CRMXchange

Productive Sourcing Strategies from 2009

Recently, FurstPerson published findings from our 2009 Contact Center Recruiting and Compensation Survey, which was completed by over a hundred contact center leaders from throughout North America. The benchmarks in this report allow contact centers to compare current practices against contact centers across the United States and Canada.  The results are intended to help guide best practices and enable contact centers to identify opportunities to improve their ability to find, hire, and keep the right talent. Five key findings from the survey were recently published in a research abstract. Over the next few postings, we will highlight several of these findings. 

Similar to the results from the 2008 survey, employee referrals produced the largest percentage of new hires (see Table) followed by national job boards, the company web site, and print ads. The least productive strategies were Radio/TV, community recruiting, college or other school recruiting, career services, and job fairs. Moreover, roughly 48% of participants indicated that they did not use these strategies.

As a case example, we recently discussed two strategies to help improve new hire recruiting. The organization profiled has focused on expanding its employee referral program and shifting internet based recruiting to better utilization of its company web site.

About the Survey Participants: A total of 101 contact center leaders from the United States and Canada completed the survey, although not all sections were completed. The majority of participants had direct profit and loss responsibility, with more than 65% holding a director or higher level position (e.g., VP, CEO, etc.). Approximately 87% of participants reported at least one year of experience, and approximately one-third reported five or more years of experience in contact center leadership roles.

How to Purchase Durable Call Center Cubicles

There are many considerations when purchasing call center furniture, in particular cubicles, which range from design, space utilization, ergonomics, durability, and warranty. The call center space needs to be warm and inviting, ergonomically friendly, and designed to last.

Specifically, durability is important because call center agents handle a steady stream of incoming phone calls and emails, meaning that they rarely have a chance to step away from their desk. Many centers are also multi-shift, 24/7 operations, and when cubicles face almost constant usage, the furniture needs to be durable. 

Below are ten tips to make sure that your furniture purchase looks good for years to come.

Lifetime Warranty
Purchase call center furniture with a Lifetime Warranty. A company that stands behind their product should be able to offer extended warranties. Also ask for customer testimonials, these will provide the level of comfort that you are seeking with your purchase.

System Requirements
Check to see if the furniture meets the ANSI/BIFMA Safety and Performance Standards.  ANSI is the American National Standards Institute, and BIFMA is the Business and Institutional Furniture Manufacturer’s Association.

Panel Material Selections
Laminate and melamine (vertical grade laminate) are nice options because they wipe down easily, and resist staining. If you choose to go with fabric panels on the cubicles for acoustics or tackability, ask to see an actual sample and look at the thickness and color. A quality fabric in a darker color will hold up better over time opposed to a fabric in a lighter color.

Ease of Panel Replacement
Choose a furniture system with easily replaceable panels, so if the panels are damaged intentionally or otherwise, it will be an easy fix. Easily replaceable panels mean that panels can be replaced without disrupting the entire system, and one panel can be replaced vs. an entire systems furniture wall.

Electronic Walk Through Capabilities
Select a furniture vendor that has the software and capability to provide not only CAD drawings but also the ability to provide electronic walk-throughs of the space. This is advanced technology can create shorter lead times, and leaves nothing to the imagination in terms of station design and space utilization. If a private telemarketing firm operates the call center, this technology can be used for them to present the space to their customers.

Electronic Project Records
Work with a company that keeps electronic records for all of your projects. Reconfigurations and additions down the line will be a simple process. Also if a repair needs to be made down the line, identifying the specific part will be easy, so replacement parts will be a quick fix.

Ergonomic Expertise
Consider a furniture vendor that is knowledgeable in ergonomics. Carpel-tunnel injuries/lost employee time is extremely expensive and can be minimized or prevented. A small investment in ergonomics can provide an extraordinary return on that investment.

Select Chairs with Arms
Consider chairs with arms when selecting seating for your center. In addition to the ergonomic considerations, chairs with arms make it a bit easier for agents to support themselves when moving in and out of their stations, as opposed to using the furniture or keyboard tray. The arms on the chairs will help to reduce wear on the furniture over time.

