12 Ways to Boost Productivity

Contact centers are at the core of customer satisfaction. However, they're also constant targets for cost-savings efforts. As a result, managers are always searching for ways to spur productivity that will balance the needs of the customers, the agents and the company. From better knowledge bases and improved natural-language search engines to workforce management strategies and business process reengineering, here is what's new in enhancing contact center productivity.

1. Give Employees More Than a Paycheck Providing incentives has been a mainstay of boosting agent productivity, but contact centers are finding new ways to reinvent this classic strategy. Take the Scotts Company, for example. The lawn-and-garden products firm creates a real-time, ongoing incentive by delivering online reports that allow its customer service representatives (CSRs) to see how well they are doing in comparison to their coworkers. "If we present this information to them, the vast majority want to do better," says Ed Billmaier, director of consumer services. "It's a natural incentive we found to get them motivated to say, 'Here's where I am. Look how much better everybody else is doing.'" Then they take action to boost their own performance.

2. Provide Better eSupport Channels to Promote Self-Service The self-service strategy can put a smile on the face of any contact center manager striving to boost productivity by diverting customer interactions away from live agents. "One of the primary call center productivity initiatives has been to give callers clear choices to use other channels to obtain their answers," says Jon Anton, Ph.D., director of benchmark research at Purdue University's Center for Customer-Driven Quality. Channels like Web self-service, email, interactive voice response systems (IVRs), and Web chat. "There are many times when a customer does not need to talk 'live' to an agent," Anton says. "The question is simple, the answer is easily found through self-service, and the customer is happier with the speed and accuracy of these alternative channels."

3. Identify and Curb Call Sources One way to help deflect calls to other channels is to monitor calls for commonalities. Better monitoring and tracking systems also allow for better record keeping and routing. Electric Insurance recently developed a contact tracking system, built internally, to allow management to identify the types of calls the company was receiving in its customer service center. "We found that there are three types of calls that drive about 85 percent of our call volume, and from there we will identify process improvement opportunities to drive some of those calls either to the Web or to the IVR," says Jack Schumaker, vice president of call center operations. Since implementing the approach in June 2003, Electric has seen a 15 percent drop in call volume.

4. Integrate Service Channels One mainstay of productivity in the call center is first-call resolution. And one way to improve resolution rates is to integrate service channels. Yorkshire Water discovered this firsthand. "Yorkshire Water implemented Amdocs ClarifyCRM to integrate and manage all customer-facing activity, capturing over two million phone, email, fax, and letter customer contacts annually. [We also created] personal profiles and [provided] contact center agents with a single view of the customer," says Kathryn Lewis, contact center manager at Yorkshire Water, the world's ninth largest water utility. "These steps allowed call centers to quickly and easily address customer needs on the first call, access work scheduling and mobile workforce systems in real time to expedite appointments, and increase call competence surrounding all pertinent products and services." Today more than 70 percent of customer calls are resolved on the first contact and more than 95 percent of callbacks are completed in 30 minutes.

5. Give Calls to the Right Agent Dating service eHarmony uses routing technologies to increase productivity. "We have a bridge that's been built from the eGain contact center application [we use] into our main database and our custom application that does customer lookups," says Greg Steiner, eHarmony COO. So at the point of contact the system routes customers "to the appropriate party in our organization," he says.

6. Get Comfortable Just because agents spend much of their day focused on the phone and the computer screen doesn't mean they aren't affected by their surroundings. The design of a contact center can significantly affect agents' productivity. Yorkshire Water's sister company, Loop Customer Management, uses its contact center layout to reflect its open culture, which directly translates into productivity gains. "There are no individual offices within Loop's sites and all staff, including the management and director teams, work within an open-plan environment fully integrated in the contact center," Lewis says. "The benefits are clear, with Loop enjoying high retention, motivation, and empowerment resulting in performance improvements in our teams." Contact center provider Affina has turned the traditional office setting backwards to boost productivity at its centers. "Offices are in the middle and CSRs are next to the windows," says Valerie Ferguson, Affina operations manager. "Ergonomically that's fabulous." Agents also have their own large desks that they personalize, which can help to increase the overall morale, according to Ferguson.

7. Send Agents Home Cubes not comfy enough? Let agents work at home. Using home-based agents provides increased flexibility to both agent and center, while improving productivity and boosting morale. By using Voice-over IP technology, select Tower Travel agents can work from home. "We're open from six a.m. to ten p.m. [and] nobody wants to work until ten p.m. in the office, " says Mike Foster, manager of technology development. "But if they're a home-office agent...[working from one p.m. to ten p.m.] is not as big a challenge as if they had to be physically in an office on a second shift." Tower uses the home-agent program as an incentive for highly productive agents. Once they are allowed to work from home, they must maintain that level of productivity in order to continue to do so. The possibility of being called back to work at the contact center spurs agents to maintain a high level of excellence.

8. Support Agents With eLearning A better-trained staff equals a more productive team. Training that happens at the desktop can double that productivity by reducing agents' time away from their phones and providing value during any downtime. This is why contact centers increasingly are implementing computer-based training for their agents. Electric Insurance implemented MaxIt's computer-based training program, LearnerWeb, to better train their employees and lessen the frequency that representatives are pulled off of the phones. According to Kimberly Koury, Electric Insurance's manager of new policy sales, the biggest advantage of using that technology is that the form can have representatives "go through the training on their own when it's convenient for the team, the departments, and for them. We'll typically attach a quiz at the end that will help us understand if they've really attained the information."

9. Build Better Systems for Finding Answers Few things are more frustrating to both customers and agents than not having access to the information necessary to resolve an issue. Not surprisingly, an increasing number of companies have a comprehensive knowledge base. But users need intuitive access to that data. Scotts uses a horticultural class to prepare its agents to use its knowledge interface, which has been dubbed Power Center. "There's no way a person could possibly memorize what they need to know to do the job in two weeks. So the Power Center...is really one of the most important aspects of what we do," Billmaier says. "We train [agents] on how to find the information in the system easily and quickly, and that's critical."

10. Speed Communication Another method for getting information to agents quickly is instant messaging (IM). Best Software, for example, uses internal IM as an add-on to its knowledge base. "[Instant messaging] allows us to do work...while we're online with a customer," says Ron Taylor, vice president of customer support. Rather than transferring a customer or escalating the call, agents will in some cases use instant messaging to speed the process of getting customers answers during that initial contact. "We probably reduced some forms of transfer by five or ten percent," Taylor says.

11. Institute Quality Assurance Better-performing agents are generally more productive agents. Using tools like quality monitoring can go a long way to building productive behaviors. Carlson Marketing Group, for example, uses Witness Systems' eQuality to record calls and examine call behaviors. "This tool allowed us to increase the number of monitorings, and it also increased our overall satisfaction ratings," says Tom Falkowski, director of customer care. Although Falkowski attributes some of the increase to incentive programs, he says that the Witness tool along with IEX's Agent Webstation have generated a 15 percent reduction in cost and a 25 percent increase in overall call activity.

12. Keep Agents on Schedule Conquering the peaks and valleys of call volume can be a huge boon to call center productivity. Workforce management tools help ensure the right number of agents are on call at the right time.

Foremost Insurance Group is one company that has seen its call center productivity increase as a direct result of workforce optimization. "Foremost was experiencing rapid growth that was increasingly complicating our business," says Nancy Treul, senior vice president of marketing. "Taking the conventional approach of focusing on one problem at a time just wouldn't cut it." Source: destinationcrm.com