Call centres learn from skills-based routing implementations

Skills-based routing (SBR) for call centres has been with us for more than a decade now. But like a lot of tools that introduce new ways of doing things, simply installing the technology won't guarantee success. As we learned in talking to a couple of Canadian companies with mature skills-based routing implementations, the technology is the relatively simple part. The real challenges are planning and change management. Fail in those areas and skills-based routing buys very little.All major call centre platforms now offer the ability - usually as part of an optional upgrade - to assign multiple skills and skill priority levels to agents, and automatically route calls so customers end up talking to the agent with the appropriate skill set. It could be a question of routing the caller to an agent with the right language skills, the right product knowledge, the right training for different media - phone, Internet chat, e-mail - or the right depth of knowledge and experience to handle sensitive calls.Call centres can use different call-in numbers, caller ID or, most frequently, phone menus - press one for sales, two for customer service, et cetera - to determine the reason for a call. Then a skills-based routing-enabled automatic call distribution (ACD) system can route calls to the best available and/or least occupied agents.Costs & benefitsThe benefits - improved customer service, increased productivity and in some cases reduced labour requirements - are reasonably well understood. The improved customer service part is self-evident. The customer experience is better because callers less often end up with the wrong agent and have to be transferred, which is frustrating and time consuming. And callers less often waste time talking to an agent ill-equipped to handle their call.Increased productivity falls out of that improved customer experience because a call that needs to be transferred or escalated also wastes the first agent's time. Plus, a less skilled agent will take longer on a call than a more skilled agent.Susan Carrier, manager of planning and development in the telephony department at TD Meloche Monnex, says the technology helped her company reduce abandoned calls by 3%, improve the percentage of calls answered within 20 seconds by 22% and improve the average time to answer from 53 to 29 seconds. How? When an appropriately skilled agent takes a call, Carrier points out, the call goes faster, and agents are available quicker for the next call.In networked multi-site "virtual call centre" environments, SBR can also contribute to reduced costs and labour needs, says Tracy Fleming, IP telephony practice leader for Avaya Canada. Instead of an ACD at every site, the company only has to buy one big centralized ACD. Using SBR and taking advantage of the availability of appropriately skilled agents in different centres can result in a 5% to 10% reduction of full time equivalent people, Fleming says.In this environment, the business case for skills-based routing often writes itself, he says. "It's not uncommon to see ROI of a year or less. We have one customer right now with 12 sites. It was going to cost just under $1million - with a calculated return on investment in eight months."An important "side benefit," Fleming argues, is agent retention, a huge concern for most call centres. "The most expensive part of a call centre is always the people in it," he says. Taking six months to train agents to full productivity and then having them leave is all too common. How does SBR help? With simple ACD queuing techniques, agents typically only handle one type of call. "Agents get bored if they do the same thing all day," Fleming says. Skills-based routing means agents can be assigned to field different types of calls.As attractive as the potential benefits are, the costs for SBR are not trivial. Fleming estimates the price tag for implementing skills-based routing at between $1,000 and $5,000 per seat. That includes software licences, implementation and maintenance.How do you protect that investment? Make sure to do the implementation right. Here's how two Canadian companies managed it.TD Meloche MonnexMeloche Monnex, a TD Bank Financial Group subsidiary, sells home and auto insurance. The company has about 2,500 agents in 14 call centres across the country. Some centres are networked together. Agents in New Brunswick currently handle calls from Alberta customers, for example, because the company can't recruit enough agents in Alberta. Meloche's is not quite a fully blown virtual call centre, but every regional centre is networked to at least one other, and some are networked to most.Each centre services a different set of products and brands. The busiest handle up to 5,500 calls a day. Customers call in to get a quote, renew a policy, verify, change or request information about an account, modify a policy or initiate a claim. Call handle time is high, averaging seven to 10 minutes, with calls for home insurance quotes frequently running 20 to 40 minutes. This is typical of the insurance industry, Carrier says.Before it implemented skills-based routing, Meloche Monnex was using basic Nortel Networks ACD technology, "There's only so much you can do with ACD queuing, " Carrier says. The company was even taking advantage of Nortel's Multiple Queue Assignment feature, which allows agents to receive calls from multiple queues, but it wasn't enough. "We wanted more flexibility, more precision in how we routed calls," Carrier says. In 1997, Meloche implemented Nortel's advanced Symposium (now Call Center Manager or CCM) with skills-based routing.Phone menus steer calls and the ACD routes calls to the best available agent based on stored agent skills profiles. The first level of skills differentiation is language, then product lines - auto and home insurance are quite different areas, for example. In some instances, Meloche is also using skills-based routing in conjunction with overflow to route calls from one centre to another.One important benefit right from the start was that Meloche could train new agents and get them on the floor quicker by teaching them one skill set - typically auto insurance, which is easier to learn - and then only routing calls of that type to them. In the meantime, the company could cross-train the recruit on other products and types of calls.One of the beauties of SBR is that call centre managers can adjust skills assignments on an ad hoc basis. An agent may normally be assigned to skills a, b and c, but actually have other secondary skills that can be called into play when necessary. Like other SBR systems, Symposium provides detailed real-time data that shows managers the level of service callers are getting. They can use this information to plan changes to accommodate fluctuations in scheduling and call patterns."For example, they know that a Monday is going to be busy , so they want as many renewal agents to be logged in," Carrier explains. "Or they may want to have a meeting, so they give certain people skill sets and then pull the meeting."Meloche was an early user of the Symposium product, but its implementation went surprisingly smoothly. "We really had no major hurdles to overcome," Carrier says. Other pioneers fared less well, but even for them, it wasn't so much because of problems with the technology, she says. It was