Call Center Experience
Choose to do business with a company that has years of experience in the call center market. Call center environments have specific design needs opposed to typical office environments. Work with people that have the market knowledge to help design a more functional space.

Cost Per Station Considerations
Sometimes a furniture purchasing decision is made based on hypothetically saving a few dollars per cubicle. Comfortable and quality furniture can impact employee satisfaction, worker comfort and productivity, and employee retention. These factors are a much greater expense than furniture. Other considerations, such as durability and extended warranties, will provide an additional cost savings down the line.
 

For eight straight quarters Sprint has improved its overall customer experience. The improvement in Sprint's customer satisfaction scores, according to third-party studies, is a result of introducing its best-ever handset lineup with Android phones HTC Hero and Samsung Moment, simplifying cell phone plans with Any Mobile, AnytimeSM and Everything Data, and offering 4G service in 27 markets.

 

All of these new products, plans and services create a complex and ever-changing customer service environment. Consequently, a key part of Sprint's success in improving critical measurements such as first call resolution of customer issues and calls per subscriber, has been the performance of its Care agents. The technology and training Sprint's Care agents receive play a big role in Sprint's industry-leading pace of customer service improvements. The goal is to ensure agents always have access to the training they need to continue improving interactions with Sprint customers.

As part of that effort, the company is partnering with Knowlagent, a leading provider of call center talent management solutions, to deploy technology that delivers training directly to call center agents' desktops during periods of time when there is excess agent availability between calls.

Sprint says that its agents continue to get better in areas that are critical to its business, such as first call resolution and customer satisfaction. The company has dramatically improved the productivity of its agents and the Knowlagent technology enables agents to promptly receive the information and training they need in order to respond to and better serve customers.

Since January, Sprint agents and supervisors have already completed more than 3,400 hours of training.

Read Sprint’s Press Release

Download Five Signs That Your Call Center Is Using Performance-Enhancing Methods

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association released a Guide to Disclosure in Social Media Marketing in an effort to help companies navigate the FTC’s new rules on endorsements and testimonials.  Manatt Partner and WOMMA General Counsel, Tony DiResta, and Gabe Martinez, also of Manatt, provided substantive review of the document, not only to ensure the accuracy of its content, but to make it as useful for compliance and legal departments as possible.

In December, the FTC’s Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising went into effect, which applied to blogs and other social media platforms that utilized word-of-mouth marketing.

Under the new rules, endorsers – including bloggers – are required to disclose any material connection they might have to the company whose products they are writing about.

WOMMA released its guide to help word-of-mouth marketers disclose their material connections.

The guide emphasizes the need for clear and prominent disclosures on all forms of media. Disclosure language should be easily understood and unambiguous, while the placement of disclosures should not be hidden deep in text or on the page, but easily viewed, the guide suggests.

In addition, the font of disclosures should be in a reasonable size and color that consumers can read.

The guide includes sample disclosures for blogs, online discussions, status updates (like on Facebook), microblogs (like Twitter), video- and photo-sharing Web sites, and podcasts.

For example, the model disclosure for product reviews suggests that bloggers write, “I received [product or sample] from [company name] to review” or “I was paid by [company name] to review.”

The guides further suggest that for product review blogs, bloggers create a “Disclosure and Relationships Statement” section that discloses how the blogger works with a company in accepting and reviewing its products, and post the statement prominently on the blog.

Why it matters: The FTC’s new requirements are a sea change for those using word-of-mouth marketing on social media platforms. WOMMA’s model disclosures offer helpful guidance for any marketers concerned about how to comply with the new requirements.

Barely a week after launching its social networking service, Buzz, Google's answer to MySpace and Facebook, faced a complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission, followed by a class-action lawsuit alleging privacy violations. Google Buzz was instantly attacked by critics.

As originally presented, Buzz was automatically added to all Gmail (Google’s e-mail system) users, and the program then turned users’ frequent e-mail users into followers.

The users’ information and followers were also made public by default, including their photos and information shared in other Google products, like the Picasa photo-sharing site.

