We do an exceptional amount of planning for tomorrow in contact centers. It’s a healthy obsession we have – from getting ahead of the technology curve, to anticipating changes in customer needs, to closely controlling vacation allowances, our focus on tomorrow leaves us well prepared. But the unique features of a contact center, where demand is real-time, queues are invisible and customers expect to be answered in a minute or less, place one obstacle clearly in the way of that rosy tomorrow. And that obstacle is today.
To be more precise, the obstacle is not so much today as it is right now. This very moment, calls and other contacts are queuing up. Then again, maybe they are not. Maybe it is a lull, and agents are sitting around with nothing to do. The harsh reality of now in a contact center is that it ebbs and flows, creating an environment that is far from predictable regardless of how well we plan. The frustration we feel, though, is a small part of the price we pay for this chaotic now. Because it is not always tracked properly or responded to appropriately, the effects linger into the future, morphing into longer term issues that on the surface seem unrelated to those very tactical challenges caused by our queues. In that highly charged moment, when we are trying to avert some sort of mini-disaster, we unfortunately say and do things that upset that delicate balance between meeting our organizational commitments, providing a positive work environment and satisfying customers.
It does not have to be this way. Now can be less of an obstacle when we accept that it is one of our great challenges and we build the processes required to manage it effectively. Yes, advance planning is critical to our success. Just as important is our real-time preparation and reaction plan – the one we invoke when those best laid plans fall a bit short.
The Impact of Real-Time Data on Key Management Challenges
Solving Key Contact Center Challenges through Real-Time Management
The Surprising Side Benefits to a Better Now
Asked to tick off the benefits of better real-time management, we would all likely start with a few of the obvious ones – shorter queues, lower abandonment, etc. Those are some real important advantages that should not be ignored, but let’s take a different look at payback. We know what some of the big problems are in contact centers. How does better real-time management help with those? The table below explores these issues that keep us up at night, along with the impact real-time management has on them:
Issue The Role of Real-Time Management Resolution
Agent Turnover If not the biggest problem facing contact centers, agent turnover has to be one of the top three. We have all heard how people typically don’t leave companies as much as they leave supervisors. How does real-time management play into this? Observe a contact center when the queue starts to build, and if the wrong processes are in place you will see supervisors “cracking the whip”, often micro-managing staff in an effort to improve the situation. Better real-time management promotes better agent awareness and self-management - shifting the oversight role away from supervisors, allowing them to actually develop relationships with their staff that extends beyond the “butts in seats” mentality.
Our queues are invisible in contact centers, and that has the unfortunate consequence of de-sensitizing staff to the frustration customers feel when waiting. Providing them with information on the numbers of calls waiting, the longest wait, and similar metrics helps to bring the customer experience closer to everyone in the center. Having the data “available on demand” simply does not cut it. This is information that has to be only a glance away at all moments.
Absenteeism True, there is nothing that real-time management can do in order to bring people back into the office when they call out. But let’s expand the view of absenteeism. If our real concern is getting the amount of people on the phone that we need to meet service level, then surely adherence (or rather the lack of it) plays a role along with absenteeism. How big a role? Usually way bigger than contact centers realize. Call-out 1 [pg. 6] compares both absenteeism and adherence, and points out how important good, consistent adherence is to a contact center. Keeping a close eye on real-time adherence, and enacting an established reaction plan when it dips below desirable levels, clearly has benefits.
Contact centers with great adherence numbers will tell you that it is part of the culture. In order to get there, you need realistic objectives and up-to-the second information. Matching the actual agent staffed numbers to scheduled numbers and displaying the result takes what is typically a historical metric and makes it real time and actionable.
“Doing More with Less”, or trimming costs while workload continues to expand
We often limit our views of better real-time
management to ways in which we can better address queuing situations. In many contact centers, the bigger problem is not customers queuing up, but agents queuing up waiting for customers to arrive. Some of this is necessary in order to meet service level goals. Too often, though, high levels of agent availability go unaddressed, contributing to rising costs. The best real-time management plans quickly identify these situations and enact the appropriate response plan – ensuring that staff is utilized effectively throughout the day.
Overstaffing needs the same sort of management approach we use for understaffing, with visibility of agent availability a key. Our real time reaction plans are normally focused on high queuing situations, but we must also build complementary actions that move staff off the phones when traffic is lighter than predicted. Training, coaching, off-phone work, and projects are all activities that can be handled during those times – and if all else fails, we can always consider taking volunteers for time off without pay.
Issue The Role of Real-Time Management Resolution
Improving Customer
Satisfaction Speed of answer is undeniably an element of customer satisfaction, and better real-time management yields quicker and more consistent service levels. But an even more important way to improve customer satisfaction is to do a better job matching customer needs with agent skillsets. We have a much greater chance of “wowing” the customer when the call is sent to the highest rated agent based on the customer’s need, rather than forwarding the call to someone just nominally skilled because better matches were not available. Here again, real-time management plays a key role when we can monitor the conditions in all queues and skills and be alerted when potential issues arise.
