People make the difference

The new economy version of call centres are contact centres, the hubs from which companies conduct all two-way communication with customers, partners, and often also employees.

In theory, such hubs can handle all channels of communication, including via telephone, fax, e-mail and Internet chat, and by some interpretations even walk-in clients. In reality, estimates of the non-telephonic communication handled by a run-of-the-mill contact centre vary between 1% and 10% of total volume, effectively making these centres nothing but call centres with a view to the future.

Many agree that in the near future, written communication between companies and clients, in whatever form, will become far more prevalent. Reasons include consumer adoption of e-mail as a preferred medium, the relative simplicity of text chat to guide users on a Web site and cost benefits to both sides.

However, the cost benefits to companies, caused by a lower number of calls as attentive care deflects follow-up contact, through extended cross-selling and better customer retention, will not materialise immediately. The road to establishing a contact centre that genuinely acts as the much touted "revenue generator" instead of being a monetary black hole, is strewn with expensive hurdles. The risk-averse may find the short-term downturn unpalatable.

Foremost among these hurdles would seem to be human resources (HR) issues. An investment in state-of-the-art hardware to effectively distribute incoming communication, and advanced software to present operators with the correct answers, is dwarfed by the ongoing cost of operators. The ability to use written communication effectively and solve problems, rather than providing only stock answers, requires operators very different from the freshly matriculated semi-skilled workers earlier days saw as ideal fodder for call centres. More advanced skills come at a price.

You are now teaching agents where to find information, how to extract information and how to put it into a meaningful format for both the company and the client.

Candy Kotze-Hayes, MD, Call Centre Academy

A shortage of suitable workers also means that staff turnover, already costly, becomes an intolerable expense, also in terms of productivity and efficiency. Consequently, modern contact centres are very different from the hellhole environment traditionally associated with such facilities. The casual mobility of staff, and the awareness that only happy agents can perform well, are leading companies to consider their contact centre staff as a precious asset.

As many traditional and new economy companies have learnt, technology can only provide a framework allowing employees to perform their tasks, and is not a solution in itself. In contact centres, people make the difference.

In 1999, three Australians, Catriona Wallace, Geoff Eagleson and Robert Waldersee, published a short paper titled "The Sacrificial HR Strategy in Call Centres", examining what they saw as a solution used in the industry to achieve both efficiency goals and excellent service at low cost. This, they said, is done at the expense of the physical and psychological well-being of staff.

The trio explained the rationale behind the naming of the phenomenon as follows: "It is sacrificial because the enthusiasm and motivation of the front-line are sacrificed by management. It is a strategy because it involves a coherent set of management activities and attitudes, which together solve the efficiency/service conflict. It is new because emotional burnout and high turnover are tolerated, if not encouraged."

In looking at four large call centres, the study found that all had adopted some version of this strategy. Staff with an intrinsic motivation to provide good service were selected and then driven to handle a high volume of calls through a combination of monitoring systems and management which demanded performance. Bringing in new agents and repeating the process offset the resulting high turnover in staff.

Because a similar strategy seemed to have been adopted independently by a number of call centres, Wallace, Eagleson and Waldersee sought out contingency factors leading to it. The contributing factors they identified were the classification of irate clients as just another transaction to be completed in record time, IT systems which allow agents with only superficial training to have information at their fingertips, and a large labour pool.

"To be successful at implementing a Sacrificial HR Strategy, the call centre has to excel in four areas," they declared. "They must have efficient recruitment processes to ensure that they can quickly access the available labour pool. They must be skilled at selecting intrinsically motivated staff. They need to be able to design the tasks so that the agents have minimal need for organisational knowledge. Finally, they must excel at monitoring staff performance, including call monitoring and customer satisfaction measurement."

While the IT systems required for such a scheme are generally a feature of contact centres, and measurements of both performance and customer satisfaction are standard, local experts say the market of suitable labour is smaller than it may seem, and that companies will see far greater long-term benefits from well-trained staff.

<I>Adam Craker</I>, MD of Dimension Data Customer Contact Solutions, says contact centres require written skills, even though he estimates that even centres handling faxes, e-mail and online chat still spend 99% of their time on the telephone. That makes the right people hard to find, and expensive to train.

"Literacy skills here are pretty good if you look at it in context of Africa, but basic grammatical and written skills are lacking. It is relatively straight-forward to take someone with basic spoken skills and enhance those people rapidly, but it takes a lot longer to put someone through a writing programme."

He cites a Web chat channel between call centre and customer as an example of new pressures and opportunities. "In an isolated situation, such a channel is less productive because you have an agent sitting in a chat session with a customer who probably doesn`t have speed-typing skills." However, DiData Customer Contact Solutions has found that agents can easily handle three chat sessions simultaneously, reducing dead time and making the proposition profitable.

An agent who suddenly does encounter a speed-typing client can simply dump an ongoing chat session on a colleague`s desktop, without the client ever realising there has been an operator change. Multiple experts can act together on a difficult case, either openly or representing a single face, and monitoring team leaders can easily interject or take control of the conversation.

Research has shown that if you are more attentive to customers, you can deflect a lot of calls later on.

Paul Bornhutter, HEAT helpdesk product manager, Ixchange

But multi-thread handling is not something that a recruit fresh off the street would be able to handle. Craker suggests that managers, in particular, need graduate level skills across the traditional business functions such as HR, finance, marketing, training and technology to handle many channels.