In response, the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint with the FTC, requesting an investigation into whether any consumers were harmed, and seeking to have enrollment in Buzz be optional.

Buzz “violated user privacy expectations, diminished user privacy, contradicted Google’s own privacy policy, and may have also violated federal wiretap laws,” according to EPIC’s complaint.

An e-mail address book could reveal the names of a user’s doctor, lawyer, romantic partner, a journalist’s confidential sources, or other personal information, the complaint noted.

Just days later, a putative class action was filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, alleging that Buzz violated federal privacy law by disclosing to the public users’ e-mail contacts.

“An individual’s e-mail contacts may be a different group of people (for example, professional contacts) than the group with whom a user would want to be in a social network,” according to the complaint. “By implementing the Buzz program, Google forced upon its Gmail users Google’s own definition of a proper social network, all in an effort to jump-start Google’s entry into a new consumer market.”

Specifically, the suit alleges violations of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Stored Communications Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and public disclosure of private facts. Gmail had 31.2 million users in January, according to the complaint, which looks to include all those users whose accounts were automatically linked to Buzz.

Google issued a series of apologies on its blog and has twice tweaked its program since the initial rollout. Now new users are presented with a list of “suggested” followers.

“We’ve already made a few changes based on user feedback, and we have more improvements in the works,” said Victoria Katsarou, a spokeswoman for the company. “We look forward to hearing more suggestions and will continue to improve the Buzz experience.”

Despite the changes, both the FTC complaint and the class action claim that Google is not doing enough, saying the modifications do not go far enough to address privacy concerns.

Why it matters: Given the myriad of privacy issues Facebook has faced over the last few months, Google’s troubles with its new social networking program come as no surprise. Companies that engage in social networking or deal with any form of personal information should proceed with caution, as privacy has become a hot-button topic for both the FTC and consumers.

Agent Call Center Performance Optimization tools are a set of applications that seek to increase agent effectiveness, reduce workforce costs and improve service levels. These tools allow contact center managers to plan schedules, forecast agent requirements, measure agent performance, analyze results and improve outcomes.

Call Recording/Logging and Quality Monitoring (QM) software allows users to record, retrieve, analyze and improve agent/customer interactions.  These recordings are being increasingly used to capture intelligence that is of interest to within the contact center as well as the enterprise. This intelligence provides greater insight into customer behavior and the means of improving the customer experience.

Call Center Workforce Management (WFM) is a forecasting tool used to estimate call volume based on historical patterns. It uses data from ACD and CTI statistics servers to maintain and monitor appropriate levels of customer interaction processing by optimizing staffing schedules.

According to Frost and Sullivan, 2010 Agent Performance Optimization Market Key Trends the most striking development in the Agent Performance Optimization marketplace in the last couple of years has been the growth of enhanced applications that do more than simple recording and scheduling.  Some of these enhanced tools serve to fill in operational gaps in contact center management. One who uses basic call recording and QM may require a way to distribute the quality findings and make sure that problems found are addressed. Many  of these functions have been added as modules to standard QM and WFM products.

The tools that are most prominent in this category include Performance Management systems, Speech Analytics, Desktop Screen Analytics, and other kinds of Analytics for contact centers, and simulation/scenario building tools for planning. These tools, allow management to communicate the value of the contact center to decision-makers in the executive suite.

Analytics tools provide insight into the kinds of processes that can help extend customer longevity. Since performance and cost control is paramount in this environment, analytics that involve data, web and speech processing and event notification are gaining in importance across contact centers.

 

It is no surprise that a better customer experience provides enhanced revenue and profits. Customers that have good experiences with your company are not only more loyal, they will buy more. Unfortunately, companies are realizing that the experience they deliver fails to engage their customers in critically important ways.  In an era of multi-channel options, many customer service touchpoints are missing the mark. 

In most cases the highest recurring cost in a contact center is agent salaries. It was thought that with the advent of online customer self-service, salary costs would be reduced. However, achieving these savings has often proven to be elusive.  There is confusion as to what really works and what customers not only want but what they expect when they visit your home page. The key is to make it easy for a customer to do business with you, but what are the guidelines?

