Call Centers For Dummies^®2nd Edition

Call Centers For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Call centers for dummies / Réal Bergevin ... [et al.]. -- 2nd ed.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-470-67743-8

1. Call centers--Management. I. Bergevin, Réal

HE8788.C36 2010 658.8’12 C2009-906118-X

Printed in the United States

1 2 3 4 5 RRD 14 13 12 11 10

About the Authors

Réal Bergevin is executive vice president of Transcom Worldwide. In 1991, he founded a call center consulting business that he and his wife, Anne, expanded into NuComm International, a global outsourcing call center service provider. NuComm was listed in Deloitte & Touche’s Canada’s 50 Best Managed Companies for five consecutive years and, in 2005, was awarded the National Quality Institute’s Canadian Award of Excellence. NuComm was sold to Transcom in 2007.

In 2001, Réal was honored as one of The Caldwell Partners International’s Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 business executives. He holds a business degree from Sir Wilfrid Laurier University and is the author of 23 Steps to an Effective Call Centre (NuComm Solutions, Inc.).

Afshan Kinder (formerly Bye) is a partner in SwitchGear Consulting with more than 20 years’ experience running contact centers and more than 8 years’ experience as an industry consultant and magazine columnist. She has been a senior vice president of sales and service for companies including Sprint Canada (now Rogers Communications), ING Direct, and Wardair.

She is a past board member of Contact Centre Canada, a current board member of the Greater Toronto Association of Contact Centers, and the author of the “Dear Affy” column that appears in each issue of Contact Management magazine.

Winston Siegel is a founding partner in SwitchGear Consulting and a specialist in high-growth service businesses and leadership development. He brings multi-industry expertise to call centers, having run customer service operations in restaurants, musical theater, and retail before seeing the call center light. He was vice president of operations for North America and Australia at Lavalife, growing its call centers from 9 to 20, and became president of the company in 1999.

He is a speaker on call center metrics, leadership, and sales, as well as the author of several white papers, including “The 10 Sacred Cows of Call Center Metrics” (Innovators Roundtable). He has a philosophy degree from York University and an MBA from the Schulich School of Business in Toronto.

Bruce Simpson is a founding partner in SwitchGear Consulting with a sales background in pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, and insurance. He was a founder and chief operating officer of North Direct Response, a call center outsourcer with clients including Royal Bank of Canada, Clearnet (TELUS), and Hewlett-Packard.

He is the author of industry white papers including “The ROI of Coaching” and “How to Control Payroll Leakage,” published by Frost & Sullivan.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the unsung heroes inside every call center. From front-line agents to team leaders and managers, you inspire us — and you inspired this book.

Authors’ Acknowledgments

We’d like to acknowledge the work of Réal Bergevin, who — with the support of John Dickhout, Daniel Willis, and other members of the Transcom team — wrote the first edition of this book. It was a privilege to add to your work and wisdom. We hope you approve.

Thank you to Amar Sidhu from Trader Corp., Arleen King and Ian Cruickshank from TELUS, Bernie Herenberg from ServiceOntario, Stephen Gaskin from Scotiabank, Paul Gyarmati from Reliance Home Comfort, Mariflor Di Rienzo from Ceridian Canada Ltd., Mario Perez from Telax Voice Solutions, and Karen Jensen from CI Investments for sharing their insights with us.

To the members of the SwitchGear army, who provided “roadside assistance” whenever we experienced writer’s block, thank you for your patience and support. A special “thank you” goes to Suzanne Figueirado, who chased us and prodded us relentlessly for months to make sure that we met the deadlines.

Thank you as well to the team of editors at John Wiley & Sons: Robert Hickey; Kathy Simpson; Pamela Vokey; our copy editor, Laura K. Miller; and our technical editor, Bob Milne. Your feedback and coaching helped us produce a better product and gave us a new appreciation for people who write books for a living.

