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Many progressive contact centers are starting to break free from the confines and rigidity of traditional call routing. Rather than blindly sending callers to the next available agent – regardless of who’s calling or why – these centers are exploring routing methods that are so unconventional they have been banned in certain Midwestern U.S. cities.

Here are a few prime examples of customer care organizations doing call routing on the edge.

HMOno Health Insurance
HMOno uses priority queuing like no other contact center on earth or in New Mexico. The center’s New Policy division gives high priority to healthy callers because they cost less to insure and whine less to agents. 

Every call is front-ended by an IVR system designed to determine if new callers have any serious health risks. A voice prompt asks callers a series of risk assessment questions, such as “Do you smoke?” “Do you drink?” and “Do you work at a public high school?” Callers who answer “no” to all risk assessment questions are quickly routed to a live agent anxious to sell them a policy. Callers who answer “yes” to one or two assessment questions are knocked back a few places in the queue. Those who answer “yes” to three or four questions are placed at the end of the queue. And those who answer “yes” to five or more questions are immediately routed to a company competitor or a hospital.

The IVR system also has been programmed to listen for any sneezing, coughing or wheezing sounds to help determine a caller’s health. If any such sounds are detected, a voice prompt says “Gesundheit!” or “Please cover your mouth” before the caller is bumped back in the queue or routed externally.


MegaMerchandise
MegaMerchandise, which sells everything from saucepans to sporting goods, knows customers appreciate the personal touch. That’s why their contact center – staffed with an eclectic group of employees – uses a truly unique routing process that matches each caller with an agent who has similar interests, personality traits, and SAT scores.

All calls are initially answered by an automated “matchmaker” programmed to quickly assess which agent the caller is most likely to bond with. For instance, if a man from Brooklyn calls interested in purchasing a baseball bat or a thick gold chain, the matchmaker will route that call to an agent like Joey “No-Neck” Gambini. Joey can then have a friendly informal chat with the caller about benchpressing and broken kneecaps to help build rapport before closing the near-certain sale.


Big Spur Bank & Mistrust
Handling irate customers is never fun, but routing them to convicted murderers can be. Big Spur Bank & Mistrust – based in Sweetwater, Texas – has been doing it for about a year, with impressive results.

The bank’s contact center uses cutting-edge technology to identify angry callers, who are then seamlessly routed to death row inmates trained to help the callers realize the pettiness of their complaints.

Here’s how it works: The center’s automated attendant is able to measure the heart rate of each caller. Whenever the rate exceeds 200 beats per minute, the attendant knows that the caller is either furious or has just run a 10K race. To determine which is the case, the caller is told to “Press 1 if you are fighting mad” or to “Press 2 if you need some Gatorade.” Callers who press 1 are routed to the first available killer in one of the many fine high-security prisons in Texas. To help callers put things in perspective, Inmate agents use phrases like, “How dare you complain to me about a $3 ATM fee – I sleep on a metal slab and eat gruel every day,” or “You think being rejected for a loan is bad? Try having your stay of execution request denied 10 times.”

In most cases, callers calm down and apologize for their selfishness, at which point the inmate agent can take advantage of the caller’s guilt and begin cross-selling/up-selling premium bank products.

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Imagine a world in which customer service agents spoke their mind on every call. What if, instead of always trying to soothe angry and abusive customers with forced empathy, agents voiced how they really felt?

How interesting it would be if such scripted statements as “I understand your frustration” were replaced with such authentic ones as “It’s probably just karma.” How exciting things would get if, in place of “I’m going to do everything I can to rectify this problem,” agents instead said, “I make $7.50/hour, sit in a cubicle the size of a gym locker, and have worked the last 17 weekends in a row – go ahead, Mr. Johnson at 105 Elm St., I dare you to scream at me again.”

