SATSE: Part 3: Keeping the Show on the Road

When the lights go out in a contact centre it can be very bad news for the entire organisation. For example, imagine a Live TV Fundraiser, what happens to donations if the contact centre systems fall over? Advisors being left to tell customers "Sorry, our systems are down, can you call back" is hardly satisfactory. What if you can't even get through to an advisor? Contact centres are so fiendishly complex that failure can happen at many points - telephone lines, database systems, commercial power supply, back-office systems, building security systems, etc. etc. Many of these items can be duplicated or beefed up for resilience, so for example, you can run your database on a cluster of servers so if one server fails, the cluster remains viable and service continues. Similarly, the telephone lines (more likely digital fibre links) can be duplicated to take separate routes into a building, from different "points of presence" on the supplier network and be configured for network level resilience. For small contact centres, the services available for redundancy and continuity are more sophisticated than you might expect and don't have to cost the earth. The key to Keeping the Show on the Road is good planning. This section expands on "planning" to key steps to take to ensure that the customer experience is consistently good.

Chapter 8: Technology

Here's an example of why technology is great. I'm writing this, May 30th 2007 and I get a rollover on my RSS feed panel from Google Desktop that catches my eye. It's a note from Bloomberg - "Wayward California Whales May Have Ret...". I'm intrigued. At the time of writing this was published some 27 minutes previously. So I click through and right there is this fantastic story of a 45-foot humpback whale and her 25-foot calf who have drifted 70 miles off course on their spring migration to Alaska. On the US Pacific coast, heading north, the whales got as far as San Francisco, decided to turn 90 degrees right and enter San Francisco bay and head up the Sacramento river to the Port of Sacramento. I'm not making this up, (see http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aGxLoaddlZoM&refer=us) but it gets better. I quote directly from the article:

"By May 20, they had reached a dead end at the Port of Sacramento, northeast of San Francisco. They turned downriver, then spent more than a week stalled in the fresh water. Their unwillingness to head back to the Pacific frustrated rescuers, who tried to drive the whales homeward.

Scientists fired on the whales with water cannons, played sound recordings of an Orca feeding on a whale and even car- alarm noise to try to force them toward the ocean. Eventually, the whales headed downriver on their own."

So far, so good, but what's this got to do with technology? Well the article continues:

"During the rescue effort, more than 2,600 suggestions from the public poured into a special e-mail account set up by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

One e-mail suggested using helicopters to harass the animals downriver, while another proposed building a fake whale with an outboard motor to lead them to the Pacific. A Navy dolphin squad might be able to guide the whales home, according to one e-mail. And a psychic asked to read the whales' minds."

"Building a fake whale with an outboard motor". You can't make this stuff up. Bernadette Fees, a deputy director with the California Department of Fish and Game said "There have been some real interesting folks who've contacted us." Oh yes indeed Bernadette. My point is, whales go off track, a government agency gets 2,600 emails with suggestions, it's picked up by Bloomberg and I'm reading it 27 minutes after publication, one-third of the way round the globe. Never has there been a time in history when so much was available to so many, for such little effort. Want to see photos of bush fires in California, want to see funny TV ads archived on YouTube, want to make free telephone calls around the globe, ... well, somehow we have engineered a connected world that allows all of this and more. And we don't even bat an eye. It's like, oh yeah, I was on the New York Times website last night reading about ... Amazing what we can access and amazing that we are not stunned by it all. It's not like we've been doing it for 20 years!

So, technology is all around us and most of it, and this is the really clever bit, is slipping into the background - releasing the benefits but hiding the features - just letting us get on with communicating.

In contact centres, an unbelievable amount of technology goes is in play moving voice and data around the centre, screen-popping information from advisor to supervisor in milli-seconds to save us from repeating ourselves. The instant screen pop, moving a screen worth of customer data from advisor to advisor as a call is put on hold and transferred, used to be really clunky. Now it's a click of a mouse. Adviors starting in call centres don't go "WOW, Did you see that!!!!", they just get on with it as one more unremarkable thing the technology can do that helps them get on with their job.

Without technology, contact centres do not exist. It is a technically very advanced environment and providers innovate and upgrade relentlessly. After people, technology is the second largest cost in contact centre and at the establishment of the contact centre, aside from building the contact centre structure, you likley will spend more on technology than anything else.

Technology in contact centres, because of the capability, is necessarily complex. With complexity comes confusion and expense. It is the land of TLAs - Three Letter Acronyms, for example, ACD, CTI, PBX, WTF, what? I made up the last one, but how many people can tell? This section is dedicated to unpeeling onion layers - getting to what is important about technology with the complexity getting in the way.