In today’s challenging environment, chat can play a unique role in online customer communications.  Using chat, companies are able to address the consumer’s questions and concerns immediately. This reduces consumer frustration and helps drive loyalty and sales. When used correctly, chat can also be a very cost-effective means of customer communication.   Chat transcripts, reporting and metrics can provide management with insights into the customer experience and with opportunities for continuous improvement of customer relations across channels.

In 2010, having a one-to-one connection with the customer is increasingly important.  A chat strategy, implemented correctly, has the ability to give your customers a positive experience that will bring them back again and again.

Natalie Petouhoff, Ph.D, Senior Analyst, Customer Service CRM for Forrester Research, in a live webcast, will discuss best practices for chat deployment, companies that should and should not consider chat, and the economic model for chat deployment.
 

Are you systems operating as efficiently as possible?  You have invested in coaching, training and quality monitoring programs, yet, your best agents still outperform your average agents by 20-50%, so your average handle time still hovers at its current number. The “ million dollar question”  is why.

The University of Southern Mississippi (USM) and the Mississippi Department of Economic Security(MDES) have established a contact center lab that is available to the industry for the purpose of equipment testing, beta testing, comparison testing and product review.  The results of the test become the property of the company or companies that provide the grant that funds the test.

On March 4th, Paul Stockford, President, Saddletree Research will give an update on data trends from the latest National Association of Call Centers (NACC) at The University of Southern Mississippi research survey.  He will also explore how agent desktop activity can provide data that can help identify exactly why your best agents are best so you can share these best practices for immediate performance gains. 

In the past, most technologies and programs have been not able to paint a complete and accurate picture of call center agent performance.  However, with newer technologies that provide information from the agent desktop, management can now uncover hidden productivity issues that drive handle time and hurt your bottom line. These technologies can now analyze data from agent desktops can also expose system problems that effect productivity.

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After 18 months of a grim economy, companies are emerging from one of the most volatile business environments in recent history. Some are still feeling the pinch, while others are optimistic about what this year will bring. Regardless, companies are – for the first time in a longwhile – looking ahead, exiting survival mode and focusing on how they are going to gain a competitive advantage in a post-recession environment.

This is especially true in the call center. In December 2009, Knowlagent conducted a survey to determine the impact of the last 18 months on call center performance and budgets. The survey was also intended to determine the areas where call centers will be focusing their improvements and investments in the coming year.

At a high level, the survey yielded two key observations:

-The call center is more important than ever to today’s enterprises. Roughly 72 percent of respondents said that the call center’s perceived value to the company increased in 2009.
-It appears that the days of cuttingstaff and slashing budgets are coming to a close.

The next 12 months will also  be in a state of flux for most enterprises. The ability to improve customer service and satisfaction levels at a minimal investment will be  instrumental in determining who will thrive in a post-recession business climate.

As call centers prioritize their budgets for 2010, they should focus their investments in areas with the most potential to eliminate process inefficiencies, improve agent management, while improving the customer experience and customer interaction. Managing the talent of the call center to effectively execute on the goals of the enterprise represents the largest opportunity for cost reductions and revenue improvement. The challenge will lie in finding a solution that reflects the call center’s greatest hurdles and can be as on-demand as the very nature of call volume. 

In an era where contact centers are often undermanned and under funded, managers need to get the job done with fewer resources despite ever increasing demands on their time.  For the year 2010, there are quite a few practical as well as actionable contact center trends and technologies that are helping managers save money and time.

Some of these “hot trends” include: 

 -Contact Center Analytics-The value of speech analytics, desktop analytics and customer feedback to lower the time spent doing QA while increasing its effectiveness

-Multi-Channel Contact Centers – Efficient deployment of voice, chat, email and self service channels can significantly lower overall contact rates and costs while increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. As more mobile device driven consumers are demanding these additional channels, contact centers must be equipped to respond to ensure their company’s success.

-Proactive Customer Care Initiatives – Low cost, automated outbound IVR, email and SMS can be used to head off customer issues before they become a problem. Proactive customer service changes the cost dynamics while greatly improving service.

