Empower CSRs to Combat Absenteeism, Tardiness and Adherence
1 Sep, 2004
By: Pól SweeneySchedule adherence is one of the major obstacles to overcome in a contact center. Absenteeism and tardiness problems often are connected to a lack of job satisfaction on the part of contact center staff. This dissatisfaction can come about because contact center staffs of large service delivery organizations often bear the brunt of angry customers who have had a bad experience with their service delivery.
Studies have shown that there is a clear link between customer support staff motivation and customer service satisfaction levels. According to Fred Reichheld, director emeritus of Bain & Company, Bain Fellow and author of three books on loyalty, companies that enjoy high customer loyalty are very principled in their approach to business. Crucially, they also talk about delivering a better experience for both employees and customers. In fact, Gallup poll data demonstrates that customer satisfaction is linked directly to customer support staff motivation. The more that contact center staff can evolve toward aligning with customers’ preferences rather than becoming more productive in scheduling according to fixed rules, the higher both employee satisfaction and customer loyalty will be.
This article explores several different ways that organizations are creating more agile and empowered contact center staffs to improve overall job satisfaction and ultimately enable the delivery of a vastly improved customer experience.
Human Resource Policy-Based Approaches
Many contact centers first review their human resource policies on schedule adherence to see if they can find ways to combat absenteeism and tardiness. Typically, schedule adherence is used as a way to judge customer service representatives’ on-the-job performance and is looked at by CSRs as a strict “Big Brother” measurement, with little or no leeway. To combat this negative perception of management, some contact centers have adopted “free under five” policies, in which all late arrivals under five minutes are disregarded. This is a first step in demonstrating a more flexible approach to managing the contact center staff.
A more progressive approach is to take much of the job roster planning process and put it into the hands of the employees. Currently, many contact centers create their schedules, post them and then get feedback from employees that are unhappy with their assigned duties. They redo the roster, only to find that another group of employees is now unhappy. This continues over and over again, never really satisfying everyone and creating a “vicious cycle” of tension between management and employees.
Pull quote: In essence, the CSRs took over the management of the schedules and set them up on their own, choosing the most appropriate shifts based on their own personal lifestyle needs.
To address the high costs of roster management, a natural gas utility in the United Kingdom found its CSRs were willing to adopt a “Lifestyle Roster” for scheduling. In essence, the CSRs took over the management of the schedules, choosing the most appropriate shifts based on their personal lifestyle needs. Grouping CSRs into teams to cover a specific shift rotation, management found that employees worked together to ensure the entire time frame in question was properly staffed. As a result, the organization was better able to plan the contact center coverage, lower its costs and still provide enhanced customer service. At the same time, CSR job satisfaction increased.
Another approach that has proven successful in contact centers revolves around an incentive point system that can be used to reward CSRs based on the number of calls they can handle in a certain time frame. As they surpass certain milestones, the monetary value of their accumulated points will also increase. For example, 500 points could be worth 50 cents per point, while at 1,000 points the value could increase to 60 cents per point. With a point system, there is an extra incentive to be in the office on time and to resolve customer calls faster and more accurately.
Performance Optimization
While these pure HR-based approaches promote added employee flexibility and monetary rewards to promote better schedule adherence and employee satisfaction, they may also increase the costs of doing business due to their financial underpinnings. Therefore, it may be ideal to combine these solutions with technology that empowers CSRs to perform better, which then generates more productive and efficient interactions with customers.
This is a critical, transitional step to take, as staffing expenses represent approximately 70 percent of contact center costs. Any and all improvements in the ability to manage human resources have been proven to lead directly to operational improvements and clear, measurable return on technology investments.
To address this challenge, many contact centers have started looking at performance optimization technologies to manage resources and costs. A solution that effectively synchronizes a service organization’s resources—whether people, skills, time, equipment or inventory—to ensure customer commitments are kept, despite complex and unpredictable daily events, will have a profound effect on customers’ experiences. This type of resource synchronization and performance management tool makes up-to-the-minute operational information (such as contact center, field force, billing, sales, scheduling and forecasting) available to the CSR.
Technology that can continuously synchronize all of these resources ensures that customer commitments are met and that the right individual shows up at the right time with the right skills and correct information needed to get the job done right the first time. In turn, this increases the number of satisfied customers, raising customer satisfaction and retention, as well as improving employee satisfaction and productivity.
CSRs benefit from better transparency and accurate, up-to-date information, something that they can immediately share with their customers. They also benefit from having a global view of all resources and capacity to deliver against commitments at the time of making appointments, instilling more confidence in the organization’s ability to meet these commitments, while also giving customers more choices. As a result of being empowered with more information, CSRs are better able to meet customers'' needs, can handle customer calls more quickly and, as a result, deal with far fewer complaints.
Empowerment Benefits
To illustrate how this technology changes the way a contact center operates, consider a proof of concept trial that a field service organization in the United Kingdom conducted with Vidus, a leading field service automation provider. Within the contact center operations, three target metrics were agreed upon for the trial: increased net conversion (customer leads) by reducing lost calls, reduced number of calls transferred to another area of the business and reduced second contact “dis-service” calls.
During the trial period, CSRs were able to offer a broader range of narrow appointment windows that better suited callers’ needs, and the organization was able to meet these appointments more consistently and reliably. This resulted in nearly 50 percent more calls that were controlled by the customer and a 30 percent increase in the number of service appointments offered that exactly met the requirements that the customer requested at the beginning of the call. As a result of being more empowered, CSRs were better able to answer customers’ questions, thus also reducing the number of calls that had to be addressed elsewhere within the organization.
There were also some very interesting findings from this trial. When the CSRs had the ability to let the customers lead the calls (that is, the customer told the CSR what time they wanted a service call rather than being dictated an appointment time), they found that these calls were about 15 percent shorter than before. The reason for this was attributed to how quickly customers reached a satisfactory conclusion on their terms, as opposed to the difficulties and dissatisfaction that they had previously faced and expressed to the CSR over the phone. As a result, both employee and customer satisfaction levels went up significantly. The CSR was happier with their job as a result of having better access to information, and the customer was more satisfied with the result—along with the fact that they were able to choose when and how their problems would be addressed.
There are many ways to approach the challenges of absenteeism, tardiness and schedule adherence within the contact center. While some organizations may try HR-based or technology-based approaches to address these issues, the best approach is a combination blending traditional HR/staff management approaches with the implementation of technology that better empowers the CSRs.
