Better ways to weather a worsening economy: What do high performing contact centres need to do?
Very soon, we’ll all have to learn to navigate some very stormy economic conditions. Contact centre managers will have do do more with less; and it’ll be a tough job finding ways to help their staff and customers overcome three difficult challenges:
· A steep rise in business costs
· A looming recession
· A worsening cost of living crisis
Brands will find it challenging to create and maintain high performing contact centres, and may need to weather the storm by focusing on:
· Applying behavioural science to improve team performance
· Adapting to meet the needs of a younger workforce
· Reviewing the KPIs they use to monitor their business success
· Using new technology wisely
Behavioural science used to be called social psychology and is essentially the study of how people actually behave rather than how they claim to behave.
Researchers have been working in this field since the 1890s so there are thousands of experiments that reveal ways you can manage your team more effectively.
It’s a broad field but can be separated into four key principles:
· Make it social
· Make it attractive
· Make it easy
· Make it timely
Each principle is based on an idea, with an experiment whose results prove that idea. Each principle can then be applied in practical ways to improve the way your team thinks and works in a contact centre setting.
Make it social is probably one of the most straightforward of the ideas and one that’s most regularly applied in business. When psychologists talk about making it social they’re not talking about social media; this isn’t about Facebook or Twitter. It’s about a long-standing idea called social proof.
That’s the idea that when people make decisions about how to behave, wherever that might be, they often look at what others are doing first rather than behave as individuals. And it’s not just an idea: there’s lots of evidence to back it up.
For example, in 2008 a study was conducted by Kees Keizer from the university of Greningen in the Netherlands. He found an alley where lots of people parked their bicycles; he put flyers onto the bicycles’ handlebars with elastic bands and sprayed graffiti onto the walls. He threw litter on the ground.
Keizer hid around the corner and monitored the number of people who threw the flyers from their bikes onto the ground. 69% of people coming back to their bikes did exactly that. On another occasion, Keizer covered the graffiti and picked up the litter then again monitored the number of flyers thrown on the ground. When he did this, creating the impression that most people didn’t litter, only 33% of people coming back to their bikes threw the flyer on the ground.
The amount of littering doubled, depending on whether people thought it was a common or rare behaviour.
This is the idea of social proof. We are a herd species. We are a social animal. We are deeply influenced by what we think others are doing.
If you can make a behaviour appear like it’s commonplace, it will become more appealing and more people are likely to do it.
Think about the behaviours you want to encourage in your team, then make them look as if they already frequently occur. Draw attention to the positives, rather than the negatives.
If you emphasise that lots of people are behaving in the wrong way (perhaps they’re not filling in their timesheets or expenses on time) you’ll remove the sense of transgression and make that behaviour more likely to occur.
Make sure the behaviours you want to encourage seem commonplace and the behaviours you want to discourage seem rare.
An experiment was conducted by a psychologist called Chip Heath in 1999, when he asked a large group of bank employees what motivated them at work. Then he asked them what he thought others would say to the same questions.
He gave everyone a list of eight key factors that influence job satisfaction. The first half of the list was made up of extrinsic motivations (e.g. pay, benefits etc) and the second half of intrinsic ones (e.g. developing skills, learning new things).
· Quality of benefits
· Amount of pay
Job security
· A good schedule
Make it attractive is a principle based on an idea that employees are motivated to perform better by how they react emotionally to a situation than how they evaluate it rationally. Lots of experiments have been done to illustrate how this idea can be used in business.
· Praise from manager
· Helping customers
Learning new things
· Developing skills
As you can see, there’s a clear pattern: people think others are much more motivated by pay and schedules and much less motivated by things like learning new skills etc. Employees’ predictions and reality were completely out of kilter in Heath’s experiment.
He argued that this is a repeated, regular and problematic mistake: that we underestimate how much others are motivated by the same things we are.
Companies will put too much emphasis on pay and benefits and too little on making jobs challenging, allowing people to learn new things, helping people see the benefit and purpose of their role.
There’s an opportunity at most companies to rectify this imbalance.
Heath shows lots of ways to boost employees’ sense of worthwhile: one of his studies amongst call centre workers to was show them the value of their job. He talked to employees of a university call centre whose task was to ring up alumni to ask for donations. He introduced them to people who had benefitted from these donations: students from poor backgrounds who had been able to go to the university as a result of previous graduates’ generosity.
