Breaking Call Center Rules: Find Time to Wow Customers
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The document discusses strategies for improving performance in call centers, emphasizing the importance of enhancing customer interactions and agent satisfaction. Key trends include prioritizing customer experience, optimizing idle time, and reducing operational costs. Additionally, it highlights the potential for significant savings by converting off-phone work into active wait time during low call volumes.
Breaking Call Center Rules: Find Time to Wow Customers
- 1. Breaking Call Center Rules: Find Time to Wow Customers PRESENTED BY: Matt McConnell, CEO, Knowlagent Richard Snow, Vice President and Research Director, Ventana Research 1
- 2. Agenda Call Center Trends Agent Performance & Customer Experience Efficiencies, Occupancy and Utilization Understanding Idle Time Case Study Final Observations 2
- 3. Call Center Trends 3
- 4. Priorities for Investing in Contact Centers Increase Customer Satisfaction 54% Reduce Operational Costs 18% Adhere to Regulations 10% Gain Competitive 7% Advantage NOT to scale Based on #1 responses Source: Ventana Research State of CC Technologies Benchmark Research 4
- 5. Handling Customer Interactions 82% of Companies Indicated the Need to Improve the Handling of Customer Interactions Increase Customer Satisfaction 89% Improve Business Processes 72% Increase Customer Retention 70% Reduce Operational Costs 70% Source: Ventana Research Agent Performance Management Benchmark Research Source: Ventana Research Agent Performance Management Benchmark Research 5
- 6. Quality of the Customer Experience The Attitude of Agents 26% The Ability of Agents to Understand the Issue 23% Queue Lengths 20% The Ability of Agents to Resolve Issues at the First 20% Attempt Agent Knowledge 8% Consistency of Based on #1 choice ONLY Information 2% Agent performance is vital to the customer experience and customer satisfaction Source: Ventana Research CEM Benchmark Research 6
- 7. Efficiency of Interaction Handling Optimize agent utilization 30% Divert interactions to self-service 24% Optimize call routing - skill-based 18% Improve agent training 9% Improve QM process 7% Formalize agent coaching 2% Source: Ventana Research Agent Performance Management Benchmark Research Source: Ventana Research Agent Performance Management Benchmark Research 7
- 8. Key Objectives for Improving Performance 8
- 9. Priorities for Improving Agent Performance 80% of Companies Say it is Very Important to Improve Agent Performance Improve Customer Satisfaction 82% Improve First Contact Resolution Rates 72% Improve Agent Satisfaction 66% Make Better Use of Agent Idle Time 40% Reduce Agent Turnover 30% Increase Agent Training Times 29% Source: Ventana Research Agent Performance Poll 9
- 10. Time Invested for Improvements Industry Average Composition of Secondary Loss 21% Training 17% Coaching 16% Team Meetings 11% Projects 9% Paperwork 9% Call Research / Follow-up 17% Email, Call Back, Knowledge Base, etc. 1 Source: 2010 Contact Center Shrinkage Survey 10
- 11. Efficiencies, Occupancy and Utilization 11
- 12. Target Agent Occupancy Rates Target % The Average Target for Agent 95% 11% Occupancy is 83% 90% 85% 17% 19% 80% 18% Reasons why targets are NOT 100%: #1 Agents are required to do other tasks as well as answering calls #2 A rate any higher would cause agent burn-out #3 Raising the rate is impractical given the uncertainty of call volumes/patterns #4 This is an operational decision #5 We are not able to forecast idle time Source: Ventana Research Agent Performance Poll 12
- 13. Profile of a Typical Agent Shift Source: Ventana Research Agent Performance Poll 13
- 14. Understanding Idle Time 14
- 15. Managing Wait Time 40% of companies schedule agent time in 15 minute slots, 34% in 30 minute slots, and13% only do it by shift. On average agents are only idle for 2 minutes at a time. 15
