Soaking The Contact Centre Sponge:
It is ironic that for those who spend eight hours every day glued to the telephone, the job of the contact centre agent can sometimes feel like a very lonely existence. With high performance targets leaving little free time during the working day to share experiences, de-stress and bond with other members of the team, it is perhaps unsurprising that motivation and attrition will continue to be two of the major challenges discussed by contact centre managers and the industry as a whole in 2008.
Motivation can be nurtured in different ways to make agents feel a valued member of the team. This coupled with incentivising improvements in performance are high on the agenda of all contact centres, most of which will have quality monitoring and coaching programmes in place. Such initiatives focus on measuring and improving performance against predetermined KPIs, such as the volume of calls answered and completed in a certain time, sales targets etc and the overall quality of the service to the customer. This is, of course, vital information that the agent needs to know in order to improve their performance, but it is only one element in keeping agents educated, engaged and informed.
Everyone will acknowledge that good agents are highly valuable assets (despite the national mean of £15,458 being well below that of the average annual salary in the UK). A seasoned agent will be an expert on the company’s products and services, up-to-date with the latest marketing campaigns, as well as an accomplished salesperson with strong communication, negotiation and sometimes mediation skills. The challenge for the agent is how to be such a ‘sponge’ for the company in order to assimilate and relay - often frequently updated – information, on demand. Conversely, the challenge for the contact centre manager is how to present all of this information to agents in a way that is both engaging and effective and with out distracting them from taking and making calls..
Many contact centres that attempt to address this issue do so by pushing information to the agent desktop or printing information for display on notice boards. However, both of these mediums have significant drawbacks. In many of the contact centres I have visited one of the issues that agents will often recount is challenges associated with navigating the multiple software applications often needed in order to complete a single call. Screen pop-ups that appear whilst agents are in the middle of an important transaction are an unwelcome distraction that will inevitably be ignored.
The use of corporate Intranets and notice boards suffer from a lack of immediacy and rely heavily on agents being proactive, logging on, or visiting a notice board to find information.
Increasingly, contact centre managers are investigating alternative tactics to engage agents. One such technique was in evidence at Call Centre Expo late last year. Imagine walking through Times Square in New York or Piccadilly Circus in London. It is virtually impossible to ignore the advertising messages being pushed to you from the brightly coloured hoardings high above. You take in the information but it doesn’t impede with what you are doing. The principle, albeit on a smaller scale, is the same in the contact centre when high visibility display screens can be placed in strategic points that are constantly pushing information out to agents (and on occasion between agents).
These screens are able to integrate information (statistics from the call switch, other data management systems, notes from human resources/management, social events, news about the company pulled from the website, information etc) and push it out to agents in a highly visual way.
This year is set to be a year of growth for contact centres and as agent positions increase the communication challenge amplifies. My one piece of advice at the beginning of 2008 is to take some time to understand what your agents know. What do they need to know and what do they want to know? Answer these simple questions and you will have made a significant step towards more educated, engaged and informed agents who feel part of a motivated team and that can only be good news for the business, the contact centre and the customer.
Published: 2008-02-11