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» November 2008
Call Centres Today – A Holistic Approach to Overcoming the Challenges of Call Centres Today

Our work is not just about call centers any more. It’s about complex, single points of service called contact centers. The change has been driven by call center representatives performing more services, advances in technology, and an increase in the number of communication channels.

Today, the customer contact center is the single face that’s presented to the customer–the face that communicates across all channels and handles all requests–whether they originate from email, the web, or telephone.

The increased demand and under supply of agents has lead to companies “poaching” and recruiting from each other. In order to sustain productivity the net result is an increase in salary costs and a decline in the available workforce.

This lack of trained agents will continue to put growth pressures on local companies unless a sustainable solution is found to address the following issues:

• Supply of trained agents,
• At an entry level cost that will mitigate the cost increases brought about by “poaching”, increase salary costs,
• Agent development,
• Management leadership development

Benefits of skills development

• Dedicated and sustainable skills development and supply program
• New and experienced skills • Offers flexibility for attrition and absenteeism
• Amplify quality of skills introduced to the internal centres
• Reduce risk of employing poor performers – select only the best
• Reduces “loss of revenue” associated with absenteeism and recruitment obstacles
• Best practices environment for a “Centre of Excellence”
• Outbound campaigns on an “on demand” basis for:
  • Contract extensions
  • Retention and loyalty programs
  • Customer satisfaction indexing
  • Quality of service assessments
• Disaster recovery and business continuity

Impact on the Bottom Line
It's no secret that the main challenge for contact center operators is agent attrition. With the cost of hiring and training new agents any reduction in annual attrition rates goes right to the bottom line. High agent attrition rates degrade the customer experience and customer satisfaction, which negatively impact the bottom line.

Proactive customer-centric care providers are addressing this problem head‐on. Their strategies focus on many different tactics that can improve attrition rates: hiring the right candidates upfront, improving agent management, developing agent career paths, improving training, utilizing automation, building agent teamwork, improving facilities, employing home agents and so forth.

In addressing the attrition challenge, it is important to understand why agents leave and just as important to proactively address the needs of the individual agent before he or she resigns. Addressing individual agent issues without knowing exactly what those issues are and which agents are being impacted might seem like an impossible task for call centre operators – especially since many organizations employ thousands of agents.

Training
With agent attrition rising and the need to improve customer satisfaction coming even more to the fore, agent training has become a high profile issue within the industry. As the types of roles that contact centre agents perform continue to grow in complexity, ongoing training is required that goes beyond simple call handling and top‐line product information training.

There is an increasing trend towards cross‐selling and up‐selling, which requires agents to switch between very different skill-sets at a moment’s notice.

Training requirements can be roughly divided into hard and soft skills. Hard skills are those which are specific to the job in hand and/or that can be measured. Examples include:

• Data entry speeds
• System navigation
• Product knowledge
• Application usage
• Understanding of relevant business processes.

Soft skills are more about influencing the agent’s behaviour and character as well as looking at the non-measurable elements. They include:

• Empathy and listening skills
• Cross-selling and up‐selling
• Managing intra‐team dynamics
• Developing self motivation
• Dealing with abusive customers.

Value of Coaching
A well developed coaching and mentoring process builds individual employee strength, develops personal leadership and responsibility and delivers desired business results to the organisation – simultaneously. Research indicates the use of coaching across industries is on the rise, but so too is the confusion over what effective coaching is, how to build a coaching process that links to the organisations business model and overall learning strategy and successfully implementing the process enterprise-wide for attaining peak performance levels.

Coaching is the most critical leadership activity a manager can engage in because of its powerful influence on individual employee performance. Leadership activities in general are designed to keep a department, unit or workgroup focused in a disciplined way on their goal.

Coaching is the activity that gets each individual in the group aligned so that the team becomes stronger and reaches the intended business results. When managers coach consistently and effectively, they draw out the best in people, help them close performance gaps and empower them to lead themselves. The result is a stronger bottom line for the organisation.

Our Approach
Recruitment
We employ an integrated selection process that begins with a job profile based on our client’s unique qualification and skill requirements.

We make use of state-of-the-art tools and assessments to measure ability and willingness along with competency based interviewing strategy that focuses on past behaviour and experiences as the best predictor of future job performance to determine best fit.

Soft Skills and Work Readiness Training
The training is designed to prepare sales consultants with no or very little work/call centre experience.

Advanced Sales This training provides formal Sales training addressing the science of selling. It is designed to teach the sales consultant such topics as sales structures, overcoming objections and in addition the course is designed to assist agents at entry, intermediate and advanced levels to become more aware of paralanguage and its importance on a conversation.

Practical Contact Centre training (Hub Training)
The main focuses of the practical training in the incubator hub is for the sales consultants to comfortably and with confidence, engage in a very professional way, in a live contact centre environment. To achieve this as effectively as possible the learners are subjected to a number of high quality pre‐recorded calls and are then on to taking live calls in a safe training environment. The sales consultants are measured according to set goals and target and are monitored using state of the art measurement tools.