In most call centers, over two-thirds of operating costs are directed to personnel. As the largest single investment of your call center, staffing and scheduling efficiencies are paramount to securing a healthy bottom line.
Call center workforce management is a complex process. Optimizing frontline staff’s performance while reducing costs is an ongoing concern, one of the most important in any call center’s planning and management functions.
There are many indicators that can help you manage your call center’s workforce. And while a close monitoring of all key indicators is important to the health of your enterprise, the single most important element to success is customer satisfaction.
Workforce Management Is About Agent And Customer Satisfaction
In the rush of day-to-day operations, the critical role of agents’ job satisfaction can easily fall off the radar. But amid the needs to schedule and train staff efficiently, there needs to be room to promote staff morale.
There’s hard data supporting the need to have happy call center staff. The SQM Group found that for every 1% increase in job satisfaction for employees, there followed a 2% increase in customer satisfaction.
It’s clear that your call center’s staff moral is an investment that yields a solid return.
How Workforce Management Can Promote A Happy Call Center Team
Any manager of a call center knows that when it comes to frontline staff, every individual has a tremendous impact on reaching service goals. Maximized efficiency means that there is no shaky wheel on the cart. 100% motivated team members actively invested in meeting performance goals is simply the most efficient way to have the highest levels of customer satisfaction.
Here are a few of the foundational components necessary to promoting a committed call center team.
1. Keep your ears open. Always. Listen to your staff, and take what the say seriously. The thrust of their concerns or their victories may not always be actionable from a managerial standpoint, but you provide powerful impetus to motivation if you are ready to listen to your team. It’s about dignity: showing concern for your staff is the beginning of a process of trust and mutual respect. Once it’s there, listening reaffirms it.
2. Mentor Your Team. As a manager, it’s all too easy to forget that you are much, much more than ‘just a boss.’ You’re a call center’s mentor, your team’s coach, their teacher. Being there to offer suggestions and encouragement, or to give the praise due to a job well done is the difference between red tape and making a difference to staff performance.
Training is an important part of mentoring. When staff struggle, you need to be there to support them with training options to get them through a rough spot. Your role as a leader can make what seems like drudgery into a potential to greater job satisfaction for your team. Whether teaching new skills or polishing old ones, excellent call center workforce management has mentoring as its core.
3. Make Agents The Heart Of Every Process. Practical perspective is priceless to crafting any new policy. Including staff in planning policies or changes that will affect them is important. By allowing them to give advice you work towards promoting respect and trust.
A policy that is the result of collaboration is more likely to implement and function well. Be sure to share feedback with staff so they can see what works, and what doesn’t. You’re validating the process when assessment is shared with your team – even when a new initiative fails.
A successful relationship between management and staff turns every negative into a positive.
Call Center Management Is A Whole With Parts
Call center management is a blend of key elements that must all be in place and operational if your contact center is to be successful. Skillful team members require support by effective resources that are available when needed, employed in response to an accurately forecasted work load. Service needs to be at quality levels that are clear, consistent, and fully communicated.
In other words, a successful call center in today’s fast paced world needs information. And the most critical use of data gathered is in feeding back into agent training.
Workforce Management Supports Your Team
Perhaps there is so more crucial piece to your call center than its training program. Training is the critical level of support that empowers your call center team to give great customer service. More than imparting a skill set, training helps define an agent’s role in the team’s effort to meet quality goals. But to be most effective, training should be tailored to the concrete needs of your team.
Call Center Metrics Can Bring Your Team Together
It’s about establishing trust with your agents. Looking at data, panicking, and throwing training at your team will only erode confidence in your support structure. Successful training is about allowing your contact center’s team members to see how they can control and work to meet performance objectives by taking appropriate action at the appropriate time.
Verint Media Recorder: Workforce Management Software That Makes Training easier
Verint Media Recorder eLearning provides training on agents’ desktop. Your call center’s metrics or direct observation can direct what courses and lessons are made available to individual team members or to entire groups.
Results of quality performance monitoring evaluations can be used to provide automated prompts to tailor training opportunities to a specific agent’s scorecard results. Verint Media Recorder’s eLearning even allows agents to schedule training on their own initiative if they perceive a need.
eLearning: Management Software That’s Adaptable To Your Needs
Managers can see at a glance the coursework that has been assigned, the deadline for completion, and what has been completed. Created with your needs in mind, tutorial material can be generated with Verint Media Recorder’s Content Producer or you can create your own training material for eLearning to assign.
eLearning’s Automated Training Assignments Support Your Team
Verint Media Recorder’s eLearning system meets all your workforce management needs. Advanced Scorecards can be adjusted to include performance thresholds. If performance falls below these thresholds, the appropriate remedial training is automatically assigned to the agent.
