Chris Crosby

One reason I love the Call Center world is that it breeds into you a passion for goal attainment. Everyday when you walk in the door you have a clearly defined set of short-term and long range objectives that must be met. You come in every morning, review your plan over a cup of coffee, then lock and load for the day ahead. Come snow storms, flu outbreaks, hurricanes, surprise mail drops or infomercials, fiber cuts, or product defects… you pro-act to react day-in and day-out to hit your numbers. It’s exhilarating. Really.

Hitting goals such as: Service Level, Average Handle Time, Average Speed of Answer and Agent Utilization are so core to call center operations that companies invest millions of dollars a year into technology and people with the sole purpose of attaining them. It’s also how people get paid. I can’t tell you how many compensation plans I’ve seen that reward people for hitting these types of “performance goals.”

The problem though, as I’ve come to realize it, is that they’re always the same goals. Day after day you are striving to be only as good as you were the day before. Secondarily, the goals are designed in such a way that they would be silly to try and do any better, ex. hitting an 81% Service Level for a day is really no better than hitting 80%. This means you are endlessly tweaking the machine to only achieve the same level of results everyday. In addition, the process is making you only as good as your competitors, not better than… This is sort of like endlessly adjusting your sails while at sea with the purpose being not to actually go anywhere, but rather just to avoid capsizing the boat. Isn’t the point of “goaling” to make you better? Perhaps make you more competitive or more profitable? So why then do we call these things “goals”? Aren’t they really just achieving the status quo?

Here’s an exercise to drive the point home: go through all of your reports, employee evaluations, and executive presentations and change the word “Goal” to “Status Quo”. Now start circulating these amongst the team and see what conversations come about. My guess is that once people realize the amount of money and resources going into efforts that do nothing to actually acquire or retain customers then priorities will start to change.

I’ve been pondering lately some the practices and methodologies in the Contact Center industry that are out dated and in need of a new approach. One thing that comes to mind is how people measure and manage “Agent Occupancy”. My first lesson in Occupancy came in the summer of 1995 when I transitioned from the domain of outbound telemarketing into the then foreign world of Inbound Call Centers. My manager sat me down and tried to explain to me the basic concepts of running an inbound call center. Somewhere between describing Service Level and Calls Per Hour, the concept of Agent Occupancy came up. There are many variants to the notion of Occupancy, but for simplicity and purposes of this discussion let’s define it as the percentage of time that an agent is occupied, or working, during any given period of time. For example, if an agent spent 45 minutes of the last hour talking to customers then their occupancy rate was 75%. Occupancy is traditionally, and almost always, measured at the Skill Group Level and not by individual agents. Urban mythology says that the higher your Occupancy the more efficient your staffing plan is, and thus your profitability. However, my manager cautioned me that, you “never want to run your occupancy rate at higher than 80% because you will burn your agents out, and your attrition will be higher.”

Now, as I mentioned, since “agent occupancy” is really measured by “skill group” and not by agent, let’s call it what it is Skill Group Occupancy. Coming back to 1995 and my manager’s (mostly correct) notion that the higher the rate of occupancy the more likely you are to burn out your agents (I also believe the inverse of that to be true); certainly a general rule of 80% doesn’t pass the acid test and there are other variables that impact an agent’s decision to quit; for example, the type of calls an agent handles (billing inquiries typically have a higher rate of agent churn than, say, general technical support). Additionally you will find that Skill Group Occupancy, as we’ve defined it, does not mean the work load is evenly distributed amongst the agents within that Skill Group; and you inevitably find that some agents are busier than others (the problem is compounded if they are multi-skilled).

So here’s the deep thought of the day: Could one build a model that can predict an agent’s likelihood to churn based on their individual “occupancy” data points? My sense is that we can. By taking Skill Group Occupancy down to the Agent level, we should be able to build an algorithm that evaluates factors like the amount of time an agent spends by each Call Type (not Skill Group) and overlay it to when similar agents churn. We could also ascertain their comfort level, and thus “stress level”,  with specific Call Types by looking at the amount/percentage of time the agent puts customers on hold, conference, has longer than normal talk time, or transfers calls to their supervisor or escalation queue as compared to other agents. If this notion is correct, then one could build staffing plans that not only optimize call handling but also prevent attrition.

Any thoughts, feelings or opinions?

Some random musing on some things we need to be thinking about and mantras we need to depart from in order to move call centers forward. Call it too much caffeine on a Monday night… 

1. Soon a Contact Center won’t have a “center” at all
2. We’ve moved from “Calls” to “Contacts”; “Interactions” is the next logical step
3. “Calls per Hour” as a metric needs to go away forever- please tell me that no one out there is still using it…
4. The same goes for Service Level – just when you thought I had stepped down from that soap box
5. "This call may be Analyzed for data mining purposes.”
6. Reporting from pre-summarized data (1/2 hour and daily reports from standard aggregated tables) is, and always has been, fundamentally flawed
7. Social Media + Customer Care = Tweet or Die
8. “Video Killed the Voice Only Star”
9. Outbound Telemarketing has been rebranded “Proactive Care” – Eat your heart out Do Not Call List
10. Erlang C and all it’s variants are no longer relevant (this means WFM as we know it will need to be rewritten)– yep, wrap your head around that one

Any thoughts?

