THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MAGAZINE ISSUE 1 • 2014
5 tips for a winnng rewards program ❯❯How to improve contact centre performance ❯❯Case study: Star Telecom
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Hardware Solutions
Listen up! Jabra unveils new headset purpose-built for the next-generation contact center professional
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abra, a leading manufacturer of innovative audio solutions, today announced the answer to the contact center of tomorrow – the Jabra BIZTM 2300. Completely rethinking the role of the headset in the contact center, Jabra is launching the Jabra BIZ 2300 as a direct response to address the needs of the evolving contact center landscape.
Developed with the contact center agent in mind Today contact centers play an increasingly important role as the customer’s first point of contact, and companies are realizing their contact center agents are in essence their brand ambassadors. With agents on the frontline, it is paramount that each call is handled as professionally as possible with crystal-clear sound and minimal to no background noise. “We believe that contact center agents are key contributors in safeguarding brand perception, and this will only increase in the future,” said Holger Reisinger, Jabra Vice President of Marketing, Products and Alliances. “With the Jabra BIZ 2300 we accepted the challenge of developing a superior audio device for these brand ambassadors with best-in-class sound performance, built-to-last durability and exceptional comfort.” With up to 50 percent better noise cancelation and a 20 percent lighter form factor compared to competitors, Kevlar ® cords and a virtually unbreakable boom arm for durability, the Jabra BIZ 2300 comes out on top with all key call center headset parameters.
Jabra BIZ 2300 benefits include: • Unprecedented noise cancellation microphone: Best-inclass noise-cancellation microphones reduce unwanted background noise and are ideal in crowded open office environments. • Agent comfort: Lightweight form factor and ergonomic design make the BIZ 2300 comfortable for extended wear. • Built contact-center tough: With a 360° break-proof boom arm and a Kevlar®-reinforced cord, the Jabra BIZ 2300 is built to withstand -the long hours of usage by high-performing contact center agents. • Optimized for speech analytics: The Jabra BIZ 2300 maximizes an organization’s speech analytics investment by ensuring accurate recognition of key words and phrases. An Air Shock microphone designed aerodynamically, with small perforations reduces the penetration of air shocks to the device increasing speech intelligibility • Mass deployment: The Jabra BIZ 2300 (USB version) is fully supported by Jabra Xpress, the mass deployment tool by Jabra that makes remote configuration and deployment simple and intuitive. Issue 1 • 2014
“What strikes me most about the new Jabra BIZ 2300 is it offers features typically found only in more expensive, higher-end headsets, such as Kevlar cords and the 360 boom arm,” said Sheila McGeeSmith, industry analyst and president, McGee-Smith Analytics. “Agents wear headsets for many hours a day, and these features add increased comfort and durability.”
A collaborative development effort To ensure that the Jabra BIZ 2300 meets all the demands of the modern contact center, Jabra has developed the headset in close collaboration with customers and strategic alliance partners such as Avaya, a global leader in business communication. “Today, companies like Avaya need to execute to perfection at all customer touch-points, with a crisp and clear voice,” said Linda Hartig, Avaya VP of Global Support Services. “Our Services Desk in Westminster, Colorado has piloted the Jabra BIZ 2300 and it is spot on in terms of delivering that superior sound quality Avaya and our customers expect.” contact management | 3
Rewards & Recognition
5 tips for a winning
rewards program Top ways to utilize recognition and rewards in the call center
By R Scott Russell
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heir days are different from every other worker or executive at the company. While exciting, rewarding and lucrative – it is often brutal – because front line call center employees spend every part of their day working in anonymity. They are the keepers of the “people relations” that most of the organization will never be exposed to. From responding to customer complaints to processing complicated transactions to answering inventory questions to loss and theft concerns to tactfully cutting short the happy effusive customer in order to move on to the next call and sale – workers in the call center are critical to the supply chain because if the customers stop coming – the company stops running. While every day brings news customer surprises - good and bad – what should be consistent and positive each and every day is how our Managers and Supervisors communicate with their teams. Meaningful and welldesigned employee recognition and rewards are critical for a well-run center. When designing a successful recognition program, it is important to integrate five important criteria: Sincerity, Timeliness, Meaning and Understanding, and of course… Fun! Below are a few concepts which all 5 of these criteria can be demonstrated and embraced.