Because training can impact work schedules, eLearning can be used in conjunction with KOVA’s Workforce Management system. When training has been assigned to your team, eLearning can send this information to Workforce Management, which can schedule times for training sessions when service won’t be interrupted.
Making Customer Satisfaction Actionable
Customer feedback is key to maintaining optimum service levels. Customer satisfaction surveys can be used to assign training: eLearning allows customer scoring of an agent’s performance to prompt training opportunities.
When it comes to outstanding customer service, it’s the agent that delivers. Persistent and effective training are the means to success. The challenges to that success include changes in products, services, staffing, and processes. KOVA’s workforce management software can allow you to offer timely and relevant training without the inconveniences and expense of classroom instruction.
Customer service is vital to keeping your business strong and agile. But for call centers, ensuring the highest levels of customer service can be a challenge. The modes of communication call centers utilize in interacting with a customer base can distort the tone of a message. Being alert to ways telephone and chat communication can be improved in your call center is the foundation upon which a high performance call center is built.
Call center Performance Management Is Based On Information Gathering
Supporting your call center’s team and ensuring an outstanding customer experience are each a half of the same whole. But ensuring that these components are working smoothly, each flowing into the other, can be difficult.
Monitoring staff performance is much more than seeing if team members are doing their jobs. By carefully and comprehensively evaluating agents’ performance you not only lay the groundwork for improvement plans or promotion or reward opportunities, you are looking for trends than can feed back into staff training.
Training is the single best means of achieving the best possible efficiency in a call center. Avoid the pitfalls of throwing random training opportunities at staff whenever a concern in performance surfaces. Too often such approached mean staff loses faith in training sessions, seeing them as a burden to be endured rather than a means to a better work experience.
Part of any contact center solutions must be gathering data about performance and customer feedback to enable your team to acquire the tools they need to succeed. And if your team succeeds, your business thrives.
Call center Software Is The Key To Overall Performance Improvement
Call center software that lets you capture and analyze your team’s performance while at the same time recording customer feedback is crucial in today’s business world.
KOVA has the solution to your call center management needs. KOVA’s Enterprise Feedback Management allows you a deep and clear insight into how customers view your call center’s performance. Offering you the ability to act quickly in response to customer feedback, Enterprise Feedback Management can direct employee training opportunities.
How Call Center Software Makes Your Team Stronger
Enterprise Feedback Management allows you unparalleled insight into customer feedback. Here are just a few of its features.
In today’s competitive world, acting upon customer sentiment can make the difference to a call center. Employing the latest in management software, KOVA can help make your business flexible and responsive to customer feedback.
Optimizing your call center’s performance can sometimes seem like chasing a dream. Divergent performance paths among teams and the daily difficulties of scheduling and customer service management can make prioritizing and effecting action difficult. But there are ways to help integrate performance management, team training, and customer service into a streamlined, smoothly functioning unity. By working smarter, you work better.
The day-to-day management of a call center presents unique challenges. Juggling the complex interactions between team members and management operations, coupled with the communication and problem solving involved with customer relations, makes managing a call center a paradigm of its own. The response to the unique needs of a call center needs to be tailored to its particular operation.
Getting Started
Before you can optimize your call center’s performance, revise your operational goals. Make sure these goals are clearly expressed and understood by all team members. Helping your team see how these goals apply to their performance is a great way to prepare your operational infrastructure for optimization.
Solution For The Future
KOVA’s Impact360 Workforce Management software is a powerful tool to help align performance with your program goals. Crafted specifically to the needs of call centers, it provides the ideal management system to make your planning a functional and successful reality.
1. Improve Your Call Center’s Customer Service
The Impact360 system is geared specifically toward the support of the best possible customer experience. By employing information derived from call center performance management, Impact360 empowers you to make the best staffing choices to meet customer needs – scheduling team members according to individual proficiencies and skills. Uncovering workload patterns and predicting trends helps you utilize and schedule agents more efficiently.
2. Meet Your Call Center’s Requirements More Easily
Impact360 can schedule meetings without adversely affecting service levels. Its scheduling feature can provide automatic compliance with any union, governmental, or time-banking requirements. Shift rules can be factored into scheduling, smoothing the path to attaining your target service-level goals.
3. Help Your Call Center Attain Actionable Insights
Impact360 can offer managers clear insight into day-to-day operations, supporting oversight and problem solving. By improving managers’ response to and tracking of performance data, processing quality can be improved. Shrinkage, overtime, and overstaffing can be better identified and corrected using Impact360. Team training can be implemented based upon easy assessment of agents’ performance, and tailored to fulfill concrete needs.