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Introduction

Welcome to Call Centers For Dummies, 2nd Edition. If the topic of call centers has piqued your interest, and you’re looking for a road map that can help you lead and manage a call center, you’ve come to the right place. The purpose of this book is to demystify call centers, explaining clearly what they do and how they do it, all in a simple, straightforward manner. We hope that you’ll have a little fun along the way, too!

In the first edition, Réal Bergevin clearly laid out his approach to call center management and did an excellent job of covering a wide range of related topics. So why did we write a second edition? Well, call centers have changed significantly because of the advancements in technology and the growing influence of the Internet. A new challenge now exists because customers have many ways to communicate with the call center. In addition to the good ol’ phone, customers can use e-mail, online chat, or text messaging to express their feelings or ask questions about products or services.

In addition, many agents can work from home now, so you need to be able to communicate with those home agents effectively. You also have to find innovative ways to lead, motivate, and coach people remotely.

With change coming at a fast and furious pace, how are you going to provide consistently exceptional service to your customers? You can conquer this seemingly difficult task by sticking to the fundamentals, which we cover in this book. This book draws on the experience and insight of four people (us!), but we all lead our businesses by using the same people-first philosophy.

We can’t think of a better vehicle for sharing our knowledge, vision, and philosophy for leading and managing call centers than this book. We hope that you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed writing it.

About This Book

Many people have developed some pretty strong opinions about call centers. Executives and analysts alike realize more than ever that call centers can have a tremendous impact on a company’s revenue, costs, market intelligence, and customer loyalty. Call centers have become a significant part of local and world economies.

A well-run call center doesn’t happen by accident or chance. It happens only if the leader of the center has a clear vision of what can be achieved and creates an environment where high-performing teams can flourish. This book can help because it’s full of best practices for leading people and managing process and technology.

Because of the complexity of operating a business in today’s world, many call center professionals have come to us to deepen their understanding of how changes in business affect call center operations. We hope that you benefit not only from this book’s collection of best practices, but also from the depth of knowledge that we’ve gathered through our combined half century of experience. The difference between this book and the variety of call center publications, seminars, and Web sites out there is that this book doesn’t offer a call center “theory of everything.” We share with you concepts and practices that have worked for us in our operations. We know that managers benefit from their mistakes as much as they do from their successes, and through these pages, you get the advantage of seeing what to do as well as what not to do.

Foolish Assumptions

If you work in the call center industry, this book gives you an easy-to-use and (we hope) easy-to-read reference guide to the effective operation of a call center. We make some assumptions about who you are and what you may be looking for in this book:

You’re a hotshot MBA tracking through your career, and you find yourself running a call center.

You’re an experienced call center manager, and you’re looking for some new ideas and perspectives.

You supply the call center industry and want to better understand your clients’ management perspective.

You work in marketing, finance, or human resources, so you have some contact with a call center and wonder what goes on in it.

You’re considering a career in call centers.

You’re working in a call center and want to advance your career by unlocking the mysterious, ancient call center secrets.

You’re looking for new material with which you can dazzle members of the opposite sex. (Okay, we don’t make any promises about this one.)

How This Book Is Organized

Call Centers For Dummies, 2nd Edition is organized in six parts (plus two appendixes), each covering a different aspect of the call center. Chapters within each part cover specific topics in detail. Each part contains concepts and definitions, interesting facts and anecdotes, and (in most cases) practical how-to suggestions pertaining to the topic. You can take any approach to tackling this book. Unless you’re a seasoned call center pro, however, you’ll probably get the most out of this book by starting with Part I.

Part I: From the Ground Up: An Overview of the Call Center

This part provides a good overview of many of the topics covered in more detail in later parts. Consider it to be a call center primer, with a little bit extra. If you’re just getting started or want a brief indoctrination in all things call center, you may find this part to be especially useful.

In this part, we also discuss planning a new call center and considering outsourcing, and we introduce a business model for building a call center and relate that model to the larger corporate mission and goals.

