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Articles on Leadership Matters:

Call Center Killers - How To Prevent Them?

To some these may be common sense to others these concerns will grab your interest. My goal is to not just provide the list to avoid but to also provide techniques you can employ to address these issues proactively and positively.

Three Areas of Focus
1. Employee Retention (attrition)
2. Absenteeism
3. Ineffective Frontline Leadership

Can you see the relationship among all three? Clearly, ineffective frontline leadership can and does have an impact on Employee satisfaction.

This article will provide you with a brief explanation of the cost of each "Killer" and a brief overview of solutions to each of these three issues.

As you will see to truly solve these areas of opportunity you will have to approach the solutions from a Holistic methodology. I know your time is limited so

Employee Retention vs. Attrition
Simply stated….follow the golden rule and call center life will be productive. Meaning, treat people the way you want to be treated.

Looking at the importance of attrition reduction some say "so what we can hire and train for pennies on the dollar." This view is short sighted and I will explain why.

The cost of attrition needs to be calculated based on both hard and soft dollars.

Hard Dollars
Increased Training cost (Agent's hourly rate x hrs to train) Trainer cost = salary or rate of pay x hrs to train + prep time.

Soft Dollars
Lost revenue - This can be better gauged when working on the outsourcing side but the cost would;

Rate that is bill client x the hours lost due to attrition. For instance, the contract calls for $24.55 per hour. The agent usually works 37.5 hours a week then additional cost of attrition would be $920.63. This is lost revenue.

Performance Cost - What happens when you lose a veteran agent that knows and understands the performance metric criteria? Performance drops! The cost of this lost is debatable but clearly you lose in performance. This can be dramatic especially if you are bonused based on performance.

So for those that think attrition is not important, you just do not understand the true dynamics of call center management.

These costs become exponentially important on the Inbound side when you get to training times that take up to 5 or 6 weeks to prepare an agent for the phones.

Absenteeism
The cost of this "killer" is obvious. But let's apply the Hard/Soft dollars methodology again:

Hard Dollars
In all Call Centers, your Workforce Management Team schedules based on assumed absenteeism. On the outsourcing side it is generally higher (probably because pay is lower and efficiency is that much more important.)

So basically if you predict that you will have a 8% absenteeism rate on a Tuesday and normally your staffing requirements dictate that you need 100 reps throughout the day to handle the call volume. If that is the case you will need to train 108 reps.

But if you could manage your absenteeism down to 2% then you would only need to train 102 reps. This will cost you less.

Soft Dollars
Brings down morale by pushing more work onto the agents that are coming to work.

Service levels suffer as does customer service, As a result, you may lose some customers. Ouch!

Ineffective Frontline Leadership
This issue is a slippery slope. This issue affects everything in your center. Therefore, being on top of this "killer" can turn it to your centers advantage.

If you think about it, what your leadership team does with the Agent resources can have an incredible effect on:

1. Performance
2. Attrition
3. Absenteeism

Morale - This effects all of the above. And effectively managing the above determines if YOU and your center is successful.

Ok, let's learn how we can reduce these costs!

First and foremost your Leadership team determines how successful you are in reducing these cost and increasing performance and profit!

The following are some techniques and skills that are most likely to allow you to be successful:
According to Dan Coen in his book, Building Call Center Culture, "the communication presented to call center in the first thirty minutes of their day will set the stage for the rest of the day.

Greeting your agent with enthusiasm is the single most important point to positively impact their day when they arrive. Imagine walking into work on a Monday morning (you don't want to be there) but your boss greets you with all the enthusiasm in the world and says to you…"Good morning how was your weekend?" I bet you will be pleasantly surprised and that positive touch will be contagious.

In Building Call Center Culture, Coen, provides 5 styles and techniques of greeting your agents.

Motivating your employees can be as easy as engaging them in the overall process of the Call Center….In laymen terms include them in the decision making process.

Some critics say that this will only slow down our ability to move forward. This is nonsense!

Yes, decisions need to be made on the fly but if you do a good job planning you can incorporate this engagement as an ongoing process, which WILL NOT interfere with moment to moment decision.

There is a great book out that very few leaders know about. If they did then we would have a whole lot more success in business. The name of the book is titled…"Enlightened Leadership, getting to the heart of change, written by Ed Oakley, Doug Krug.

In this book it provides a clear path to increasing performance and morale in your center through agent involvement.

The amount to gain from having the philosophy of engaging in your workforce capital is extraordinary!

Greg Meares
09 June 2007

Greg Meares is an accomplished call center consultant. He recently released a solution to these areas of concern. If your interested in learning and testing this system you can get a copy here: http://www.accountabilityprocess.com also if you need tools to help motivate your staff then visit http://www.callcenterbestpractices.com/

Resources: Enlightened Leadership, getting to the heart of change, written by Ed Oakley, Doug Krug.