Call Centre Fundamentals Part 1

(This write-up is useful for someone wanting to get a better understanding on how contact centre functions. It came directly out of notes designed to train contact centre leaders in a global contact centre operation.)

All big corporations, especially service companies that have ongoing relationships with customers, e.g. power, telco, banks, are likely to have one thing in common … the existence of a contact centre (or call centre). Contact centres have been around for more than 50 years, with Pan Am (Pan American World Airways) being one of the first 24/7 contact centres; it provided customers a local phone number to ring for every market. With the advent of cheap telecommunication cost, contact centres are even based overseas in places where the staff cost is astronomically lower than the local environment.

Such corporations have quite similar goals for their contact centres and these can best be described below as follows:

• They want a customer’s query to be diagnosed accurately,
• They want a customer’s query to be resolved quickly, and
• They want a customer to finish the call with a positive impression of the Company.

To bring about these goals, I have developed the Contact Centre Service Triangle to better explain the requirements of a contact centre.

The Customer

At the apex is ‘The Customer’. S/He is the most important reason for the existence of the contact centre. Hence, it is at the apex. At the base is the contact centre. It consists of TWO elements – CSR (Customer Service Representative – The human voice and front-facing staff with the customer) and Systems and Technology (The non-human elements that assist and track the performance of the contact centre).Right in the middle is ‘Service Measurements’ which are ‘measurements’ that we use to gauge how the contact centre is responding to the Customer.

For the ‘Customer’, there are THREE critical questions that we need to answer as follows:

• Why do customers ring a company?
• When do they call?, and
• How prepared are they to wait?

Why do customers ring a company?

Customers generally avoid calling a Company unless they have an issue. The best way to guide us to answer these questions is to work out the Product Life Cycle of the Company’s products involved. For example, customers may ring us because of one of these events: 

• Enquire – A Customer rings to make an enquiry,
• Buy – A Customer rings to BUY something,
• Change – A Customer rings to change some details in their accounts,
• Pay & Bill – A Customer rings to pay or enquire about their bills,
• Resolve – A Customer rings us to fix something for them, and
• End – A Customer rings to terminate an account.

Knowing the relevant product life cycle will help the Company to structure its systems but more on that later.

When do Customers call?

Practically, any time but there will be certain patterns even within that ‘randomness’. However, there are THREE factors that we can cover off:

• It is possible to predict when customers generally call. There will be some predictable patterns, e.g. time of the day, and day of the week,
•  Although we can ‘predict’ when calls come in (e.g. a Marketing campaign), they can still come into the centre in an erratic manner, and
• Finally, it is not possible to predict all call scenarios as human behaviour and the unfolding of daily events will impact on call arrivals.

A good contact centre is always using systems to capture the data so that it can analyse the predictable patterns and plan its staffing accordingly.

Next, how prepared are customers to wait?

Contact centres are built across the concept that ‘customers are prepared to wait on the phone’. This is what is termed as ‘Caller Tolerance’. There are possibly SEVEN factors that will impact on the way we plan staff resourcing and these are as follows:

• Degree of Motivation – If a Customer is experiencing severe inconvenience, e.g. power outage, they will most likely wait longer to reach their utility company than those with questions relating to their bills. If it is a case of medical emergency, you can assume that they will want an answer immediately.
• Availability of Substitutes – If the Customer is severely inconvenienced AND the telephone is THE ONLY mean of solving the problem, then they will stay on the line or keep calling
• Competition’s Service Level – The Competitor(s) will have an impact on the way that Customers view our resources,
• 0800 Line – Who is paying? For a 0800 line, customers may be encouraged to keep hanging on,
• Human Behaviour – The weather, a caller’s mood, the time of the day. Would you believe that there are more calls coming in when the moon is full?
• Level of Expectations – Customers in big metropolitan cities used to speed and convenience maybe less tolerable to wait, and finally
• Time Availability – Retirees would react quite differently from, say, stockbrokers.

Service Measurements

Remember, at the start, we said that the Customer is the most important reason for the presence of the contact centre. Having said that, ‘Service Measurements’ becomes the most important ‘next’ element. ‘Service Measurements’ are measurements designed to gauge the level of ‘quality services’ delivered by our staff to all customers. They represent the glue between the Customer and the Contact Centre.

‘Targeted scores’ are set, based on the Company’s understanding of customer and their needs as seen above. Any abnormalities will then be reported as they could represent issues. There are TWO types of targets:

• Service Level – It represents the level of tolerance set for calls; it is quantitative. In a one-sentence definition, it may be seen as follows - ‘Service Level’ is defined as the ‘X% of calls to be answered within Y seconds’. Here, we articulate that it is not just about answering the calls but answering them within an acceptable range as pre-defined by Management. Service Level should be tracked on a ½-hourly basis. (More on ‘Service Level’ in another write-up.)

