By Jeanne Bliss, May 15, 2012 at 9:00 am
Are customer goals as important as sales goals? Is there clarity in your business that the work you do in the call center drives profitability because of the work you do to keep and grow customer loyalty? Here is a critical way to elevate your work in the call center from ‘cost center’ to customer profitability center. Understand and manage to increase customer lifetime value, just as Zane’s Cycles does. Elevate the role of your folks from “phone rep” to “customer rescue artist.”
How Zane’s Cycles Grows because they know and respect the lifetime value of their customers.
With only one retail location, Zane’s Cycles of Connecticut is one of the three largest bike shops in the United States. They sell $15 million each year in bicycles, and bike supplies, with a relationship grounded in customer trust. For example, on any given day you might see a $6,000 bike go out the door for a test drive without any one of Zane’s folks asking to collect the customer’s identification or any type of collateral. “Do you want my license?” is often asked by the customer. The response is always, “Nope, just have a good ride.” Zane’s makes this decision because they want potential customers to know that in this world there’s a store that trusts them, and it’s Zane’s. Made as a decision to embrace customers, this decision also sends a strong message to Zane’s staff. “This is not about protecting ourselves,” owner Chris Zane says. “We’re in the people business, not the thing business. This decision helps our staff understand and act on that key difference.” It gives customers confidence and a lasting impression that they have found a place where they’ll want to do business.
Each Customer’s Lifetime Value is $12,500.
Zane’s Won’t Risk That. Zane’s Cycles decided to act on its belief that the majority of customers do what’s right. “We calculate the lifetime value of every customer at $12,500,” says President Chris Zane. “Why start out that customer relationship by questioning their integrity? We choose to believe our customers.” New Zane’s employees often suggest that they protect the business by taking customers’ keys or wallets when they test drive a bicycle. Chris Zane firmly says “no” to this suggestion. This is when employees and customers realize Zane’s is a service business, not a product business. And it sets the tone for how they interact with people. It frees them to do the right thing.
Trust Is Reciprocated: Zane’s Loses Only Five Bikes a Year.
Customers feel trusted by Zane’s. And that trust is returned to Zane’s. Of the 4,000 bikes they sell each year, only about 5 are stolen during test drives. For Zane’s it’s just not worth having the whole attitude of the company change because of the attitudes of five dishonest people. Zane’s believes customers are good. That attitude frees Zane’s to grow. They have achieved an average annual growth rate of 23 percent since opening in 1981. Why not take a page from Zane’s, and take a hard look at your policies? Change or eliminate any that exist to “protect” you from your customers.
Do You Believe Customers Are an Asset or a Cost Center?
Zane’s Cycles doesn’t take collateral from customers who test ride its bikes. Of the 4,000 sold each year, only 5 bikes are stolen. Zane’s calculates the lifetime value of a customer at $12,500. “Why start that relationship by questioning someone’s integrity?” asks Chris Zane.
• Do you know the value of your customers? Does everyone in your company?
• Does how you value customers guide decision making?
• Are you investing in customers or managing costs?
• How would you rate your intent and ability to understand the value of customers and invest in them?
• Do your decisions on how you value customers earn you “beloved” status today?
• Let’s take a hard look at your policies. What one thing can you change or eliminate that “nickels and dimes” your customers, especially your best customers?
In the first quarter of 2012, we surveyed workforce management professionals to learn more about the goals and challenges that pertain to their role within the call center. We wanted to understand more about the group whose daily responsibility is to deal with the complex nature of the contact center to match supply (agents) with demand (calls). We heard about the issues involved with scheduling agents, ensuring they have time to complete the necessary off-phone work that helps them be better at their job and working in additional requests from multiple departments that take them off the phones.
Survey results identified the biggest challenges for workforce managers as balancing service levels with other off-phone activities (65.7 percent), enhancing forecasting and staffing processes (59.1 percent) and improving forecasting accuracy (55.1 percent).
It’s not surprising to see that balancing service levels with off-phone work is an ongoing concern as service levels must be maintained and call volume will continue to fluctuate. Given that the off-phone work is the glue that keeps agent proficient, WFM professionals don’t have the option to pick one over the other. They have to perform multiple maneuvers along the service level/off-phone work tightrope to be successful within their role.
Likewise, process and accuracy improvement for their forecasting efforts increase the efficiency of overall call center operations.
