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Excellent Hosts

By Brendan B. Read,
Senior Contributing Editor

Contracting with third-party firms or OEMs to host or provide solutions in the cloud is emerging as a viable
lower-cost and more flexible alternative to on-premises, installations for a growing range of contact center applications. The proof though is in the implementation. Here is one such example of an excellent host (and guest):

Extra Space Storage (ESS) is the second largest self storage provider in the United States. It had been using a combination of local onsite staff and a BPO firm to handle its calls. Inbound inquiries to individual facilities
were answered by employees when available and by the outsourcer after the fourth ring. It wasn’t enough though; the firm needed to improve the customer experience and to track all customer contacts.

So in summer 2008 ESS rethought its contact handling strategy. At the time it operated 670 self-storage properties in 33 states and in Washington, D.C., with a goal to double its footprint by 2013. It decided to build an in-house contact
center as well as invest in a CRM to maintain customer account information and provide detailed performance metrics
to help it optimize operations.

“We were using an outsourcer because, in our industry, it’s imperative that customer calls be answered by a live person,” says Extra Space Storage Chief Information Officer Bill Hoban. “Otherwise, callers go to the next self-storage company in the phone book and we lose the sale. But our service had no way of knowing whether the caller had phoned before or was already a customer, outsourcer appointments sent by e-mail sometimes didn’t get retrieved before
the customer showed up to see a unit.”

ESS planned for a new 50-seat center near its Salt Lake City, Utah headquarters. Incoming calls to the local self-storage facilities would be routed to the center’s sales or service queue based on customers’ IVR selections. The center would also handle outbound callbacks and campaigns. A new CRM system as well as the company’s existing point-of-sale software would beintegrated with the contact center software to equip agents with one-screen access to all customer and facility information.

Extra Space Storage investigated premises-based contact center platforms and CRM software. It chose inContact
(www.incontact.com) and Salesforce. com (www.salesforce.com) respectively because of the cost and rapid deployment
advantages with hosting; inContact’s solution is integrated with Salesforce. com’s product.

Going to inContact saved ESS tens of thousands of dollars in capital investment and in ongoing building infrastructure, maintenance and replacement costs by eliminate the need to buy and install hardware and software; inContact provides routing, IVR,outbound and workforce management applications. Call handling is provided over a broadband connection from equipment hosted at inContact’s own data center.

Taking the hosted route with inContact and Salesforce.com (News - Alert) also enabled the firm to meet an eight-week deployment schedule before its outsourced contract expired. Premises-installed contact center and CRM solutions would have missed the date because they entailed much longer ramp up times, in part because of time-consuming integration chores.

Extra Space Storage opened its inContact-powered contact center in phases beginning in November 2008 and completed deployment to all properties in February 2009. Implementation went quickly and smoothly. By October 2009 growth had expanded the center’s responsibilities to 740 local stores.

The post-setup results have been dramatic. In the first eight months after rollout ESS nearly doubled the percentage of prospect phone calls that resulted in reservations; this is vital as 90 percent of them convert to sales. On-site facility managers no longer have to answer telephone sales inquiries, freeing them to pay attention to maintaining their property and serving existing customers in person.

inContact’s hosted solution has futureproofed Extra Space Storage’s growth. The storage firm is building out a selfservice IVR for simple tasks, such as bill payment, which will manage live agent call volumes. The inContact solution will also enable ESS to add work-athome- agents as the firm is likely to outgrow its current call center space.

“We don’t want to be call switch or CRM experts,” Hoban said. “Having someone else manage these systems in the cloud makes business sense from every perspective.”

Squaring the Training Dilemma

Contact center training in this tight economy is much like essential government services. The needs they address are becoming more complicated; the more thorough and effectively they are provided the more everyone benefits: but few want to foot the bill, citing tight budgets. Instead both services and training have typically been slashed to conserve resources and to avoid raising prices (and taxes) that will annoy the customers, who are also taxpayers.

For contact centers, if not necessarily for governments there may be a dim light on the horizon. Dina Vance, senior vice president at Ulysses Learning, is seeing organizations’ purse strings loosen slightly beginning in the last quarter
2009 which has freed up some money for training.

