My Blog

According to Dimension Data’s "Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report 2007″, a massive 70% of the cost of running contact centres are related to the people who work there: the agents or customer services representatives. The report also reveals that the UK contact centre industry wastes close to half a million pounds every month as a result of its average 24% staff attrition rate.

Live testing of agents and we call it mock call. HR department have to take some steps regarding this. They should implement a policy (can be shown as HR policy) in which they have to clear the new agents that they will get finalised only when they will clear the mock call's round. Through this we will get the result about the new agents whether they are capable and good enough to handle the stress and pressure of process. As it came in a research report, many companies (25%+) still haven't introduce this mock call's round in the part of their hiring policy.

Agent must be aware about the process and responsibilities he/she will going to be implement on them and because of that they hired by the company. The growth and progress must be cleared to everyone att he time of hiring. Although there is perception in a this industry that people get into this industry because of fame, money and the diffrent facilities providing by company but those who taking and joining this industry for the long time and want to make a career in call center. They are really serious about the career development and if they stuck with the organisation for long time then they will get good oppotunity and good carrer chances in this industry.

They should keep the simplification and process flow as simple as they can. There is a possibility that some agents might not be good in using computers incomparsion to tech savvy agents. Work flow analyst must provide the process flow where agents not to toggle between multiple windows and application. If possible as this could be a stressful and time-consuming act while a important client/customer is on call.

Interestingly, although 77% of the organisations surveyed in the Dimension Data report and that reports say they have workflow solutions in place, only 32% have some form of decision support or case-based reasoning system to prompt agents with answers to customer queries.

Do you know how many people need to achieve theri service levels and create satisfied customers? Do you break this down per hour per day, and schedule staff with the right skills and experience accordingly? If not, then you are really in bad staffing policy and might be suffering from a huge hidden staffing cost, increased attrition with associated recruitment and training costs.

Alternatively, you may be under-staffed, resulting in high abandonment rates, stressed staff, reduced first call resolution and dissatisfied customers. Workforce management tools have now reached maturity and can deliver a rapid return on investment; the main issue today is ensuring the tool is set up correctly and managed by a trained scheduler. According to the Dimension Data research, the top development strategy is customer satisfaction at 87%, with staff satisfaction close behind at 70%. I would therefore suggest there is no good reason for a mid-size or large contact centre not to adopt a properly managed, industry standard workforce management tool.

Good training is key for success of a call center, poorly trained agents deliver a poor customer experience, leading to unhappy customers and, therefore, stressed employees who leave or go sick. Providing initial training is just a beginning of agents career and process, there are so many different kind of queries which came time to time while process is on the go in this case agents often need help with complex or infrequent queries.

Training must be provided by professional coaches, trainers, or virtual coaching systems. The latter essentially can provide step-by-step desktop assistance through processes, with a blend of specialist staff and virtual coaching providing arguably the optimum solution.

Dimension Data’s research shows that an average of around 17 hours of coaching is delivered to agents per month. This can cost-effectively be increased using a real-time online virtual coaching tool delivered to the agents at their desktops, resulting in improved first call resolution and employee and customer satisfaction.

We should greet the agents by giving them incentives, rewards & recognitions by various monetary and non-monetary methods. Rewards provide a great feedback mechanism and agents will get motivated and they will give good productivity whatever you will give them, so you need to ensure you don’t reward skewed behaviors also, rewards can be great motivators if applied correctly.