This white paper presents ten suggestions for ensuring call center best practices. Some of them involve periodically evaluating the way youre already doing things. Others involve adding new functionality that builds on emerging technology or addresses changing business needs.
Executive Summary
Things change rapidly these days. What constituted best practices a year or even a month ago might no longer be yielding an optimal return on your investment. The best way to ensure that your call center practices are really the best is to constantly reassess your procedures and technology to make sure they are in line with real-time business goals and requirements.
This is by no means a comprehensive list, but, ranging as it does from reviewing call flows to disaster planning to preparing for the profound influence that voice over IP will exert on the call center, it covers major areas where updating your practices can reduce costs, improve service, and increase revenue.
We offer these ten suggestions as a general guide, but youll find that there are many more call center practices that it pays to review periodically and that the best approach to best practices is to stay constantly aware of the need to keep procedures and systems in line with changing business needs.
Are Your Call Center Practices as Effective as They Can Be?
Ten ways to ensure your practices match business and customer requirements
If youre reading this white paper, youre probably a call center professional with years of experience in managing efficient, effective customer contact operations. And you probably have systems and procedures in place that were well designed to meet your call centers goals for efficiency, productivity, and customer service delivery. They were best practices when you implemented them.
But are they now?
You know as well as we do that things are changing nowconstantly, and rapidly. Technology. Customer demands. Competitive pressures. The shape of your enterprise. The products and services your company sells.
So our purpose here is to remind you that the call center procedures you put in place yesterday might no longer be as effective as they were when you first implemented them and that the best practice of all is to review your procedures regularlyat least once a yearand conduct special reviews whenever there are conspicuous changes in business conditions, processes, or procedures.
Here are ten simple suggestions for evaluating your call center processes to make sure theyre still in line with your business goals and that your call center is operating as efficiently and effectively as it can .
1. Give your ACD a checkup
If your ACD has been in operation for a year or more, its time to validate and optimize its performance.
Some things to look at:
Do a full review of your call-routing system database, checking for volume issues, loops or dead ends in call flows, obsolete or redundant applications that can be deleted, resources such as users and agent groups that arent being used, and other problems that might reduce database efficiency.
Review unique business applications written for your ACD to ensure that they are in line with your current business goals.
Review your day-to-day system administration practices as well as your procedures for responding rapidly to strategic initiatives and operational demands. Focus on efficiency.
Review the feature set of your ACD to see whether you have advanced features such as skills-based routing, flexible security options, or math functions, and if you do, whether you are using them to maximum advantage. Features that didnt meet your business needs when you first implemented the ACD might now play an important part in your operations.
Dont dismiss the possibility of enlisting the aid of an expert consultant in this review. An objective outsider will see possibilities for improvement that your staff, immersed as they are in day-to-day operations, might overlook.
2. Review your call flows regularly
The call flow is the most basic tool of the call center. These process flows determine how incoming calls are routed and have a direct and profound effect on both customer satisfaction and call center efficiency. Properly designed, they ensure that every step of every customer contact contributes to clearly defined business objectives. But if theyre not in line with your current business rules, they can actually reduce the efficiency and effectiveness of your call center.
Most call center staffs are expert at building call flows, and contemporary user interfaces replace time-consuming and error-prone coding with drag-and-drop functionality, making it easy to compose and test call flows. But just because your staff can build good call flows doesnt mean that the call flows currently in place in your call center are functioning at peak efficiency.
Why? Because call flows are written in response to specific factors that are subject to change. Business rules, marketing campaigns, the number of agents and the mix of skills that they have, call volumes, and a range of other factors determine the shape of each call flow. When those factors change, well-designed call flows can become dysfunctional work processes that actually impede productivity.
An excellent example occurred recently in a high-volume call center operated by an Aspect Call Center customer. The center, which handled collections for residential telephone service, had been a model of efficiency. But over time, service levels began to drop, and more and more customers began to get busy signals instead of live answers. In fact, on one day, the ACD returned a frightening 30,000 busy signals. (The workforce administrator insists that she saw smoke coming from the wallboard status display.)
