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The Agent Experience: Small Fixes with Big Impact By Keith Dawson
Call center management is more of a people-management job than most people realize. Yes, call center professionals are responsible for high levels of mission critical technology, but big ticket tech purchases come along every few years in each sector. Agents and their supervisors come and go every single day. And in truth, most of your budget is spent either directly on agents (salaries and benefits) or indirectly (training, recruiting, and tech tools like workforce management that keep track of them). Every aspect of call center management comes down to the care and feeding of agents: • making sure you have the right number of them; • that they have the right skills for the job; • that they have the proper tools to do their work; • that what you spend on them does not balloon out of control; • that they perform at a consistent level; • that you properly measure that performance and relate it to other goals of the company. With so much at stake in the agent equation, and so much of your company’s budgetary resources aimed at the problem, you should be paying attention to the end result of all that spending: the actual daily agent experience. Ask yourself this question: Is all my hard work and spending wasted due to some avoidable, trivial problem occurring from the agent’s point of view? And: Are there simple ways I can cut through the company bureaucracy to make small, inexpensive fixes — that reap big benefits? The answers to both these questions are probably: yes. The chasm between management and labor in call centers is wide — but bridgeable. By understanding what the job looks like from the agent’s perspective, you can perhaps encourage longer tenure, which has sizable impact on the major cost centers of recruitment and training. Here are a few simple areas of agent experience that you should explore in order to see if there are cost-saving and confidence-building measures you as a manager can take that will benefit everyone in the organization. DOES THIS HEADSET FEEL RIGHT TO YOU? The headset market has consolidated in the past few years. There are fewer manufacturers, fewer vendors, and a whole lot of commoditization. The result is that it is easier than ever to buy headsets in bulk that are comfortable and reasonably durable. The flip side of that, though, is that it’s also a lot easier to buy headsets in bulk that are cheap pieces of crap. Word of advice. Don’t skimp. These things are so important, so supercritical to agent performance, and yet you often don’t stop to measure their impact on agent behavior. If you think you can save money in your call center’s budget by buying the lowest priced model, even from a major manufacturer, you’re being penny wise and pound foolish. Agents sit with these things in their ears, messing up their hair, literally in their heads, all day long. Day after day. Call center agents are people who probably have iPods and other consumer electronics — check out how many of the people in your call center actually spend their own money to upgrade the headphones on their personal music players beyond the basic uncomfortable pair that the manufacturer includes. Let agents choose from among several brands and styles of headset. Give them the option to try out several and select the one that suits their personal preferences. Adding the element of personal choice and involvement may also act as an incentive to take better care of the set, reducing the overall number you have to purchase over time. Some of the models we like: • The Plantronics H261N Supra- Plus Noise-Canceling set. Enhanced receive-side audio quality, intelligent flexible boom and it comes in monaural or binaural versions. (Personally, we favor the binaural, but like we said, everyone should get to choose.) • GN Netcom makes one that’s pretty interesting: the GN 805- Flex that runs under the chin or behind the neck. It comfortably provides sound to both ears through the unique acoustic tubeówithout disturbing hairstyles. The 805-Flex also features a flexible microphone boom for precise microphone positioning, a noise-canceling microphone to reduce distracting background noise, and a single cord for maximum user comfort and convenience. Comes with two eartip styles, foam and conical. • The Sennheiser CC 540 has really large (and extremely comfortable) ear-caps on a singlesided headset. (Double-sided are available with a different model number.) The Ultra Noise Cancelling microphone reduces background noise pollution and provides a unique sense of privacy, even within the busy center. These are just examples. Every manufacturer has a wide range of styles available. Even if you have to standardize on sets from a particular manufacturer, you can still offer your reps a choice of style and comfort options.
