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September 2000

Rich Tehrani

 

On Your Mark, Get Set, Stretch!

BY RICH TEHRANI, GROUP PUBLISHER, TMC

Go To Sidebar: What Are Your Options?

As a freshman in high school, I, like many others in my class, wanted to get involved in sports. My favorite sport was soccer. While I was always a good hitter in baseball, my fielding skills weren't good enough. Football really wasn't for me either, so I decided I would try out for the soccer team.

The big day of soccer try-outs came and I discovered that the coach was inclined to believe all team hopefuls were of the same skill level, so the best way to rank us would be to have us race to see who was fastest. I always thought the coach should have concentrated more on skills than speed and stamina, but, as a freshman (or any member of the student body), I didn't have much say. (Coach Fernandez, if you're reading this right now, couldn't you have at least watched us kick the ball around for a while before you chose who made the team?) Anyway, to assess our speed, the coach had us race in tandem. As I recall, we had to sprint about a quarter mile. I was paired up with a pretty fast runner. I psyched myself up to give it my all. At first, the race was close and I even took the lead at one point. I wanted to get on the team so badly, I ran faster than I ever had before.

Things were going great and it clearly looked like I was going to be the winner. Then something happened I had never experienced before: I felt a terrible pulling pain in my hamstring, which caused me to slow down to a walk/limp pace for the last 10 feet of the race. Needless to say, my track time increased dramatically and I didn't make the team at that trial.

Before you start showering me with sympathetic letters, let me say there were more trials later that year and I did much better, because by then I had learned from my earlier experience about the importance of muscle stretching. Had I stretched out to prepare my body for that first trial, I probably would have done much better and not injured any large muscle groups.

That story serves as an analogy for the point of this month's column -- stretch before you run. Translated, prepare effectively before embarking on any competitive situation. Of course, your business is the specific competitive situation to which I am referring and you should prepare adequately before you embark on your race. For most, that race concerns fully automating your contact center and/or moving to e-commerce. The biggest mistake we can make is to not adequately prepare for the race ahead by failing to recognize that people are the most important ingredient in the sales process. If you aren't sufficiently staffed to interact with your customers, have not sufficiently trained that staff to interact with your customers and have not implemented the proper technologies to keep that staff functioning at maximum efficiency, you will not be able to provide the service level necessary to keep your customers loyal to you.

This point was driven home by a proliferation of press releases I recently read from partners of Blue Pumpkin Software, a leading provider of workforce management technology. In every case, these partners, and they are some of the biggest guns in the market, have decided to link their software packages to Blue Pumpkin's PrimeTime family of workforce management solutions. Just who are these partners, you ask? None other than Avaya (formerly Lucent's Enterprise Networks Group), Cisco Systems, eGain, Kana, Nortel, Quintus and Siemens.

With interest in workforce management solutions so fervent, I decided the topic deserved special coverage, so I asked Blue Pumpkin's cofounder and chief technical officer, Dr. Ofer Matan, some questions about the workforce management market to give you a better understanding of the solutions necessary for contact centers to evolve.

RT: What is your perspective on the changes the customer service industry has undergone in the last four years?

OM: I think the Internet has changed things drastically, but not in the ways people often focus on. It has changed the business rules for everyone. Now, all businesses must play by e-business rules even if they are not dot coms. Everything is becoming a commodity and service is becoming the only differentiator. The result is that the human element is becoming critical and, as a result, the importance of workforce management, quality monitoring and training has increased.

RT: Why is the human element so critical?

OM: While a lot of attention has been paid to the convenience of self-service and potential efficiencies of e-commerce, we have seen some of the difficulties many of the dot coms have faced, particularly during the past two holiday seasons. The key point is trust. Consumers who take advantage of self-service assume there is real "human" help if something goes wrong. You can invest in the best Web server and e-commerce infrastructure, but if the consumer cannot get to someone when a package is lost or the color of a sweater is wrong, your whole e-business strategy goes down the drain.

Customer service representatives make the difference between success or failure of attaining and retaining your customer base. A good staff is difficult to hire and keep and is the biggest expense in a business. The challenge for every business is how to leverage the maximum potential from these employees.

RT: How do workforce management systems help you do that?

OM: It's quite simple: you need to make sure you always have the right agents with the right skills at the right time responding on the right contact channel. A workforce management system helps you forecast demand and make sure you have the appropriate human resources to handle the demand. In addition, a system is a catalyst for change management. Most centers operate today in firefighting mode. They often think they are fighting fires due to lack of resources, but often it's the lack of process for planning, tracking and metrics. Some of Blue Pumpkin's customers who embraced operational change have experienced productivity gains of 10 to 20 percent or more in skills-based routing environments.

RT: What's special about skills-based routing?

OM: You have conflicting agendas. On one hand, you wish to segment your customers based on product, language or customer value and match them with domain experts. On the other, having smaller agent pools is more expensive - contact centers are more efficient as they grow larger.

Skills-based routing technology allows you to build larger agent pools where agents can handle contacts from multiple queues. Forecasting and scheduling agents in these environments and guaranteeing the correct coverage for your service goals is tremendously difficult. Businesses without workforce management automation are (a) not able to leverage the economic benefits of skills-based technology and (b) are at a terrible competitive disadvantage with respect to those that have deployed it.