• KTSR


• Legacy Integration


• CTI, IVR, ACD, Call Recording


• Root Cause Analysis - Verint


• PBE or Hosting

Chapter 9: Project Management

It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future - Yogi Berra

Many times in contact centres, particularly at the start of a new project, the most common project management methodology seems to be JFDI. Not a term from Star Wars lore, but a pithy statement of just getting the job done (use your imagination). Sadly, JFDI whilst useful if you need to get the lifeboats launced, is sub-optimal and leads to great wastage.

Planning in a contact centre might involve many people - marketing proposition teams, retail or field staff, team leaders, technologists, external partners, trainers, etc etc. Something of that magnitude requires more than a to-do list and a winning smile - real discipline is needed, from establishing clear project objectives to being rigerous in setting timescales to proper testing. Skimp at the planning stage and the risks go sharply up. One of my favourite quotes about project management is "I'd rather fail three months into a two year project rather than fail three years into a two year project".

• BDUF / Agile


• MOSCOW


• Involving the right people in the project

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Chapter 10: Living with Risk

It doesn't do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations if you live near him - J.R.R. Tolkien

Risk Free doesn't exist. There is always risk. No project in a contact centre is without risk but most risks can be anticipated for, mitigated and used for learning. In that regard, risk can actually be a positive. But what realistically can you do if the power fails? The key to dealing with this risk is to have thought about it before you need to actually deal with it. That's the key to risk management - running through scenarios, creating mechanisms to identify risks (particularly early warning measures), defining communication links for different risk occurences, risk mitigation and recovery and planning best defence for an allowable cost.

It is important to factor in an allowable cost as budget is a scarce resource and allocation of resources in an environment of scarcity always involves compromise. It is no bad thing to understand the difference between coping with 12 hour power outage for £1M or coping with 72 hour power outage for £100M. Your circumstances will determine your investment in risk mitigation & recovery resources.

Successful risk recovery depends absolutely on planning, so that's where we start. Firstly, what kinds of risks might a contact centre face? The risks fall into three categories:

• Commercial - is the plan / process economically viable


• Operational - is the plan / process efficient


• Technical - is the plan / process do-able

For Commercial risks, we are looking at the economic viability, will the planned cost savings be achieved, will the cash flow support the investment, will this create costs elsewhere in the business, is this risk/reward arrangement reasonable?/p>

For Operational risks we are looking at efficiency factors - can we support 24/7 operation, how will service delivery be impacted by a postal strike, how can we maintain service levels with higher staff absence, can we train all advisors before the new release of the new product catalogue?

For Technical risk the underlying capability of machines and processes is being questioned, can we support 200 more users, can access control cope with more home workers without impacting system performance, can a server upgrade happen in core hours, what happens if a router fails?

The David Tortolano Zwanzig Schilling Trick

Quite a few years ago myself and three friends went to a small Austrian ski resort called Neiderau. One member of the party, David Tortolano distinguished himself in two ways: Firstly, eating more bananas than the rest of the party combined, in fact, two or three times as many bananas as the rest of the party and secondly, for a little bit of flirting with a waitress over dinner. It happended like this: At the end of our evening meal, our waitress arrived with the bill and we started counting out our cash. David aggregated the cash and counted out the amount due. He then added into the pile a 20 Schilling note (this was many years prior to the introduction of the Euro) as a kind of tip. I say kind of as it was really a device to have some fun. As he passed the money to the waitress he managed, through sleight of hand to make the 20 Schilling note disappear and then reappear as he ran it through his fingers. Quick as a flash the money is there, then it's not. And then with a winning smile, and if anyone ever had a winning smile, David Tortolano had a belter of a winning smile, teased the young woman to figure out which hand the note was in. Now at this point, the next step is critical. Does the young woman accept the tease and make a guess? The restuarant is pretty quiet so there is no pressure from other tables. She has time. The rest of us, David's cousins Mark and Dana and myself are sat motionless, silent but excited with anticipation. The tension has to be released soon, and it is, as the young woman takes the money minus tip, gives David a withering look and smartly about-turns, leaving David to open his right hand (as I recall) to reveal the note but only to the waitress's back as she cuts through the tables to the bar. David looks shocked. We laugh. Crashed and burned.

And that's the thing with uncertainty, it could have gone the other way. She could have smiled, perhaps guessed where the money was, but she didn't. What could David have done differently to secure a different outcome? Well there may be many ideas, for example, 'don't be making fun of me when I'm working you tourist-pig' might be some advice to try? The thing is, we can never know what it would take for that outcome to be reversed, because you can never live the other line - once a choice has been made, you don't get to see how it would have been if the choice had been different. Sure David can try the Zwanzig Schilling Trick again, on other people, on other nights, and the outcome may be the same or different (rejection and misery or acceptance and fun). But critically, the original event can never be replayed. This is a risk dilema, because there are many opportunities for learning and for improving the chances for future outcomes, but as David will tell you, you can't have time back.