The call center staff needed to find the cause of the problem. Using the rapid development capability of Aspect eBusiness Architect, the user interface of the Aspect Call Center, they analyzed their main call flow and found that it was no longer appropriate for the call volumes they were currently handling.
They made some basic changes, such as increasing the number of callers that could be in queue before a busy signal was offered and playing an announcement telling customers that the lines were busy. These simple changes dropped the busy signals from the thousands to fewer than 100 per day, greatly reducing customer frustration and also reducing call volumes in other departments that were being inflated by customers trying other toll-free numbers to get around the busy signal.
So as far as call flows go, the best practice is to review frequently. Any time call volumes change, any time your business launches a new marketing campaign, any time there are significant changes in the number of agents or the mix of agent skills, take a close look at your call flows and see if they need to be revised to fit the new conditions.
3. Focus on first-call resolution
Getting issues resolved on the first call is critical not only for your customers but for your business and your staff as well. Consider these factors:
Customer satisfaction drops an average of 15 percent each time a customer has to call you back. Say your target in customer surveys is 90 percent of all customers responding that they are entirely satisfied with your call centers response to their queries, and as long as youre getting first-call resolution, your numbers are running around 92 percent. If the customers have to call twice, youre at 77 percent. Three times and youve dropped to 62 percentdismal numbers by anyones standards.
If your first-call resolution rate is 65 percent, then 35 percent of your total call volume is made up of repeat callscalls from customers whose satisfaction is already dropping, calls that are more complex for your agents to handle because the agents have to find out from the customer or from a case history what transpired on the first call. If you can resolve all issues on the first call, you can reduce call volumes, talk time, and overall expense.
First-call resolution is an important factor in cross-selling and up-selling. Studies show that customers feel that their issues must be resolved before your call center agents have earned the right to make new offers. And customers who have one unsuccessful call behind them and are on their second attempt may not be receptive to sales pitches at all.
Finally, consider the effects on call center agents of handling second and third attempts by customers to get satisfactory service. The work is harder and the customers less pleasant to deal with. The end result is low morale, high turnover, and additional expense for your call center as you try to manage a disgruntled agent population and recruit and train replacements.
So if your first-call resolution rate is low, focus on raising it. Train your agents to meet customer needs, route the calls intelligently, and give your agents the information they needsuch as screen pop from customer databasesto resolve every customer issue on the first try.
4. Raise routing to the next level
In many call centers, routing scenarios are based on simple principles. Speed of answer is a commonly used metric, the goal being to get calls to the first available agent in order to reduce PSTN costs and to promote customer satisfaction.
Another common principle is load balancing, which makes sense because a welldistributed workload keeps queue lengths and wait times down, keeps agents consistently busy, and shares the workload fairly across the agent population.
But contemporary call-routing software offers advanced routing capabilities that make it possible to tie call routing even more closely to business goals.
Priority routing, for example, is extremely effective. If you can identify your customers, either via automatic number identification (ANI) or by having them identify themselves in response to IVR prompts, then you can give priority to the most important customers and the most important calls. If you have a premier customer group that accounts for a significant portion of your revenue, you can make sure those customers are put at the head of the queue for fast, loyalty-winning responses. If a particular type of transaction is especially important to either the customer or the business, then use the IVR to let the customers identify the transaction type and deliver those calls first.
Skills-based routing is another good tool. In a multiskill call center, routing by agent skill sets can be a time and money saver and a customer pleaser. Let the customers themselves use the IVR to identify the skill needed to respond to their requestwhether the skill is the language the caller speaks, knowledge of the product the caller has purchased, or a professional skill such as financial or medical advising. Or use CTI to integrate your ACD with front- and back-office databases and use the information in those databases as the basis for routing customers to an agent with the exact skills to meet their needs.