Service Standards – These are the subjective ‘softer’ elements of service. They are behavioural – e.g. how are the CSRs performing in terms of ‘Call Opening’, ‘Establishment of Customer Needs’, ‘Hold/ Wait Protocol, and ‘Enthusiasm and Professionalism through the voice’? 

Now, look out for Part 2 to conclude this write-up.

Problem Sensitivity

At 73, Shirley was still a buzz in the office. Once I asked her for some A3 paper to put into the photocopier and she wanted to know the precise number of sheets that I required.

One day, she exclaimed how it was a pity that some internal mails continued to have a P O Box number on them. These mails were inadvertently considered as external, got franked and came back into our mail box. "If only the department replaced the P O Box with an internal address, we would save money, time and indeed effort."

Peter, a Training Consultant, was approached to run a negotiation training workshop for a sales call centre. Senior Management had observed that call centre staff were compensating customers at an alarmingly high rate. In fact, the estimation was that if nothing was done, the compensation level could hit an all time high of $24 million for the year. The Director of the Call Centre’s response was to do more training around negotiation skills.

Instead of agreeing with the Director, Peter asked permission to investigate the problem further. He started by analysing the compensation data; fortunately, these were captured by the computer system. He, then, broke them into logical categories of time, team and staff member. The Goal? To see whether any pattern could be observed.

He next spoke to team members at the call centre in order to get their perspective; people at the frontline often have the ‘best’ solutions as they knew the root cause(s) more than anyone else. In Kaizen terminology, Peter went to ‘gemba’ (the place where the ‘problem’ took place or, simply, the place of action).

He next studied the available documents including the ‘Compensation Policy’. The policy read as follows:

“The Company does not compensate unless the error is definitely made by the Company and ONLY IF the customer asks for it. And if they are adamant, then the limit given to each call centre team member is up to $200 per incident per customer. If the amount asked is higher than that, then the team member can escalate it to their team manager.”

At first glance, the limit of $200 per incident per customer seemed rather ‘generous’ to Peter. In fact, further discussion showed that a customer might be compensated far higher than the $200 limit as s/he might have more than one incident per complaint. When he probed some of the longer serving staff, he was told that the limit was set up at a time when the Company was promoting the value of ‘empowerment’. To make it simple for ‘empowered’ staff, Management encouraged them to treat the Company as their own and they were given the ‘flexibility’ to compensate based on their empowered judgment.

Problems are generally caused by either a Policy, Process, System or People issue. If it was a ‘People’ issue, then training is potentially a good solution. Together with the more insightful front-liners, Peter drew up a Cause & Effect diagram to identify the ‘root cause’. The conclusion of the group was that ‘Policy’ misalignment seemed to be the root cause. In addition, the group could also see how the Policy statement created more downstream problems as the statement ‘ONLY IF the customer asks for it’ meant that different customers could end up with different experience although the incident might well be similar. It potentially could create a ‘suspicious customer-public’ as the Company did not consider the impact of customer chatter (talk among customers).

Peter’s recommendation to the Director was to alter the ‘Compensation Policy’ by reducing the limit of each centre’s team member to $50 per call and to involve team leaders to decide on anything up to $200. He also added that there was a need to provide clarity around what could be compensated and by how much. That way, frontline staff would be more consistent in administering compensation to customers depending on the type of issues.

Shirley offered a ‘simple’ solution. Peter’s was a bit more complex. However, both were applying the trait of ‘problem sensitivity’, ‘Problem Sensitivity’ being the ability of a person to recognise that a problem exists or to be able to cut through misunderstanding, misconception, lack of facts, or other obscuring handicaps to recognise the real problem, and hence, devise the real solution.

‘Problem Sensitivity’ is a critical trait of a creative person, a trait that is often ignored by people who talk about creativity. Most people would think that ‘Imagination’ or ‘Originality’ represent creativity. That is true but there are other equally critical ones.

Research shows that other than ‘Imagination’, ‘Originality’ and ‘Problem Sensitivity’, the other key traits are ‘Curiosity’ (this one is obvious), ‘Fluency of Ideas (the ability to generate many solutions), and ‘Flexibility of Thoughts (or the willingness to consider a wide variety of approaches to a problem).

The good news in Shirley and Peter’s case was that both had a good ending. Shirley’s idea was adopted; all internal mails had since had their PO Boxes removed. Peter’s idea was handed over to another team to complete the task. The savings? A mouth-watering estimated figure of $7.9 million.

Good ideas are everywhere and they do offer payback, some bigger than others. But, like Forrest Gump said infamously, “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get.” The moral of the story is to keep fishing.

More important than financial payback is the element of motivation for its staff, that their ideas matter and do make a difference. Because fundamental to our human need is the element of feeling valued.

The crux is still how do we unleash ideas to flow within the organisation. That tends to be more difficult than we think and it will be for another time that I follow up on this issue.

Happy reading.