they work. If they do, they are much less likely to leave.
So --- what is it that makes a good workplace?
Let's look at a few common motivators – money, recognition, clear objectives and, finally, fun.
Money, it is known, is a negative motivator. That is; not enough money and people will go looking elsewhere. But once salaries are in line, you need to start looking at the actual work environment. The key here is to keep people happy enough so they don''t want to go looking for another job. Money in many call centers is a problem; however, in many others, the staff is paid fairly and it is not the biggest issue.
So let's move on to recognition.
Recognition can be viewed as the simple "atta boy" at the right time; however, there are underlying values that management can propagate in the contact center that recognize the importance of the agent''s contribution on an ongoing basis.
If for example, you gave a group of software developers a new, state-of-the-art development machine, you would see a productivity increase that has nothing to do with the text editor they use. They feel valued by management and the minor speed improvement the fancy hardware provides has little to do with any productivity improvement. It reflects an attitude of management and their view of the staff''s importance to the organization. By providing the best tools you can get (and by best I mean in the staff''s view, not in your view or in the vendor''s view!) will improve morale and increase retention.
Providing contact center agents better tools not only helps them do their jobs, but it also shows that you, as management, pay attention to what they need and are willing to provide it to them.
There are steps you can take that don''t take massive management or cultural changes. These are simple technology changes --- to shift the attention away from sometimes useless call handling statistics and to agent performance metrics --- that can positively affect your agent''s performance and help lower costs while increasing revenues.
And before you defend call handling statistics, let''s face it; most agents realize that call handling time is not the key statistic on which we should base decisions. Most agents have even figured out ways to work the system and meet call handling time goals at the expense of customer satisfaction. So let''s look at some of the new technology tools and approaches that not only show agents that our priorities are right, but actually have a great chance of improving first call resolution.
1. Implement screen pop on your inbound calls.
Many companies shy away from using interactive voice response. That''s because they don''t want to burden their callers with a bad IVR system. Simply prompting your customers for an account number and then forwarding them to an agent allows you to ensure that they get appropriate treatment from your automated systems. You can increase their satisfaction and reduce your costs at the same time.
But once you''ve asked them for information, you need to make sure you don't ask them for it again.
By collecting their account number and delivering that to the agent along with their call, you eliminate repetitive information while providing the agents with the information they need to best handle the call efficiently.
With screen pop, you will not only provide better customer service, but you will increase your efficiency by about 10 percent in a busy center.
2. Provide agents some context for the incoming call.
In a perfect world, a service center would use a single application for everything. But an average contact center uses six applications to provide service.
When an agent gets an incoming call, he or knows nothing about the call or the caller, and must determine everything from scratch every time. If you pre-determine who is calling you and potentially why, you can help guide agents to the correct application.
If a caller is contacting you to inquire about the shipping status of an item, it doesn''t make sense to deliver that call to a CRM application if the agent only needs to switch immediately to the legacy shipping application.
Even if agents are asking the reason for the call, providing them easy access to the right record in each of the applications they use will save them time, hassle and training. Providing some context around each call helps them prepare sooner and react more naturally. Guiding them to the correct application will allow them to provide better and more efficient customer service and eliminate key clicks from the call.
3. Provide contact history.
Providing a concise history of callers' contact with your company will help your agents deal with callers. It shows them why someone called, who dealt with the caller, and even if the caller abandoned his or her last call attempt. A big key here is to provide a history across all contact media, so an agent can reference not only voice calls, but also e-mails and chats. Providing this information to agents allows them to use their brains in determining a course of action for each call.
One of the key elements of contact history is setting up a mechanism to identify whether or not the problem was resolved on the first call. This helps you measure FCR and establish a baseline for improvement of that metric. For example, you can modify your call-handling process and add a simple question the agent can ask, who then enters the answer in a field in the record. There are automated methods of determining FCR as well, such as an IVR-based question at the conclusion of the call, which tends to be more accurate than a live agent asking. Additionally, if you set up tickets for specific problems, you can correlate the number of contacts with a specific ticket. There are other methods as well. It has been found that the most successful technique for determining your FCR rate is to use several methods and combine the results.
4. Automate applications where you can.
Your agents will often need to deal with multiple applications on a single call. This may be due to the caller having multiple reasons for the call, or it may be due to the agent solving the customer''s issue and moving on to up-selling new products.
In many instances, information must be manually re-entered into several different applications. Agents will make mistakes in transcription; in other cases they will not update every application due to time constraints in the call center. Human nature will ensure that you will end up with incorrect information in some applications as a side effect. Providing agents with the ability to easily share information between applications will save the agent time and provide more efficient customer service. It will eliminate errors2 and ensure that the tediousness of retyping information is eliminated from the agents' daily work flow. Automation will give you more accurate information, as well as more efficient calls, saving money and increasing revenue as a result.
5. Adaptability increases value to the overall business.
Service center employees are often the last people in a company to find out what's going on. Marketing or manufacturing will often do things that have a direct affect on the center without considering the impact. For example, if the fulfillment department isn''t adequately staffed, a big marketing push might slow down delivery of materials to the customer. It could take several weeks for something to be sent to the customer, when the agents have been promising that item will be delivered within several days.