We get into our biggest problems when there are skills that are unmanned, or when they are manned only with lower rated agents. For those centers with numerous skills and overflow conditions, visible, real-time updates of these unmanned or undermanned skill groups can help us avert a crisis before it ever happens.
Managing New Channels The increase in channels is one of the biggest changes in contact centers in the past decade. While all are important, each channel has varying degrees of success. Even the most popular ones are adopted slowly, and the lower the volume the more important real-time management becomes. Why is that? Because queue management is a numbers game, and smaller numbers are simply less predictable than larger ones. When things are not predictable, we have to rely more on reaction and less on planning.
In multi-skilled contact centers, we tend to focus only on the big number skills and just let the smaller ones “drift along”. That’s understandable, but can be counter-productive. New channels generate small volume numbers, yet performance is critical to make smooth transitions into these channels. Real-time dashboards and digital displays need to include text chat, social media, and other channels that are smaller in volume but large in importance.
Avoiding/Responding to
PR Disasters It’s a sign of the times: one small mistake can blow up in little more than an instant. Real-time management is not just about monitoring numbers, it is also about managing content and responding quickly and consistently to Public Relations situations. At its best, real-time management can alert us to trends early enough that we can make improvements before the disaster ever occurs – or at least before it takes off and “goes viral”.
Real-time information should not only be about traditional performance metrics. Seeing some of the latest comments from customers via social media, or tracking satisfaction ratings, rounds out our real-time information and helps bring customer input closer to everyone.
Improving Frontline
Leadership Skills Once relieved of the burden of micromanaging, supervisors can tend to higher value activities like helping agents build skills and develop careers. That allows our frontline leaders to be accountable not just for today’s results, but also for ensuring we are well prepared for the challenges of tomorrow. It is those sorts of activities that prepare supervisors to eventually be effective Managers, Directors and Vice Presidents.
High visibility into real-time conditions, coupled with well-defined reaction plans, takes the supervisor out of micro-management roles. Time that used to be spent in oversight can now shift to analyzing, planning and coaching – just what we want from our leaders.
As we see from the selected examples, the impact of what happens right now is real and far reaching. It deserves the time required to build processes that will maximize our efforts. When properly implemented, a sound real-time performance management strategy helps solve many of the common challenges plaguing contact centers today.
Real-Time Management Best Practices
The goal when designing real-time management processes is to get the right information you need at the right time, and then react quickly, correctly and decisively. Like most of our contact center goals, the devil is in the details.
While looking at our metrics and data needs, we should also think about enterprise data or other information that will help keep your staff abreast of what may be affecting the type or quantity of contacts they are receiving. Seeing continual real-time updates about the types of calls being received, customer feedback, or industry-specific news can often alert leaders to a need to take action well before the findings get highlighted in a historical report. The needs tend to be much more industry specific, as seen in some of these examples:
• Financial services companies can help their staff by providing them the latest news from business media channels or highlighting key economic indicators on a digital display or via a scrolling message on a desktop.
• Utilities need to stay close to weather forecasts, so agents should always be aware of what is happening in a region and when it is about to happen. Actual utility plant data, such as water pressure or power outages are examples of operational data that can be shared to keep agents informed.
• Retailers should see what is being said about them via feedback channels and social media, and making those real-time feeds affords the opportunity to respond quickly to the input. Sharing the latest marketing promotion or advertisement with agents is another good option for retail agent awareness.
Every industry is different, yet all have some operational content or related information that has great value when it is fresh and shared with your staff. Beyond the industry specifics, we can all benefit from a method of communicating company-related information (deadlines for benefit sign-ups, dates for a company event, etc.) to everyone quickly and consistently.
Real-Time Metrics with Meaning
Key performance metrics are at the heart of any real-time management plan. What makes a data point real-time? The classical definition focuses on the data element itself, and how “fresh” it is relative to current conditions. That certainly makes the metric relevant in explaining now, but a more inclusive look at the data recognizes that the only purpose of any metric is to drive the proper response. The best real-time metrics, then, are those that form the picture that tells us what to do next.
For that picture to be rich, it will need more than just a couple of data points. It will have some main data points, and these will be more actionable due to supporting contextual data. A great example here is the number of calls in queue, a classic element of any real-time management program. Knowing that there are 17 calls in queue is certainly helpful. But once you ask “ok, so what now…?” you realize that more data is required.
It is the contextual data the forms the link between metrics and action. How do 17 calls compare to our volume of answered calls for the past fifteen minutes? How do they compare to yesterday or the last six Tuesdays during the same interval? How does it compare to the number of agents logged on? What does it mean in relation to the service we have been providing so far today? In the end, for the number to be useful, it needs to be viewed relative to past intervals and other, relative metrics and thresholds. And today, with multiple channels, numerous skills and budget constraints, the thresholds absolutely must be dynamic.