Part II: The Master Plan: Finance, Analysis, and Resource Management

This part looks at call center analysis, financial planning, and staffing. We provide a simple overview of how (and what) measures come together to drive a call center’s operational and financial performance.

Also in this part, we uncover some of the mysteries of how and why call centers perform the way they do, and we explore everything from forecasting to schedule creation and workforce management automation.

Part III: Making Life Better with Technology

Part III reviews call center technologies, including basic requirements, valuable enhancements, and home agent programs. We also cover a simple approach to recommending and justifying new technology, and we show you what this technology can do for your customers, your agents, and your call center.

Part IV: Creating High-Performance Teams

In this part, we cover recruiting; establishing job expectations; offering training, feedback, and support; and creating employee engagement. We also show you how to implement a simple five-step process that can guide the way you manage agents’ performance.

Part V: Ensuring Continuous Improvement

In Part V, we explore the call center process and how to manage and improve it. In addition, we examine policies, procedures, and the effects of legislation and employment law on call centers. We also give you the scoop on mastering change, as well as details on various quality programs and certifications for call centers.

Part VI: The Part of Tens

In this part (a For Dummies classic), we offer tips and techniques that we’ve collected from the call center industry. These quick hits can give a boost to your company’s revenue and efficiency, employee morale, and customer satisfaction. Even if you don’t read the rest of this book, check out this part!

Appendixes

Many industries use a language all their own, and the call center industry is no exception, so Appendix A provides a glossary of key call center concepts. Appendix B gives you access to support services such as call center associations, technology suppliers, and consultants.

Icons Used in This Book

We’ve placed several icons throughout this book to point out certain information, and these icons have the following meanings.

Material marked with the Tip icon provides a general recommendation about how you can improve your call center or run it more easily.

This icon flags any potential pitfalls that you may want to be careful to avoid.

This content is — you guessed it — the stuff we don’t want you to forget.

This icon designates information that you probably don’t need to know but may find interesting.

This icon points out real-world stories that we’ve experienced or that someone told us.

Where to Go from Here

We certainly invite you to curl up on a Saturday night with a nice cup of tea, hot chocolate, or whatever and read this book from cover to cover. We’re sure that you hard-core call center types will find it quite gripping — a real page-turner.

We suspect, however, that some of you may not have the desire or need to read this entire book straight through. We encourage you to find the part that interests you most and start there.

Part I

From the Ground Up: An Overview of the Call Center

In this part . . .

We answer the question “What is a call center?” and explore what makes a good (or bad) call center. If you just want to know how call centers work, are thinking about working in one, or have ever had any aspirations to start a call center of your own, this is the part for you.

In this part, we introduce a business model for building a call center and relate that model to the larger corporate mission and goals. We examine the organizational structure, exploring the roles you need to fill to ensure that the center performs according to its business model and goals. We also discuss the logistics of building a call center and some key factors to consider if you’re thinking about outsourcing your call center.

Chapter 1

A First Look at Call Centers

In This Chapter

Understanding what call centers are

Following the evolution of call centers

Knowing how call centers operate

Differentiating the good and bad aspects of the industry

For years, Réal’s mom has been asking him, “What is it you do, again?” Well, here it is, Mom: He works in a call center. In fact, he works in a lot of call centers. Okay, okay — you don’t know what a call center is. Well, this chapter explains it all.

Defining Call Centers

Here’s a basic definition of a call center: When you call, say, an airline, cable-television company, or bank, the person you deal with at the other end of the phone is a call center agent (or perhaps representative, consultant, or associate), and the office or department that this person works in is a call center. Sometimes, a call center consists of just one or two people sitting beside a phone, answering customer calls. Often, it’s a very large room that has a lot of people neatly organized in rows, sitting beside their phones, answering customer calls. To the customer, the call center is the voice of the company. If you’re angry, you often get mad at the person at the other end of the phone. After all, you’re talking to the company, right?

