Technology enabled agent empowerment within the call centre
Technology-enabled agent empowerment within the call centre
Contact centre performance can be improved by giving agents tools to improve their own performances, claims Andy Sleath of Aspect Software.
To deliver great service, time and again, organisations must make the most of their customer service resources – human and technical. Most contact centre managers today would acknowledge that this calls for a multi-pronged strategy focused on HR, business process and technology.
It’s clear that there are many complex factors involved in delivering superb service.
Historically though, most contact centres would admit that it’s been a struggle to get the ‘people’ side of their operations right. Not only has the industry suffered from a poor public image and high attrition and absenteeism rates, but many organisations have also found it difficult to empower their people and to create good long term contact centre career opportunities. This situation, however, is rapidly changing.
What we are seeing is a new focus on ‘people’ as organisations increasingly come to recognise the link between skilled, well-trained and motivated personnel and overall contact centre performance. Major practical improvements are now being made to agent welfare and training programmes. New contact centre career structures are being put in place. And a revolution is taking place in agent empowerment.
Take the area of workforce management. Workforce management techniques have long been used to determine the staff and resource requirements. They are also used to schedule staff and resources (for different skill sets and contact centre sites) to meet particular business criteria (such as revenue maximisation or quality of service targets) and to track contact centre performance.
What we’re now seeing in workforce management software are features that give agents more control over these processes – and hence more control of their working days. Agents can now, for example, request changes to their schedules (for vacation, overtime, non-paid time off, etc.) via the Web or over the phone using IVR. Automated software will then assess schedule exceptions on the basis of rules defined by management, make the changes and automatically notify the individual by email.
Data analytics are changing agent empowerment. To understand this development better, it’s necessary to explain the difference between traditional performance measurement techniques and modern solutions based on data analytics.
Historically, contact centre performance data was seen in the relatively narrow context of a centre’s ability to handle calls efficiently, with ‘production reports’ generally taken from standard ACD and dialler systems. ACD stats provide insight into the numbers of inbound calls handled (e.g. per hour/ day/ agent/ group), average talk times, after calls work, answer times, etc.) while outbound dialler stats measure the number of calls handled per hour (by agent, group, etc.) and more.
However, production reports are one dimensional, providing only a snapshot of contact centre activity at a particular point in time. They’re also out of date as soon as they are generated – a problem compounded by the time it takes to analyse them. It’s not uncommon for agents to receive their performance results after the quarter has ended, making this information useless in terms of helping agents improve in time to impact their quarterly bonuses.
The most serious problem with relying on ACD/ dialler production reports is that they only give a very broad and general view of the contact centre, collecting vast amounts of unsorted information, much of which has little relevance to effective operations. For reported data to be of any use, managers need not only to know what statistics are relevant, but also to figure out ways to extract relevant information from the clutter. Only then can they analyse the data and decide what to do with it.
By contrast to production reporting, modern analytical applications do all the heavy lifting for the user.
Rather than dump statistics on managers’ desktops, they deliver specific, relevant information that applies directly to the most pressing concerns of running contact centres efficiently and supporting business goals. The time-consuming work of sorting data is done by the application, and presented to the user in a structured format that is easy to comprehend. All of this makes analytical applications much more desirable - from the standpoint of both cost and effectiveness - than traditional production reports.
A powerful example of this methodology in practice is provided by Workforce Optimisation software. Workforce Optimisation software enables organisations to drill down into contact centre data, slicing and dicing that data by time period, region, site, campaign, group and individual agent in order to pinpoint the root causes behind a particular issue. Performance can then be displayed numerically or as graphs that compare time periods or groups. Many vendors have developed solutions based on this approach.
The move towards data analytics-driven performance measurement is highly significant in the context of agent empowerment. What this new generation of Workforce Optimisation software effectively does is put decision-critical Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in the hands of every stakeholder at all levels of the contact centre. Managers, teams, supervisors and agents can now view a dashboard of their own operational performance - enabling them to drill down to the root causes of problems and resolve them.
KPIs appear on individuals’ screens in formats that enable them to assess performance, while traffic light colour-coding reveals, at a glance, whether performance is above, at, or below, target levels set by managers. In addition to being pre-selected for their relevance to contact centre efficiency, KPIs can also be organised into subsets by function so that each staff member sees the particular KPIs directly related to their function.
Using these advanced capabilities, agents, managers and supervisors can now personally identify areas of improvement and make changes to better their performance. By giving agents details of their average handling times, wrap up times, etc. they could, for example, go to their supervisors and say, 'I have an issue here, I can see I'm not hitting my targets, can you help?' No data assembly is required, the data being already sorted for individual requirements – enabling the right information to be delivered to the right person in a timely manner.
Alternatively, if managers or supervisors find that overall service levels are held down by the performance of a few identified agents, they can communicate quickly and directly with those agents, pointing out specific areas that need improvement, setting new performance goals and giving agents incentives to meet them. Software can even be configured to send automatic email notifications to staff members affected by changes. Such an approach relieves supervisors of the task of telling agents when their performance is off target and it gives agents all the information they need to be sure that they meet goals that are often tied to bonuses and promotions.
It’s a win-win situation for agents and management – and one that helps businesses better understand and improve agent performance, customer satisfaction and overall operational performance while meeting known KPIs that result in reduced costs, improved revenues and enhanced customer loyalty.
For one major financial institution, adopting a new approach to Workforce Optimisation has resulted in a reduction of Reporting FTEs (Full Time Equivalents) from 20 to 2 and a 3% improvement in Adherence - and, for one credit card company, an improvement in sales conversion rates from 1.5% of calls in March 2003 to 10% in January 2004 with forecasting accuracy jumping 10%.
Andy Sleath is Northern Europe Marketing Manager of Aspect Software. Andy can be reached on +44 (0)20 8589 1168 or by email andrew.sleath@aspect.com
|
