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
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