Interestingly, workforce managers identified improving agent morale/satisfaction as one of their top four challenges (45.6 percent), ahead of processes for driving profitability improvements. It would be easy to surmise that agent morale improvements can have an added impact on a number of other key call center metrics from customer satisfaction to handle time to increased sales and beyond.
We’ll be tackling other results from the survey in future blogs. Stay tuned!
Nearly 400 workforce managers and workforce management team members responded to this survey. The majority of respondents included workforce management team managers, schedulers and real-time desk managers. The size of the respondents’ contact centers varied with 26 percent of respondents having more than 3000 agents within their contact center, 22 percent with 200 agents or less and 21 percent with 1501 to 3000 agents.
By Donna Fluss, May 1, 2012 at 9:00 am
For many years, contact center workforce management (WFM) solutions have been used to optimize agent schedules and productivity. These solutions have most commonly been deployed in contact centers with 250 or more agents, where managers found it impractical to use spreadsheets for scheduling. WFM solutions have been used to forecast the volume of calls and then schedule the right number and mix of agents to handle the projected volume.
A major problem with WFM is that few agents have been satisfied with their assigned schedules. Unfortunately, managers have ignored this issue, and have often tried to force agents to change their lives and personal schedules to accommodate the needs of the business. Or, after failing to convince the staff to change their personal schedules, managers have given up and put their WFM solution on the shelf. The challenges arising from applying the recommended WFM schedules have been so serious that for years these solutions have jokingly been referred to as “the best way to clean out a contact center.” Clearly, this scenario isn’t very funny, and has represented a very expensive waste of money.
The good news is that there is finally a new generation of workforce management solutions that allow managers to decide if they want to optimize the productivity of their contact center (as they tried to do in the past), to prioritize agent schedule preferences, or to find a balance between the two. Another major enhancement in this new generation of WFM is that the solutions have agent self-service modules that allow employees to enter their own schedule preferences, request time off (vacation days, or even just a few hours) and swap shifts. These self-service modules have many advantages; they empower agents while freeing WFM specialists from spending hours doing data entry, and allow the rebalancing of schedules on-the-fly.
Innovative managers in contact centers with 50 or more agents are using these new solutions to build departments that are quite different from the “churn and burn” shops of the past. They are improving the agent experience (and morale) for the benefit of customers, staff, contact centers and enterprises. The current thinking is that it’s better to have satisfied agents who want to come to work than an ideal number of disgruntled employees who are going to try to find a new job as soon as possible.
The old way – trying to force agents to change their lives to accommodate work – was never a winning approach. The new way – prioritizing agents’ schedule preferences and empowering them with self-service tools – can give a big boost to agent morale and reduce staff attrition. If you have not updated your WFM solution in the past few years, or you’ve never used one, it’s a great time to look into these valuable applications. Even better, many WFM vendors are now offering their solutions on a hosted basis, so you can try them out before making a large investment.
By Matt McConnell, April 23, 2012 at 9:00 am
The latest generation entering the workforce brings a new energy to the contact center, which also brings new challenges to the table for call center management.
But this generation also represents the new social customer, so understanding what makes them “tick” can provide invaluable insight into what motivates your customers.
On Thursday, May 10th at 2:00 PM (EST), Donna Fluss, a recognized thought leader and innovator in contact center and real-time analytics, will join me for an interactive webinar on how to play to the strengths of Gen Y agents.
In this webinar, you’ll learn how to harness the strength of Gen Y by:
- Improving overall performance through positive, constructive and timely feedback
- Adopting workforce management tactics that balance center and agent needs
- Improving operational efficiencies by utilizing the latest technologies
Donna is also the newest member of our Productivity Plus Panel, which we created for contact center industry experts from around the world to share tips, tricks and techniques to help call center leaders improve productivity and increase revenue in their own centers.
As founder and president of DMG Consulting – the leading provider of contact center and analytics research, market analysis and consulting – Donna has spent 25 years helping end-users build world-class contact centers and vendors develop high-value solutions for the market.
She is the author of the book, The Real-Time Contact Center: Strategies, Tactics and Technologies for Building a Profitable Service and Sales Operation, as well as many leading annual industry reports on a wide range of contact center topics.
Look for Donna’s posts on this blog in upcoming weeks and click here to register for the webinar on May 10th.