When these situations arise, the center should track resulting customer calls and compile a report with a numeric estimate of the added cost to the call center. This report allows a call center manager to approach other departments and make a case for operational changes in other parts of the company, for example. By implementing a technology solution that can quickly and easily adapt to changes in market conditions or business initiatives, you can ensure that you are actually increasing the value of the center to the overall business while not adversely affecting your bottom line.
6. Information access and knowledge are important.
Do your agents know where to get the information, and if they do, is it easy to access? If agents can''t find the information they need, then the customer's needs are not met, which can lead to multiple calls, or worse, a lost customer.
Even in cases where information is available, if it''s not "handy," a well-meaning agent may just rely on his or her memory to provide an answer – introducing a potential for errors. Agents need to have any information needed available to them quickly and easily to ensure that it's timely and correct for the caller. Knowing how and where to find the answers to questions quickly can eliminate major blocks of call time, such as fruitless network searches, conferencing other agents in or finding a supervisor.
Another aspect to information access is as simple as the desktop layout an agent sees on the screen. Are there ways to consolidate views, layer applications intelligently and set up a view that requires less clicking and scrolling? Just trying to navigate between applications can be mind numbing and ergonomically dismal. There are new approaches to this science that can have a huge positive impact.
7. What are you measuring?
Lack of clear objectives is an area that plagues businesses around the globe. Objectives are often misinterpreted or implemented locally without consideration of the spirit of the objective and the rest of the organization. But in contact centers, the typical measurement and rewards aren't even related to the performance of the business – they are specifically and tightly related to the performance of the telephony system of the contact center.
Clearly, next to sales, call center agents are about the easiest employees in the world to measure. So why does senior management talk about customer retention and satisfaction, and then turn around and measure the agent against average handle times and speed of answer? Management complains about excessive call times and then uses those same quality-recording examples for training the other staff. Whenever management does this, inconsistent signals are sent out to agents, which significantly affects staff job satisfaction and performance.
As your organization pursues higher revenues, you must constantly weigh all costs and "people" challenges. But as managers attempt to grow their businesses, far too many are numbed by a deluge of nearly meaningless call-handling statistics to the point they've forgotten about supporting their people first.
These statistics are then used to measure staff and to reward or punish them. Management must actively align their business measurements with how and what they measure their agents on. Only by doing this can you hope to get the performance you want. Further, companies must ensure that they are providing their call center the tools and support they need to do their jobs as valued frontline customer service staff.
Finally, let's look at the fun factor. It permeates everything we've covered so far, and then continues.
Human beings in general like to please other people. They like to be proud of what they do and be complimented on it. They like dealing with happy people, and they like to be able to make people happy in return. By providing agents the tools and the authority they need to do their job, you can significantly improve staff retention and satisfaction.
By focusing on critical agent performance metrics instead of a blizzard of difficult-to-interpret call-handling statistics, your contact center can excel in its markets and differentiate you from the competition. The contact center is, after all, a very large aspect of how your customers see your business – and in many cases the only way your customers interact with your business. The importance of the service provided by your agents is paramount to your success. Your agents have no real control over the quality of your products or your delivery systems. They do, however, take the brunt of the complaints. They deal with the daily hassles of customer service. And they greatly influence the perception of anyone who contacts you. Using intelligent measures like FCR shows the agents what they're fighting for.
Taken all together, through focus, measurement and ultimately improving the agents, the tools and the ability to provide customers with the service they need the first time, you increase first-call-resolution rates. This improves customer satisfaction, which in turn decreases agent stress levels and increases the fun factor. When you actively encourage a customer-focused, service-based business by focusing on the people who provide that service, it's not surprising that you will achieve great customer satisfaction levels.
First call resolution should be one of your key metrics for the service center. Achieving higher FCR rates not only relates directly to the satisfaction level of your customer base, it also directly relates to the "people productivity" of your center.
So what are you doing for your agents to achieve that?
Are you doing anything to take away some of their daily frustrations? Giving them the right tools and objectives? Helping them deal effectively with each call?
By correlating "customer saves" with talk times, you can find out who your best agents are. By tracking and eliminating the reasons behind repeat calls, you improve your call volumes and have happier callers.
By measuring the center in conjunction with other business information, you can start to get a clearer picture of how your contact center is performing as a business unit rather than as a call center.
Remember, your customers aren't calling your center; they are calling your business. If they have to wait in queue five seconds less but have to call back several times to get an issue resolved, you aren't meeting their expectations. Measuring your center's performance won't in itself save you any money. However, it will allow you to identify what areas need improvement.
Ready, Set, Go!
You have a lot riding on your agents. They're your gateway to your world of serving existing customers and thousands of possible new ones. You've invested a lot in your agents, so it's a good idea to make the effort to ensure that they've got all the right tools and resources they need to be performing at their best. Having a happy and productive staff doesn't require massive changes, just a few smart steps.
2 Purdue University found that the number-one negative key performance indicator in a call center was errors.
