Contact center training and certification can generate significant bottom-line benefits that even in challenging times such as these. It can also assist organizations that already have a longstanding reputation for excellent service.

 

Just ask the City of Garland, Texas. The city, which has more than 200,000 residents, is the 10^th largest in the state and is part of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. The City of Garland Water Utilities is, reports Wikipedia, an original member of the North Texas Municipal Water District that has led Garland and the other members to benefit “from reliable, high quality, affordable water from the water district’s many reservoirs.”

 

To boost service to its customers and to prepare its contact center to handle more calls on behalf of other city departments, David Jacobs, Project Manager, City of Garland Utilities received Call Center Manager Certification from the Resource Center for Customer Service Professionals (RCCSP). TMCnet approached him to find out how the RCCSP program has helped his department, and the city. Here are the highlights of our interview:

 

 

The City of Garland Water Utilities contact center performs provides customer service including repairs, information over a wide range of services and subject matters such as water utility service issues and concerns, water conservations topics, and watering violation contact information 24/7. After 5:30 pm Monday through Friday and over weekends and holidays the contact center becomes the city’s 3-1-1 [nonemergency] operator for all departments and services. The contact center employs eight full time operators [contact center agents] that also provide systems operations oversight over water pumping operations, camera monitoring and security, and service order dispatch activities.

 

Garland Water Utilities contact center has been modernized and updated with technology within the last 18 months that has assisted the center in the performance of its duties and responsibilities. Our center is different than more traditional centers in that our operators are tasked with other non contact center type work activities. We are a water utility first and contact center second. We have incorporated contact center methodologies within our agency to cover the other 50 percent of job responsibilities and this is where the relationship with RCCSP was so meaningful. The certification program allowed me to perform a “sanity check” on our communication systems to ensure that effective parameters were in place or put into place toward effective call management.

Our center utilizes TelStrat’s Call Parrot voice recording system to assist us in not only ensuring that our operators follow expected voice scripting but allows our utility to grade the performance of our operators upon a monthly basis.

 

The technology we have deployed has changed the way we approach a call. This service approach, named Customer 3Sixty, focuses on keeping a requestor in the communication loop throughout the duration of a service request that starts with the initial requestor’s call or e-mail to the Water Utilities Data Control Center via www.garlandwater.com . The information is then entered into the utility’s work management database.

 

The utility sought to ease the burden of the unknown a requestor may encounter throughout service request reporting and field work processes by creating a seamless interactive system that provides an open forum for continued communication. The resulting collected data is wirelessly transmitted to field crews who receive and drive to the address and perform the work. Upon completion of work the field crews enters updated results into in-vehicle data terminals that are transmitted back to database in near real time speed.

 

Finally all requestor initiated field work completed daily is collected and sent in the form of data tables to an auto dialer by 5:30pm each day for automatic callbacks or e-mails to the requestors notifying of work completion. The utility completes 91 percent of field work initiated by a requestor within a 24 hour period. Evaluation criteria are based upon breaking down the telephone call into four components and include:

 

1.         Call Opening (How the call is answered)

 

2.         Call Body (Expected process to gather information and enter information into work management database)

 

3.         Call Summation (Verification of information with customer to ensure received information is correct)

 

4.         Call Closing (How call is terminated)

 

Customer 3Sixty customer service evaluation scoring is based on a 100 point system. Each Operator receives an evaluation per month. Time is scheduled with management each month to go over the evaluation and determine positive aspects of calls as well as weaknesses for Operators to work toward correcting.

 

Feedback indicates that the system is both changing and improving Operator’s performance and resulting service to requestors. Operators are embracing the system and analysis indicates Operators are elevating service to its external utility customers and citizens as well as internally to city departments and utility field staff. Various period data further reveals that:

 

 

 

 

 

There are short term challenges and goals include challenges such as meshing of expanded service delivery brought about by reorganization of call taking and dispatch operations mandated by the City Manager, training, and an aging workforce. There are improvement goals, such as to expand current efficient service delivery to cover new responsibilities while maintaining customer satisfaction targets and to develop an action plan targeted in providing options for replacement of retiring workforce.

 

There are long term challenges and goals that include increasing overtime demands, rewarding high performing staff in down turned economy, and balancing work responsibilities with upper management expectations within a center that has an unpredictable rate of future growth. There are improvement goals such as to evolve current center into a citywide 3-1-1 contact center operation, enhance staff reward, recognition and career ladder opportunities, and become a best practices contact center.

 

The bottom line in our organization revolved around the fact that contact center operations were more or less seen as second nature to the water utility until my arrival in the department. Call taking was a requirement and not seen as an opportunity to delivery positive messaging to the customers and citizen base. In my role as the new supervisor over System Operations in 2004, it became clear that the second handed nature of taking and dispatching calls to the field needed to be overhauled. I initially utilized my background in operations to make improvement changes as well as developing directives and structure for operators to follow.

 

In 2007 the utility moved its communications operations to a new facility. Soon afterwards in 2008, I contacted the RCCSP for information regarding in Call Center manager certification. I felt this training and certification program would assist in my overall knowledge of best practices and result in creating an environment for better work performance, staff development, increased staff satisfaction and better service delivery to our customers. Knowledge gained from my experience with RCCSP has improved our center’s ability to cope with the demands of the work responsibilities and developed a new “can do” attitude by our staff.