4. Keep Your Call Center Cost Effective
Managing people, system, and customer service is challenging, but integrating constituent components into an efficiently performing whole is even more difficult. Improving communication across institutional boundaries is a vital means to realizing a unified enterprise. Impact360 gives you the means of ensuring all aspects of your call center are aligned and focused, supporting a smooth, cost efficient customer experience.
By reducing waste and inefficiency while increasing communication and data collection,
KOVA’s Impact360 management system can supply the solutions to all your call center’s needs. From staffing issues to capturing customer experiences in a transparent and useful way, Impact360 can help you optimize your business.
Who said work can’t feel like play? That person surely did not go home loving their job at the end of the day. There are many different contact center games and incentives that you can put into place in your contact center to boost employee morale - which will keep them coming back, as well as increase the positivity and ease of each call they attend to.
Power Hour
If your contact center uses customer satisfaction software where you can access the results, such as KOVA’s Impact360 Customer Feedback, this incentive is for you. The concept is easy, but produces a great reward. Announce to your staff that the next hour will be called “power hour.” The worker with the highest percentage of satisfied customers will win a prize. This helps to ensure that at least for the next hour, your call center representatives will be working hard to give great customer service. It is likely that the boost will last longer than that hour though, and ensure great customer service for the rest of the day.
Jeopardy
This is a new twist on a classic game. Make your own Jeopardy board or find one online; either way works. Each time a contact center representative is finished with a successful phone call (key word successful), they get to pick and answer a question. If they get the question right, they get the points. The employee with the most points at the end of the shift wins a prize. You could even continue Jeopardy for a couple of days’ time and at the end of those days, the points are tallied and then the winner is announced. This both increases representatives’ incentives to have quick, but successful calls, but it also inspires greater attendance, as the more days worked during the time period, the higher the chance to win the game and the prize.
Board games
Any board game can quickly be turned into a call center motivational game and played just like Jeopardy is played above. Each rep gets a move after completing a successful call. You could also add extra moves for things like a positive customer review, etc.
It is important to note that prizes should be just that, a prize, and not just more money. The goal of these games is to stay fun and inspiring. When there’s a monetary component, some of the fun changes. Not only that, but some employees may be less motivated because they know they can just work more to earn that same amount of money. Here are several contact center incentive ideas:
If you think along these lines, you’ll be sure to find fun prizes that people will be motivated to work hard to win, instead of something you may find at the dollar store. Think of something you would want to win and work from there. Have your own prize ideas? Share them in the comments section below!
After you’ve worked at a contact center for a while, you will start to notice that a lot of the people you’re talking to can be grouped into a few different categories. Some of the people in those categories, though, are harder to deal with than others. Here are some problems associated with different personality types, and some contact center solutions to help you deal with these customers.
The Ego Stroker
Now this caller thinks they’re just the bee’s knees. They think that if they let you know that, they’re going to get better, faster service. You know that you give the same good service to each caller though, so someone like this can be frustrating. If they say something like “Do you know who I am?” you know you’re talking to an ego stroker.
Do you remember when you were little and you would tell your mom or dad a crazy story and they would change their tone of voice so that you felt like you were telling them the most important thing in the world? It is now time to master that voice. If you use that same voice with the ego stroker, they should calm down long enough for you to get the information you need to solve their problem.
The Chatty Cathy (or Chris)
Women are often associated with this rambling, talkative personality, but it happens just as often with men as it does women. Callers with this personality will tell you about their life, their problems (unrelated to their reason for calling) and frustrate you with their lack of the ability to be concise.
This can be an opportunity for great customer service to be shown, so don’t shut them down right away.
1. For the first minute, listen to this caller to understand what they’re saying and the problem at hand.
2. Restate what you have heard the problem is.
3. When they go back on a tangent, reconnect what they’re saying to the problem. This way you help them stay focused and you can get on to the next caller.
The (Seemingly) All-Knowing
This customer calls you with a question, but is resistant to solutions different than their own. Apart from saying, “obviously that didn’t work the first time, that’s why you called me,” make the caller feel like they’re part of the team while they’re calling. Use words like “us” and “we” when talking to this personality. That way they feel like they’re part of the process to find a new solution and can put their “expertise” to work.
The Mouse
Now, these customers don’t run around looking for cheese, and you wouldn’t be able to hear them even if they did. These customers are those that don’t respond when you ask them questions about the situation. If you experience a caller that seems like they’re not going to utter a word, switch from open-ended questions to close-ended questions. This way the caller only has to pick from three responses, instead of many combinations of words, and can get their point across quickly and efficiently. Email also works as a great global call center solution. Your caller may not be responding because they do not understand your language, so if they can email a concern it can be ensured that they get a response and the help they need.