I’M STARING AT A SCREEN ALL DAY LONG Another way you can have impact on — or at least sympathy for — the agent experience is by taking a good look at their desktop. By some measures, agents are supposed to juggle between five and 10 separate applications on their screens at one time. Each application opens a separate window, creating an overlapping, mind-numbing, productivity-sapping madhouse that wastes time and increases burnout. There might be one window that takes them through the call, including the status and script. Another would hold customer or CRM data. Yet another to track a shipment, and another for financial or billing info. And there goes an alert from the supervisor. And an email. And that’s without lifting your eyes to see the strip of data moving fast across the readerboard. Was any of it important? Who knows? You, as manager, know what’s important and what’s tangential, but during the press of the moment when it’s a delicate interaction between agent and customer, how can the agent make sense of what takes priority? The answer is both simple and complex. For most people the only solution to application clutter is more and better training. Increasing familiarity does improve the agent’s ability to function, but only to a point. With the cost of recruitment, training and turnover so high, more training will only stabilize a bad situation. Some companies are offering a way out of the morass. Jacada, for instance, has been working for several years on a really nice way to streamline all the apps that go on an agent’s desktop into one clear and usable interface. They attack the problem from underneath, with software that gathers all the disparate data streams and merges them into the interface before it hits the agent’s screen. The interface doesn’t replace the underlying systems you use, it merely replaces the interfaces those systems present to the agent. The Jacada solution cuts right through to the interface layer, and that makes the cost and deployment time of the solution much more palatable. It protects both your investment in your existing systems, and your ability to switch systems later on. It would be surprising if the switch from cluttered multi-screen desktops to a streamlined interface didn’t result in better call times and other improved in-center statistics. We suspect that it also results in longer agent tenure (though this is something that remains to be proven over time). They’ve made strong inroads at companies with large and varied deployments, including West, an outsourcer with a very large industry footprint. Cincom takes a similar approach with Synchrony, a suite of tools that coordinate the contact with customers through a variety of modes. Phone, of course, but also email, chat and self-service. It manages both the information (tracking the customer data) and the workflow (coordinating between myriad backend applications). The program merges all the information from the various interaction modes and presents it to the agent in a single view. When an agent (or a manager) can see what’s going on from a single vantage point, he or she can act quickly. Just as important, training takes less time. Error rates drop from agents juggling multiple apps on screen. And interactions become more fruitful. BEWARE OF TOO MUCH PRODUCTIVITY There are other aspects of the agent experience that bear looking at. Training (both initial and ongoing) is your best chance to instill a sense of company values to your staff. But it’s often superficial, a process designed as much to weed out those who won’t cut it as to boost those who can. And then there’s the old adage that reps don’t leave companies, they leave supervisors. Have you really looked at the types of training that you are giving to supervisors? And how you are selecting for those jobs? Does someone get to be a supervisor because they’ve been an effective agent, or because they have superior people skills? What are the success metrics you’re using to select and evaluate supervisors? We’ll be looking in more detail at some of these many agent-facing choices that managers encounter in future articles throughout the year. Some elements are so simple we’re not going to bother to write articles about them: comfortable chairs. Good lighting. Sound-proofing. One of the things to beware of, though, is cramming more than is necessary into the agent’s job description. Vendors often make the mistake of selling technology to call centers premised on the idea that their agents will be more productive, or will be able to accomplish more tasks within the same amount of time. This is wrong-headed. Instead, think of it from the endpoint and work backwards: you want agents to stay longer because your real cost is in replacing them when they leave with equivalently skilled reps. The fact that your agent might be marginally more productive within a particular hour is not the problem. It would be nice to be operating at 100% efficiency all the time, but no one ever does, and they are not machines. If you look at your technology tools in terms of their long term effect on people management issues (instead of short term productivity) you’ll be buying smarter. Look at the agent experience so that you can predict what factors — like the desktop clutter or inadequate training or bad supervisors or uncomfortable headsets — will encourage them to want to stay on the job, to feel a sense of loyalty to your company and its products. To genuinely want to sell more to customers, or help them solve problems.
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