<I>Candy Kotze-Hayes</I>, MD of the MB Worksoft group`s Call Centre Academy, says agents no longer just answer phones, but need to extract information from a client so that the rest of the organisation can prepare products and services for its market.

"You are now teaching agents where to find information, how to extract information and how to put it into a meaningful format for both the company and the client." She identifies problem-solving, analytical and even leadership skills as important, with initiative also ranking high.

"When you talk about CRM [customer relationship management] and knowledge management, it is completely different from just answering the phone with a smile in your voice. It is being able to talk to a client and solve his problem there and then, on the first call."

<I>Paul Bornhutter</I>, HEAT helpdesk product manager for Ixchange, says such a "handle once" strategy can pay off handsomely in the long-term as more calls are prevented by spending more time on problems. However, it depends on the nature of the contact centre.

"If you are looking at a business that has a high volume of calls going through, you probably need performance, somebody who can handle calls. You can`t have them spend 10, 15 minutes on a call. Yet research has shown that if you are more attentive to customers, you can deflect a lot of calls later on."

Once people with the right skills have been identified, recruited and trained, retaining them becomes difficult. Staff turnover, always an accepted fact in the market, could be getting worse just as candidates become scarcer.

A 1999/2000 benchmark study by Merchants UK found that "despite the fact that staff attrition is at an all-time high, nearly two-thirds of the call/contact centres have no policy for staff retention".

Craker estimates that the local market conforms to the international 15% to 20% average attrition rate, and practitioners say active headhunting on agent level is not by any means a strange occurrence.

You need to make the call centre a lot more attractive as a career opportunity.

Candy Kotze-Hayes, MD, Call Centre Academy

Salaries are an obvious starting point in a retention strategy, and the experts agree that a new breed of operator expects a new level of remuneration.

"You are talking about individuals that will demand a higher salary because they are better educated," says Kotze-Hayes.

Craker says the problem is much more pronounced at the operational management level, where multiple channels make things a lot more complicated than before. He cites a recent advertisement for an operations manager as an example of the threats faced by companies trying to hold onto their staff. The advert called for a candidate with a tertiary education and experience in the IT and call centre fields, and offered an annual salary of R350 000 to R450 000.

Technology also makes workers more mobile. Rob Salvado, a director at eContact Solutions, says the knowledge bases built into contact centre products make it relatively easy to access the correct information, if the agent knows where to look for it. "It is essential when you have hundreds of products or services. It is impossible to keep all of that in your head." This also means operators trained in the basic skills can slot into a new environment relatively painlessly, with only a short adaptation period.

Yet money isn`t everything, notes Kotze-Hayes. "You need to make the call centre a lot more attractive as a career opportunity." Paying less than the competition is not necessarily a crippling factor, and neither is a high rate of attrition.

"Attrition is okay as long as you are losing key members to the rest of the organisation. If you are losing people to outside companies, something is wrong and you need to look at it."

She says contact centre design now uses smarter ergonomics, keeping noise levels down, providing the right equipment to make the job easier and eliminating nuisance problems. In general, the environment is aimed at keeping staff happy rather than keeping costs downs.

You are not going to get high quality service if the agents aren`t relaxed and motivated, and feeling cool and calm.

Adam Craker, MD, Dimension Data Customer Contact Solutions

Craker agrees, and says the agent grapevine soon picks up when positions are open in a pleasant working environment. DiData`s i-Media Centre provides two "chill areas", one social and noisy, and the other quiet and relaxing.

"You need to recognise that it is a stressful environment. You are not going to get high quality service if the agents aren`t relaxed and motivated, and feeling cool and calm."

Ixchange`s Bornhutter also does not count money as the most important element in retention. "The problem is not finding people as such, it is keeping them stimulated enough for them to remain in the organisation. Then you can move them on up."

One of the major HR shifts in future contact centre strategy may be full virtual call centres staffed by telecommuting workers. Many agree that the combination of zero central infrastructure costs and an attractive proposition to potential recruits could work well, but not in SA.

"There is a mentality problem, in that managers don`t trust people to work when they can`t see them," says Bornhutter. "Management believes productivity will come down. Business won`t be ready for work-from-home centres for at least three to four years."

<I>Garth Hayward</I>, CEO of Centricity, says the market is ready, but existing management is not.

"How do you manage it, how do you control it when people are telecommuting?" he asks. "It is an opportunity, and there have been increases in productivity where you have telecommuting."

Salvado believes telecommuting contact centre workers to be an inevitable fact of the future for purely economical reasons.

"You won`t be able to avoid it. The price of property if you set up a centre in say Sandton is huge. We won`t be able to afford the luxury of setting up in a building anymore, and you would be forced to use telecommuting."

Craker and Kotze-Hayes both disagree, pointing to other economic reasons such as the cost of establishing connectivity to workers` homes and the inhibiting factor of putting a PC in employees` homes. "If you work an eight hour day, that PC can only be operational for eight hours a day," Craker says. "You are using that asset only a third of the time, which makes it uneconomical."

Hayward also expects the profiling of agents and matching agents to callers to become a science in years to come.

"Linking a person to the right agent in terms of language and culture can make a huge difference. You have better staff attention, more empathy toward the caller and generally huge benefits coming out of it."