I just read the article Asia’s Call Center Woe’s that discusses an Asia-Pacific consumer survey about customer service. The thesis isn’t a new one: Customer Care matters now more than ever; if your consumers aren’t happy with the customer service you are providing, they will switch to your competitor.  What struck me though is what was most important to those interviewed: How quickly the phone gets answered when they call. Now, I don’t like waiting for my call to be answered any more than the next guy, but there are certainly things more frustrating to me than long wait times, such as: navigating poorly designed IVRs, being transferred multiple times, talking to a rude agent, having to call back to get my issue resolved. These various aspects of a call rolled together (plus a few others) creates the Customer Experience.

Each one of your customers has a unique set of preferences about how they want to interact with your company and what they expect from those interactions. It’s your job to analyze those and discern how to create that customized care in a profitable manner. The end goal should be to provide distinctive and profitable service to each individual customer. It’s no longer safe to assume that one-size-fits-all.

The road to true customer intimacy can be a long one, however there are some things you can do to get started.

• Customer Segmenting: Do you know who your customers are, why they contact you, and what’s important to them? You can probably answer that at a high level today, but start to think in more detail about all the variations and nuances across your customer base, products/services and how they map together.
• Contact Handling: Are you routing calls solely based on what products/services your customers have purchased (or want to purchase) and what language they speak? Do you have one Service Level goal across your lines of business? As the article demonstrates there are other factors, such as cultural preferences, to be considered when setting objectives and designing routing plans.
• Metrics and Reporting: Are you measuring the right things and are you monitoring your success?

This list is not intended to be comprehensive, but rather just a conversation starter. As we kick-off 2009 I’ll be discussing these topics in more detail. Let me know your thoughts.

Speech Recognition is about identifying what people are speaking.

Speech Analytics is about figuring out what people are saying.

I noticed yesterday on weather.com that the temperature here in Boston was a lovely 92 degrees F, but the Heat Index reflected that it felt like 98 degrees F. This sent me on a tangent that I think is analogous for the call center.

Can a customer interaction look like one thing to you, but feel like something else to your customer? Let’s say that your trusty ACD report shows you that a customer’s handle time was 300 seconds, and 300 seconds happens to be your Handle Time Goal. That would seem acceptable, right? But what if 200 of those seconds the customer was on hold? How would that variable impact the customers perceived experience? Or hypothetically the call was answered in the goal of 20 seconds, but that was only after spending 2 frustrating minutes in the IVR?

The heat index takes variables like humidity and wind and makes a relative, plus or minus, adjustment to the absolute temperature value to reflect how it is actually perceived by people. Sound like a reasonable approach?

If it seems like I’ve been harping on customer experience measurement lately, its because I am. Stick with me here…

I’m out at a customer site this week and overheard the following conversation from the Workforce Management Team:

The difference in customer experience between 93% Service Level and 100% Service Level is negligible. But the difference in staffing cost to us is huge.

Now, I’ll spare you my full rant about Service Level (you can find it here) but I think this is indicative of a larger perception and education problem in the call center industry. Simply put: Service Level is NOT a measure of Customer Experience. It’s an opaque metric.

Let’s assume for purposes of this argument that the service level goal is 93% calls answered within 20 seconds. By decreasing the goal from 100% to 93% you’re saying that it’s okay for 7% of your customers to sit in queue for longer than 20 seconds. Logically, and most likely what the Workforce Manager was thinking, the effect on customer experience by being answered in 19 seconds vs. 21 seconds is unnoticeable. However the real impact to Customer Experience between 93% and 100% is actually immeasurable from Service Level alone. You have no way of knowing how many of the calls in queue longer than 20 seconds were answered in 21 seconds or how many were answered in 20 minutes and 21 seconds.

Try explaining to the irate customer that listened to hold music for twenty minutes that his difference in customer experience was “negligible”.

Last fall I participated again in the ICCM Canada Keynote Panel: 60 Ideas in 60 Minutes moderated by Paul Stockford from Saddletree Research. Dave Butler over at NACC recorded the session and has been distributing the ideas presented in his monthly newsletter. I keep promising him that I’ll expand one of mine into an article for him, but in the meantime here is the one he sent out today. Since it’s one of my favorite rants, I thought I would share (pardon my grammar):

Take out the garbage, I am not talking about employees or customers, I am actually talking about reports and data. One of my pet peeves, and I could go on for hours but I will go on for 45 seconds, is when you walk into a call center and you see the reports that supervisors are looking at every day and the first column you see is calls answered,  and this is for an agent. Johnny had 27 calls yesterday and was logged in for 15 hours, blah, blah, bah, blah. Step back and ask yourself what value you are getting out of this information. So take your 30 column report and pare it down to four or five columns that you can actually impact and actually take action on. If you can’t impact whether an agent is logged on for six hours or seven hours, get rid of the column. Just say, you know what, what was their schedule adherence, or what was their hold %? In other words, what are the columns that you can influence? Then write out the business value for each column on the report. Are you going to see service level on there, or outbound calls? Write down why you need to see that so you can articulate that back to the people that are managing to that data every day and why it is important.

I couldn’t have said it better myself