more that they tried to do too much all at once, a pitfall her company managed to avoid.Even though it limited the initial pilot implementation to basic features, though, it still took Meloche three months to get the system up and running the way it wanted. "These tools are truly amazing because they bring you all the flexibility you can dream of," Carrier says. "But when you're responsible for delivering the application, you need to keep in mind that with flexibility comes complexity."One key is to get call centre managers involved early, train them intensely and then train them some more. Once they really understand the technology, they can lead the way in bringing more advanced features on stream. "There's a learning curve of about six months for them to understand what the software can do," Carrier says. "Then they start to say, ‘How can we do this?' They become really comfortable with the technology within about a year."One other concern, Carrier warns: make sure you have a fallback system. "If you implement a nice skills-based routing plan and don't have any backup plan, you can be in a lot of trouble if the system goes down." If Meloche's CCM system goes down, and SBR with it, the basic Nortel ACD queuing system kicks in.Voxcom Security SystemsVoxcom is a Canadian company that markets and installs residential and small business security alarm systems and also offers alarm-monitoring services. It employs a little over 100 agents in three separate call centres, all in Edmonton. They handle three different operational areas - sales, customer service and emergency response.The sales and customer service sites are blended inbound and outbound call centres. Between them they receive about 190,000 calls a month. Customers call in with billing enquiries, account changes, pre-sales questions and orders. The emergency response centre mainly receives alarms from Voxcom systems and calls out to clients or client contacts, and to medical and emergency response agencies.Voxcom has been using skills-based routing for about three years. Before that, each agent had one skill, and frequently had to transfer or escalate calls. After fire destroyed the company's call centre facility in 2003, it replaced an outdated Nortel system with equipment from Avaya, including Communication Manager and Avaya Contact Centre applications, both part of Avaya's MultiVantage Communications Applications. Skills-based routing is an optional module for which Voxcom pays additional licence fees.The Avaya SBR tools allow Voxcom to assign up to 60 skills per agent. It can also assign priorities to each skill. If two agents are available for a call from a commercial customer, for example, and one has Priority 1 skills for commercial, while the other, an agent in the residential department, has a Priority 2 designation, the call goes to the Priority 1 agent. If the Priority 2 agent is the only one available, however, it goes to her. For some high-priority calls - if the customer has been flagged as at risk of withdrawing his business, for example - the system knows to wait for the highest-skilled agent.Like Meloche, Voxcom adjusts skill priority levels on the fly in response to call traffic patterns. If the emergency response centre is swamped, for example, agents from other centres with secondary skills in emergency response can be drafted into service by temporarily changing their skills profiles. "It takes less than 60 seconds to add a skill to an agent," says Patti McDougall, the company's manager of quality assurance and telecom services. McDougall can make the changes from within the program, or call centre supervisors can make on-the-fly changes using a Web-based interface.Setting up a new agent in the system also takes less than a minute, she says. During initial set up, McDougall was able to make batch skill assignments - to all agents in a department or group, for example. It took some trial-and-error experimentation to understand the ramifications of setting skill priority levels, though. The company initially assigned new agents Priority 2 or lower skill levels, but then found that this resulted in them not getting enough calls to learn and gain confidence. Now new agents are Priority 1 for their primary skill area.One of the key benefits of the Avaya technology comes from the "least-occupied" load balancing features, which smooth the distribution of calls among agents. This took some adjustment at first, however, both for supervisors and agents. One agent might get three calls in a row, while another sits idle, but over the entire shift - and shifts could be overlapping - each agent would receive a roughly equivalent number or duration of calls.Planning is vital to a smooth implementation, McDougall says. The first step is understanding how the company wants calls from each type of customer to be routed. Fleming suggests this should mirror the way customers are handled by the business units responsible for them.According to McDougall, Voxcom received plenty of help from the system vendor. "We had a very strong Avaya project management team that worked very closely with us over a month, planning the installation," she says. "They spent lot of time learning our business. We basically had no challenges with implementation."That said, McDougall warns that skills-based routing will always require fine tuning after the initial implementation - Voxcom having to change the priority levels for new agents to ensure they received enough calls is an example.It's also crucial to ensure that front-end routing supports the way you want the SBR system to route calls. If the menu system is too generic or complicated, and callers always click one or zero because they can't be bothered listening, skills-based routing will never work. Voxcom limits menus to four options and allows only two sub-menus.Fleming adds some other cautions. Don't parse the skills too finely. He knows of one company that set up separate skills designations for incoming emails with different subject lines. "Some try to come up with this unbelievable array of possibilities. You don't need to get that detailed, especially when you're first starting out," he says. Another company assigned all its agents all skills. Result: it became a very expensive ACD queuing system.Call centre supervisors new to skills-based routing tend to spend too much time watching real-time statistics about how calls are being routed and making minute-by-minute adjustments to programming to tweak performance or address apparent lack of parity in call distribution. This may be necessary with simple ACD queuing systems. It's not with skills-based routing."They should let the switch do its job," Fleming says. "The amount of planning that needs to be done far exceeds the amount of time they need to spend in front of monitors." Time spent obsessively monitoring statistics would be better spent coaching agents, he suggests.The message from all this is clear. Researching and planning how you want the system to work and then helping call centre managers understand and adjust to the processes are vital to success. Skills-based routing can pay big dividends, but as with so many technology projects, however powerful the technology, sound execution is everything.

Call centres learn from skills-based routing implementations

News | 04/12/2007 2:08 pm EDT

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