 

This is a hands-on course where each participant is put through the paces in class, with self-assurance and confidence-building as instructional objectives. Hands-on tools, software, a forms library, benchmarks, and action plans used in class are packaged up for the participant to take back to the office so that newly learned skills and methods can be immediately applied. I attended the certification training program; I completed all required steps in receiving the certification.

 

Participants like myself were taught on a wide range subjects among them how to assess the current state of their call center, key metrics and the relationships between them, practices for use of technology tools and best practices for forecasting call volume, work load, and scheduling staff. I was also taught how to use Erlang formulas and workforce management tools to calculate the required staffing needed meet service levels commitments andhow to create a standard operating procedures manual that includes best practices for call handling, documentation and customer service.

 

From a maturity and developmental standpoint, the water utility contact center is experiencing a growth phase and as a result has not reached its goal of advanced maturity status. The center can be characterized as a standardized operation through its development and deployment of workflows, voice scripts, policies and procedures to achieve its goal to align with best practices within a contact center by September 2010.

 

 

My expectations going into the training were sort of twofold. On one hand I wanted to receive a base of knowledge and understanding that I could use within our contact center. Secondly, I wanted to have professional contact center information available so that I could use this information in evaluating and advancing our center operations. Basically to validate our progress toward achieving best practices status. The certification and training class met and surpassed my expectations by giving me the tools to better oversee my operations and a deeper understanding of “why what you do in the center has the impacts upon the overall water utility operations that they do”.

 

 

I felt that my instructor was very knowledgeable and understood the subject matter to the extent that the delivery of the information was very well received by me and my classmates. I am an operation styled professional and a generalist so I have seen and worked around a variety of municipal and county government work activities over my 30 year career. Through those involvements I have seen a wide variety of different best practice subject matter. I also felt that my instructor gave me sufficient guidance and challenged my thinking such that I have utilized knowledge I have obtained to assist in transforming our center into one that now follows a heighten expectation level.

 

 

Yes, a project was required as one step toward reaching certification status. My chosen project was titled “Customer Satisfaction”. I chose this subject due to its importance to the overall success of any contact center.

 

I wrote as part of my submission that “Customer Satisfaction is a measure of the degree to which a product or service meets the customer's expectations. It is not a recent phenomenon. Many very successful public and private service providers have identified the importance of customer satisfaction over the years and the role played in establishing customer loyalty. As a result, its importance can and should not be underestimated regardless of services rendered by the service provider.

 

The project should be approved to lend further credence to the value of receiving feedback from the service provider’s most needed entity, its customers. A naïve view of business might suggest that profit is the appropriate goal of an organization or service provider. The project hopes to establish that a more practical viewpoint in which the organization should undertake is the retention of its customer base. Only with a steady base of customers can an organization hope to retain its current customers. And only by satisfying customers can an organization ever hope to retain its current customers.

 

The impact of the certification project on our contact center was both economically based as well as operational. From a financial standpoint by first demonstrating the cost saving (ROI) potential of developing verbal scripting in the RCCSP project write-up was actually realized upon implementation. A 1.17 year payback or $1,275.00 per year savings was realized by utilizing an automated pop-up survey form as part of the utility’s work management system over a previously used written and mailed customer satisfaction surveys. From an operational standpoint the work management database collects customer satisfaction data and the data is used to quantify satisfaction to our elected officials as well as city management.

 

 

 The utility’s contact center realizes a $1,275.00 per year ROI as the direct result of the manner in which the utility chose to revise the way in which it collects customer satisfaction data. Beyond this annual offset the utility has elevated customer satisfaction by 15 percent over previous satisfaction data reporting. Customer loyalty is difficult to quantify due to the utility being the only entity in the city that supplies water to customers. But utility managers feel that loyalty is affirmatively affected in that previous satisfaction has been reported at 83 percent and currently as the result of adopting sound call center management principals is reported at 98 percent. Improving customer satisfaction to this level from a figure that is already considered fairly high is seen by the utility as being commendable and represents clear advancement in elevating customer loyalty.

 

 

From a management perspective it’s when staff accept and embrace the concepts that are presented that are designed to assist them but often time on the front end there is resistance because it is outside their comfort zone. Secondly it is the manner in which our operators adapt to new responsibilities and increase workload volumes. We have recently been mandated by city management to assume call answering and dispatch services for another major department in the city. Our operator’s have reacted very positively to new workload undertakings.

 

Another source of pride is the center’s impact on elevating customer satisfaction from 83 percent to 98 percent. The increase in my view is a direction reflection upon customer loyalty. Recently I received an e-mail from another city employee that wanted to let me know how impressed he was with how we had handled their initial service call and field service delivery. He stated that when he called for service he did not tell the operator that he was a city employee simply he was just another customer calling for service. He stated that the operator was very helpful and pleasant; the individual provided him with a reference number that he could use to speed access to information upon a return call to our center or when visiting our automated self service look up information grid available on our web site. He further stated that he had not received that level of customer service in some time. That is a feel-good moment.

 

 

I and my staff are likely to attend other training and certification opportunities available through RCCSP in the future. I really like their discount price offerings for group training and feel in these economic hard times that this approach is well suited to gain our future business. I feel sessions like Customer Care Supervisor Certification, Essential Skills for Effective Incoming Call Center Management, Call Center Strategic P.anning for Executives and Call Center Coaching Getting Results are a few areas I may be interested in pursuing for myself and staff. I feel all areas identified would position our center in the obtainment of best practices status, a goal I am very interested in reaching for our center and the community we serve.