Chris Crosby

Since their inception, call centers have been infamous for high turnover (especially in the outsource world). While this is no revolutionary statement, I recently had the realization that by my mid-twenties I had personally fired, or overseen the termination, of over 1,000 people (an average of about 200 people a year). I believe my personal record was 14 people fired in one day. Most of these terminations were executed in the name of “attendance policy violations” or other seemingly direct violations of ill-thought-out policies. At the time, I tried to detach myself emotionally from the situation and rationalized my actions as ‘just doing my job’. Yet in retrospect that part of my job absolutely just plain fuckin sucked. While its been roughly a decade since I’ve been in such a position, the gut wrenching feelings that naturally come along with taking someones source of livelihood from them are, perhaps above anything else, the part that still hangs around still today. So much for emotional detachment.

The point of this post, however, is not some weird soul cleansing apology or confession, but rather the beginning of a new conversation. In the coming days and weeks I’ll be tackling the issue of employee turnover through a new lens and attempt to offer some fresh perspective on the age old problem. High levels of attrition negatively impact the often forgotten individuals involved, the local community as well as the companies that foot the bill. Personally, I think its time we start to introduce new ideas into the broken equation and begin to rethink the relationship between employees and employers. Comments welcome.

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.

Some of you know my disdain for the use of massive Excel files and what I call the “shotgun blast” approach to reporting. However, since they are a necessary evil in most environments today, I thought I’d point out how you can leverage Cisco Unified Intelligence Suite (CUIS) to automate them. One of the major challenges to creating “one-size-fits-all” excel workbooks is that they are largely a manual process as someone needs to export data from its source and then copy/paste it into excel, format it and then email. By combining CUIS with an Excel macro, we’ve had customers take this manual effort from a couple  hours a day down to a couple of minutes a day. Here’s how it works:

Every report in CUIS has what’s called a permalink, or distinct URL, that can be directly referenced by other applications or your web browser. Each report actually has four different permalink options that can be accessed depending on how you need to query the data. 

The first step is to create your CUIS report and run it for a filtered and relative date range (usually for a specific set of Skill Groups or Call Types for say “This Month”). Save a copy of this report with the filters intact and then follow the steps below. *Tip- I usually save these reports in their own category folder for easier management.

Step One: Locate the HTML Permalink for the report (make sure that it is a filtered report for a relative date range as mentioned above). Copy it to your clipboard. 

Step Two: Open Excel and find the Data>Import from a Web Query Function. Copy the Report Permalink into the New Web Query Address box. Excel will load a preview of the data. Click “Import”.

Step Three: Highlight the cell that you would like to use as the upper-left starting point for the imported data. Hit “OK”.

Step Four: Your CUIS Report data is now imported into Excel to format as you choose.

It’s truly that easy. I recommend creating an Excel macro to handle the above steps for you. Most customers create a “data” tab that the other formatted tabs reference to get their data and calculations. By using a macro you can have Excel automatically query CUIS and format all the tabs as needed. Then you simply save and email the file to whomever needs it.

Please feel free to reference the Cisco Unified Intelligence Suite End User Guide for additional detail. 

Enjoy.