Out With The Old, In With The New
1 Jan, 2004
By: John KaiserThe contact center is more than a cost center. It’s where the pedal hits the metal—where business takes place, where customers get their first taste of your brand, and most times, where they’re won or lost. Contact center agents who staff this frontline wield the ultimate power. Their stellar service creates lifetime customers. Their bad service, on the other hand, is as good as showing customers the door.
Most contact centers employ quality monitoring programs to keep watch over this frontline and to ensure good service. It’s a simple process: capture calls, evaluate agents, coach and train. But while monitoring has become a staple for most contact centers, it’s not the end-all solution.
In this article, we’ll examine why quality monitoring alone is not enough when it comes to optimizing agent performance, and why a new approach called Workforce Relationship Management is better equipped to address today’s toughest contact center challenges.
First, the Challenges…
Have you ever had a bad experience with a difficult customer or ornery co-worker? Felt unappreciated in your job? We’ve all had these feelings at one time or another.
But imagine for a moment that you’re a contact center agent. You feel underpaid, underappreciated, insufficiently trained, and dead-ended in your career. Still, you have one of the most demanding jobs in the world, fielding hundreds of calls each day from frustrated and time-constrained callers. To top it off, Big Brother is watching over your every move, monitoring each call that comes in. How would you feel? Would you be motivated to provide great customer service? Would you feel you had all of the tools and training you needed to do your job? Would you even want to stay in your job?
If you’ve ever wondered how much this mattered, consider this: Agent turnover in contact centers averages around 35 percent, and is even as high as 73 percent for entry-level reps. Also consider the high cost of turnover. Whether agents leave because of poor pay, lack of a career path, lack of recognition, insufficient training, or simply because they’re ill-suited for the job, agent turnover is expensive. This cost can be calculated in terms of missed sales opportunities, lost customers, and high recruiting costs. (And remember, it’s estimated that for every agent that leaves, it costs an additional $6,000 to recruit and train his or her replacement.)
Training is another huge challenge for contact centers, and a big priority too. How important is it that agents are well-trained? Just envision your most poorly skilled contact center agent fielding hundreds of calls a day from your biggest-spending, most loyal customers.
When Boston-based Yankee Group queried contact center managers about their spending priorities, 62 percent of those surveyed identified agent training as their "highest" priority. Still, contact centers struggle with the best training approach. Cookie-cutter approaches to training are less than optimal because agents (who are human after all) aren’t all cut from the same mold. Each brings unique talents, abilities and characteristics to the job.
Too often, training organizations deliver training “en masse,” when a more focused approach—one that ensures each agent gets the exact training needed—would be more effective, both from performance optimization and cost standpoints.
Insufficiency of Traditional Quality Monitoring
By one estimate, 90 percent of contact centers employ some form of monitoring program for quality assurance. We’re all familiar with the process—capture and evaluate calls, then coach and train. What’s wrong with this approach?
First, quality doesn’t begin with capturing and evaluating calls. It begins with choosing agents with the right combination of skills, knowledge and abilities for the job. Some skills, such as empathy, aren’t trainable, so you need to pre-screen candidates and recruit accordingly.
Once you’ve hired the agent, you need to provide the right training to close any skill gaps before the agent gets on the phone. You also need to develop that agent’s proficiency over time through training. The only way you can know what to train is to clearly identify the competencies required for the job, understand where each agent is strong or weak, and then deliver focused training to close those competency gaps. Then there’s the question of knowing whether the training is even working. How do you measure and track performance improvements because of training to see if your training programs are actually paying off?
None of these things is easily accomplished in an environment where different people, all using different processes, benchmarks and systems, are responsible for managing the contact center’s training, assessment, and recruiting initiatives.
Another problem with traditional quality monitoring programs is that, from the agent’s viewpoint, monitoring is often seen as a necessary evil, an unfair and subjective exercise, something that really doesn’t benefit the agent in any way. It’s a way to be caught doing something wrong, rather than a way to help the agent do what’s right.
Dictaphone’s Workforce Relationship Management—
Dictaphone believes that a new approach to the age-old challenges is in order. This new approach is called Workforce Relationship Management or WRM, and here’s what it is, and how it is an improvement over traditional quality monitoring systems.
Essentially, WRM is a new contact center tool designed to optimize overall contact center performance by optimizing the performance of every agent. It works in concert with the contact center’s quality monitoring system and links your contact center’s recruiting, training and assessment initiatives through a common competency model.
The competency model allows the contact center to create job profiles that identify the skills, knowledge and abilities that agents need to be successful. The job profile breaks the agent’s job down into specific roles, responsibilities and tasks. The model assumes that to do the job well (perform the tasks within a certain expected level of operational performance), the agent must have certain competencies (developed to a specific level of proficiency).
For example, as an inbound customer service representative in the lost card division of a credit card company, an agent might be required to perform these types of tasks when taking calls: customer screening, case management, and back-office administration. To perform those tasks, the agent would need to have certain competencies:
• communications skills, so the agent could handle stressed customers;
• empathy, so the agent could empathize with the customer’s predicament;
• process knowledge, so the agent could explain the company’s process for handling lost cards and what that means to the customer;and
• system knowledge, so the agent could effectively use and update the systems for lost card inquiries.
Once these competencies are identified, they can be systematically and consistently applied to your contact center’s recruiting, training and assessment initiatives. Agents can be pre-screened and recruited based on specific competencies that are required for the job. The WRM system also recommends and delivers focused training, based on individual agent competency gaps. Agents are rewarded for results that link back to the competencies they have developed. Top performers are easily identified and promoted, a key consideration in high turnover contact centers where agents who feel dead-ended are more likely to leave.
In short, everyone in the contact center works together toward the common goal, of optimizing the performance of all agents. HR doesn’t hire agents who lack key skills that can’t be acquired through training. The training organization trains agents on the right things, so when they get out of training, they’re effective right away. Monitoring and assessments—once seen as punitive—become a way for agents to get the training and development they need to provide better serve to customers, and to progress in their careers.
There’s one benefit of WRM that stands out above all the rest: By focusing inward—by motivating and empowering agents—you can create a contact center that values employees.
Now imagine again for a moment you’re that same contact center agent, but this time in a contact center equipped with WRM. Ready to handle anything that comes your way. Empowered by the right training. Recognized for a job well done. Need I say more?