By Jeanne Bliss, April 20, 2012 at 9:00 am
The manner in which customers start and end their interactions with you have been proven to be a large part of what they retain and share on social media, and with friends, relatives and colleagues. How do you engage your frontline folks to work to create a specific beginning and ending of customer interactions? Read how this company creates memories customers want to tell others to have and repeat again.
Making Griffin the Hospital of Choice in the Community
Griffin Hospital (in Derby Connecticut) has made a commitment and investment to understand the lives of patients and their families. Their goal was to imagine what it would be like to be the patient so they could improve the experience for both patients and their families. Griffin Hospital hadn’t always received this type of accolade. Back in 1982, Griffin Hospital was very far from extreme loyalty. At that time, one-third of the local community named Griffin as the hospital they would avoid if they could. That rude awakening pushed them to rethink their purpose and literally everything they did. The hospital wanted to create an experience to remember.
Griffin Hospital Decided on Music in the Parking Lot and a Piano in the Lobby
Being told that it was avoided whenever possible pushed Griffin to rethink the purpose for their hospital, physicians, and caregivers. Their goal was to go from being the hospital to avoid to being the hospital of choice in the community. Griffin knew that if “choice” was the goal, then they had to readjust their purpose; they needed to move from being healthcare providers to becoming service providers. Griffin had to stop executing required tasks and determine what experience they would deliver, what patient and family emotions were involved. What they found was that the emotional journey of going to the hospital begins in the parking lot. So Griffin provides free valet parking and concierge services. Music in the parking lot and lobby welcomes visitors and takes away the sterile “hospital” feeling. Says Bill Powanda, Griffin Hospital vice president, “It doesn’t matter if you have the shortest Emergency Department wait times around and deliver the greatest care in the nation; if parking is a nightmare, your patients won’t be completely satisfied.”
Griffin Hospital Enjoys a 99 Percent Recommendation Rate
Understanding the customer emotions involved in “coming and going” from a hospital visit prompted actions that made Griffin stand out. Those bookend experiences are part of the magnet that pulls people back to Griffin. No longer considered the “black sheep” hospital of the community, Griffin grows through customer referrals. Inpatient admissions grew 28 percent from 1997 to 2009, compared with a state average growth rate of 10 percent. And outpatient services grew 92 percent from 1998 to 2009. Not only have they become the choice of their community, but for surrounding communities as well. One-third of Griffin Hospital’s customers come from outside of the community it serves. Ten percent of administrators of U.S. hospitals want to visit Griffin Hospital to learn from them. Do you think about how you punctuate your moments of connection with customers? First impressions last the longest. Is yours purposeful? Does it create the ideal first opinion of you?
What Are Your Customer-Experience Bookends?
Griffin Hospital decided to eliminate the fear of hospital visits with music in their parking lots and a concierge in their lobby. The memory of these experience bookends bond visitors to them.
• Do you have a purposeful beginning and ending to moments of customer contact?
• Are you creating memories or executing tasks?
• How would you rate your intent and ability to create purposeful moments of customer contact?
• How would your customers say you are doing?
• Do customers rave about a memorable experience?
• How does your decision for having purposeful moments for customers from beginning to end compare with this beloved company?
• What are the marquee moments in your customers’ experiences with you?
• Do your decisions for creating memorable bookends earn you “beloved” status today?
Most companies measure their success on a quarterly basis from the amount of revenue produced subtracting out costs. This yields profit and the higher the profit the happier investors are and the more secure the jobs of the senior people in the company. This same type of measurement is used within companies to determine how much profit each unit within the business makes the company.
For call centers that are not third-party outsources or outbound sales this proves to be a problem. For without revenue generated, a call center just uses up revenue in the form of costs which decreases the potential amount of profit each quarter, at least on paper.
How does a call center manager or director justify itself as a critical part of the company and aligned with the company goals when it does not produce revenue? That is a very good question.
First, the manager must know enough about business and business finance to know that his/her call center is a cost function on the books. Knowing how much it cost the company to run the call center operation, and fully loaded cost per call and call per item sold, is a starting point for any manager.
Second, the manager needs to know about who uses the call center and why to determine if the call center did not exist, how this would hurt the overall revenue and repeat sales of the organization.
Run a hypothetical scenario. Make the call center disappear on paper. All of those costs, poof, gone. So now what happens when the customers try and call and get no signal? What do they do? How does this impact the company’s bottom-line?
