Call Center Software | Call Abandonment Rates | Envision
Dec 27, 2006

Call Abandonment Rates
Posted by: Connie Smith

Last week, I had a contact center manager inquire about acceptable call center abandonment percentage rates. As a best practice, centers should shoot for an abandon percentage somewhere between 2% to 3%. Understand that abandons should be calculated only after entering your switch and remaining on the line for 10 seconds.

After 10 seconds, you start counting abandons. The reason you do this is because customers calling in that hang up within the first 10 seconds are not doing so based on a low tolerance level. They are choosing to hang up for many reasons including they may have dialed the wrong number or changed their mind and decided to call back later because someone walked in their office. All major ACD systems have the ability to track abandon rates and any outside vendor should be able to provide you with reports in this area.


Post tags: , , , , ,

 
Call Abandonment Rates - 2:47 PM | Call Center Best Practices | Add Comment (0) |
Dec 20, 2006

Making People Priority #1
Posted by: Connie Smith

Employee retention and agent motivation has gotten a lot of great press this week. In addition to the Donna Fluss article that I mentioned earlier this week, I came across an article by Barbara Scofidio about making people a priority. At the end of her article, Scofidio states:

"Regardless of rising costs, challenging contracts, air travel hassles, the seller's market, or any other issues you're dealing with, finding the right employees — and keeping them motivated (and keeping them, period) should be one of your top concerns in 2007 — and every New Year."

I can't agree more: efficient and effective employees are one of the enterprise's greatest assets. Ensuring that we invest in the physical, mental and emotional needs of our employees, especially customer-facing representatives like our contact center agents, will pay off with increased customer satisfaction and ultimately a healthy bottom-line.

How are you investing in your employees? Is it paying off within your organization?



Post tags: , , , , , ,

 
Making People Priority #1 - 2:40 PM | Coaching & Agent Effectiveness | Add Comment (1) |
Dec 18, 2006

Agent Motivation: Tips & Strategies
Posted by: Connie Smith

I came across an article today by Donna Fluss about motivating agents. She has some great tips and strategies to motivate and provide growth opportunities for call center agents. I encourage you to take a look at her article.

In addition to Donna's comments, I would add that there are three critical employee needs that rewards and incentives can't buy. They include: physical, mental, and emotional needs.

Physical needs include making sure that they agents are working in a clean and safe environment.

Mental needs include making sure that your agents receive enough training and coaching to confidently complete their jobs.

Last but not least, are emotional needs. It's important to make sure that you're communicating with CSRs on a frequent basis so that they have a sense of belonging and can experience positive work relationships.

If you're not meeting these three critical needs, rewards and incentives will only act as a Band-Aid.



Post tags: , , , , ,

 
Agent Motivation: Tips & Strategies - 4:12 PM | Coaching & Agent Effectiveness | Add Comment (0) |
Dec 13, 2006

Centralized Quality Teams
Posted by: Connie Smith

Yesterday, Envision hosted a Web event where we discussed a trend towards developing centralized quality teams. This is where dedicated quality assurance reps take over the day-to-day evaluating and/or coaching of agents from the supervisors. One of the questions that was posed by a participant was: “How do you get your supervisors to give up ownership?” 
I answered that supervisors do not give up ownership, their role just shifts. You see, quality monitoring is only one piece of the performance puzzle. A supervisor is also responsible for performance in the areas of WFM, ACD etc. By offloading much of the day-to-day evaluations and coaching, the supervisor is freed up to analyze and coach to overall performance. With this said, the supervisor still needs to stay in tune with their agents and should be performing a few random evaluations, side by side coaching and participating in calibration sessions. The QA team is not there to replace the supervisor. They are there to assist the supervisor.
Do you have an experience you'd like to share relating to centralized quality teams?


Post tags: , , , , , ,

 
Centralized Quality Teams - 2:45 PM | Coaching & Agent Effectiveness | Add Comment (0) |
Dec 06, 2006

Outcome & History in Calibration
Posted by: Connie Smith

This week, Tom Vander Well wrote a great blog entry about the role of history and outcomes in scores. His article got me thinking about calibration. Here is how I responded to his entry:

Calibration credibility and objectivity are crucial to the overall success of your quality program. Here are two things you can do to ensure the integrity of calibration:

1. Have clear definitions of what it takes to accomplish each skill. This is especially important when dealing with soft skills. With “empathy” for example, your definition might read something like “Convey understanding, helpfulness and concern when customer is inconvenienced or shares an empathetic experience by acknowledging the callers emotion by expressing empathy through words or through acknowledging statements.” When evaluating based on this definition, the evaluator will be looking specifically for acknowledging statements such as "I'm so sorry that happened to you."

2. Score subjective skills such as empathy on a 3 tier basis. Did not demonstrate the skill = zero points, Developing the skill = partial points and Mastered the skill = maximum points. This type of scoring along with a good definition takes some of the subjectivity out of the equation and back to the task at hand. Did the agent, on this call, this time, accomplish this skill?

I've talked about calibration in the past, and I'm sure that this is a subject that we'll touch on again. How do you handle calibration in your contact center?

 

Post tags: , , , , , , ,

 
Outcome & History in Calibration - 4:15 PM | General | Add Comment (0) |