Organisational learning is a process that uses rejections to better inform future decisions. You just have to hope the the learning opportunities don't kill you. It's all very well for a channel swimmer to learn that the distance turns out to be too far for them and get pulled out into the boat crewed by the swimmer's support staff, but what if there's no boat? You've learned something, but it's kind of comming too late to be useful. Fly in your Chardonnay, to say the least. That's way we plan. That's why organisations invest time and effort in scenario planning.

• Identifying Risk


• Project, Operation, Commercial Risk


• Recognising Risk and dealing with it


• Business Continuity

Chapter 11: Running a Contact Centre in 137 Easy Steps

This is all about the practical, nitty-gritty detail of running a contact centre, from developing training materials relevant to the process, important points for team briefings, what to listen for when you're listening to calls, developing systems for advisors, how to interpret contact centre metrics, etc.

They say you can never be too thin or too rich. Is Keira Knightley too thin and not rich enough? Who cares, in contact centres, you can never spend too much time developing staff. I know this article looked like it was heading for celebrity-mag territory, which might have been fun (if vacuous), but hey, this is a book about contact centres and some of this content is going to sound dull compared to Paris Hilton selecting a new brand of shoe. The title on the cover should have alerted you to the likely direction. So, staffing a contact centre. Let's she what worthy stuff we can find.

It really is true, you can never spend enough time developing staff. There are several reasons for this. Firstly cross-training. This allows a wider team of people to gain skills to complete a wider range of transactions. Why's that a good thing? Well, for one it gives more resilience so that if customers call with specific questions there is a better chance of finding advisors who can answer correctly. It's also good because the more advisors who are trained across multiple skills, the easier it is to meet service levels as you don't need to worry about ring-fencing resources in case calls come in about a specialist, in times of staff shortage or peak load, you will achieve higher usage rates (and hence more efficiency) as the level of cross-training increases.

Secondly, with today's products and services being increasingly content-led - take mobile phones, 10 years ago there were fewer devices and they could do less. Now there are hundreds of devices, most with cameras, able to view TV, receive email, browse the web. The complexity is increasing and training provides advisors with more current information, enhanced skill and confidence fielding more questions. It's great for confidence becuase it reduces the number of times an advisor needs to check a fact, refer to a colleague, escalate to a supervisor or hand-off to a subject matter expert or another team. These are all drags on efficiency and affect advisor confidence which dirctly translates into service performance.

Thirdly, advisor satisfaction. Holding roadshows, seminars, training, coaching, etc. adds variety and substance to a role and gives confidence that an individual is developing their skills to improve their future job prospects, and to aid them in doing their job better. This creates good outcomes: lower absence, lower shrinkage and longer tenure. Retention of good advisors is so important - the effort and cost it takes to find, recruit, induct and train a new person to the level of a leaver is very expensive. Calculate the full cost in your centre and you will quickly see that advisor retention activities have an incredibly high return on investment. Losing advisors in the three/four month period is particularly expensive as that's the point when they really start to become useful having spent the first 100 days or so learning the job. If they then leave, you've thrown away several thousand pounds - go do the addition yourself. This is often a hidden cost in contact centres.

Fourthly, for service development. Advisors who are used to learning new topics and used to new content, are better at accepting ... new topics and new content, so when you roll out new projects, guess what, teams that regularly get briefings on changes deal with change much easier. A public sector environment where a job changes little in three years is a hard place to introduce change compared to a fast moving centre, all other things being equal. Change is always difficult but if staff resist all changes, then it's really tough. And resistence to change builds up barriers and resentment and creates negative energy in teams. This translates directly into to negative outcomes - longer wrap-up times, higher absence levels, longer wait times for customers, etc. So the more appropriate training, the more engaged the advisors, the easier service management becomes.

For all of these reasons, training is hugely important to improving outcomes. It can be more impactful than a small increase in staff rewards.

• Scheduling


• Recruitment, Induction, Training, Development & Retention


• Team structure


• Briefing in Projects


• Service Levels - Measurement Performance and hitting targets


• Coaching and Performance Management


• Knowledge sharing and escalation to Super Agents / SMEs


• Maintaining knowledge bases and feeding back to training sessions


• What challenges do "no paper, no pens" environments create

Copyright 2007, Robert A Innes