-Integrated Tools For Quality Management – There is a growing need for integrated, efficient and cost-effective quality management tools that support the needs of contact center managers and supervisors as they work to consistently provide an outstanding customer experience. Minor improvements in efficiency through tools can add up to less headaches and lower costs to support already overworked managers.

Analyst Donna Fluss, DMG Consulting will present a live webcast on these issues.  She welcomes anyone that is interested in this topic to attend.

The contact center is rich with customer data, but finding and analyzing the information needed within these captured conversations can be very difficult. With speech analytics technology, companies can now mine recorded customer interactions to help surface the intelligence essential for building effective customer strategies.  It can help pinpoint trends and opportunities, identify strengths and weaknesses with processes and products, and understand how your offerings are perceived by the marketplace.

Used properly speech analytics can not only help to identify at risk customers but can also provide organizations with greater insight into a variety of process issues.  According to Roman Trebon, Business Review Manager at Elavon, within the first three months, speech analytics helped his company to save nearly 600 at-risk accounts—about $1.7 million in revenue.   Mr. Trebon was so pleased with the results he is going to share his thoughts and best practices in a live event on February 25th.
 

Twenty years ago, the contact center industry was greatly improved through the application of a mathematical modeling tool now commonly known as  contact center workforce management. We found that computers and mathematics could do a better job of determining agent schedules than we could do by hand or using a spreadsheet. It had long been thought that this modeling technology has run its course and that we have captured all of those contact center workforce management benefits. But we’re not done yet.

While all of these mathematical models are interesting, what is more interesting is what you can do with these technologies.  Contact center operations that have improved their planning technologies have the ability to answer quickly and optimally, a host of critical real-world business questions such as:

--How do I best manage my variable shrinkage?
--How do I plan, given my forecasts are completely unstable?
--Given the seasonality of call volumes, handle times, sick time, and attrition, when and which groups should we hire into?
--If  my handle times or volumes continue to change, what does that do to my staffing requirements, and more importantly, my hiring/overtime/undertime/variable shrinkage plans?

It has now been proven that applying algorithmic technologies, similar to those deployed twenty years ago to strategic planning, can yield significant staff savings yet again.  Bay Bridge Decision Technologies is holding an open webcast to discuss how WFM technologies can be applied to strategic planning.

Consumers are increasingly active users of social media sites, and they also view such sites as purveyors of important and trusted information on companies, products and brands in
which they are interested.  Companies that recognize, embrace and integrate  social CRM and social media strategy  into their customer facing operations for marketing, sales and service are better positioned to simultaneously improve their consumer experience while reducing the cost of marketing, selling and delivering service.

From a marketing and sales perspective, companies should embrace the same social media sites their customers use, and use those sites to both create dialogues, get customer feedback, assist with customers with their purchase decisions, and mine sites for information on what customers are saying about the company and its products. New tools that enable the amalgamation and analysis of a wider range of quantitative and qualitative data will be a key enabler in this regard.

Accenture's new white paper "Social CRM: The New Frontier of Marketing, Sales and Service" discusses how a comprehensive social media strategy presents opportunities to enhance customer interaction, connect more tightly with the customer. 

An Illinois judge dismissed a defamation lawsuit brought by a landlord over a tenant’s Twitter post.

Apparently unhappy with her lodging, Amanda Bonnen took to her Twitter account and wrote “Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay.”

In reply, her landlord filed suit. Despite the fact that Bonnen’s Twitter account had only 20 followers, the landlord claimed that its reputation had been greatly injured and sought $50,000 in damages.

Bonnen filed a motion to dismiss, arguing that her tweet was an opinion and not a factual assertion. She claimed that based on her other tweets – such as “To run or not to run? The temp says 93. I might die out there,” and “A dog smaller than a pigeon tried to attack me this morning” – the post about her landlord “exists within a context of random and imprecise hyperbolic comments void of explanation.”

Judge Diane Larsen agreed, dismissing the suit, ruling that Bonnen’s tweet was nonactionable as a matter of law.

