Keeping Advisors Busy (and Happy)

A few years ago in the UK a Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) firm ran a series of TV ads to focus on the quality of their products. The device they used was to film advisors in the call centre, running the Quality Assurance (QA) line. The point was, no-one called - because the products were so good. The actors representing the advisors had to find a way to fill the hours and they did that by experimenting with how far they could tip back their chairs before they fell, indulging in food fights and other "fun for TV" activities. The ads were funny and presented the brand in a new light, however, from a call centre management perspective, the old phrase "the devil makes work for idle hands" comes to mind.

Nothing is as certain as that the vices of leisure are gotten rid of by being busy - Seneca

Quiet times in call centres can come about for a variety of reasons - dips in workloads as a result of campaign changes, reduction on advertising volume, product changes, previous peaks settling down. Quiet times can also occur from system outage, delays in new systems, etc.

10 Activities to keep advisors happy in quiet times

However they occur, quiet times need to be filled and a good call centre manager will have a ready list of activities that can be deployed to fill gaps in volume.

1. Provide reading materials for interest and personal development, which can be physical or online (intranet)


2. Create comfortable break out areas


3. Encourage suggestion forums, often the best ideas come from unusual sources - this has to be monitored and demonstrably used otherwise advisors view it cynically


4. Cross train staff to perform other teams work, creating more resilience


5. Cross train staff for back office tasks, creating more skilled advisors and greater capacity


6. Re-training, particularly in content-rich settings, such as media, communications where new publications or devices, for example, appear weekly


7. Briefings, get the team together to review recent days activities, look forward to any change initiatives forthcoming, etc


8. Simple quiet time - if there has been a heavy workload, allow time for advisors to simply cool off, take the pace down a bit until the next peak


9. team activities - fun can be had with stuff like NASA Moonbase Survival Game or even better, preparing for special days - say a Mexican day, a Football day, any kind of theme day - get the team thinking together on something unrelated to regular tasks. Dress-up themes shake the schedule and are always fun - take lots of pics and post them around the centre and on the intranet.


10. time off - if an outage is likely to last an entire shift, after exhausting some of the above, send advisors home (paid) as it's better to give them a treat than sitting are their desks getting bored (or worse, figuring out something negative to get up to)

Hopefully these suggestions can perk up quiet times and make as positive use as possible of gaps between work stages. As a final note, it's important that the advisors don't get into a mindset of "oh oh, another quite time, here we go for another pointless two hour team meeting", variety is the spice of life and keeping the mix varied will keep people focused. Obviously this is particularly important in environments with many quiet times.

Why are there quiet times?

Another approach to being imaginative with quiet times is to conduct failure analysis - this could actually be a quiet time filler for advisors! Why is there so much quiet time?

• technology outage - escalate and develop fix/improvement initiatives. If the outage can be planned, e.g. Sunday night, then adjust staffing accordingly


• staff resource persistently too great for call volume - are you trying to answer 98% of inbound calls in 5 seconds? That's unrealistic - reset targets for IB call presentation


• high absence levels leads to over-staffing - high absence is a clear signal that something is wrong in the centre and it could be serious - demotivation, bullying?
  

Copyright 2007, Robert A Innes