- 16. There is a Lot of Wait Time in The Call Center 2010 Contact Center Shrinkage Survey 100% Secondary Loss 12% (off-phone work) 90% 80% Primary Loss 18% 17% (absenteeism, vacation, etc.) 70% 11% Wait Time 60% 50% 40% 30% 60% Call Handle Time 20% 10% 0% Source: 2010 Contact Center Shrinkage Survey 16
- 17. Five Weeks of Really Bad, Boring Vacation The average agent waits: • 48 Minutes Every 100% Day 12% 90% • 240 Minutes Every80%Week 17% 18% • 960 Minutes Every70%Month 11% Wait Time 60% • 11,520 Minutes Every Year 50% 40% • Five Weeks! 30% 60% Costs our industry $30Bn/Yr 20% 10% 0% 17
- 18. Can I Reduce Shrinkage Hours & Deliver Quality? Shrinkage hours can be reduced by moving off-phone shrinkage activities into wait time creating “Active Wait”. Secondary Loss (off-phone work) Active Wait Wait Time 18
- 19. Active Wait Off-phone activities are assigned to agents forming "Activity Queues”. Content is dynamically delivered to agents during downtimes in call volume. 19
- 20. Active Wait - Shift Off Phone Activities Today Occupancy Call Volume Tomorrow Occupancy Call Volume 20
- 21. Moving Shrinkage to Active Wait Labor Savings $7,830,000 $810,000 21
- 22. Push Almost Any Activity From Shrinkage to Wait Training/ Knowledge Back-Office Communication Performance 22
- 23. Customer Satisfaction Getting First Call Resolution Done Major U.S. Telecommunications Company Using Knowlagent to deliver more training, coaching, and communications to over 45,000 agents Increased Delivery “Delivered more training time to a site in 5 days using RightTime than was delivered over 1 month when manually scheduling time” Improved Take Rate “71.7% take rate for RightTime vs. 59.4% take rate for pre-scheduled breaks” 23
- 24. Deploying the productivity gains Agent Agent Productivity Performance Increase training, coaching, and communications to: • Increase FCR New methods • Increase Customer Satisfaction • Increase Retention Performance Agent Traditional Methods Time 24
- 25. Final Observations 25
- 26. Key Takeaways • Customer requirements drive increased focus on customer experience • Idle time is abundant and useful if optimized with appropriate tools “Rule” to Bend – Wait/ idle time is unproductive. “Rule” to Break – High shrinkage is a fact of life. “Rule” to Ignore – Wait/ idle time improves agent satisfaction. 26
- 27. Contact Info Matt McConnell matt.mcconnell@knowlagent.com Richard Snow Richard.Snow@ventanaresearch.com 27
Editor's Notes
- #3: Larry: Review Agenda
- #7: Richard: discuss how to improve the customer experience, stressing importance of agent performance and discussing details of benchmark research that indicates this.
- #10: Richard:discuss initial findings about survey participants’ objectives
- #11: Matt:(echo Ventana research) based on Richard’s data, we know that the key objectives are to: improve customer satisfaction, FCR, etc.Question is – how do you get there w/o losing efficiency gains?From our research, we know that 12% of an agent’s day is attributed to secondary loss – shrinkage associated with the very activities needed to improve agent performance. Here’s how we break it down (go through data on green chart)
- #13: Richard: discuss poll results around occupancy
- #14: Richard and Matt to discuss what these results mean
- #16: Has info for both Matt and Richard…
- #17: In November 2010, Knowlagent conducted research on shrinkage, where we also asked respondents to give us information on service levels, utilization and occupancy. Their responses give us this picture of a call center agent’s day.
- #18: MATT:
- #21: Matt: discuss finding time by moving shrinkage to wait time
- #22: Matt:Using very average numbers, this is an example of how a company could benefit from using idle time The $810,000 can be applied in different ways. It can be applied back into handle time, resulting in a headcount reduction.
- #25: Matt: Many of our customers use that found time and apply the benefit to increasing performance against a variety of goals. By applying more time to training and coaching against these goals, improvement quickly outpaces that of more traditional methods. Here’s a way to find the time without increasing the labor costs