Agent Optimization: The Sweet Spot for Enhancing CRM Results
Ten thousand. That's the number of customers one contact center agent touches in a single year. With that kind of impact, an underperforming agent can do considerable damage to both your reputation and customer retention, one call at a time.
Executives are beginning to view their contact centers — the former black sheep of the organization — as a powerful and highly effective marketing channel where agents can drive revenue, build brand, inspire loyalty, and reduce costs. In fact, contact center agents have become the de facto mission critical workforce.
Without effective agents, no amount of CRM investment will live up to expectations.
Unmotivated and misdirected agents operate at dismal performance levels, turnover rates run rampant, and managers flail for answers. The cost: thousands of customer interactions gone wrong everyday.
New integrated tools, better and more data, and improved knowledge about human performance enable companies to focus, measure, model, predict and drive the behavioral change of the mission control workforce: contact center agents. When executives are able to align agent performance with overall business objectives, the true benefit from contact center investments becomes a reality.
Taking Another Look at the Contact Center and Agent Performance
According to a recent Accenture survey of 500 global business executives, 80 percent said "people" issues — training, motivating, and rewarding employees — have become more important in the past three years. However, 36 percent reported there still isn't enough attention being paid to such issues.
Despite the fact that training and development is a top initiative to improve human performance in more than half of those companies surveyed, only one-fourth said they have made any changes in their growth and development programs (The High-Performance Workforce, Accenture 2001).
So, how did we get here? New business growth was once the mantra and sales force automation the strategy. Business thinkers believed the best path to market domination and enviable margins was through automating the field sales force. Ironically, after automating the process, only efficiencies improved, not business performance. Executives are now discovering the futility of speeding the sales process when the outcome continues to be negative. Contact centers have a similar transaction efficiency focus.
A contact center technology investment can be likened to a Ferrari. If your agent doesn't know how to drive such a sophisticated machine with enough skill to maximize the power at his fingertips, it only speeds your investment toward disaster.
For years, the contact center was a cost center associated with existing customers pesky service requests. Both the mantra and strategy failed to live up to stakeholder expectations. And, the rapid exchange of customers among a handful of competitors does not make for a profitable business model.
The message had been muddled somewhere between the CRM strategists and the contact center. The CRM strategy said, "Acquire and retain profitable customers," but the urgent emphasis was on service or channel efficiencies with less importance placed on effectiveness.
Now that customer retention has become the new business focus with a healthy emphasis on the acquisition of profitable customers, the contact center is the strategic weapon of choice for most service-intensive companies.
Agent Effectiveness Is Priority One, Two, Four, and Five
The vital elements that make a fundamental difference between agent efficiency and effectiveness are clear direction, rigorous performance improvement systems, good and motivated people, and true insight into your customers.
"The employees, in many cases, are the company," says Alexander Hiam, author of Making Horses Drink: How to Lead and Succeed in Business. "Executives know they have a huge investment in other things — not just employees — but for the customer, the other person on the phone is your experience."
As agent-customer contacts are treated increasingly as opportunities to sell, contact center agents will have to be able to do more than simply recite scripts. Improving performance in the top five CRM capabilities — motivating and rewarding people, customer service, turning customer information into insight, attracting and retaining people, and building/selling service skills — can produce significant financial rewards (Figure 1).
Figure 1 — The Five Most Important CRM Initiatives
Four of these five top priorities relate directly to your people initiatives. But, how do you harness and drive the potential of something as complex and unpredictable as a human being? Consider these questions from an employee's perspective:
- What is the best thing to do now?
- Do I know exactly how to do it?
- Can I do it now?
- Will I do it now?
- Did I do it right?
What is the Best Thing to Do Now?
Employees and managers are often unclear on the best thing to do right now. Executives suggest a CRM strategy that says retaining the most profitable customers is central to the long-term profitability of the company, while bonuses are dependent upon short-term cost containment. Agents are also confused, often unclear on the company's goals and their role in accomplishing them. As a result, they feel powerless and unmotivated to perform.
While efficiency is important, effectiveness can add far greater value to a company's bottom line. The best method for eliminating confusion is to implement a balanced scorecard for your contact center, which considers the financial impact of both efficiency and effectiveness.
In one instance, a major cable provider created an environment where employees No. 1 priority was shortening the length of time callers waited on hold before speaking with an agent — a classic measure of efficiency.
But queues were long because of product installation issues. Agents reduced hold times by deploying service trucks to customers homes without attempting to diagnose problems while the customer was on the line. Once agents were refocused toward understanding and resolving issues over the phone, service deployments dropped 75 percent. Now, the business saves the same amount per month that it costs to run the call center.