RT: How are CSRs accepting workforce management systems?

OM: This issue amazes me again and again. Some teams view the system with suspicion at first, but most of our customers are seeing that after deployment, agent satisfaction actually rises. We've seen significant drops in attrition rates as well. This is attributed to the fact that the center has moved from reactive mode to proactive mode, leading to the fact that agents are less burned out, are getting trained consistently and getting shift assignments they want. You end up with a positive reinforcement cycle. Happy agents lead to lower attrition and higher expertise and productivity, which in turn leads to higher customer satisfaction, customer retention and higher revenues.

RT: What human elements need to be addressed in the multichannel contact center?

OM: There are a variety of things to consider. I'll focus on only two. The first is: what are the skills necessary to handle a new contact channel and does my agent pool possess those skills? Though voice over IP does not require new skills from a phone agent, e-mail and Web chat require writing skills a phone agent may or may not have. The second is that deferred media such as e-mail have different characteristics than immediate media such as the phone, leading to different agent requirement models and the need to manage backlog.

RT: How do you manage backlog?

OM: Let's focus on e-mail. The fact that service goals are usually not strict with e-mail allows you flexibility in staffing. You don't need to track the e-mail arrival rate with matching staff as you do with immediate media. The problem is that e-mail doesn't go away, and if you let the backlog grow too large, you might never catch up. For example, if you can respond to 1,000 e-mail messages a day and your backlog is 2,000, then any new arriving contact is already two days behind in queue. The problem with that kind of management is that customers who receive no response may send you additional contacts via e-mail or phone, leading to an upward spiral of workload. While this in contrary to our basic instincts, it is sometimes better to answer an e-mail instead of taking a phone call.

RT: Should centers manage different contact channels independently?

OM: It depends on the business, the skill sets and the volume on each channel. Small centers will have no choice but to share agents across channels. Larger centers will have a choice. Highly skilled representatives will be shared, while those with lower-level skills will not.

When sharing an agent pool, you have two possible operating modes: blending and task switching. In the blending mode, an agent is logged into multiple channels and can be switched from e-mail to phone to chat. The context switching is strenuous for agents and seems to push many centers to embrace a task-switching mode in which an agent handles only one media type for a significant chunk of time. For example, e-mail until lunch and phone thereafter.

RT: What do you think will happen in the next couple of years?

OM: I anticipate there will be even more dependency on people working in customer contact centers. The volumes will increase dramatically across all channels: e-mail, VoIP, Web chat and phone. The service-level and quality requirements will become tougher. At the moment, the industry is still in its infancy and best management practices are lagging behind the technology. The success of e-business as a viable model is dependent on developing practices to manage this next-gen workforce. It's going to be an exciting time for vendors like us to work with leading businesses to develop these new practices and accompanying technologies.

Sincerely,

Rich Tehrani
Group Publisher

[ Return To The September 2000 Table Of Contents ]


What Are Your Options?

If you think there's a ton of great technologies and services out there worth considering for your company, you're right. To help you learn about the myriad options available to help you fully automate your center, enhance your human resource dynamics and provide world-class CRM, we'll be presenting a truly in-depth conference program at Communications Solutions EXPO FALL December 5-7 at the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The editors of all TMC publications and engineers of TMC Labs have spent many days assembling this conference program. There are tracks on e-commerce, call center human resources, Internet telephony, data management, CRM and more. I think the readers of this column will be particularly interested in the Call Center Human Resources track slated for the EXPO. There is an extremely detailed description of these tracks in the brochure enclosed in this issue as well as on our Web site. I've listed these session titles as a heads-up, but please take some time to peruse the entire conference schedule as I'm sure you will find many other sessions concerning the latest and greatest technologies.

The Call Center Human Resources track includes the following sessions:

  • I Was a High-Turnover Agent, But Then...
  • Must You Shower Your Agents with Money? Or Will Confetti Do?
  • It's Good to be Omniscient... Thanks to Logging & Monitoring
  • The Workforce Management Ethic or... The Spirit of Scheduling
  • An Effective Agent is a Happy Agent, with Skills-Based Routing.

While we are focusing on the human element of a corporation, I'll list some other sessions that discuss the integration of technology and people, whether they are your employees or customers.

  • Remote But Not Forgotten: Tele-commuters, Road Warriors and Branch Offices
  • Enriching Applications with Speech Recognition
  • As the World Churns or Doesn't Thanks to CRM: How to Reduce Customer Churn by Increasing Levels of Customer Service
  • Web Portals for Improved CRM
  • Listen to Your Customers: Using Feedback to Improve Sales
  • Collaboration with Voice and Video over IP
  • Spinning a Sticky Web - Self-Service by Design
  • Sprinkle Pixel Dust on Your Web Site, and Benefit from Chat & Instant Messaging Interactivity.

So... there you have it, just a sampling of some wonderfully educational and timely sessions on the topics you need to become more efficient, productive and profitable. As always, I hope to see you in Las Vegas and, once again, please see www.csexpo.com for details.

[ Return To The September 2000 Table Of Contents ]







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