Today's Call Center Quick Tip comes from Dale Raduenz, quality assurance analyst for Great Lakes Educational Loan Services:

We receive four times more calls in August than we do in April. We compensate by hiring seasonal staff for our peak season. For business reasons, it is desirable for us to carry a core staff in April that exceeds our needs. Instead of letting the customer service representatives sit idle and wait for the next call, we put their talents to work. When we are not experiencing our peak call volume, we focus on our processes and procedures. We use our front lines to evaluate what needs improvement to gear up for our busy season, and we use their experiences to work with management and software developers to make sure the improvements are implemented properly. This may involve creating training materials for our seasonal staff, or helping to create streamlined procedures for clerical tasks. Using our slower season to prepare for peak helps create camaraderie among staff and makes good use of our staffing resources.

I was forwarded an article today from Businessweek.com titled "Customer backlash against bad service." The article, penned by Jena McGregor, highlighted numerous situations where customers have taken their service grievances public through social media, peer-to-peer networking, and other online forums. In addition, many of the cases included angry customers who have begun reaching beyond customer service centers to executives throughout the enterprise. The article drove home the point that it is imperative that we listen to the voice of the customer -- whether it is in the recorded calls in the contact center or monitoring online forums to help head-off negative customer experiences.

What do you think? What are you doing in the contact center, and in your broader enterprise, to capture and utilize the voice of the customer? How are you insuring positive customer experiences today? 

Post tags: Businessweek.com, Jena McGregor, contact center trends, customer experience, contact center, call center, contact centre

Today, Tom Vander Well pointed out that not everyone responds positively to coaching. Even though the coach may approach the coaching sessions in a positive manner, the agents being coached may not approach the session with a rosy outlook.

Vander Well points out that you can't control how the agent approaches the session, but you can control how you approach the session. I agree with this sentiment, and also believe that you need to shift how you approach each individual agent. Everyone responds differently to feedback, and some require different delivery styles based upon their personalities. In January, I delivered a Webinar on agent classifications where we defined different personality traits and how you can potentially communicate with them more effectively. Ultimately, if you can discern which personality classification each of your agents fall in to, you can tailor your delivery to each agent's need, which can result in more positive interactions and outcomes.

What are you doing to make each of your coaching sessions positive? Are you tailoring your delivery to each agent's style? Are you seeing the "smaller" wins like Tom Vander Well (progress over time, etc.)?

Post tags: Tom Vander Well, call center culture, contact center trends, contact center Web event, contact center, call center, contact centre

Today's Call Center Quick Tip comes from Greg Gamble, a training and communications supervisor at Weyerhaeuser:

Hire for the Future

To assist with making a good call center great and preparing for the future, look for qualities in your call reps that might make them leaders in your organizations in the future. Not all great call reps will make good leaders but, if you have a good development program in place you may see a decrease in the turnover rate.

 Post tags: Greg Gamble, Weyerhaeuser, agent retention, call center attrition, call center, employee satisfaction

It's Friday, so I thought that I would share a few contact center related links for you to enjoy.

Doug at Service Untitled has posted a three-part interview with Tony Hsieh at Zappos.com. The first interview covers what Zappos does, how big they are, how many report customers they have, the company’s “wow” philosophy, and a bit about their very generous return and exchange policies. Part two of the interview talks more about the company’s very generous policies, how they’ve dealt with their growth to date, and more about the company’s incredibly strong customer service culture. Finally, in part three of the interview, they cover what it’s like to work at Zappos, how the company finds its employees, what they’re doing to improve their customer service, and why the company decided to differentiate itself with customer service.

Over at Return Customer, there is an article about building goodwill with customers. What are you doing to "go the extra mile" and build goodwill with your customers?

Tom Vander Well shares some common points of interest on setting up your quality form at QAQNA.com.

Enjoy the links, and feel free to send along any others that you have learned from or that have piqued your interest!

Post tags: Service Untitled, Zappos.com, Tony Hsieh, Return Customer, Tom Vander Well, QAQNA.com, contact center trends, contact center, call center, contact centre

Tom Vander Well at QAQnA and David Morse at CustomerOps.com have been engaged in an interesting conversation today about what businesses, and contact centers, are measuring and the effect that it has on the customer experience. In his posting, "Quality Scores Don't Always Tell the Truth," Tom asserts that when upper management mandates an internal metric, it can be manipulated and met, but at the cost of the customer experience. Customer experience, and customer satisfaction need to be taken into account, "but the process, culture and incentives create an environment where CYA is more important than TLC," agrees David at CustomerOps.

I have observed that there is a huge inconsistency in what is evaluated as well as how it is scored and many companies don’t know how to build a solid evaluation form with accurate scoring. Too often the "number" or "percentage" associated with quality becomes the determiner of success when actually, success should be measured by Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) associated with the skills on the evaluation form. For instance, if you are trying to drive First Call Resolution (FCR), then evaluating and coaching to skills such as asking probing questions, identifying customer needs and offering the appropriate solutions should drive that FCR and FCR should be what is measured. If a company can’t tie the individual skills on the form to KPI’s, then perhaps they should abandon the skill. Further, Tom pointed out that there are other factors affecting FCR, like policies, procedures, and lack of information being provided to agents.

What about your quality program? Is it time for an evaluation form makeover? What are you measuring, and are you looking at it from your customers' perspective, or has QA become more about "CYA" than TLC?

Post tags: Tom Vander Well, QAQnA, David Morse, CustomerOps, contact center coaching, QA, quality monitoring, call center trends, call centre trends