The idea for this essay came from a magazine article written by women to help men be more romantic. One section was titled, “Happy Valentine’s Day. Now Admit Defeat.” The notion here was that if guys do what they are supposed to do on Valentine’s Day…dinner, flower, chocolate, heart-shaped pancakes, etc…their female partners will think they are just doing it because they are supposed to. On the other hand, if men don’t do that stuff, they would be regarded as “cruel and bloodless.” It’s a no win.
 
The same is true of our efforts with call center agents. Since the first call center was opened right up to today, call center leaders have been trying to get agents to do what they want them to: show concern, be cheerful, diagnose the issue correctly, provide all the correct information, hide that accent, update the CRM properly, use the customers name, and for goodness sake, be quick.
 
We have thrown billions of dollars at this challenge. We have hiring screens, we do accent neutralization training, we record, monitor and coach, we have knowledge bases to look up information, we have speech analytics to make sure our agents are not yelling at the customers and are saying the right thing. The list goes on and on. And then, just when we have an agent performing where we want them to be, they quit and we start over. (Can you say, “Sisyphus?”)
 
Well, from all this effort and expense, are agents doing what you want them to more often or not? Are your center wide process adherence, accent escalation, FCR, Handle Time, C-Sat, X-sell metrics all trending in the right direction? I’ll bet you a paycheck there are few center leaders who can say, “Yes, across the board” to that question.
 
On the other hand, though metrics might not all be steadily improving, surely if we stopped spending all that money and effort on trying to get agents to do what we want them to do, our centers would descend into chaos. Is the title of this essay starting to make sense?
 
The Valentine’s Day article went on to suggest that you could “win” by concentrating your special efforts on the days before Valentine’s day. In other words, change the game. It is the same in our call centers.
 
While the whole industry is focused on the agents and trying to improve them one at a time, vanguard companies are achieving staggering breakthroughs by focusing on the process. They are standardizing what agents do and say and letting the agents simply execute that engineered process. There are desktop consolidation solutions that are proliferating which allow single clicks by the agents to execute multiple actions to ensure compliance. There are also agent-assisted voice solutions which standardize what agents say to customers using pre-recorded audio files. Both approaches are driving dramatic, across the board improvements in all agent, customer and shareholder metrics.
 
Admit defeat or change the game? The future of your romance and call center await your reply.
 
Dennis Adsit, Ph.D. is VP, Business Development at KomBea Corporation - dennis.adsit@kombea.com.