Motivation and reward are critical components to changing agent behavior. |
This is a simple real-world example, but it's usually not this easy to understand the tradeoffs between efficiency and effectiveness. Simulations mimicking the randomness of a contact center can help management understand the effects of their own metrics, technology, process, and people. Ultimately, the simulations predict the optimal level for key opposing metrics: cost-per-call vs. revenue-per-call, service level and customer satisfaction.
Do I Know Exactly How to Do it?
The agent's role in a company's success is critical. Exactly how the company wants the agent to interact in various customer situations should not be left to interpretation.
Often, agents don't know exactly how to do what theyve been asked. Either the strategy hasn't been translated into specific training, the training has been forgotten, or the agent has reverted to old habits — good or bad — under pressure.
New tools — such as simulated training — allow agents to practice in virtual customer situations that look and feel like live customers. Simulations can teach agents how to navigate new CRM systems while simultaneously learning how to deal with difficult customers or overcome common customer objections during a cross-selling effort. Agents can practice and build new habits in a safe environment where they feel comfortable, building their own confidence, as well as customers confidence in them.
Can I Do it Now?
The ability to do the right thing depends on having access to the tools, time, information, know-how, and authority needed to fulfill a customer's request. Though many CRM investments seem focused on this area — bringing disparate customer and product data to the point-of-service — the know-how and authority are often forgotten components. "Know-how," however, is the more significant issue.
Agents forget about 50 percent of what was taught to them in just over an hour unless it is reinforced quickly and repetitively. Recurring, performance-driven e-learning can dramatically combat the problem of knowledge retention.
Through contact center integrated e-learning applications, managers can achieve "mass individualization" of their customer-facing workforce, identifying individual knowledge and skill gaps and correcting them before they adversely affect customer service.
Will I Do it?
Motivation and reward are critical components to changing agent behavior. Accenture's CRM study "What are CRM Capabilities Really Worth?" found that motivating and rewarding employees are equally impactful in shifting behavior patterns.
Frustration with the repetitiveness of their jobs, limited mobility into higher positions, low pay, and frequent negative feedback from customers are all evidenced by agent turnover rates as high as 90 percent in some industries and regions. Motivating agents does not necessarily need to be financial. For example, providing agents with scheduling options, access to management, career options, healthy competition, and special projects can dramatically increase agent satisfaction and raise performance.
"You have to treat your employees like your customers. When you treat them right, then theyll treat your outside customers right. That has been a powerful competitive weapon for us," said Herb Kelleher, CEO of Southwest Airlines in an interview with Fortune.
Southwest, which has thrived while competitors have either lost market share or disappeared, deploys programs with the understanding that you must communicate the importance of company objectives and the employee's role in achieving those goals to ensure a workforce motivated and knowledgeable enough to maximize customer relationships.
Did I Do it Right?
Immediate, accurate, constructive and focused feedback is critical for continuous agent and contact center improvement. Agents have a strong "need to know" and they want feedback.
"Without feedback, your service effort is a transatlantic flight with no navigational tools, flying on autopilot with no sense of direction until it inevitably runs out of gas," says Dr. Thomas K. Connellan, author of Sustaining Knock Your Socks Off Service.
Performance measurements and employee feedback are a common practice in most successful organizations. "Putting a measure on something is tantamount to getting it done," said Thomas Peters and Robert Watterman, Jr. in their well-known book, In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies.
However, this widely accepted business method has not made its way into the call center. Yes, evaluative tools measure quantitative factors, like average hold times and call volume, but rarely have executives been given the capability to measure agents qualitative skills.
Most employees feel excluded from their own development when results generated from efficiency benchmarks are imposed upon them. But when effectiveness is the focus, and measurements center on skills and knowledge, agents feel involved in their own progress and motivated to succeed.
Performance feedback can guide management efforts as much as agents by providing supervisors with the information they need to effectively oversee agents. Comprehensive results deliver invaluable indicators of a center's overall performance, highlighting root problems that could be causing widespread knowledge gaps or agent motivation issues.
In order to sustain the maximum level of customer service, companies must clarify and prioritize their critical business objectives, identify key performance objectives that can be directly linked to financial gain, then develop a closed-loop learning strategy that aligns employee performance with those business objectives.
Thanks to the 37,000-foot view, factors negatively affecting agents can be addressed and mitigated and the call center is able to grow into a balanced and robust operation where managers feel empowered and confident, and agents both knowledgeable and encouraged.
Your organization will benefit in the form of increased revenue, improved productivity, a higher level of customer satisfaction or simply reduced operating costs.
Ultimately, improved workforce performance can be measured through an overall improvement in your organization's bottom line. By focusing on creating an effective rather than efficient workforce, youll see not only immediate rewards, but continued and accelerated growth as employee knowledge levels deepen and turnover rates subside. Youll be steering an organization built on the strongest foundation of all — good, knowledgeable, motivated people.