True, customer satisfaction and loyalty would likely take a vicious dip, but so would agent turnover. Several studies haves indicated that contact center employees who are encouraged to freely express themselves at work are more productive, more engaged and less likely to burn customers in effigy while chanting passages from the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Think about it, most of your agents currently do the “right” thing by offering empathy and understanding to irate callers, only to be berated and lambasted by the customer anyway. The end result? High employee burnout/attrition in addition to the already existent low customer satisfaction. By empowering agents to fire back at furious callers, you at least win one of the two battles.   

And just think of the entertainment value for those in your contact center who are tasked with evaluating calls for quality purposes. QA staff would get plenty of healthy, stress-reducing comic relief while listening to customer-agent interactions such as the one featured below:

Agent: Thank you for calling Narcissist Fitness Customer Care. My name doesn’t matter. How can I help you?

Caller: I’ve called you stupid people twice already asking you to cancel my membership. Why are you still charging my credit card!?

Agent: Could you please yell a bit louder, sir? That way the folks in Membership will hear you directly and I won’t have to go through the trouble of processing your request.

Caller: Are you getting smart with me?

Agent: Oh, no sir. I couldn’t even if I wanted to. You were right before  – we’re all quite stupid here.

Caller: I want to speak to your supervisor this instant!

Agent: No you don’t – he’s even dumber than I am.

Caller: Listen, cancel my membership once and for all! And stop sending me your annoying monthly fitness newsletter – it’s paper-wasters like you who are destroying all the forests.

Agent: Oh good, you’re concerned about the environment. In that case, you really shouldn’t cancel your membership. You wouldn’t believe all the paperwork involved.

Caller: I can’t believe this! I’ve never been treated like this in all my life!

Agent: Thanks.We’ve been getting a LOT of attention for our customer service lately.

Caller: If you don’t cancel my membership today, I’ll do everything I can so that you lose your job!

Agent: Good luck, sir. I’ve been doing everything I can to lose my job for months now, to no avail.

Caller: Knock it off! I’m not playing around here. You’d better cancel my…

Agent: Okay, okay. Let me bring up your account. Can I have the last four digits of your Social Security Number please?

Caller: 7322

Agent: Can you please confirm your last name?

Caller: Pierce

Agent: Thank you. Let’s see here – ah, there’s the problem.

Caller: What is it?

Agent: Your cancellation request was denied.

Caller: What are you talking about? How can you deny my cancellation request?

Agent: Well, when you signed up, I see you listed the following as your main goals: “Lose 50 lbs”, “increase muscular strength”, and “improve cardiovascular condition”.

Caller: Yeah, so?

Agent: Have you achieved those goals?

Caller: Um, not exactly.

Agent: Of course you haven’t – you’ve only been a member for two months. That’s why we aren’t letting you cancel your membership yet. We really want to see you succeed!

Caller:[click]

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Some people are simply blessed with the power of prognostication. They have visions and pick up signals the average person cannot, thus enabling them to provide unique insight into how things are likely to go down in the future.

I am not one of those people, but that has never before stopped me from making bold predictions about contact centers and customer care.  

With the aid of my crystal ball and a couple cans of Red Bull, here’s what I see happening in 2012:


A new metric – “Average Speed of Anger” – will take hold.  Customers are more demanding than ever. It’s nearly impossible to respond to their calls, emails, chats, and social media comments/inquiries before they start whining or worse.  Many companies now find measuring traditional accessibility metrics like Average Speed of Answer (ASA) to be a waste of time. After all, even when the contact center hits an ambitious ASA objective, customers still complain and clamor for quicker service.

That's why a growing number of centers have started secretly tracking a new metric: Average Speed of Anger (ASA grrr),  which measures the average time it takes customers to become so enraged they curse your agents/IVR and/or blast your brand on Twitter. By focusing on ASA grrr, the contact center can make training and staffing adjustments that will quite possibly keep customers from killing anybody, and maybe even satisfy a few.