Heath showed that by meeting these beneficiaries, the call centre staff’s motivation was boosted. It led to a long term increase in donations.
Think about the imbalance between perception and reality: about spending more time explaining intrinsic benefits of the job to employees – how they can learn new skills and accomplish something worthwhile. You’ll be tapping into genuine motivations –not what we think motivates them.
Make it easy is a principle which draws on the work of Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel prize for economics in 2002. He is a very illustrious behavioural scientist and when he was recently asked what the most important thing he’d learned during his 50-year career, he answered “Make it easy”.
If you want to change the behaviour of others, don’t make the mistake of thinking the way to do it is to motivate them to want to change. Of course that’s important, but the most important thing is to make the behaviour you want to change as easy as possible.
Two American psychologists, Bergman and Rogers, ran an interesting experiment with the Department of Education in 2017. It was based on a new service which texted parents advice about how to encourage their children to work harder. But the parents had to sign up to use the service.
The psychologists launched this service three ways, to three groups of parents.
The first group were sent a text explaining why the service was amazing, with a link at the bottom which took them to a webform. They had to complete their details to be enrolled and took about 60 seconds to do. 1% enrolled.
Next group were sent the same text with the same information, but with a message prompting them to enrol by texting back the message ‘start’. This only took 15 seconds to do. There was a huge change: this time, 8% of people enrolled.
Next group were sent the same text with the same information, but with a message that asked them to text back the message ‘stop’ if they didn’t want to be enrolled. This only took 15 seconds to do. 97% of people enrolled.
This resulted in a 96% variance in the signup rates: as Daniel Khaneman argues, even small barriers – or friction – can have a disproportionate effect on people’s behaviour.
That was just the first part of the experiment. Then came the clever bit.
Bergman and Rogers then recruited experts in education and asked them to guess what they thought the three sign up rates would be for the three different enrolment methods.
The experts knew that barriers would put parents off; so they got the direction of change right, but were wildly wrong about the scale of the impact.
They guessed that 39% would sign up to the first ‘standard’ approach, 44% to the second ‘simplified’ approach and 66% for the ‘auto-enrolment’, guessing a 27% change in behaviour based on the levels of friction. The experts massively underestimated the importance of friction, thinking motivation would be a much more important factor for parents.
If you want your staff to, say, be more environmentally-aware and photocopy fewer things, you might inform the staff about how paper usage creates CO2 and its environmental damage; and this might have a small effect.
But most studies show that if you want to change people’s behaviour, you need to make using the photocopier harder than not using it. Set it to print double sided, make users have to enter a code… these small barriers will have a disproportionate effect.
If you want to encourage a behaviour, don’t think of how to motivate staff, think about the small barriers that are stopping them behaving the way you want them to. Even inconsequential hurdles can have a disproportionate effect on behaviour.
Make it timely is based on the idea that the same message can have a markedly different effect depending on when people hear it. This is because a lot of people’s behaviour at work is habitual. We do the same things again and again. In a way, this is a sensible tactic: we have so many decisions to make in life, if we considered what the best thing to do was in every situation, we’d grind to a halt with the sheer effort.
So if we face a situation we’re familiar with, we’ll repeat what we did last time. Ideal if your staff are behaving the way that you want: but problematic if you want to change their behaviour – and how do you achieve that if they’re not even weighing up the merits of what they’re doing?
Psychologists have identified predictable moments when these habitual behaviours are weakened; one example is based on the work of psychologist Katherine Milkman who came up with an idea called ‘The fresh start effect’.
Her argument is that one of the biggest drivers to human behaviour is the desire to be consistent; and that when we enter new time periods our link with our past self is weakened and we become more open to change.
And she proved it. In her initial study she looked at volumes of Google searches for things like ‘quit smoking, start dieting’. She looked at gym attendance and registration data – an each set of data she looked at revealed a set pattern: at the beginning of new time periods, people were more likely to start diets, to quit smoking, to change their behaviour. So whether it was the start of the year, week, month, or after a holiday or a birthday, these were all moments where people were more open to change.