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1. Make recognition matter Reward and recognition programs must connect the needs and expectations of the workforce with the company’s overall goals and strategies. In a payfor-performance environment this is even more critical to the program’s success. Make sure your programs have a balanced approach to ensure the employees are providing first class customer satisfaction while achieving the highest level of operational efficiency. The program should also be designed to decrease absenteeism and manage schedule adherence. The balanced program will first look at multi-tiered approaches to recognition and reward the behaviors that your company has defined as pertinent to the overall success of the center. Most programs will have qualifiers to ensure that eligible employees are the ones being recognized. Examples of some target metrics in the call center environment are:
Average Handle Time, Average Calls Per Day, and First Call Resolution. If customer loyalty is a key mission of the company – then create employee recognition that identifies this behavior. Basically, tie the recognition to the mission and values of the organization but down to the call center level. 2. On the spot vs. point accumulation Call center work is immediate work which is why daily rewards blended with weekly/monthly are so influential. Create programs that recognize your top performers since they are the ones bringing in the most return, however, don’t forget to build a most improved component to reward those that exist in the middle of the success chain and need that extra ignition to cross over into best in class category. You make the most movement with your middle 30% then you do with the top 10%. If you only have a program the Issue 1
Rewards & Recognition recognizes the top performers then you will have left the majority of your workforce existing in an area of no recognition which will lead to dissatisfaction. A combination of on the spot recognition such as a “Caught In The Act” or “Going Beyond The Call” award is perfect for driving daily performance and behaviors. For more long term results you will need a point based or monetary accumulation reward program for employees to strive for on a weekly, monthly basis. 3. Peer-to-peer recognition While many organizations believe instituting peer to peer will fail because of competitive environments – not so with call centers because the tasks are not based on interactions with each other but with individual external contacts every time. Allowing employees to thank each other across work groups and channels is essential to the overall positive attitude of the center. By encouraging peer to peer recognition you are helping to drive overall employee satisfaction. 4. Employee or team of the day/week/month These programs motivate the workers to stay engaged, positive and take initiative – but also serve to decrease absenteeism and manage schedule adherence. You can’t manage a call center without having people in their seats. Challenge your front line leaders to recognize their employees in different ways and at different times for their achievements. Team building and team recognition is such an important part of success that it can’t be ignored. You need strong teams in a call center
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and some healthy competition will help you achieve results. 5. Shout it out Make sure everyone knows. It will be a big boost for the employees and reminds the entire department that working hard, smart and moving numbers pays off. Communication is such a critical component of any recognition and can be the determining factor whether recognition is working or not. It isn’t recognition if no one knows about it. That being said, the communication channel should reflect the level of recognition. The bigger the achievement the bigger the audience…but all recognition deserves proper communication. Note that it’s a great idea to find out about your employees and make sure that they are aware of how their achievements will be communicated. Nothing worse than recognizing someone and preparing to take their photo and call them in front of the center only to find out they don’t like pictures taken of themselves or group recognition.
Across every business, effective employee recognition enhances employee motivation and satisfaction, increases employee productivity, and contributes to improved organizational performance. Design, develop and implement programs that will capture and enhance your company’s professionalism, quality, attendance, effectiveness and efficiency. When employee recognition and reward programs are done well – the real reward is that satisfaction will be felt from shareholders to customers to employees to everyone who does business with your company. Good luck! R Scott Russell is the Education Director Chair for Recognition Professionals International www.Recognition.org, the only industry organization solely dedicated to educating, improving and advancing employee recognition and rewards in the workforce. He can be reached by email at info@recognition. org or on Twitter @RPITweets.