A law will be passed that makes it illegal for a contact center to not have a home agent program in place. Study after study has shown the huge impact home agent programs have on employee engagement, retention and performance, as well as staffing flexibility and operating costs. Nevertheless, three in four centers still don’t have a single home agent in place.

Fortunately, the leaders of these centers will soon be imprisoned and/or fined if they don’t get with the program. A militant but growing group – led by me – has been lobbying Congress about the issue for over a year now. I’ve been told by powerful sources that, thanks to my group’s efforts, Congress now views expanding home agent positions as a top priority, right behind balancing the Federal Budget and bringing down Kim Kardashian.  


A new type of cancer caused by over-exposure to acronyms will plague the customer care industry. This is one prediction I hope doesn’t come true; however, I don’t see how it can be averted. Medical researchers have strong evidence that excessive absorption of acronyms radically alters brain cells and can cause severe vowel deficiency.

A recent landmark study showed that lab mice placed in a cage lined with shredded ACD reports were 17 times more likely to develop malignant growths than were mice whose cage was lined with shredded long-winded speeches free of any abbreviations. The study led medical researchers to conclude that excessive exposure to acronyms may be more dangerous than smoking two packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day while standing next to a Japanese nuclear power plant. The researchers implore contact center and customer service professionals to start using fully spelled-out terms as much as they can, and to do so ASAP.
 

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_ It's that time again – that time when my fearless journalistic tendencies flare up after a year of repressing them. I can only keep the lid on controversial and shocking contact center-related stories for so long before they start to gnaw at my conscience and disrupt my daily mid-morning and mid-afternoon naps.

Here are a couple of the most contentious contact center news stories our industry has been censoring for months.


Overly Convincing Speech Recognition App Blamed for Customer's Death

Managers at Ephemeral Airlines' reservations center knew that callers would love the company's new advanced speech recognition system. However, it never imagined that a caller would actually fall in love with it, nor that it would cause him to perish of a broken heart.

Unfortunately, that's exactly what happened to James Dumas, a 31-year-old accountant from Bloomington, Ill. Dumas, who first called Ephemeral's reservations center on July 12, 2011 to book a flight to Boston, became enamored with the sultry and overly friendly voice of Ephemeral's automated attendant. The highly advanced system features natural language recognition that gives customers the impression they are speaking with a live agent, or, in Dumas' case, a really sexy woman.

"The poor guy called our center about 15 times a day, each time asking the system for its name and if it would meet him for a drink," explains Amy Powers, Ephemeral's Director of Reservations. "Sadly, the system was only programmed to handle reservations-related inquiries, and thus repeatedly responded with, 'I'm sorry, I don't understand your request, could you please repeat it,' which Mr. Dumas interpreted as playful flirting and teasing."

After over 100 calls to the reservations center, Dumas reportedly starting telling friends and family that he was madly in love. Consequently, his mother insisted that he invite the "woman" to dinner. When Dumas called the reservations center to extend the invitation, the speech recognition system – which had just received a new upgrade that expanded its vocabulary from 10,000 to 15,000 words – told him that it had to wash its hair that night. Enraged by and despondent over the torturous game of "hard-to-get" he had endured, Dumas told the system that he would stay on the line and hold his breath until he received a "yes." Eight minutes later, he was gone.

Although Ephemeral Airlines was full of remorse over the tragedy, the company found solace in the fact that that its very expensive speech app was good enough to dupe a human. "We are deeply saddened by Mr. Dumas' untimely demise," said Brian Richardson, spokesman for Ephemeral. "And while our thoughts and prayers are with his family, we are tickled over the ROI we expect to see from this new technology."

To ensure that a similar incident does not occur in the future, the airline is looking into replacing the current voice of its speech system with that of comedienne Kathy Griffin.