Third, the manager needs to be able to take these facts and produce a loss of revenue sheet for the company that addresses the loss to the company if the call center disappeared overnight. This is the data that was produced from the thought exercise and the data should be turned into dollars and cents because this is the most common unit of measure within a company.
Fourth, from those data, the manager can produce a defendable return on investment (ROI) calculation for the call center which places the call center more in line with the revenue producing units within the company.
If, and when, someone challenges the purpose and cost of the call center, these numbers can not only help to justify its existence, but can also help to articulate plans for expansion, growth and other resources needs. In short the manager of the call center can walk the walk and talk the talk of the other units in the company helping to showcase the value that call centers bring to an organization.
By Matt McConnell, April 5, 2012 at 11:15 am
Facebook and Twitter have become part of the American’s everyday vernacular. We spend countless hours watching videos on YouTube, e-mailing friends and researching everything from political candidates to sunburns online.
Chances are, when you have a question, the first thing you do is Google it.
Social networking is a modern phenomenon that crosses both age and socio-economic boundaries, and the call center is no exception. As agents have become increasingly comfortable with social learning in their personal lives, more and more companies are adopting social and informal learning platforms at work.
This type of learning offers agents an alternative way to learn, but also increases the performance of the entire agent population, because it encourages collaboration. Agents can share their knowledge and experience with their peers.
The result is mutually beneficial to the agents and the company as a whole. Not only does social learning improve overall agent performance and productivity, it promotes a more collaborative company culture, and ultimately, a higher level of customer service.
Think about it: through social platforms, agents are able to tap into arguably their most valuable knowledge source – fellow agents. By sharing experiences, information and advice, agents can learn from one another’s success and failures and avoid making the same mistakes.
Through social learning platforms, agents can share their expertise in a knowledge base that can be accessed across the entire agent population. Other social applications include discussion boards or blogs from various subject matter experts and some platforms even integrate with popular social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
The information is always current because it is constantly being updated. The collaboration helps new employees become proficient faster and can ultimately lower training costs.
The best part is that agents can access this wealth of information during natural idle times between calls – and all without ever having to leave their desks.
By Jeanne Bliss, March 28, 2012 at 9:00 am
How do you use your customer feedback to help change the course of your business? Inside your call centers you have a gold mine of information that you should be using to harness action. One of the most powerful is organizing that information your “detractors” (those who are not pleased) give you. It can help to change your business and increase profitability….because detractors drive business from you. And they do it very verbally on the internet!
Action Number 1: Be sure people know a “Detractor” when they hear one.
The importance of driving the “customer mission” as a strategic imperative of the business is to throw a bright glaring light on the fact that business prosperity comes from increasing the number of “promoters” or customer advocates, and in reducing the potential “detractors.” Your reps can play a key role in rescuing “detractors” or customers at risk.
As you train your reps, consider developing a heightened listening skill for knowing customers who are “at risk” of leaving your business. What do they say, what are their emotions? What are the best ways to empathize, support and rescue these customers in distress?
Action Number 2: Know the reasons why customers are your detractors.
Engage your reps to help you to inventory the issues why customers are the most upset and on the verge of leaving. You may want to do some additional outreach to contact those customers. To get that information, you need to reach out to these customers and genuinely ask what went awry in the relationship.
This type of action (which can be done during down times) flips your center from cost center to strategic partner business partner to the business – providing relevant and ROI related information to improve the operation.
Actions Number 3: Engage company executives in a quarterly or monthly customer loss review.
I call this a “culture boost” to driving customer focus. The reason is that it puts executives close to customer issues and connects reasons for their contacting your center with defection and loss of revenue. Inventory the issues and trend them. If you can, support your executives in personally calling some lost customers prior to your review.
If that’s not possible, record those calls so they have the voice of the customer in their ear. Reports are great. But there is nothing as powerful as hearing the voice of the customer personalizing and bringing the issues to life to drive traction.
This should give you plenty of momentum to focus and attach resources to problems that are driving your customers and your profitability out the door. And you continue to increase the value of your operation and you increase the value of your folks, from “service reps” to “customer rescue artists.”
By Jeanne Bliss, March 23, 2012 at 9:00 am
Companies still jump to surveys and focus groups to find out what their customers need. All they really need to do is to listen and reach out and respond with service when customers need them.
