The fix is in Part II: kicking call centre training into high gear

For some, contact centres are among the most despised manifestations of communications technology. They're difficult to navigate, and agents aren't always particularly helpful. There's room for improvement. The following article, part II of Gerry Blackwell's investigation of call centre enhancements, provides advice to help companies get back into the client-aid game.Evaluate, coachGiving agents the information they need to respond to customers quickly and effectively is crucial, but only one factor in determining the success of customer interactions. The other part of it is agent performance. You've chosen the right agents, you've trained them, but how well are they executing? Do they need coaching or re-training?Call recording and agent evaluation tools have been around for years, but are often not used well. Ken Landoline, the Yankee Group's program manager for enterprise research, estimates that about one tenth of 1% of contact centre calls are recorded. "And very few companies are mining those calls to try and find out how they're doing, because it's a very time-consuming thing to do manually."One solution is speech analytics, computer-based technology that automatically analyzes audio recordings and generates reports. The technology has been around for about five years. It uses key word spotting to detect trends in customer interactions or to check that agents are reciting mandatory disclosures and assigned scripts. "You can tell very quickly how well you're meeting goals, or complying with the law," Landoline says.Speech analytics systems also use techniques such as detecting volume levels and other audio cues that might indicate emotion in calls. The technology can flag such passages and let a supervisor zero in and listen to just that portion of the call. It can expose other abuses as well. Landoline knows a company that discovered using speech analytics that one of its agents was putting customers on hold for long periods as a way of taking unscheduled breaks.Several companies have speech analytics products, including SER Solutions Inc., Sound Communications Inc. (CallMiner) and Utopy Inc. "They have traditionally required big, tedious implementations," Landoline says. "But they're reaching a price point now, or very soon, where it will be feasible to record 100% of calls and listen to them in an automated fashion."Recording and listening to every call robotically may raise disturbing issues around privacy for some agents and in some organizations. The counter trend is linking evaluation to coaching.When Perry Kendall, general manager at Delta Hotels' global reservations services in Fredericton NB, went looking for a new agent evaluation tool that would let his supervisors grade email and chat sessions as well as voice calls, one of the key requirements was that it be "agent friendly." He ended up selecting Click2Coach (now the Envision Performance Suite) from Envision Telephony Inc."We wanted agents to realize, this isn't big brother watching, this is a coaching system you can take advantage of between calls - review past calls, look at the evaluations, look at the coaching information."Delta records one to two hours of calls a month for each agent, then evaluates four randomly selected calls spaced over the month. Supervisors can listen to the call on headphones and see the screens the agent called up, in synch with the audio - this was something the company's old recording and evaluation tool couldn't do. The screen scrapes from the call appear in one window. Another window displays a scorecard the supervisor fills in as she listens and watches.One of the most powerful features of the Envision technology is that it lets supervisors create tailored computer-based training on the spot. If a supervisor sees that an agent is having trouble with a particular procedure, she can record a video that shows the agent the sequence of screens and mouse clicks to complete a process while listening to a recording of the supervisor giving step-by-step instructions.The supervisor can send a recorded call, a scorecard evaluating the call and any coaching material directly to the agent's desktop, where it's available for her to review whenever she has down time. Other systems the company considered forced agents to go to a central training room to view coaching materials.Seamlessly integrating coaching with evaluations delivers a couple of benefits. It helps managers identify opportunities for coaching and improvement, and that has resulted in a reduction in the time it takes to get a new agent up to speed, Kendall says. Since Delta implemented the system, average scores on calls have gone up from 83% to 89%. And conversion rates - the percentage of calls that resulted in reservations - went from 38% to 41% in the first year after implementing the Envision system.Measuring results Delta only began measuring customer satisfaction with call centre interactions in the last year so the company doesn't know for sure what impact Click2Coach has had there. But the improved conversion rate implies that more customers were satisfied with their calls. And Kendall notes that much of the scoring of recorded calls measures factors such as the agent's ability to build rapport with a caller, which again relates to customer satisfaction.If the problem with contact centres is that customers are too often cheesed off by their encounters with them, then measuring satisfaction levels is clearly crucial. And too few companies are doing it routinely or well, Landoline says.The best results come from striking while the iron is hot. "Don't send somebody an email a week later," he says. "It's got to be immediate, while the person is still emotional." But exit surveys can be expensive if you're using a service with live pollsters. Plus in the past, it was difficult to set it up in a way that prevented agents from cherry picking which callers to send to the survey.Today, there are automated, IVR-based solutions that can recruit survey participants before the call, while they're in queue. They go directly from the call to an automated questionnaire in which they're asked to press or say a number corresponding to the answer they want to give - typically either their level of agreement with a statement or their rating of a performance or satisfaction criteria.A few companies sell tools for developing and managing automated IVR surveys, including NICE Systems Ltd. with its Customer Feedback IVR Survey system, Autonomy etalk with Qfiniti Survey and Voice Print International Inc. (VPI) with Activ! Feedback.There are no quick fixes for making your incoming contact centre a customer service asset rather than a customer service liability. Mostly, it takes talented managers and great agents. Contact centres are, as ever, a people business. People are typically the biggest part of the problem - when there are problems. And people will ultimately have to be the solution. That said, it doesn't hurt to use the technology tools to hand.DirectorySER Solutions Inc., speech analytics, www.ser.comSound Communications Inc., speech analytics, www.soundcommunications.com Utopy Inc., speech analytics, www.utopy.com Envision Telephony Inc., evaluation and coaching tools, www.envisioninc.comNICE, IVR survey systems, www.nice.comAutonomy eTalk, IVR survey systems, www.etalk.comVoice Print International Inc., IVR survey systems, www.vpi-corp.com

The fix is in Part II: kicking call centre training into high gear

News | 07/03/2007 1:49 pm EDT

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