It may be frustrating to deal with callers that have personalities different than your own. However, if there weren’t many different personalities in the world, life would be pretty boring. Learning how to deal with each different personality will help ensure your day on the job runs smoothly. You can even help those in your workplace with customers like this through phone call recording software. Each of these personalities can be recorded and used in different trainings for your team. It can also be hard to know if every customer had a good experience. You may want to think about using customer survey software so their opinions can be heard.
They call in every day; you talk to different ones for hours on end; you hear their problems and answer their questions: Customers.
During the monotony of the workday, it’s often hard to personalize each person’s experience when they call. The process changes from quality over quantity to quantity over quality. However, the race to see just how many customers you can get through in one day is not helping your contact center, or customer loyalty. If you use contact center best practices you’ll keep them coming back. Be well versed in these 3 common contact center customer service mistakes to be able to avoid them in the future.
High call numbers don’t mean high satisfaction
Sure you’re getting through your calls, but that doesn’t mean you’re giving each customer the best experience. Never allow your mindset to change and think more about getting through the call than building a relationship. Listen to each customer’s problem and make sure to restate it so you know that’s exactly what they need help with. No customer is the same; they all want different things. After you understand what they need, take the time to fix it. There’s a difference between working efficiently and speeding through a call. By listening to each customer and addressing their needs, you’re ensuring that you’re able to help a wide variety of customers and making sure each one comes back.
Not every problem is the same
Let’s say you have a customer who calls multiple times a week, so you start to get to know them. Even though it’s the same person, their problems and the solutions to those problem will change most every time. People go through hard times sometimes, so don’t assume you understand the problem right away. Take the time to listen and respond to make sure you’re addressing this problem in the right way. Additionally, you may have many different customers, all with similar problems. After the fifth time, it may become tedious for you, but treat each one with the same respect as the first person with the problem, and they’ll keep coming back.
Listen to your employees
The start of good customer service is not always with the contact center representative, but often with their boss. Employ positive contact center management techniques. Listen to the employees in your contact centers and help them when they have questions. This will help you, as the boss, to gain insight into how to better help the customer - and be able to prepare other employees with scenarios that might occur when they’re on the phone. Not listening to your employees does both you and them a disservice, because you’re not giving them all the materials they need to succeed.
Some customers can be frustrating, and others interesting - but it’s important to give each one the same respect and service. While it’s important to know the “dos” of customer service, it’s also important to keep the “don’ts” in mind, so as to avoid them. Have your own list of don’ts? Leave us a comment below and share!
Emergency dispatchers can make the difference between life and death. Providing the vital link between a crisis and the corresponding emergency response, dispatchers have helped make our communities safer places.
But for all the good work they do, there can sometimes be a missing component in the first response they provide the public.
There is a growing movement to provide all emergency dispatchers with CPR training. The ability to coach callers in the midst of crisis on steps they can take to keep a victim’s heart beating in some circumstances is the single greatest contributing factor to their survival: for every minute of delay the chances of survival drop by ten percent.
In a country were we’re accustomed to thinking we have the best of everything, it can come as a surprise to know that where you live can directly affect your chances of surviving a sudden heart attack. And the differences are not minor: survival rates can be as much as five times higher in some cities.
A significant contributing factor is the CPR training of 9-1-1 operators.
But putting the capability in the hands of emergency dispatchers is harder than it may at first seem. Dispatchers face an incredible impediment in applying their CPR training to an emergency call. Because they must rely on the caller’s assessment of a victim’s status, the dispatcher essentially works through secondhand information. The stress the caller is under can affect their ability to understand fully what is happening or may limit their ability to communicate with a dispatcher.
Besides coping with panic, dispatchers face the difficulty of using the appropriate vocabulary to express directions. Words like ‘center,’ ‘middle,’ and ‘half way down,’ while referring to the same general concept, can mean different things to different people.
Another major hurdle is identifying if a victim is breathing. What may seem like breath to the caller may in fact be a last gasp. In other cases a victim could be breathing, but not normally.
Despite the obvious challenges of coaching CPR over the phone, the possible impact it can make makes the attempt worthwhile. Fully appreciating this fact, the American Heart Association has urged every city and county on a voluntary basis to train 9-1-1 dispatchers to coach CPR over the phone. It recommends that
Heart disease is the number one killer of Americans. It accounts for one in every four deaths. Every year 720,000 Americans die of heart attacks, and of those fatalities, 515,000 are victims of first time heart attacks. With statistics like these, the need for CPR training is clear.
