Tarp :: Release the Profit of Interaction

Exploding the Contact Center Myth
1to1 Magazine | September 2006 | Author: Jason Compton

From the sea of paper produced by the Bell System service banks of the last century to today's high-tech, Voice over IP call distributors that measure call activity down to the millisecond, contact center stakeholders have rarely wanted for raw numbers. But there has been a growing concern that service leaders may be looking at the wrong information, as new and innovative metrics have begun to spread throughout the industry, led in part by the swinging pendulum of service priorities.

Coming off a period of several years when decision-making was heavily driven by cost, the industry is now stepping back to look at the long-term impact of those cost-saving initiatives on the customer experience. "Changing the way you view your contact center can increase customer satisfaction, and that potentially increases loyalty," says Joe Outlaw, principal analyst, contact center solutions, at Current Analysis.

Another reason for the new focus is a change
in management style. Many organizations are hiring or promoting executives from outside the customer service area to run their contact centers. "The enterprise is shipping in management to run the call centers," says Tony Hayward, CEO of AIM Technology, a developer of contact center performance management software. "Previously, call centers were run by call center people—the best agent becomes the leader becomes the call center manager, but now risk managers are being given the call center." Hayward believes it is the expectations of these outside executives, who in their former roles were guided by a broad variety of both operational and effectiveness metrics, that are steering the change in contact center evaluation.

Whatever the source, the change is very real, and a direct result of the realization that efficiency alone does not create strong one-to-one relationships, customer loyalty, or product differentiation. "In the efficiency-focused contact center, you often will not hear 'Can I help you with anything else?' We see that as a customer-driven experience problem, but employees have not been trained to see it that way," says Crystal Collier, senior vice president of practices at TARP Worldwide.

Looking Beyond Costs
For call centers trapped in a numbers game, first-call resolution (FCR) offers an escape from heavy operational metrics. Examining the likelihood of sending a customer away happy -- or at least indulged -- can tell management more about the net result of each call than simple on-hook time or cost controlling statistics. "Before, we were looking at [average handle time] and trying to get an answer to the customer as quickly as possible, instead of trying to focus on understanding what the customer is asking and trying to give them better service," says Remus Siclovan, senior systems analyst at healthcare provider Health Net. Since reengineering its IVR and agent processes to focus on call resolution and ease of use, Health Net's customer satisfaction scores are up 20 percent.

VW Credit also considers the combined impact of customer experience and FCR. "We really do want the call resolved on the first 300-second attempt," says Aaron Jacobs, manager of customer care. "But if we have to invest 350 seconds, that's still a lot better than 900 seconds" from two subsequent callbacks.

FCR can be a tricky concept. Jim Puchbauer, senior manager of product marketing for FrontRange Solutions, suggests a time-to-resolution metric for environments with issues that cannot be completely resolved at the conclusion of a phone call, such as a utility outage. Such a metric, which examines the time from the company being made aware of the problem to the full restoration of service, enables a more complete view of the entire company's impact on the customer relationship.

Some contact centers use proxies such as calls per sale to measure effectiveness, as opposed to looking strictly at talk time per agent or talk time per contact. "We talk about enhancing shareholder value, so we wanted to communicate what we are doing in terms of revenue generation," says Joel Altre-Kerber, call center project manager at KeyBank NA.

Rather than overwhelming agents with raw dollar figures for every product line, KeyBank decided to boil down its metrics to a single, easy-to-understand scoring system. The system assigns revenue-generation points based on the average value of each type of banking product and the total number of booked referrals. "We were able to distill shareholder value down to just those two points," he says.

Incorporating the voice and perspective of the customer in any metric overhaul is an important step. KeyBank NA, which uses quality monitoring from provider Envision, recently incorporated quantitative measurements, including a revenue-generation index, on-hook time, and client satisfaction, in its call-evaluation process. "In years prior we did not use [client satisfaction] scores in our evaluation; we would just go through and make comments about the interaction itself, but that didn't give us a way to track over time how well somebody was doing," Altre-Kerber says.