Contact Center Consultant Wins "Nobel Prize for Ambiguity"

After years of penning obscure white papers and books, leading non-distinct seminars, and providing incomparably vague advice to clients, contact center consultant Stephen Blank has finally earned the recognition he deserves. Yesterday, Blank was awarded the Nobel Prize for Ambiguity – a new category in the prestigious award series – for his groundbreaking ability to gain a huge professional following and earn a substantial income without actually providing any specific insights or actionable practices to speak of.

Blank was up against some worthy adversaries for the award – including five multinational CEOs, three U.S. governors and the guy who coined the term "mission-critical." Experts believe that what likely tipped the scales in Blank's favor was his best-seller, Applauding World-Class, Best-of-Breed, Synergistic Customer Care Organizations.

During his acceptance speech, Blank said that it was difficult to describe exactly what he was feeling, and then spent a minute thanking nobody in particular for helping him earn such an honor.

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_ “Take the Calls”
(to the tune of “Deck the Halls”)

Take the calls, the queue’s exploding
Fa la la la la, la la la la
Satisfaction’s fast eroding
Fa la la la la, la la la la
FCR is non-existent
Fa la la, la la la, la la la
Reps are sobbing in the distance
Fa la la la la, la la la la

Call arrival is so random
Fa la la la la, la la la la
Callers sigh and some abandon
Fa la la la la, la la la la
Callers’ rage is all recorded
Fa la la, la la la, la la la
Always say “Your call’s important"
Fa la la la la, la la la la


“Violent Rep”
(to the tune of “Silent Night”)

Violent rep, crazy rep
So much stress, you haven’t slept
Punched your manager right in the nose
Told seven callers just where they can go
Please stop pressing “release”
Please stop pressing “release”

Violent rep, crazy rep
Opened the window, then you leapt
On the way down was a thunderous laugh
Thanks to you now we are so understaffed
Just when the season has peaked
Just when the season has peaked


"Working in the Contact Center, Man"
(to the tune of “Walking in a Winter Wonderland”)

Hear the phones? It’s ballistic
Reader boards flash statistics
The systems are slow
We’re pissed and it shows
Working in the contact center, man

Calls attack, chats defeat you
Holy crap, now there’s tweets too
Channels expand
I can’t feel my hands
Working in the contact center, man

In the center you can build a forecast
And do your best to keep things gliding smooth
But customers are always on the warpath
And you get left there crying in your cube

The job’s a beast – it’s getting scary
But at least it’s sedentary
We sit on our butts
We quit or go nuts
Working in the contact center, man

 
Happy Holidays to all, and to all a good laugh.

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_ Agents are a contact center’s most vital resource. A recent landmark study revealed that if it weren’t for contact center agents, there would be nothing to keep headsets from simply falling to the floor and breaking. Another key role agents play is providing quality service that keeps customers coming back and buying stuff.

With agents playing such a critical role in the success of your contact center and organization as a whole, it’s paramount that you take the time to hire the right people to cram into your cubicles. Too many contact center managers – pressed to fill seats and cover the phones – rush through the agent assessment and selection process. These managers then act surprised to find that the candidate they hired is unqualified, unreliable and/or unconscious.

To help ensure that the frontline folks you hire are top-notch, I’ve come up with two key multiple choice questions that you need to ask every applicant, along with focused analysis of what each answer option indicates. I guarantee that incorporating these two questions into your assessment process (and heeding my advice based on the answers selected) will lead to a big improvement in the caliber of agents you bring on board. If, by chance, you are not completely satisfied with the results, let me know and I’ll gladly send you a list of all the things you probably did wrong on your end.

Now, on to the aforementioned multiple choice interview questions:

1) What is the primary reason you want to work as an agent in our contact center?

a) I’m looking for a challenging yet rewarding opportunity to utilize my strong customer service and problem-solving skills to drive loyalty and revenue.

b) I have always wanted to work for your fine organization and believe that starting out in a customer-facing role would be a great way to begin.

c) The voices in my head keep telling me it’s the right thing to do.