To the company, the call center is many things: cost center, profit center, key source of revenue, key source of frustration, strategic weapon, strategic disadvantage, source of marketing research, and source of marketing paralysis. The role of the call center varies from company to company, depending on how closely the call center works with the parent or client organization to support the company’s goals and the ability of the call center itself.

Inbound, outbound, or blended

Call centers communicate with their customers in several ways, depending on the type of call center. Call centers fall into three main categories:

Inbound: In an inbound call center, customers initiate the calls. Customers may make these calls to buy airline tickets, to get technical assistance with their personal computers, to get answers to questions about their utility bills, to get emergency assistance when their cars won’t start, to get advice from a nurse about minor medical issues, to buy insurance for their cars, or to talk to a company representative about any number of other situations.

Outbound: In an outbound call center, agents of the company initiate calls to customers. Your first reaction might be “Telemarketing, right?” Well, yes, a company may call customers in its telemarketing campaign, but companies have a lot of other good reasons to call their customers. Companies may call because the customer hasn’t paid a bill or because a product that the customer wanted has become available; they may call to follow up on a problem that the customer was having or to find out what product or service enhancements the customer wants to see.

Blended: Some call centers are blended operations, in which agents handle both inbound and outbound calls.

As we outline in Chapter 8, blending, done well, can make call center operations very cost efficient and can improve customer service as well.

Contact or call center: What’s in a name?

The explosion in popularity of the Internet and wireless technologies has changed the way people communicate. People still use the phone (although it’s frequently a cellphone these days), but they also communicate with friends, Romans, and Walmart by using e-mail, online chats, Web forums, and instant messaging. Call centers have responded to this change. In fact, they’re increasingly being called contact centers to reflect the fact that they handle more than just phone calls. These facilities are centers for customer contacts in whatever ways customers want to communicate: letters, faxes, Web chats, e-mails, and so on.

Another term that you may have heard is virtual call center, in which a group of agents work from their homes instead of being situated at workstations in a building operated by the organization. Some centers are a blend of at-home agents and on-site agents. Working from home is a fantastic arrangement for many employees: The hours are often flexible, and the job has no dress code or commute. Virtual call centers can lower a company’s costs because they allow the company to optimize scheduling and spend less on real estate. (We explain scheduling in Chapter 8.)

Bottom line, each customer has to decide how he wants to communicate with the company, and the company has to respond appropriately through its contact center.

As with inbound and outbound call centers (refer to the preceding section), some companies choose to separate the handling of customer contacts by medium — a group for inbound calls, a group for outbound calls, a group for e-mail, and so on. Some call centers, especially those in smaller operations, have opted to create universal agents who handle all contact types. Call centers create universal contact agents for the same reasons that they blend inbound and outbound call-handling agents: efficiency and service.

This book is called Call Centers For Dummies, but we could just as easily have named it Contact Centers For Dummies. Throughout the book, we refer to call handling and call centers, partly because we grew up in call centers (well, not literally) and partly because phone calls still represent the bulk of communication between customers and companies. You can apply the concepts in this book to all types of contacts: phone calls, e-mails, online chats, instant messages, and even smoke signals.

Tripping Down Memory Lane: The Evolution of the Call Center

Although we can’t really tell you when the first call center opened, we imagine that call centers started around the time that the telephone became a common household device.

The evolution of call centers just makes sense. A consumer can much more easily pick up a phone and call a company than she can start the car (or hitch up the horse), bundle up the kids, and go to town to arrange for the cable company to add extra channels. Likewise, for businesses like the cable company in this example, it’s much easier to do business over the phone than to have agents show up on the customer’s doorstep.

Consumers and businesses have used the phone as a way to do business for a long time. As a formal business discipline, however, using the phone to communicate with customers is not so old — maybe 30 years or so of development.

Moving from low-tech to high-tech

Before the mid-1970s, airlines and major retailers used phone rooms — the precursors of call centers. Phone rooms were located in sites spread across the country or operated in large rooms that had lots of desks, phones with many extensions, and a lot of paper for tracking everything that was going on. We’re all too young to have seen these places ourselves, but people say that these rooms were very busy, noisy, and confusing.