To read the complaint, click here.

To read the court’s opinion dismissing the suit, click here.

Why it matters: The dismissal of the suit in the early stages shows that a single blog post or tweet doesn’t necessarily result in a viable lawsuit. Social media users should, however, remain cautious of their online commentary.

The integration of self speech service applications into an IVR system has become the norm rather than the exception in today’s environment primarily due to the cost saving and the efficiencies they are generating for companies and the high level of customer satisfaction they are achieving for their customers.  Daniel Hong, Lead Analyst at Ovum, believes that the next hot area for these applications promises to provide us with a bevy of significant improvements which should continue to improve cost savings and the level of customer satisfaction.

According to Hong, the ability to integrate relevant data from various sources such as enterprise data, interaction history, and contextual data  within the enterprise, called “Personalization” or “Personalized IVR” by some vendors, promises significant benefits for the companies using it for applications such as  intelligent call routing, order status, and billing.  Selecting an integration framework based on factors such as quality of service, database vendor compatibility, data orchestration needs, and the velocity of data changes are keys to creating a personalized IVR.    Daniel will be presenting his findings and introducing a personalized IVR model that can be used as a framework for creating intelligent applications in the in the upcoming webcast ”Personalized  IVR-Turning Information into Intelligence” to be held at 1pm eastern on February 11^th at http://www.crmxchange.com/webcast/personal_IVR/voxifyfeb10.asp  

A Q3 2009 survey asked 107 enterprise, contact center and IT executives and decision-makers from around the globe to identify their top goals and priorities for 2010. Surprisingly voice- speech self-service solutions (also known as interactive voice response systems or IVRs) are expected to play a key role in helping enterprises of all sizes achieve their 2010 objectives.

The top 2010 goal for enterprise and contact center executives is improving customer service, thus increasing customer satisfaction.  The second most important goal for enterprise executives is cutting operating costs; this is similar to the number two goal for contact center leaders, which is to improve productivity. Companies where contact center VPs and leaders have aligned their top goals with those of the executive suite are much more likely to succeed in retaining and enhancing customer relationships.

The DMG benchmark study shows that IT has its own priorities; IT’s top goals for 2010 are to meet the needs of business customers and to keep the enterprise’s technology and applications running at optimal levels. This shows that IT organizations are entering 2010 with a strong appreciation of the need to support their business clients’ goals and objectives. It’s disappointing that IT does not make an effort to understand their customers’ goals, as this would help organizations to meet them better on an ongoing basis. This goal misalignment is the primary reason for the lack of trust between IT and contact centers.

Managing and maximizing customer relationships for longevity and profitability have been
major enterprise objectives for the past several years. Companies collect and analyze mountains of data on customer preferences and behavior with the goal of fine-tuning products, services and marketing campaigns to specific customer needs, and better understanding the drivers for customer loyalty.

The contact center is an important source of customer information as well as revenue generation, and a significant contributor to the quest for greater customer intelligence. Advances in technology that help unearth intelligence buried within recorded interactions have paved the way for a change in the way that an enterprise views the core objective of its contact center. In addition to a means of providing excellent customer service, the contact center is the place where customers express their feelings to the company.  The contact center can now be a significant source of current and predictive customer intelligence.

Speech analytics products let us enhance and improve upon the customer experience, thereby influencing customer retention rates. Speech analytics products can offer enterprises the ability to conduct an effective correlative analysis, thereby addressing the core of any customer service issues, and ensuring faster problem resolution. Companies with streamlined customer-facing business processes are able to offer a differentiated customer service, a source of competitive advantage in the current competitive marketplace.

Frost and Sullivan projects growth rates in excess of 100% over the next several years for speech analytics solutions, based on the multiple benefits that these solutions help enterprises realize. The Frost & Sullivan white paper, Mining the Contact Center for Customer Intelligence,  looks at the significance of speech analytics products as solutions to gather greater customer intelligence, drive enhanced customer experiences and streamline customer-facing business processes to deliver more cost-effective service differentiation.  The paper also highlights some of the benefits that successful speech analytics