This was proved again in the commercial world, when Spotify’s ‘Discover Weekly’ playlists were launched. These use subscribers’ listening history to suggest songs they haven’t listened to before. But when Spotify first launched it it was a complete flop; it had been launched midweek. Then Spotify discovered ‘the fresh start effect’ (and Milkman’s work) and decided to relaunch the playlist on a Monday. It was only then that ‘Discover Weekly’ took off and became hugely popular.
If you want to introduce a programme to change your employees’ behaviour, don’t do it at a random time. Do it at the beginning of the year, or the first of the month, on a Monday or when people have just come back from holidays.
Or when a person has just joined the company: this represents a big change for them and a time when they’ll be open to changing their behaviour in broader ways. Or when someone has come back from maternity leave, just been promoted or just moved office: these are all moments when habits become destabilised and people are more open to changing their behaviour.
A vital element in building a successful, high performing contact centre is attracting the right young people: recruiting, training and retaining them may require a different approach and some flexibility.
Don’t necessarily seek employees with previous experience
It’s helpful to remember that you can teach IT skills; what you can’t teach is putting the customer first, resilience, work ethic and understanding how to interact with other people. Perhaps a young person has only done bar work before: but perhaps that experience makes them exactly the kind of person you’re looking for!
Young people have a highly developed sense of social conscience
Young people’s needs as employees are quite different to older people’s; they are aware of the issues that affect mental health and the support they need. With 45% of advisors working from home, it’s worth thinking about whether a young employee is ready for this kind of isolation: perhaps they need to get comfortable working in the office before returning to a hybrid working environment.
Think about how young people view your corporate culture
If you want to recruit young people, think about how your business might look to them. Whilst some new employees might be comfortable with a smart dress code, others might not: in the current economic climate, do you really want to lose a great prospect because they might not be able to afford a new, smart wardrobe for work?
Show them the future
Where could your young employees go from here? What are their future opportunities with your company? What could they achieve with the skills you’re going to teach them? Show them!
Involve and invest in your young people
Sit with your new young advisors; make them part of your brand; show them how important they are to your business and the difference they are making; make them feel involved. Do this and your advisors’ quality scores, key metrics and employee satisfaction will all increase.
Contact centres are driven by a wealth of statistics. But how many of them actually help make your business better for the customer?
Wallboards are a traditional feature of the call centre. But do you need them? Do your advisors really need that kind of pressure – and does it improve the customer’s experience? After all, if your business is ‘customer first’, why does it matter how long your advisors’ calls are and how long the queue is?
On the other hand, does handling time indicate that your advisors might need support or extra training?
Statistics are there to improve, help and support, but shouldn’t drive your operation. Make sure your KPIs aren’t punitive or pointless and that they are working as a tool to achieve your strategic goals.
Bots now play an integral role in high performing contact centres, but is their effect always beneficial? And if not, what is the answer?
Like all new technology, opinions are mixed about bots. In some scenarios, they work amazingly well and offer a great level of support to advisors. In others, they barely work at all… meaning a human advisor may need to step in with little notice.
As a result, customer confidence in them isn’t always great: so it pays to carefully consider how well your bots are designed and whether they are being used in the right way, before they are put to work.
If you use them – should you admit it?
How do customers feel if they discover what they thought was a human helping them is, in fact, a bot? Is it wrong to allow bots to mimic humans – or doesn’t it matter how human an interaction feels, as long as the customer gets the resolution they need?
It requires careful thought. If the bot fails, perhaps you feel it would be better that the customer knows all along that they are dealing with one. And it’s always easier to blame technology than a colleague when something goes wrong!
Bots, AI, the upcoming metaverse… technology is developing far faster than the culture of contact centres it’s designed for. Companies are naturally slow to adopt the latest technologies, so how do you strike the balance between being cutting edge and retaining a human face for your business?
There are a number of technologies out there already to help and advise agents, from bots that reduce the number of boring and repetitive tasks to applications like Next Best Action that prompt advisors through a journey.
But you need to focus on the problems customers – and advisors – need solving, rather than the technology itself.
Technology needs to be an enabler: exactly the right application in exactly the right environments. That means frictionless experiences for both advisors and customers.
Contributing experts:
Nerys Corfield – Director, Injection
Leigh Hopwood – CEO, CCMA (Call Centre Management Association)
Agam Kohli – Director, CX Solutions Engineering UK & Ireland, Odigo
Richard Shotton – Founder, Astrogen