One of the most significant advancements in call center technology was the invention of the automatic call distributor (ACD) by Rockwell International. The ACD made large, centralized call centers practical and efficient by providing a way to distribute large numbers of incoming phone calls evenly to a pool of call center staff. With the implementation of the ACD, the call center industry began, and the call center as a business discipline was off and running. We talk more about call center technology and technological advancements in Chapters 9 and 10.

Moving from cost center to profit center

Most important to the call center industry, corporations have changed their view of the call center — from cost center and (in some cases) a necessary evil to profit center and competitive advantage. Today, business owners build entire companies around call center capability. You can buy a computer from a company that doesn’t have a retail store, for example, or do your banking with a bank that doesn’t have physical branches. These businesses offer the telephone or Internet as customers’ only communication options.

Meeting legal and image challenges

Not everyone thinks that call center changes and evolution are positive, however. Partly because of the impact of call centers on everyone’s daily lives, and partly because some call centers had bad management and used bad business practices, some call centers have raised the ire of consumers and caught the attention of legislators.

Overly aggressive telemarketing practices, for example, have resulted in laws that regulate how sales are conducted over the telephone, whom telemarketers can and can’t contact, and how telemarketers can contact those people. Governments even legislate how quickly some industries must answer incoming calls — a response to the poor service and long delays that consumers experienced in the past.

Call centers are also at the head of the outsourcing debate (see Chapter 5) because many companies are moving their call center operations offshore to countries that have well-qualified but less-expensive labor.

Additionally, privacy legislation has added a level of complexity to the way call centers can collect and use information about their customers, and several countries are considering legislation that restricts how and where call centers can operate.

Poor business practices, as well as the success of the industry, have brought on some of the legislative challenges that call centers face. Explosive demand for call center services, both from business and consumers, has taxed the discipline’s ability to grow in size and capability while maintaining excellence. Still, on balance, call centers continue to advance in number, capability, sophistication, and excellence for two reasons: They’re effective and efficient business tools, and they satisfy increasing customer demand for convenience.

Today’s call centers: Ringing up big numbers

Today, the call center industry is an important part of the global economy. More than 55,000 call centers operate in North America alone, employing more than 6 million people (6 percent of the workforce). Consumers purchase more than $700 billion worth of goods and services through call centers every year, and that number is growing. You can purchase almost anything from the comfort of your home, office, car, or wherever you can get to a phone (or access the Internet).

Call centers continue to evolve at a dizzying pace. In an effort to gain greater efficiencies, provide better customer service, and generate more revenue, call centers are using more sophisticated technology, including customer information databases that give agents a better understanding of customers’ preferences, buying patterns, and desired products or services. Based on data collected about each customer, the system suggests options for that customer. This smart technology and its analytical tools give agents the best way to approach each customer as an individual.

Along with improving its use of technology, the call center community is improving its members’ knowledge and skills through trade associations, industry publications, trade shows, and specialized training and certification programs. In an effort to better manage people, processes, and technology, the industry has latched onto management approaches and philosophies that can give it an edge, including Customer Operations Performance Center, Inc. (COPC) and Six Sigma. We describe these programs in Chapter 17.

Making Call Centers Work

You can’t easily manage a call center well, because call centers are complex places. It’s not just the technology; that’s the easy part! Call centers are a microcosm of business. To run a good call center, managers need to effectively blend people, processes, and technology to produce a desired result.

Most call centers rely on people — often, a lot of people. Wages and salary typically comprise 60 percent to 70 percent of a call center’s budget.

Because customers can ask almost anything of the call center, agents need to have at their fingertips information on just about all the company’s policies, procedures, products, and services. With a huge volume and variety of customers, a call center gets a lot of activity. Even if you have the best technology available to smooth things out, when you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of calls each day, the slightest bottleneck can add up to a big problem.