Adopting immediate after-call surveys, either conducted by the agent, an IVR system, or an immediate callback, also provides key customer quality data while the interaction is still fresh in the customer's mind -- and provides actionable data before the urgency of the interaction is lost. "We don't want to wait for mail surveys that take four to six weeks to get results back and are difficult to connect back to the person doing the transaction," says Shane Butler, operations manager of the reporting services group at the California State Automobile Association (CSAA). "We did a pilot with a really cool after-call survey last year that laid the foundation for us, and we are looking for an [enterprisewide] solution that allows us to incorporate the voice of the customer as immediate feedback."

A New Take on Old Standbys
Few question that new analysis is becoming crucial to effective contact center measurement, but at the same time few are willing to bury the operational metrics of the past. Raw talk time data is important as a foundation and its implications continue to resonate in real-world environments where customer priorities must always be weighed against budget realities.

In fact, contact centers' staple measurement, average handle time (AHT), is most valuable when it is looked at in conjunction with other metrics, because longer talk times can lead directly to higher satisfaction, revenue, or both. "When I was in call center management on the sales side, I had one associate with a significantly higher AHT [than peers], but who was extraordinarily effective at building a rapport with the client, uncovering hidden needs, and capitalizing on that," KeyBank NA's Altre-Kerber says.

Taken in isolation, AHT can be a poor counselor. "The fact is, when we reduce AHT by 15 percent it may look like we are saving a ton of money, but we may have decreased revenue by 30 percent because we are forcing behavior on the agent to really cut the call," says Oscar Alban, principal global market consultant at Witness Systems. Shortening a call can also directly impact the customer experience by cutting short the interaction before customers have fully resolved all of their standing issues, or by removing the agent's ability to probe for unmet needs.

Combining root-cause analysis with classic metrics is one way to keep them alive and relevant. "AHT never seemed to be a big issue to anyone until I ran the numbers in the workforce software and showed management that if you reduce AHT by 10 seconds you save 15 bodies—then, they listened," says Aaron Johnson, supervisor of forecasting and staffing at electricity producer American Electric Power (AEP). But AEP looks at handle time as more than a cost-cutting measure; it is now part of a root-cause analysis that looks at exactly why handle time is adversely affected throughout the course of the day.

"Now if we notice that we can't process calls as quickly [due to technical problems], we go to IT and show them what the outage does to our cost of service," Johnson says. "So we now get reports on their service plans, and they only conduct scheduled outages in times of low volume. It's been a big thing, realizing what is causing problems and addressing them."

Average speed of answer (ASA) and its derived measurement, service level (typically viewed as percentage of total calls answered by a target time), also remain important for day-to-day analysis of operational targets -- and are important tools to stave off customer frustration and call abandonment. So industry experts suggest that contact center managers get more sophisticated in their use of ASA, for example, tying ASA to customer value. "Our largest single metric is very common -- service level -- but what we do there that is innovative is that we look at SLA expectations by customer type, and by that individual customer type we meet their expectations," says VW Credit's Jacobs.

Using its Aspect call center management software, VW Credit analyzes and accounts for constituent behavior not only by group but by lifecycle as well. "A dealer calling about a dealer-related issue has a tolerance that is very low—only about four to six seconds," Jacobs says. "Audi customers have a somewhat long tolerance, and Volkswagen customers have an even higher tolerance…up to 90 seconds."

By monitoring call-drop rates, VW Credit builds routing rules and staffing levels to account for the standards of all of its customer groups. The company also plans customer-facing activities according to the "bathtub" curve of the client lifecycle, where customers at the beginning or end of a loan life will call frequently, with only occasional contact in between. "Some people have to talk to us [to make a payment arrangement], so you can get more out of lower service levels," Jacobs says. "We get granular down to the week to look at customer behavior and determine our detailed hiring level."

This greater precision has helped VW Credit increase its permanent-to-temporary labor balance, controlling costs and providing a greater return on training investments.

