Four Sources of Learned Helplessness in the Call Center Industry and the Proven Ways Out
30 Mar, 2011
By: Dennis AdsitIn almost every Psychology 101 textbook ever written, there is a picture of a dog lying on the floor of a cage being shocked even though there is a simple way to escape. The dog no longer tries to find a way out because it had been “conditioned” earlier that nothing it did to escape mattered. The experimenter, Martin Seligman, called this behavior “learned helplessness.”
Learned helplessness is pervasive in the call center industry as well. Here are four cages many call center leaders live in every day and proven ways to out.
1. Labor Shortages
Though perhaps less of a problem over the last couple years, call centers around the world, especially in Asia, generally face severe labor shortages…they can’t attract people into the industry. With billions of people around the world, clearly, the problem is not a shortage of labor, but a shortage of labor with the right skills.
At the turn of the 20th century, Henry Ford faced a similar problem. There was plenty of available labor, but the labor often did not speak English, was illiterate, and/or lacked the technical skills. He solved his problem with processes changes that broke down highly skilled work into smaller, well-defined, easy to teach and repeat pieces, and moved everything along on an assembly line.
The contact center labor shortage can be solved by stealing a page out of Henry’s playbook. By using technology to simplify call handling processes and leveraging agent-assisted voice solutions, the agent's job can be simplified so that the entry level skill requirements are reduced, thereby expanding the available labor pool.
2. Inadequate Training
Agents are often put on the phones after they pass some knowledge tests and survive a brief nesting period. This leads to mistakes, long handle times, call backs, escalations, agent frustration and jokes from late-night stand-up comedians.
Let me ask you this: In the 21st century, why are we putting agents on the phone that have not been trained to a results standard? Would you get on an airplane where the pilot had only passed a knowledge test? Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger successfully landed that USAir plane in the Hudson River because he had done it a hundred times…on a flight simulator.
Technology exists to simulate calls. Agents don’t get on the phones until they perform to a certain level of quality and at a certain pace. It also allows you to throw “river landings” at the agent to make sure they can handle unexpected situations.
3. Costly Agent and Consumer Fraud
Agents handle lots of credit card information every day. They hear it from the customers. They see it. They overhear other agents repeating it. The prospect of being able to leverage this information to get something you would never be able to afford is awfully tempting to someone making minimum wage. What is the current strategy for trying to prevent this? Threaten the agents with dire consequences and hope the agents don’t steal the information.
You also have a small but expensive segment of consumers who purchase and receive goods but file chargebacks claiming they never ordered the merchandise. Fighting these claims is a rework nightmare that many call center leaders just regard as the cost of doing business.
What if the customer entered their own credit card information without the agent ever seeing it or hearing it? There would be nothing the agents could steal and the customers couldn’t claim that they didn’t order the goods because unless their card was stolen, how else could their number have been entered?
4. Stratospheric Levels of Turnover
Turnover is perhaps the biggest problem in the industry. Prior to the recent recession, it averaged in the mid-30% range in the U.S. and is much higher outside the U.S. Overseas call centers were living with annualized turnover in the neighborhood of 200%.
The current approaches...nice chairs, pizza parties, rewards, yellow smiley balloons (I kid you not)...are as effective as shoveling the tide.
Let’s face it. Call center jobs are arguably the toughest white-collar jobs. They are boring, repetitive and exhausting. You can hang up all the smiley balloons you want to but unless the tiring, boring, repetitive aspects of the job are changed, turnover will remain high.
Again, it does not have to be this way. The process can be made simpler so the agents can relax. We can reduce the probability and stress of escalations. We can reduce and even eliminate altogether the need for the agents to repeat disclosure information over and over again, day after day. Actions like these lead to real turnover reductions.
So here is the question: lie down on the floor and live with the shock of these seemingly intractable problems or escape through proven pathways? Your call.
