By Kathleen M. Peterson

Turnover

This issue comes up over and over in Call Centers around the world. Consider the fact that Human Resources represent between sixty-five and seventy-five percent of Call Center budgets. Up to fifteen percent or more may be used for recruiting, interviewing, testing, and training. The estimated cost of hiring a new agent ranges from $5,000 on the low end to $15,000 on the high end.

Turnover is certainly expensive. It is also dangerous for the customer. Customers do not want to be part of your training program; but if you can’t retain staff, the result is agents who may not meet the needs of the customer. For customers, this means losing access to the knowledge that resided in the heads of your departing agents. In the customer-focused world, Call Centers must measure turnover from the customer perspective not the enterprise perspective.

If the Call Center is also the breeding ground for other departments (as it often is, with people cutting their teeth in the Call Center frontline and then moving on to other departments), we must keep a focus on the percentage of agents with zero to three months experience, three to six months, six to nine, nine to twelve, etc. Determine a logical configuration and plan accordingly. Monitoring length of service in this way and reporting the figures provides an early warning system to avoid a scenario in which most of your agents have less than six months experience.

Recruit for the specific needs of your center. Spend some time defining competencies. Understand the type of transactions you handle and what skills are required to perform those tasks. Study your best performers and create a model for ongoing recruitment.

In today’s reality of record low levels of unemployment, we must become increasingly creative in our recruiting practices. Look to your existing staff. If your operation is well-run and successful, your existing staff will act as advocates in the marketplace.

(Editor’s example: You can learn from Southwest Airlines whose employees have ‘maybe you could work with us’ cards that they hand out to people they meet if the employee feels they are the right kind of person to work for the company).

If the existing staff is not referring others to your employ, you must ask, "Why not?" You must then act on your findings by creating overall improvement strategies to create an appealing environment.

One method of reducing turnover is to create a clear career path to keep staff in the center by creating opportunities for advancement. It may begin simply by creating levels within agent positions. Agent Level One may be a trainee level, handling only certain call types. A competency audit, assessment, or test must be passed prior to moving to Level Two. Compensation is adjusted according to ability to contribute. The use of tools like skill-based routing can further the development of these programs.

However, in many of these models, agents are taking calls sooner in the training process and may require trainers to be able to take over the calls. In the career path model, the trainers are part of the Call Center (rather than visitors from the training department) and serve some number of hours monthly on the phone to keep their skills honed.

The career path may lead to roles as supervisors, managers, or expert agents. When the program is well defined, the agents have the opportunity to participate in designing their destiny within your organization. Human Resources must partner with the Call Center when developing the plan because often we will need to change existing limitations on compensation plans. When you calculate the cost of lost resources, the expense of additional compensation is in most cases actually miniscule.

The set-up of your operation may also be a limitation on establishing a career path. Call Centers that have moved to cross-functional teams have more control over the transaction and more opportunities to serve and develop. Take the case of a bottled water company that combines Customer Service, Inside Sales, and Collections on the same team. Ultimately, each team member can function in each capacity. The team size is six people, so there are also clear opportunities for advancing to management. However, some people don’t want management. For those folks, there is a clear path to expert agent with equally attractive compensation packages.

Here is another hot area that, in many cases, also contributes to high turnover rates. The days of metric-driven productivity based performance models are over (or should be)!

The Call Center has a huge amount of data to evaluate everything from calling patterns to individual agent performance. What are we really looking for? In the words of my good friends, Brad Cleveland and Gordon MacPherson of ICMI, "What we want is people doing the right things at the right times."

Management sends the message, so be careful to ask for the right things. If you ask for fifteen calls per hour, you will get them. Even if it means hanging up on callers to deliver the metric. There are managers who celebrate "catching" agents hanging up on callers and firing them. Take another look; in most cases the agents are only attempting to give you what you requested. Demand quality.

Understand that the metrics from the telephone system cannot measure quality; they are purely quantitative measures. In fact, beware of establishing performance measures that actually cause quality problems. Use metrics wisely as part of a bigger picture with quality as the primary goal. I am not suggesting we ignore data for individual measures; I am suggesting we do not use "targets." Define acceptable ranges for performance utilizing statistical control charts, and hold these measures up to the quality and accuracy scores. Keep a balanced scorecard for the center and for the agents.

The metrics will certainly help us determine if our staff is available; that is their log on time-the "at the right time" - part of the equation. "Contribution to Capacity" is a better term to describe adherence. We must communicate to our staff that they are part of a capacity model and they must be present to make the model work. They are not simply individuals taking calls; they create a model. When the model is corrupted, delays increase, so the customer suffers. But occupancy also increases and other staff members must handle more calls than were defined in the plan. This causes staff (who are where they are supposed to be) to suffer. So this is a team measure as well as individual measure.