“Training budgets are the first items that get reduced in a downturn and 2009 was a very tough year across the board,”
says Vance. “Firms are being very careful how to spend their dollars they do have, focusing on areas that get results with
cost-efficient tools like e-learning.”

Squaring Needs Budgets and Training

Contact center needs are becoming more complex, which requires increasingly sophisticated training. One of the biggest
and increasingly common issues that Rosanne D’Ausilio, Ph.D, president, Human Technologies Global, is seeing and
treating with training is handling calls from customers who have been through automated self-service and now have to reach live agents. These individuals are upset and frustrated and want out-ofbox solutions to their problems now.

“The problem is that agents have often not been trained well on anger diffusion, at helping someone who is frustrated,”
explains D’Ausilio. “Agents often ask the wrong questions in those moments, they don’t empathize, they get deer in headlights moments. They therefore need training in these areas to turn customers around so they stay with the company.”

Maggie Klenke, a founding partner of The Call Center School, reports more demand for sales training than ever before.
Contact centers that have focused almost entirely on customer service or technical support are being asked to produce revenue through up-selling, cross-selling and add-ons such as maintenance agreements.

“Many contact centers have not recruited for sales skills and find themselves struggling to get agents to embrace the idea of selling,” says Klenke. “So we have added sales training options to our curriculum and will be adding more through this year.”

To succeed at sales agents must be welleducated on companies’ or in the case of business process outsourcing (BPO) firms their clients’ products and services including features, pricing and availability. This training is provided by internal sales managers or by BPO account or client services managers to contact center agents either directly or indirectly via teaching supervisors who then beehive the information to the teams.

Thomas L. Cardella Associates (TLC&A) is a leading BPO firm. The company’s client services managers have been with the firm since the start in 2007; they have at least 10 years’ experience at all levels in the contact center industry. All of them have been with the firm since the start.

“To be a successful client services manager you must have passion, a commitment to the clients willing to put in the
hours and do what it takes to meet their needs,” says TLC&A CEO and founder Tom Cardella. “That passion is imparted via the trainers and supervisors to the agents who then are motivated to excel at serving the clients’ customers.”

Ulysses Learning’s Vance is seeing companies increasingly focus on shortening time to competency to improve productivity. Most new hire training programs take six to eight weeks but firms to want to cut this down to four weeks.

“There’s been a lot of discussion about how we can reduce the human resources and push more of it to self-directed
self-paced learning experience, increasing agents’ knowledge so they can start right away with customers,” says Vance.

At the same time managers have had to make stronger business case for contact center training. Klenke is seeing more companies asking for demonstrations of training ROI. Managers want to see the attendees demonstrate the skills on the job and an analysis of the benefits that added to the bottom line. Theseanalyses require more “before” studies as well as management or projects and other activities that can assess the “after.”

Contact Center Products Training

When contact center products and services are installed, users: IT staff, coaches and managers and agents need to be trained on them to realize their full value to the enterprises. That training is provided by the suppliers and/or their reseller partners.

Verint (News - Alert) makes a wide range of workforce optimization (WFO) plus security intelligence products. To help customers
maximize their Impact 360 Workforce Optimization software investments, Verint Witness Actionable Solutions offers a full program via its Verint Impact Services.

Verint’s dedicated resources and programs are designed to guide the “customer in learning” with ways to best leverage
the WFO solutions. Customers have access to both self-paced and instructor-led courses, and also can leverage printed courseware materials, online course materials, and in-person/onsite training.

Verint offers Desktop Learning Libraries, which are comprised of a Web-based collection that enables training right on the customer’s desktop. The Desktop Learning Libraries include interactive training in a wide range of learning tracks. Each track contains several hours of material that students can master at their own pace, according to job requirements and goals.

The Desktop Learning Libraries include training on soft skills, such as listening and selling. Lessons can be manually
assigned to employees using a personalized home page within Impact 360, or – depending on the employee’s configuration – can be assigned based on evaluation scores and/or key performance indicators within an employee’s scorecard. At the end of each course, an assessment shows how well the topic and skills have been mastered. This assessment can be captured leveraging Impact 360 or other compatible learning management systems.