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Feature
Tips for improving contact center performance
By Matt McConnell
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ntraday management challenges – all contact centers have them. Call volume unexpectedly fluctuates outside of what was forecasted, and management must decide to protect service levels by overstaffing or understaffing to cut costs. Agents’ skill sets are varied and constantly changing, often leaving agents with newly acquired skills waiting to be assigned to the right queues. And trends that can negatively affect service levels and performance metrics are identified and communicated too late to make a difference. These types of inefficiencies can damage the customer experience. So, how do contact center leaders handle common intraday management challenges to ultimately improve productivity, strengthen performance, and positively impact overall customer service? In a recent industry poll, we asked more than 100 contact center professionals about their intraday management challenges – specifically around fluctuating 6 | contact management
intraday staffing needs, queue management and real-time notifications. Here’s what they had to say about their biggest challenges:
Addressing fluctuating staffing needs Not only do staffing inefficiencies financially hurt your business, but they can also frustrate agents if call volume is low but management is slow to approve an early release time. Or they can have a negative effect on service levels if call volume is high and you need staff to quickly agree to work overtime. But when it comes to handling fluctuating call volumes during a shift, most contact centers
still use manual processes that are hugely ineffective. Of those contact center professionals polled, more than half said they manage intraday staffing through a manual process, or not at all, resulting in significant lag time. Labor costs increase as a result, and there are not always enough agents on the floor to meet customer demands.
Managing queue capacity and agent competency Moving agents from queue to queue based on changes in skills and fluctuating workload across a multi-channel center is time Issue 1 • 2014
Feature consuming for workforce management professionals and can have dire consequences if done incorrectly. If agents are underperforming but continue handling customer inquiries on that particular queue, customers will receive substandard service until the agent is removed from that queue. This shifting is largely left to manual intervention to balance resources and service levels. Of those contact center professionals polled, 27 percent said queue management is still a manual process in their organizations.
Being proactive about unique business needs Identifying trends that impact service levels and performance metrics in a timely manner can be challenging for most contact center management. Most centers use manual, time-consuming processes to manage, monitor and alert the right people if a call goes too long or a queue is not staffed. Often, by the time an issue has been identified and supervisors alerted, the damage has already been done. Of the contact center leaders polled, only 13 percent said they rely on technology alone when monitoring call center conditions, leaving significant room for improvement in responding quickly and consistently when it matters most.
Squeezing in performance boosting activities Finally, agents have to be equipped with the knowledge and information they need to effectively handle customer inquiries and provide a consistent customer experience. But finding the time to provide agents with the training and coaching they need to do their jobs well is a major challenge in the contact center. Of those surveyed, 58 percent of workforce management professionals said intraday scheduling is something that needs improvement in their organizations. Though time for training seems scarce, the average agent spends a significant amount of time – roughly 11 percent of each day – sitting idle at their desk, waiting for the next call. Unfortunately, this time comes in twominute intervals and is largely unproductive, but there is a way to aggregate this available time by automating the intraday management shuffle.
Automating the intraday shuffle yields BIG results In this intraday shuffle, contact center leaders spend precious time manually updating agent profiles, balancing capacity across queues, addressing staffing overages, or monitoring key metrics. Automating these activities can have a significant impact on the bottom line, including the following: • Contact centers that use intraday staffing technology to automatically respond to the business rules workforce management creates are able to consistently react to unexpected staffing needs faster and with more information. • Intraday management technology gives call centers the ability to automatically update skills as agents complete training and increase their competencies, giving customers access to agents best suited to handling their inquiries. Automation can also shift agents between channels to quickly protect service levels of underperforming queues. Issue 1 • 2014
• Automating key alerts with intraday management technology enables contact centers to automate adherence and provide support to agents in real-time. Conditions such as outsourcer line adherence are monitored and leaders are automatically notified when metrics are out of compliance. On the flip side, if agents hit one out of the park, supervisors can be notified and provide immediate, positive feedback. • Intraday management technology increases the frequency of agent training and coaching by dynamically delivering individualized training, coaching, knowledge base reviews and other off-phone work directly to the desktop during aggregated idle time. When volume unexpectedly spikes, agents are automatically prompted to return to answering calls so that service levels are not negatively affected. Using technology to eliminate these manual processes reduces labor costs, protects service levels, and makes skilled agents always available to deliver an exceptional customer experience. As a result, agent performance improves, workforce managers are free to concentrate on higher priorities, and customers receive better customer service overall. Call centers that have embraced these intraday management technologies and automated their response to time-sensitive opportunities have seen an average business impact of more than 20 percent in reduced labor costs, improved agent performance and an overall improvement in customer experience. Customer satisfaction and retention have improved, as well as metrics such as first call resolution, average handle time and cross-sales.
