Sometimes its worth a look at whats been done wrong if youre trying to figure out what to do right.

If youre trying to coach your call center people up, look at some examples of what Niels Kjellerup a few years ago called Galley Slave Call Center practices:

The number one prize for brain dead application of this principle goes to Pacific Bell which under much fanfare in 1995 declared that by forbidding the directory inquiry reps to say good morning & good bye and instead using hi & bye productivity gains would amount to $22 million a year.

As Kjellerup says, only a bookkeeper with little common sense and absolutely no call center experience could believe such projections and the fact that senior management bought into the idea simply underlines how far removed the call center is from the mainstream business.

The constant pressure to answer more calls with less people has given us the Age of the battery call center, Kjellerup says. Vendors promise desperate call center managers that by implementing this IVR system or that CTI software call-lengths can be reduced by two seconds on average, which adds up to a productivity gain of 15% yearly, based on brain dead projections of current call figures.

The late 90s were a notoriously poor time for call centers. At the worst among the galley slave call centers, Kjellerup says, were airline reservations, credit card customer service and telcos not that those are the three top ones today.

What went wrong? The call center has gone off purpose, or more likely never worked it out. Remember youre there to give the customer access to the organisation, Kjellerup says. A good call handling results in more business or reduced cost. So what are you doing measuring the results of the call center in quantitative terms rather than in outcomes?

Unless youre measuring what youre doing in terms of results, that is quality of communication, then why are you doing it at all? Sure you need some traffic measures to facilitate staffing and rostering. But that doesnt make these operational figures the product of the call center, unless youre a call producing factory, in which case the best way to handle the productivity issue is to instruct the reps to hang up on any call duration over 45 seconds. Or maybe even better, have the ACD do it automatically.

The real potential for productivity gains lies with your people, the reps that actually talk to the customers, Kjellerup stresses: Its called motivation. Give people a reason to do better, to bring more of their intellectual powers to work. If instead of bringing 20% of themselves they decide the job is fun, interesting and fulfilling and bring 40% of their potential. Thats a 100% productivity increase and cost nothing in terms of monetary investment.

It does cost a lot in terms of management time and effort creating a coaching culture call center. But at least the call center will have a future.

A proper coaching call center in Kjellerups estimation is a call center where everybody from the manager to newest representative is actively working to improve communication, relationship & sales skills to achieve better call outcomes.

Coaching means to help achieve or to help improve towards a known goal. The key word here is help. In a coaching culture it becomes natural to help others, rather than demonstrate own superiority. Everybody must learn to become a coach and must learn how to coach and what to coach.

Here are some (the full list is long) of the skills most needed to be coached and trained :

• How to control a conversation, so it doesnt drag on needlessly.
• How to identify the needs of the caller.
• How to handle angry callers.
• How to project the intention to help the caller.
• How to be honest with the caller.
• How to pay attention to every caller .. and not let your mind wander.
• How to be outcome focused without being pushy or dominating

Training & coaching, he notes, is different from educating. Educating is telling or teaching the rep what to do. Training is helping the rep to do it by overcoming own barriers to communicating and achieving call outcomes.

And finally, motivating is not making others do what you want them to do, because you want it, but making them do what you want them to do, because they want it. Its helping others find the starter button to their own generator, rather than continually needing to be hot-wired by your generator.

David Sims is contributing editor and CRM Alert columnist for TMCnet.