Because supervisors often rise through the ranks and lack formal training on coaching, Verint also offers Impact 360 High-Impact Coaching workshops. Taking place over three days they help supervisors gain the skills to coach their teams effectively. The sessions focus on best practices and skills for coaching staff effectively not only in the contact center, but throughout the enterprise. Supervisors learn to implement consistent coaching across the enterprise using individualized coaching and feedback plans and a customized
behavior tracking template.

from their firms, can effectively deliver strong results while cutting costs. Every skill being taught needs a “learn by doing” segment, she explains. Research also indicates that learning is enhanced when the content is situated in the context in which the learning is put to use (i.e. the contact center). Simulations
provide this type of contextual training.

The savings from this approach are considerable. One company reports that for every day of training replaced by e-learning and simulation it saves over $500 (not including any travel costs). She says a firm that trains 30 new agents per year and provides two weeks of new hire training finds that it can replace five days of that with e-learning/simulations it would save $375,000 a year.

“We can’t afford to deliver hours of training at a time,” says Jackson. “We need modules that succinctly communicate one skill area at a time and take five to 15 minutes to complete. To support this trend, a company must invest in some type of computer based e-learning. Fortunately this technology
is extremely affordable these days.”

E-learning tools are becoming more capable. Ulysses Learning has incorporated The Experience Builder Advanced Version 3.1, from Experience Builders into its CallMentor e-learning solution. It allows contact centers to develop and deploy customized goal-based training simulations more rapidly than ever, at even lower cost.

“Experience Builder Advanced 3.1 enables our clients to combine our exhaustively researched and validated learning content with their knowledge of their organization and specific objectives to create and deploy goal-based simulations for contact center training even faster and more affordable than ever,” says Vance.

Coaching and Managers

One key area that more firms need and are beginning to address is how to get their coaches focused on the right activities: developing their teams through effective and efficient coaching. Recent industry reports show coaching should be 70 percent of a manager’s time however, today most organizations report it around 50 percent, reports Vance.

“We can’t have our contact center managers be everything to everyone and still expect them to spend 70 percent of their time coaching,” says Vance. “We need people-developers because that’s what’s going to make our centers successful.”

Part of the issue lies with senior management adding administrative and other responsibilities onto managers. Yet part of the problem also lies with many managers’ lack of interest in coaching and training. Vance recommends that firms assign the responsibilities to ancillary groups, screen management applicants before promoting them into the roles, and train them on giving consistent constructive, prescriptive feedback.

“Make sure you have managers who have the desire to do the job of coaching, remove the roadblocks in the way of allowing managers to coach and give them the skills to do so,” recommends Vance. “Invest the time now to develop your people and there’s a rippling effect that will lighten your workload three months to six months down the river.”

There is a growing array of manager training programs. The RCCSP Professional Education Alliance, a horizontal industry
alliance of over 40 U.S. professional call center, help desk, IT support, telecom and service management training providers, has developed several new and updated training programs targeted at service and cost issues.

The RCCSP Alliance courses cover how to evaluate and employ emerging contact center technologies, maximizing
IVR, speech recognition, and self-service technology capabilities and apply powerful contact center engineering techniques to cut wait and increase throughput – with no additional staffing and financial management issues. They also instruct managers on fine-tuning workforce planning, scheduling, and staffing, and designing call center compensation,
pay and bonus plans.

“In peer networking sessions, we frequently hear from call center managers who have had their staffing cut to the bone and are left with skeletal teams to carry a workload beyond their capacities,” says RCCSP Alliance CEO Nina Kawalek. “Many feel powerless, weathering an avalanche of calls as best they can. Just surviving the workload is success. They need new, innovated solutions to meet dire circumstances. And, those skills can be found in the industry’s state-of-the-art training and certification programs.
The answers really are there.”

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The following companies participated in the preparation of this article:

Human Technologies Global
www.human-technologies.com

RCCSP Alliance
www.the-resource-center.com

ResponseLearning Corporation
www.responselearning.com

The Call Center School
www.thecallcenterschool.com

Thomas L. Cardella Associates
www.tlcassociates.com

Ulysses Learning
www.ulysseslearning.com

Verint
www.verint.com

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