Be weary of applicants who choose “a”, as they are obviously very arrogant and egotistical. “Oh, I’m great. Look at me – I’ve got strong skills.” How obnoxious. Certainly not cut out for the agent position, which requires humility and selflessness. Turn them down flat, or maybe refer them for a job in Marketing.

Forget those who choose “b”, too. They are stalkers. They’ve had an unhealthy obsession with your company for years and are now looking for a chance to get inside and control it like some crazed puppeteer.

Applicants who choose “c” are where it’s at. They show creative potential and a refreshingly different mindset. It’s important to hire a diverse group of people, including those who require a padded workstation free of any sharp objects. And since they already have voices in their head, they are much less likely than others to become overwhelmed during peak calling periods.


2) The most important thing to remember when dealing with angry customers is…

a) To offer empathy and support via such statements as, “I see what you mean”,  “I understand your frustration”, or “If I were there I would hold you close.”

b) That you are the person the ACD has chosen to take charge of the situation and turn a negative customer experience into a positive one.

c) That no matter how furious the customers are and how loud they yell, they’re going to die some day.

Applicants who choose “a” here are the same people who always say that everything is going to be okay, even when you tell them that you have to move to Detroit or can’t afford an iPhone. They are deceptive and dangerous. I not only recommend not hiring these types of people, but I suggest you immediately fire any existing employees who respond to this question in the same way.

As for applicants who select “b”, run – don’t walk – in the other direction. Trust me, you don’t want “everything-happens-for-a-reason” people interacting with your customers. They’ll use the concept of “fate” to defend their every action in the contact center. “I’m not sure why I told that caller to bite me before hanging up on him – I guess it was just meant to be.”

Those who choose “c” have the right idea. They are able to keep a level head in times of strife and are thus less likely to burnout and alienate customers. In addition, their obsession with the futility of human existence typically leaves them with few friends, which means they will rarely complain about the schedule interfering with their social life. 

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Regardless of whether you celebrate Thanksgiving or not, it’s nice to take some time every now and then to give thanks for what you have. And even though you are currently fighting a war against agent burnout, a limited budget and customers with a bloated sense of self-importance, there are still plenty of things to be thankful for in the contact center industry. Here are just a few:

Increased respect. Although execs aren’t exactly writing blank checks for the contact center, you should be thankful that most now recognize the invaluable insight and data the center captures daily, and the impact that the center has on customer loyalty and revenue. As a result, many C-level officers have stopped writing nasty graffiti about the contact center on executive washroom walls. Some now even allow agents and supervisors to look directly at them during their annual walk across the phone floor. 

Casual dress codes. Until video calls come along and ruin everything, contact center pros can be grateful that nobody expects them to look classy. While folks in Marketing, Sales and other so-called "higher-profile" departments must contend with the daily stress of lining up an outfit that will impress clients and co-workers, contact center folks can slap on the same jeans or pleated khaki pants they’ve worn for the past month, with no fear of negatively impacting the customer experience or their career.      
Frontline task forces. If you are a contact center manager or supervisor, you should thank your lucky stars for the fact that you have a whole host of agents who are totally desperate for a little job diversity and time off the phones. If you haven’t yet started to tap their desperation and put them to work on projects you don’t want to deal with, or let them come up with improved processes that you can take credit for, then you should be thankful that I just informed you of this brilliant strategy. 

Social media. True, nobody in the contact center really knows how to handle social media as a customer care tool yet, but be thankful that the hype surrounding it has distracted senior management from the fact that your center hasn’t really figured out the phones, email or chat yet, either. Another reason to be thankful for social media is that, once you do figure it out and set things up right, your most avid customers will step in and start to handle most of your other customers’ online complaints for free.

Lack of windows. While some contact centers these days have an ample number of windows, be thankful if yours is not one of those centers. There’s nothing worse than having a portal to the outside world that lets you see all you’re missing while you’re busy getting slammed by calls and berated by customers. You and your staff need to focus on the internal chaos – if you have birds and sunshine and trees and mountains distracting you, you’re never going to survive.