Coming to Consensus
Introducing new metrics or making a change to existing ones means agreeing on that change. But a lack of agreement about metrics has long been a challenge for complex contact centers. Some companies are seeing improvement not so much by focusing on an entirely new slate of metrics as by consolidating several disparate scorecards, stat sheets, and performance targets into a more concise and consistent set of criteria applied across the entire organization.

The California State Automobile Association found that its disconnected methods of analysis were counterproductive to member satisfaction and retention, and moved swiftly to make changes. "As part of our contact center transformation initiative, we looked heavily at the metrics and scorecards we were using, and found that they would vary by business unit—each unit had a different philosophy around how to measure performance, even within the same contact center," Butler says. "That led to a siloing effect, and confusion among our employees [who] went from one business unit to another."

The lack of clarity across the company made a true roll-up analysis of the entire contact organization extremely difficult, leading to genuine confusion about the best direction to take in process reengineering. "We weren't sure that we were measuring the right things from a productivity and performance perspective," Butler says. No existing view of agent performance was suitable to the entire organization because each business unit had skewed its measurements to support its own goals.

CSAA, which uses AIM and Epiphany in its contact center, built a company-wide agent scorecard around schedule adherence, overall productivity yield (the percentage of paid time spent in member-service tasks), and utilization (which includes time spent waiting for calls as well as productive time). The scorecard also includes a detailed quality analysis that is done specifically to ensure that the performance statistics don't outweigh concerns for quality customer service. "Getting a complete view of [the customer experience] allows us to calibrate our own internal quality efforts against what our members say," Butler says. "It's important to us that our members receive consistency from us."

AEP faced a similar challenge attempting to rationalize its contact center metrics. The company has grown rapidly through expansion, and each contact center in the organization had independent operating procedures and standards. Over the past five years AEP has worked to bring each center into alignment. "Things changed significantly with the implementation of a single scorecard for our agents, with four components: productivity, quality, [schedule] conformance, and attendance," Johnson says. AEP is meeting its internal goals as well as its regulatory goals for responsiveness by a wider margin, and also hits its elevated customer satisfaction survey targets.

Sharing Insight
Once managers select new metrics, they must put them to use. Just sharing them in the executive suite may not be enough, however. There is a growing movement to provide analytical feedback to agents as well -- not as a digital bulletin board hammering them about handle time, but in personalized, goal-oriented scorecards. "There's a revolution [that involves] giving the call center agent far better information about how they're doing -- delivering KPIs to their desktop so they can see that they are not just slave labor, but are an integrated part of achieving the corporation's goals," AIM's Hayward says. "They won't see the same goals as, say, the CEO, but they will have goals that roll up."

The bigger danger is in blinding agents with too many low-level operational metrics, such as the classic service-level light board, is that it encourages agents to optimize on a few statistical categories but misses the bigger picture of the health of the customer relationship. "We had scorecards starting with AHT and running down to every phone status...These details are important to know to make sure you are effectively running your contact center, but don't necessarily need to be on an individual scorecard," KeyBank NA's Altre-Kerber says. "When you're telling them that every single phone status is something to pay attention to, they don't know where to focus."

Tying the crucial numbers to tangible workplace benefits can have a positive effect. "Our agents bid on schedules based on their rank in our scorecards -- that was very controversial when we started it four years ago and it wasn't done without growing pains, but it definitely enhanced our performance," AEP's Johnson says.

CSAA shares its monthly agent scorecard with front-line personnel, as well as line supervisors, and takes steps to ensure that the message behind the numbers is understood. "Our supervisors weren't accustomed to seeing new metrics like employee yield, so there has been an effort to educate them in what the data is telling them," Butler says. "They directly influence whether agents are on the phone as scheduled, so they understand now that if they make a decision to pull their team off the phone it impacts our overall performance."

Whatever you do, resist the temptation to throw every new measurement under the sun at your contact center. "We call them key performance indicators for a reason...You do want to focus on a subset of truly key indicators," says Brett Williams, senior manager of product management at Aspect Communications. "It's not about the reports, it's about the process, and a long series of operational performance indicators is more than anybody can properly manage to."