A real-life success story One UK-based insurance intermediary experienced an incredible financial savings after automating some of its intraday management processes. Faced with policy changes that caused an explosion in back office work and the threat of having to hire additional headcount, the company sought to create “blended” agents to better
utilize their current call center capacity for this additional workload. Even though call volume and back office work increased, the company still had to find time to train customer-facing representatives so that they could continue to deliver an outstanding customer experience. By implementing an intraday management solution, they were able to increase the frequency of training and coaching to agents during natural downtimes in call volume and fit in the additional back office work. When call volume naturally drops and agents are sitting idle, individualized training, coaching, back office work and communications are pushed directly to the agent desktop. When call volume spikes, agents are automatically prompted to return to answering calls so that service levels are not negatively affected. As a result of the training and the back office work integration, agents are more informed about current policies and therefore better equipped to handle customer inquiries and provide a more consistent customer experience across the customer journey. Their projected cost saving is estimated to reach $1.5 million during a 12-month span. Not only do customers benefit from the platform, but agents also have more variety in their daily activities to break up the monotony of taking calls with activities that actually make them more productive. They are more informed, more confident, and can deliver a better customer experience as a result. With an intraday management solution, everyone wins. About Intradiem Intradiem, formerly Knowlagent, is the leader in intraday management solutions for contact centers. Intradiem equips our customers with business reflexes that immediately and consistently respond to unpredictable events and conditions. Reflexes such as intraday task management, intraday staffing, reskilling, channel balancing and real-time alerts improve business performance by over 20 percent. More than 450,000 contact center, field service, retail, bank branch, and back office employees around the world use Intradiem’s solution every day. For more information, call 888-566-9457 or visit www.intradiem.com.
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Case Study
Case study: Star Telecom
This Star Telecom solution provides our call center client with increased operational efficiencies, reduced costs, built in redundancy and a high degree of call management and disaster recovery flexibility. The problem The client, a contact center outsourcer with 500 agent seats in two locations, utilized 17 T1/PRI links to connect their SIP-enabled ACD /Dialers at each site to the PSTN. Inbound and outbound calling was managed via 17 PRI, 4 inbound trunks and 13 outbound trunks split across the 2 sites, on an annual contracted basis of one or more years. The contracts locked the client into a fixed number of channels making it difficult to accommodate seasonal volumes and short term campaigns efficiently and effectively. The client was spending $12,000 per month on the T1/ PRI services and an additional $15,000 monthly for Long Distance charges at 1.7¢ per minute. There was no network redundancy so Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans were limited to the physical relocation of staff to the alternate site. This was a complicated process in itself and the loss of one of the sites also meant the loss of half of the network capacity. The client also experienced frequent outages which resulted in the all too common finger pointing between the ILEC and the client’s carrier. Lack of urgency by the carrier regarding MACs, ongoing billing issues and errors were causing additional frustration and dissatisfaction.
The solution Since both the client and Star Telecom are co-located at 151 Front Street, a simple, cost-effective cross-connect arrangement was easily implemented. 8 | contact management
Outbound long distance tra_ c is channeled through Star Telecom resulting in immediate cost savings based on a more aggressive LD rate. Some PRIs were immediately cancelled and the rest will be removed as the contracts expire. Inbound traffic is now routed to Star Telecom, resulting in savings and increased flexibility.
The results Less pain – more gain. The client has experienced immediate savings of 30% from a reduction in the long distance rate, PRI cancellations and increased telecom efficiencies. And there is an additional 35% savings from cancellation of remaining PRIs still to come. Operationally they have achieved increased efficiencies by sharing telecom capacity across both sites. The high degree of inherent flexibility of the Star Telecom solution has enabled the client to: • Add/remove capacity with short notice and without a minimum term
• Change inbound call routing in real-time via Star Telecom portal • Improve Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery through automatic call failover and re-routing Value-added features built into the solution include: • Enhanced Caller ID and Caller Name management • Real Time inbound channel utilization reporting • Daily CDRs for billing verification • Star Telecom monitoring and alerting of client systems • Ability to provision inbound telephone numbers from across Canada, US and other countries • Multi user-access to Star Telecom portal • Access and change logging for auditing purposes
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