The customer relationship management "craze" will provide the software solutions to creating better quality measures. Call Centers equipped with one of these applications will be able to measure, on an individual basis, the quality of transactions. How many of the customers handled by a particular agent resulted in a second or third call? What is the individual’s accuracy percentage? How often do errors occur within their calls? This will help us identify our true best performers, while sending a clear message about what is really important within the contact.

As managers, we must be prepared to allow for time to 1) build these systems properly, 2) train the staff appropriately, and 3) allow the time it takes to enter the information that will drive the engine. These tools are going to revolutionize the approach we take to measuring Call Center performance.

Call it employee satisfaction, call it energy, call it culture. Whatever you call it, good morale is a result of a well-run center; poor morale is the result of a poorly run center. If you want a motivated work force, you must look beyond the parties and prizes. These activities are most effective in the best-run operations. In a poorly run center, attempting to improve morale with games and parties will often fuel a cynical response - not a positive one.

It is not the job of management to motivate people. It is the job of management to create an environment in which people can be motivated. Look to the organization. Are we functioning in a way that allows people to learn and contribute? The upcoming generations will require that jobs offer learning opportunities. Once people are learning more, it enhances their ability to contribute. Contribution has often been defined as a basic human need. If we meet the needs of our staff, morale goes up and that can only be good for our customers.

In dealing with this subject, it is common to conduct surveys to analyze levels of staff satisfaction. If you conduct these types of surveys, be sure you are prepared to act on the data. If not, the very act of carrying out a survey without follow-up action will contribute to a morale problem. Communication is central to good morale. Even when times are tough, a solid and open communication strategy will serve the morale of the environment quite well.

We are in the age of explosive technological developments. Many are aimed at the Customer Service/Call Center industry. This is good news and bad news. We must always be clear on what type of problem we are trying to solve. Is it a people problem or a technology problem? People can’t solve technology problems and technology can’t solve people problems. If our handle times are off the map because system response time is slow, no amount of incentives or efficiency gains on the part of the agent can correct this. The problem must be attacked at the source.

When attending trade shows for this industry it is amazing the claims vendors make. There are claims of improved productivity, slashing costs, and reduction in turnover rates. Vendors are claiming to do everything better, faster, cheaper. The really bizarre thing is that you can visit the booth of a telephone system vendor, a workforce management vendor, a customer relationship manager software vendor, a computer telephony integration vendor – all making the same claims. It is scary.

Take the case of an insurance company examining a very expensive, very intelligent call distribution system for moving calls between ten sites. All this for the small sum of around $5 million. The agent positions in these Call Centers had been utilizing green screen "dumb" terminals. They had no customer record to speak of, and an insane number of calls were repeat calls because claims had not been paid or had been paid incorrectly. When the executive committee was asked what it hoped this new distribution system would accomplish, members hesitated then responded, "Quality - it will improve quality."

Interesting - how will it do that? A panicked executive shot a look at the Chief Technology Officer and demanded, "Bob, how will it do that?" No offense, this is scary. What they managed to accomplish was Smart Distribution to Dumb Terminals. Who cares? Customers don’t care how intelligent your distribution system is if when the customer gets to an agent they have no record of customer activity and have to scroll through deep archives of data.

No distribution, no matter how intelligent, will mask poor systems. If I had the five million, I would spend it on the desktop. The desktop is infinitely more complicated a task to undertake and not nearly as sexy. So, beware the seduction of claims of technological quick fixes. (Just for the record, I am not anti-technology).

The topic of management in Call Centers is itself in a state of flux. The requirements of management are changing dramatically. Operations are becoming more sophisticated as well as more visible within the enterprise. Managers of front-line operations often adopt a victim mentality. This behavior must be eradicated. We complain that executives don’t reach down to the front-line operations. Well, we must also be stretching up. Customer Service managers and Call Center managers must begin to stretch up and across the enterprise.

Managers of front-line operations must link the Call Center objectives to those of the enterprise as a whole. Study compensation, planning staff, and span of control. Practice making a business case for changes that will enhance your ability to run the operation.

Where do Call Center managers come from? Too often, an agent’s manager informs them on Friday that, on Monday, they will be a supervisor. Somehow we hope the "management fairy" visits over the weekend because we offer no training for this position. This is all too common. Formalize the promotion process, invest in management training, and be certain that the candidates understand the Call Center operation.

You do not want to wake up one morning and find the company has gone outside for the first Vice President of Customer Service, never having even considered an insider because you hadn’t demonstrated readiness at the enterprise level. Prepare to advance your management skills. Develop a passion for the obstacles. Evaluate them with a broad view – one that includes faulty management practices. Make a case, present the case, and institute the changes. This particular hot button will make you a hot property.