Helium balloons. You show me a contact center pro who isn’t thankful for the abundance of colorful balloons floating around the phone floor, and I’ll show you a contact center pro who doesn’t know how to use them to full effect. The squeaky voice you get from inhaling helium is hilarious and stress-reducing no matter how many times you do it. Regardless of how burnt out and browbeaten you are on the job – having a constant supply of noble gas makes it all worth it.

One final thing that I, personally, am extremely thankful for is you – my readers – for tuning in to my ramblings each week and for not reporting me to the proper authorities.

Happy Thanksgiving to all (who celebrate it)!

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Earlier this week I delivered a keynote presentation at a fun and informative user group event sponsored by Calabrio (www.calabrio.com). Prior to the event, Calabrio posed a handful of cogent questions and asked me to provide some insightful responses.

I provided these instead.

How have you seen contact centers change in the past 5 years?

For one, the contact center now receives much more respect from the rest of the company and the business world in general. What used to be viewed as a mere back-office operation is now highly valued for the critical customer data and insight it gathers daily (and shares with key departments) to greatly enhance customer loyalty and revenue. No longer do contact center managers and staff get beaten up and have their lunch money stolen by big mean bullies in Marketing, Sales or other departments. If you work in a contact center and still do endure such bullying, let me know and I’ll take care of it. I’m tough like that.

Another big and very positive change in our industry is the increased use of home agents. After years and years of contact centers just tinkering around and testing the home agent waters, many are finally fully embracing this powerful staffing model, which studies have shown to improve agent recruiting, retention and performance, as well as decrease facility costs and enhance staffing flexibility. Add in the obvious “green” benefits the home agent model affords, and it’s easy to see why more and more companies are kicking their agents out of the contact center. 

And of course, no conversation about big changes would be complete without mentioning the emergence of social media and its impact – both real and imagined – on customer care. Just when contact centers were starting to get a handle on the phones, email, chat and web self-service, social media comes barreling in and forces managers to return to therapy.  


What are a couple of the biggest challenges facing contact centers now?

One of the biggest challenges contact centers face now is one that they have always faced: Keeping agents in place and inspired. While with ICMI from 1994-2010, I was involved in several research studies and reader surveys in which we asked managers to list their biggest concerns and challenges. Agent turnover and burnout always topped the list. Fostering agent engagement and retention is especially critical in today’s crazy competitive business climate, where top-notch service and support is often the differentiating factor – the thing that determines what company a customer decides to mate with for life.

I’ve already alluded to what I see as the other major challenge in today’s contact center: Managing the multichannel madness. Have you ever tried accurately forecasting and scheduling for phone, email, chat and social media contacts – and ensuring that customers receive consistent, efficient and effective service regardless of which of those channels they choose? Scary. It’s why I merely analyze and write about contact centers rather than actually RUN one.


You’re a humorist in a unique industry. Can we use a little more comic relief in the world of customer service?

Absolutely. Just look at what we’ve got: An industry full of managers being pressed by execs to constantly do more with less; agents being measured on a multitude of performance metrics while sitting in a cubicle that’s the same square footage as their body; and the entire center having to handle a seemingly endless stream of calls and other contact types from highly demanding customers who are often abusive even though they know that you know where they live. If that’s not an industry begging for comic relief, I don’t know what is.

Managing a contact center is no laughing matter. But if you want to survive in this business, laughing matters. Humor defuses. Humor relieves. Humor inspires. And if we can’t laugh at ourselves, who can we laugh at – besides the guys over in IT.
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This week being the one-year anniversary of the launch of my ebook, Full Contact, I thought it would be fun to share the book’s Introduction, which is far too well-written to only be enjoyed by the six people who have actually purchased Full Contact.

(Don't miss the special offer at the end of this post. It's especially special.)