Emergency dispatchers are often the crucial element that can save a life. By providing them the tools that can turn around a potentially fatal situation, city and county leaders can help ensure fewer American will die from heart disease.
NENA, the National Emergency Number Association, promotes the awareness of 9-1-1 and international three digit emergency communication systems. With 7,000 members in 48 chapters, NENA is the only organization dedicated to 9-1-1 policy, technology, operations, and education issues.
The National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA) sponsored three national 9-1-1 meetings in an effort to create industry awareness of 9-1-1. In 1982, the National Emergency Number Association (NENA), a not-for-profit corporation, was founded as a result of these meetings and to further the goal of "One Nation – One Number."
NENA exists to save lives, and its mission is to foster the means to ensure that every single call for help never goes unanswered. The protection of human life, the preservation of property, and the maintenance of general community security are among NENA's objectives. By working with local and national policy makers, NENA seeks to establish industry leading standards, training, and certifications.
Working as both a clearinghouse for information as well as a hub for networking and communication in the public safety industry, NENA looks to the future. In response to industry needs and concerns, NENA seeks to facilitate the creation and implementation of an IP Next Generation 9-1-1 system.
This June NENA will hold its annual convention in Nashville. Attendees will learn about current and future public safety issues affecting the world of emergency communication. Focusing on practical, real-world application of information, visitors will be offered a wide variety of educational events, from comprehensive full-day to multi-day courses and workshops.
The week-long event kicks off with a Run For 9-1-1, a 5k run/walk to benefit the Friends of 9-1-1. The event promotes healthy living among 9-1-1 professionals. Funds raised go to support scholarships and 9-1-1 training opportunities.
Attendees will have an unparalleled opportunity to network with individuals from all across the emergency communication field. Thousands of public safety professionals, telecommunications specialists, and federal, state, and local policymakers will be present.
Highlights of the event include the opening keynote to be delivered by Naomi Judd, followed later by a keynote session with Janet miller entitled ‘What makes an effective leader?’ A networking lunch and keynote featuring Inky Johnson will follow midweek.
The expo brings a wide section of the public safety industry together under one roof. Visitors are able to see and share the latest advances in emergency communication and communication support services. By offering visitors a broad venue, attendees are able to explore what the future holds for 9-1-1 and emergency response enterprise.
KOVA supports NENA’s objectives of making our communities safer places. Our SilentPartner software is the only public safety cellular phone recording system available that records the audio at the phone level, and can capture text messages, photos and videos. It allows responders and investigators to record all their calls, or just a select few, while on scene, and then transmits those recordings instantly to the same database as your conventional phone logger.
The case management features of SilentPartner, along with the evidential audio, allow for cases to be closed much more quickly and easily.
Working in a PSAP means you will more likely than not encounter frightened callers on a daily basis. It’s important to be able to keep these people calm when they call in so that you can get the needed information to be able to dispatch someone to them effectively, and give them the information they need to be able to get along until emergency personnel arrive on the scene. If you know what to do in an emergency situation, your caller will be a lot more at ease and ready to give you the details to assist you in dispatching. Here are the dos and don’ts of an emergency situation.
DO:
Make sure you keep calm
There are not many things scarier than being told there is something to be scared of. When you receive a call from a very afraid person, no matter what situation they’re in, do not allow yourself to get as worked up as they are. You are their 911 dispatcher and they’re relying on you. If you stay calm and keep your voice even, the person on the other side will begin to feel calmer too, instead of becoming even more anxious, as they would if you were to raise your voice as well.
Give them something to do
You might have an emergency that you’re unfamiliar with, or not be entirely sure what to do when the emergency strikes. Try to think of something to tell the person on the other side to do, even if it’s just maintaining breathing (you can also breathe with them). By doing this you’re taking their mind off the situation at hand and giving them way to keep calm, so they can give you information as the need arises, or help emergency responders when they get to the scene.
DON’T:
Make a situation seem less important
While you do need to stay clam to help the person on the line, you also don’t need to downplay the scenario if you don’t think it’s that important, or don’t think the person should be as scared and worried as they are. Treat each emergency with the same care and caution, but ensure you’re staying calm.
Tell people to calm down
This may seem silly, because you do want to calm the person on the line down. However, don’t just tell them to calm down. That does nothing except possibly escalate the emotions they’re already experiencing. Use your voice and your breathing, and give them steps that they can do while waiting, to calm them down instead. If you can’t think of something to say that won’t upset the caller more, here are some suggestions:
Follow these tips and you’ll be saving the day like a superhero in no time. Have your own keep calm methods? Leave us a comment below!