Do you?
Do customers feel like you are filled with people they can talk to? How do you respond when they talk about you on social media, or give your frontline feedback about your business? Learn how Zappos stays connected with customers in a natural and real manner.
No baloney conversations. Real talk from real people.
Twittering is democratic. No baloney. Good “tweets” are short and sweet. There’s no room for any pretense or pomp. Tony (Zappos. com CEO) is a guy who Twitters and he’s glad to have you know him as Tony. So do George and Mary and Sue and all the other Zappos.com folks (“Zapponians”) sending “tweets” about what’s going on in their day. For Zappos.com, Twittering is, plain and simple, about staying in touch with the people in their lives. This naturally includes customers.
Zappos.com Wants to Be a Part of Customers’ Lives.
Twittering is a natural extension of how Zappos.com exists and participates in people’s lives. Zappos people are straight-talkers who embrace ten principles to guide how they conduct themselves in business.
1. Deliver WOW through Service
2. Embrace and Drive Change
3. Create Fun and a Little Weirdness
4. Be Adventurous, Creative, Open-Minded
5. Pursue Growth and Learning
6. Build Open and Honest Relationships through Communication
7. Build a Positive Team, Family Spirit
8. Do More with Less
9. Be Passionate and Determined
10. Be Humble
Twittering is a natural part of the “conversation” Zappos.com has with customers, suppliers, and now, many people around the world. Zappos also responds to “tweets” about them when possible. The folks there feel it’s only fitting that they stay in touch and reach out—just as you would if you found a friend who needed to talk to you. Go to http:// twitter.com/zappos to join the party and the conversation.
Millions Follow the Zapponians on Twitter.
Zappos’s growth is fueled by their great products and service. But with Twitter, it goes beyond business to make connections personal. One recent tweet from Tony was “Getting a haircut.” Why would anyone want to follow that? Because the commonality of how we go through our days pulls us all together.
Following Tony on Twitter creates an unexpected bond. People feel like they know him, so of course they want to buy things from his site. Twitter is deepening Zappos.com’s connection beyond their initial fan base of zealot female shoe buyers, helping them to expand (as Amazon.com did) into many other product categories beyond the shoes they originally sold. The company that earned the right with shoes continues to earn the right to expand, in part, by letting people know they’re at the dry cleaner.
Too many companies still jump to surveys and focus groups to find out what their customers need. All they really need to do is reach out. Do you?
• Do customers feel like you are people they can talk to?
• Are you part of their lives in a natural way?
• Do customers rave about how you reach out to them today and handle their service issues?
• Do your decisions for being part of customers’ lives in a natural way earn
you “beloved” status today?
Most western nations are highly advanced industrially and technologically. With industrialization of these countries came mass production and the assembly line. The assembly line replaced the cottage industry where one person would complete an item from beginning to end within his shop.
Now with the assembly line on person knows only a part of the whole product and few know the whole product from beginning to end. Think of a worker on an automobile assembly line. Often this person knows how to add on the door panel for the car as it moves down the line. The worker does not know about the tires, the bumper or the engine, just the door panel.
This type of production has made western nations wealthy but it has come at a cost, the loss of the individual and what the total individual can contribute to the organization.
Call centers are similar to an assembly line production. As large number of calls are queued up and routed to the person in the virtual assembly line with some agents handling only one type of call, over and over and over again.
Is this an efficient system? Absolutely. As the manufacturing assembly line showed us it can be very profitable short term on unit per cost. However, when running an assembly line process you are using only a small fraction of the employee you have hired. The employee has a whole set of skills, talents and abilities that go unused and untapped when the assembly line method is used exclusively.
I encourage a company to get the most from each employee to see what other talents and skills the employees bring to the job. Let them explore other jobs, functions within the call center environment. You are paying them the same rate per hour. So if you use only 10% of their skill set you are potentially missing out on the other 90 percent of value that they bring to the organization.
By exploring and utilizing the whole person that you hired you will produce a better work environment, a happier and more complete workforce and as a result your turnover will decrease. Even though the mass production assembly line produces great efficiencies it becomes boring, routine and employees often get bored and leave creating a high turnover rate in the call center that works against the savings the assembly line process produces.
A balance between the assembly line process and the use of the full person you have hired produces the greatest gains in a call center.