Armed with this type of information, the metric of 17 calls in queue becomes less of a number, and more of an indicator. Maybe 17 is bigger than our highest queue yesterday, yet our traffic is lower and well below the level at the same time last week. Sounds like an adherence check is in order. Or maybe we just hit 17, and have been under ten pretty much all day. Traffic is average, and service level is high. Sounds like we should just keep an eye on it – might be a temporary blip. Putting the right metrics together, quickly comparing them to historical intervals, and setting the right thresholds, gives us much more than a screen full of numbers and meaningless alerts. It gives us knowledge and context.
And with knowledge comes the confidence to take action. The final step in the real-time management process is the creation of an action plan that ensures the best response is taken at the right time. Because it requires quick response, the action plan should be fairly simple and direct. A good starting point is to identify the threshold, timing requirement, and action for three tiers of severity, looking something like this:
Element Tier 1 Tier 2 Tier 3
Current condition Queue greater than 10, but ratio of queued calls to manned staff under 1:3
Service level and abandoned rate for day above standard
Volume near or under historical averages
Queue greater than 15, ratio of queued calls to manned staff under 1:2
Service level or abandoned rate below standard for the day Volume increasing and at or above historical average
Queue greater than 20, ratio of queued calls to manned staff under 1:1
Service level and abandoned rate below standard for the day Volume n/a
Timeframe Three minutes Immediate Five minutes
Actions 1. Adherence check
2. Transition email staff to phones
Tier 1 actions plus: 1. Postpone case work time 2. Postpone any classes scheduled
to start in 30 minutes or less 3. Put trainers on phone 4. Put QA staff on phone
Tier 1 and 2 plus:
1. Put half of supervisors on phone 2. Engage contingent staff from
other departments
Obviously, this sort of plan needs to be customized to your own volumes, service level standards, and other conditions. Experimentation is common, and tiered, dynamic threshold response plans often go through a number of revisions before being optimized. And this particular example is focused only on queuing situations – every organization should have a similar program in place to identify and address periods of overstaffing as well.
The Payoff
Once finalized, the better management of now generates benefits that last well into the future. It also extends into areas that may initially seem disconnected to this type of activity, such as:
• Customer satisfaction • Agent satisfaction • Improved revenue/value • Supervisory effectiveness • Utilization of resources/cost
Call-out 1: Absenteeism vs. Adherence
We track a lot of data at Service Agility, and that provides us with some meaningful averages related to staff utilization. We know, for example, that the average percentage of paid time lost to disability absences (both primary and secondary) is 6.25%. And we know that the average adherence rate (without after the fact exceptions) is 91%. Since these are averages, we also know that actual numbers fluctuate around them. The question for contact center leaders, though, is where will improvement efforts provide the most payback?
For purposes of this analysis, we will assume that we actually can take steps to improve absence. That being the case, here’s the question: Would you rather:
A. Generate a disability rate 20% better than average (5%), along with an adherence rate of 89%, or B. Generate a disability rate 20% worse than average (7.5%), along with an adherence rate of 93%
To analyze it, let’s assume we have a 250 agent center and shrink (other than disability and adherence) is 25%. With those assumptions, here’s the staff available under scenario A:
• 250 agents – (25% other shrink + 5% disability) = 175 agents on site • 175 agents on site x 89% adherence = 155.75 agents manned Here’s the scenario B analysis:
• 250 agents – (25% other shrink + 7.5% disability) = 168.75 agents on site • 168.75 agents on site x 93% adherence = 157 agents manned
So yes, adherence can be as or more important than absences on staff availability. And most would agree that we have much more control over adherence than disability. That makes a strong case for enabling effective, balanced adherence management practices. Part of those practices should include the right real-time reaction plan.
About Inova Solutions
Inova Solutions is a global provider of real-time performance management solutions that help contact centers improve their operations through the use of actionable, real-time metrics and consolidated reporting. Inova extends the value of standard reporting by providing real-time visibility across contact center and enterprise systems via customized wallboards and mobile dashboards. Our solutions are used by call centers of all sizes to reduce costs, increase revenue, improve staff productivity and morale, and to deliver consistently positive experiences for their customers.
About Jay Minnucci
Jay Minnucci is the President and Founder of Service Agility, a consulting and training company dedicated to improving customer service and call center operations. In this role, he provides strategic and tactical guidance across all industries for enterprises that seek to optimize customer interactions. His client list ranges from small start-up operations to large Fortune 500 corporations. Prior to starting his own firm, he spent 8 years as the Vice President of Consulting for the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI). Before becoming a consultant, he spent 17 years running mission-critical award winning call center operations.