These advanced routing techniques offer many more business benefits than simply routing the call to the first available agent or balancing loads across agent groups and sites. You can promote loyalty among your most profitable customers, increase first-call resolution and therefore reduce costs, make agents more productive, and raise the general level of customer satisfaction.
5. Take a critical look at your reporting practices
Most call centers use standard tools supplied with their call center software to create custom reports. These reports consolidate selected statistics and distribute them to supervisors and managers who need the information to make business and operational decisions. As business goals, staff, and procedures change, such reports can lose their relevance.
So the best practice is to review your reports periodically and ask questions like these:
Are the things our reports measure still the most important factors in meeting our business and operational goals?
Are there new reporting needs that arent being met?
Does the format of our reports still make the most useful information easily accessible?
Are the reports being distributed to the right people? Do the ones receiving the reports still need them? Are there new organizations or individuals who dont get them but need to?
Use the answers as a basis for eliminating outmoded reports, refining the ones that are still useful, developing new reports as needed, and making sure everyone who needs the information is getting it in the most usable form.
While youre at it, question your reporting tools themselves. Is the reporting software adequate to meet your current needs, or do you need a more advanced reporting solution? Many businesses are finding that traditional production reports dont give supervisors and managers timely enough information, or that sorting and analyzing the information takes too much time away from other critical tasks.
Some of these companies are adopting data mart solutions that enable them to use online analytical processing (OLAP) techniques to more fully understand the implications of the statistics generated by call center applications, and others are deploying analytical applications that present selected key performance indicators via job-specific dashboards to staff across the call center.
6. If youve got multiple sites, go virtual
Many companies operate multiple call center sites as a result of business expansion or acquisition. Usually, each site was built to meet local requirements, and its best practices are based on only a small part of the big picture. From the enterprise point of view, a better practice is to turn a geographically dispersed collection of discrete call centers into a single virtual call center that is at the same time more powerful and more easily managed.
Tools for building the virtual call center include:
T1/E1 lines to network the sites, coupled with load-balancing software that queries all sites when a call comes in and sends the call to the first available agent or the agent who has been available longest, regardless of location
Pre-call routing solutions to make routing decisions, based on conditions at individual sites, while calls are being held at the network level
VoIP solutions to transfer voice traffic between sites, reducing infrastructure costs and eliminating PSTN charges for cross-site transfers
Unified development and administration environments that enable developers to build call flows once and distribute them easily to multiple sites and that allow administrators to manage multiple sites from a single location
However you structure it, the multisite virtual call center can enable your business to reduce administrative and development costs, extend business hours without increasing staff, make more efficient use of existing resources, tap global skill pools to meet local requirements, and give customers a consistent response no matter where their calls are routed.
7. Reconsider remote agents
A variation on the virtual call center is the use of remote agents, either working at home or in branch offices, to supplement staff in the main call center. Since contact center agents need little more than a desk, a telephone, and a computer to be fully productive, they are ideally suited for working remotely as telecommuting at-home agents or at scattered locations on a large business campus to make maximum use of facility space.
The benefits are extensive. Businesses can take advantage of lower labor or facility costs in other regions, offer the incentive of working at home to highly skilled agents, reduce facility costs by reducing the number of seats in the main center, extend business hours using follow-the-sun staffing, and take advantage of regional skills such as languages.
In spite of these advantages, some companies have been dissuaded by the cost of using PSTN lines to connect remote agents to the main call center or by reservations about supervising and managing agents at a distance. Contemporary remote agent solutions have eliminated these concerns. Solutions now available eliminate PSTN charges by allowing remote agents to connect via IP networks.
And todays high-end remote agent solutions give agents access to all the ACD capabilities that agents in the main center have, while supervisors and managers have the same reporting and communication abilities for remote agents that they have for local agents.
8. Blend inbound and outbound
Staff expenditures account for 60 to 70 percent of todays contact center costs, so any practice that succeeds in getting more out of those staffing dollars is a best practice. One way to keep call center staff consistently busy is to blend inbound call handling with outbound dialing for functions such as sales, surveys, and collections.