In fact, a 1-second increase in call length in a call center that answers 1 million calls a year creates an additional 280 hours of work requiring approximately 380 additional hours of staffing. (We explain the math in Chapter 6.)

Identifying good call center managers

Good call center managers have the following characteristics:

They have a strong sense of purpose.

They understand their roles within the organization.

They have clear, measurable targets and goals, and understand how to reach those goals.

They’re part analyst, part accountant, part engineer, part psychologist, part cheerleader, and part coach, effectively blending human resources, process management, and technology without limiting themselves or indulging too much in any one discipline.

For more information on the call center manager’s role, see Chapter 3.

Defining the culture

Because call centers rely so much on people, managers need to define and create a supportive culture to make sure that the call center can operate successfully. Think of a supportive culture as being one that clearly defines the values and beliefs that support the call center’s mission. (We talk about developing a mission in Chapter 2.)

To make the call center’s mission and values come alive, managers are responsible for modeling the right behaviors. As a manager, you should communicate goals and rewards so that they line up with the call center’s mission, vision, and values, and thereby help create the desired culture.

Understanding What Makes Call Centers Good or Bad

A good call center has a strong culture in which people work from a common set of values and beliefs, with a common purpose and a strong focus on business goals. Management needs to continually align everything that the call center does with the company’s goals and desired culture.

Generally, as Figure 1-1 illustrates, your call center should have four main goals:

Efficiency: Cost-effective operations for the organization. This area includes both operating the call center and completing core tasks for the organization (see Chapters 5–8, 11, 15, and 20).

Revenue generation: Everything that leads to revenue, such as selling, upgrading, collecting, retaining current customers, and regaining lost customers (see Chapter 15).

Customer satisfaction:

Employee satisfaction: A measure of how happy employees are with their jobs and working environment (see Chapters 13, 14, 16, 18, and 20). In our experience, happy workers are more productive, take fewer days off, and stay loyal to the company.

These four goals are interdependent. Good revenue generation can’t happen without some level of efficiency, for example; only satisfied customers continue to buy a product; and motivated employees promote the business effectively. We discuss the four goals in more detail in Chapter 2.

Characteristics of a good call center

When a call center is working properly, it exhibits the following traits:

Focuses on its business goals.

Answers phone calls and e-mails quickly.

Has high employee morale.

Resolves a high percentage of customer inquiries on the first contact.

Measures customer satisfaction as a service indicator and has high customer satisfaction scores.

Provides a significant source of revenue for the organization.

Has an effective process for collecting and presenting data on performance. Everyone knows where he or she stands monthly, daily, hourly, and even in real time.

Works efficiently. Employees need to do little follow-up on the customer file after the customer has hung up. Calls last for a consistent length of time and require a minimum of customer time to achieve resolution.

Keeps everyone engaged and busy with a purpose, with no one being overly taxed.

Improves processes continually to make gains in service, efficiency, and revenue generation.

Enables the corporation to see the call center as a strategic advantage — an ally to the rest of the organization.

Characteristics of a poor call center

A call center that doesn’t function well probably displays the following characteristics:

Creates long hold times for customers waiting to get through to the next available agent (and when those customers do reach a call center employee, they’re frequently transferred or put on hold).

Deals with customer issues that frequently require multiple contacts before they’re resolved.

Breeds harried staff members running from crisis to crisis, putting out fires but not getting ahead.

Lacks understanding of metrics or performance.

Scores low on customer satisfaction or has no way to measure customer satisfaction at all.

Lacks the appetite to improve working conditions to stay competitive and retain employees.

Experiences low employee morale and high turnover.

Generates complaints by corporate executives and senior management about costs or sales and service results. Some executives may talk about outsourcing the operation.

A well-run call center doesn’t happen by accident. Good people need to do good planning and good execution. This book gives you the strategies, practices, plans, and skills to control what your call center produces.