 
In high school, I was voted “Most likely to write a top-selling ebook on contact center best practices”. It was a peculiar honor, especially since I graduated high school years before either ebooks or the term “contact center” had even been invented. My senior class was a prophetic lot.

Of course, such a lofty and obscure prediction places a lot of pressure on a person. Throughout college I wondered if I would ever live up to the expectations of my peers. At my university there were no classes or study groups on contact center practices; no dean of Customer Management. I tried to engage my college friends in contact center-related conversations, but they all felt that frat parties and frisbee were more important than first-call resolution.

Feeling that college ill-prepared me to fulfill my ebook destiny, I took a job as an agent for an insurance contact center right after graduating in 1991. However, I soon found that having to adhere to schedule in a cramped cubicle nine hours a day left little time for me to discover best practices or to write.

Things started to look more promising when I secured a job as an editorial assistant with ICMI in June of 1994. The fact that I didn’t have much contact center experience or knowledge didn’t bother ICMI founder Gordon MacPherson; he had been looking for somebody with good writing skills and a fiery ambition whom he could shape and mold. When he read on my resume that I had been voted “Most likely to write a top-selling ebook on contact center best practices” back in high school, he knew that I had what it took to become a top-notch editor for their pioneering publication of the time, Service Level Newsletter.

I learned a ton in my editorial position at ICMI. Gordon – and later, Brad Cleveland – enthusiastically taught me the key principles of contact center management. I got to interview top experts the world over and write articles and research reports on the most pressing issues, biggest challenges and hottest trends facing contact center professionals. Over my 16 years at ICMI I learned about and witnessed first-hand the most effective practices with regard to workforce management, metric selection, quality monitoring, customer satisfaction measurement, customer relationship management, agent hiring and retention, email/chat management, IVR and web-self service, outsourcing, home agents, and a lot more. I learned how to say key contact center management terms like “shrinkage” and “Erlang” without giggling, and was able to memorize over 700 industry acronyms without the aid of performance enhancing drugs.  You name it, I wrote about it, conducted research on it, and – eventually – spoke about it at industry events.

But what I didn’t do while at ICMI is make my high school classmates’ prognostication become a reality. True, I have written well over 200 feature articles, nearly the same number of case studies, dozens of research reports and countless industry-related blurbs and bytes, but I have never written an ebook on contact center best practices.

Until now.

Full Contact is a composite of the most effective and innovative practices, processes, approaches, applications, strategies and initiatives – in what I consider to be the most critical areas of contact center management – that I have uncovered in my nearly two full decades as a researcher and journalist in the industry. The book contains not my opinions (though, yes, I do have a penchant for speaking my mind); rather it contains proven practices and tactics – those that separate the world-class contact center operations from those that merely get by, or don’t.

I realize that just because I have finally written an ebook doesn’t mean that I have lived up to my high school classmates’ expectations. After all, I wasn’t voted “Most likely to write an ebook on contact center best practices”; rather I was voted “Most likely to write a top-selling ebook on contact center best practices”.

Thus, I strongly encourage all of you to purchase multiple copies, and to persuade your colleagues to do the same. Rave about this ebook online. Tweet and blog about it. Give it as a gift for birthdays and holidays, or simply to show that special somebody in your life that you care enough to want to help them learn how to accurately forecast contact volume and schedule accordingly to achieve a strategically chosen service level objective. That’s love.  

Then and only then will I be able to attend my upcoming 25th high school reunion with my head held high.

Warm Regards,
Greg Levin

Get Full Contact at Half Price. From now until next Friday (Nov. 11), I’m offering Full Contact at 50% off the regular price. The discount code is fc1111 – be sure to use it when you stop by the gift shop on the way out: http://www.greglevin.com/full-contact-ebook.html

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Last week in Part 1 of this post, I cited several quality monitoring practices commonly embraced by the world’s best contact centers, then stopped midway through in a desperate attempt to make you come back to my website this week.