Agents trained in inbound telephone sales and service can, with little additional training, be qualified for outbound dialing campaigns. Then when inbound call volumes drop, they can shift their effort to outbound work. Blended inbound and outbound call handling is even more viable for centers that employ automated outbound dialing software.
Contemporary outbound dialing solutions can run on the same hardware as the ACD software, and they provide advantages such as browser-based scripts that get agents quickly up to speed on campaigns and give them consistent information for communicating with customers. They automate functions such as dialing and shifting agents back and forth between inbound and outbound, and a solution with predictive dialing capability can even dial automatically, screen out busy signals and answering machines, and deliver calls that get a live answer to the next available agent.
9. Take VoIP seriously
To a large extent, yesterdays best call center practices are based on yesterdays technologycopper-based PSTN telephony systems. It is impossible to discuss tomorrows best practices without talking about the influence of voice over IP (VoIP) on the call center, and a crucial best practice for todays call center planners is to be aware of that influence and be prepared to incorporate IP technology.
Local- and wide-area networks built on Internet Protocol (IP) offer such extreme cost savings over PSTN lines that every business should include IP connectivity in call center planning, if not for immediate action, then as a future direction. On the other hand, most of the telephony world still runs on PSTN, and many companies already have an investment in PSTN telephone infrastructure.
This means that todays call center solution shouldnt be locked irrevocably into either the PSTN or IP world. It should include a potential bridge between PSTN and IP connectivity. This will let you decide when and to what extent your call center takes advantage of IP. You can operate on a PSTN infrastructure exclusively, or you can adopt a hybrid approach by managing both IP-based and PSTN-based agents from the same ACD, gaining the cost advantages of IP and locating agents anywhere while preserving your investments in PSTN.
10. Develop a disaster recovery plan
Finally, none of your practices do your business any good if your call center is down, and preparing for unplanned outages is one best practice that no call center in these times can afford to overlook. Good planning will help you limit the impact of an emergency on your operations and strengthen your companys ability to recover from financial loses. By planning, you can lessen damages to equipment and reduce the length and severity of interruptions to your business.
Here are some steps that can contribute to a successful disaster recovery plan:
Add redundancy to any ACD that handles mission-critical traffic.
Distribute your call-handling capability by operating multiple sites, deploying remote switching shelves, or using remote agents.
Design a communication plan that mirrors the way you normally operate. People work best with familiar methods in a disaster rather than having to learn different or unfamiliar procedures.
Appoint a single, clearly defined incident manager to coordinate the response to an outage. Committees cannot provide quick and decisive action.
Manage every crisis event the same way. Different plans for different events result in confusion and contention.
Educate all parties involved about the communication process in advance.
Communicate appropriately. Identify in advance who needs the information and how it will be provided.
Consider using more than one telecommunications carrier, so youll have backup if one carrier is hit with an outage.
Ask your telecommunications provider what emergency routing it can supply.
Build 911 routing into your existing call flows to make sure you comply with federal regulations.
Have spare agent telephones and headsets on hand.
Create an emergency contact list complete with phone numbers, circuit IDs, etc. Make sure it includes your utility suppliers and local fire and police forces.
Back up your data and voice recordings, store them offsite, and verify the backups.
Run reports to identify potential issues.
Get management involved in the planning process.
If your call center doesnt already have a disaster recovery plan, you should be working on one now. If you have a plan in place, review and update it frequently.
10
Constant change demands constant vigilance
Things change fast these days. If you dont reassess your call center best practices periodically, you run the risk that the procedures that made your business successful a year ago might gradually become less and less effective.
Successful call center planners and managers today have to constantly question the status quo and be flexible enough to adjust to change, whether that means rewriting call flows or revisiting features of the ACD that they havent been using or adding components to the overall contact center solution.
In a business climate where change is constant, flexibility is the only best practice that can ensure your call centers success.
2004-08-24
Em Foco – Pessoa