Here we go with Part 2. I hope the wild anticipation didn’t cause you to lose too much sleep.
 
Incorporate customer satisfaction ratings and feedback into monitoring scores. Here is where quality monitoring is really changing. This shift in quality monitoring procedure is so important, it’s underlined here – and just missed getting typed out in ALL CAPS.

Quality is no longer viewed as a purely internal measure. Many contact centers have started incorporating a “Voice of the Customer” component into their quality monitoring programs – tying direct customer feedback from post-contact surveys into agents’ overall monitoring scores. The center’s internal QA staff rate agents only on the most objective call criteria and requirements – like whether or not the agent used the correct greeting, provided accurate product information, and didn’t call the customer a putz. That internal score typically accounts for anywhere from 40%-60% of the agent’s quality score, with the remaining points based on how badly the customer said they wanted to punch the agent following the interaction.


Add a self-monitoring component to the mix. The best contact centers usually give an agent the opportunity to express how much he or she stinks before the center goes and does it for them. Self-evaluation in monitoring is highly therapeutic and empowering. When you ask agents to rate their own performance before they are rated by a quality specialist (and the customer), it shows agents that the company values their input and experience, and it helps to soothe the sting of second- or third-party feedback, especially in instances when a call was truly flubbed.

Agents are typically quite critical of their own performance, often pointing out mistakes they made that QA staff might have otherwise overlooked. Of course, the intent of self-monitoring sessions is not to sit and watch as agents eviscerate themselves – as much fun as that can be – but rather to ensure that they understand their true strengths and where they might improve, as well as to make sure they and your quality personnel are on the same page. Self-evaluations should cease if agents begin to slap themselves during the process, unless it is an agent you yourself had been thinking about slapping anyway.


Provide positive coaching soon after the evaluated contact. Even if you incorporate all of the above tactics into your monitoring program, it will have little impact on overall quality, agent performance or the customer experience if agents don’t receive timely and positive coaching on what they did well and where they need to improve. Notice I said “timely” AND “positive” – this is no either/or scenario: Giving agents immediate feedback is great, but not if that feedback comes in the form of verbal abuse and a kick to the shin; by the same token, positive praise and constructive comments are wonderful, but not if the praise and comments refer to an agent-customer interaction that took place during the previous President’s administration.

At the end of each coaching session during which a key area for improvement is identified, the best centers typically have the coach and the agents work together to come up with a clear and concise action plan aimed at getting the agent up to speed. The action plan may call for the agent to receive additional one-on-one coaching/training offline, complete one or more e-learning modules, work with a peer mentor, and/or undergo a lobotomy.


Reward and recognize agents who consistently deliver high quality service.  While positive coaching is certainly critical, high-performing agents want more than just a couple pats on the back for consistently kicking butt on calls. Top contact centers realize they must reward quality to receive quality, thus most have some form of rewards and recognition tied directly to quality monitoring results. Agents in these centers can earn extra cash, gift certificates, preferred shifts and plenty of public recognition for achieving high ratings on all their monitored calls during a set month or quarter. In some centers, if an agent nails there quality score during an even longer period (six months or a year), they may earn a spot on the center’s “Wall of Fame”, and perhaps even the opportunity to serve as a quality coach who can boss around their inferior peers.

To foster a strong sense of teamwork and to motivate more than just a select few agents, many centers have built team rewards/recognition into the fold. Entire groups of agents – not just the center’s stars – can earn cash and kudos for consistently meeting and exceeding the team’s quality objective over a set period of time. Such collective, team-friendly incentives not only help drive high quality center-wide, they help protect the center’s elite agents from being bludgeoned with their own “#1 in Quality” trophy by co-workers.


If you have some other key quality monitoring practices you’d like to share, please do so in the comment box below. If you’d like to take serious issue with the practices I’ve highlighted, get your own blog.

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