Calabrio expanding in France

I'm not a regular reader of CRM Today, but I was interested to see the announcement that Activeo will become a reseller of Calabrio Workforce Management for the French market.

I suspect it's a good move, especially as Activeo will be selling it as part of its Cisco Unified Contact Centre Enterprise offering. I've posted previously on Workforce Management in Europe ("Workforce Management - Part 2 Vendor Selection") and I suspect the Calabrio offering is well timed. Holy-Dis are strong in the French market, but they are strongest for a more general workforce management for branch offices or small contact centre rather than the more specialised high-end contact centre where Cisco Unified Contact Centre Enterprise is usually implemented.

You can get a decent overview of Activeo's approach to Cisco Contact Centre here (mais seulement en Francais!).

Happy New Year - 1,000 new UK call centre jobs

I was wondering what blog topic I should begin the new year with. This good news story, "Call centre begins recruitment drive" in the South Shields Gazette seemed a very appropriate way of starting.

Garlands, one of the UK's largest privately held call centre companies is adding 1,000 jobs (100 in the first phase)to their South Shields centre. It's interesting to see that these are onshore customer service jobs, primarily for the telecoms/ broadband industry.

Now my experience of the telecoms industry is that many organisations have a high percentage of low margin customers and make their money on a much smaller percentage of high spending customers. In the past this has led to a focus purely on cost of service and for many organisations that meant looking at offshoring. It's good to see that the onshore is now a consideration again when customer service is a consideration besides cost.

In many cases, offshoring purely for cost led to a reduction in customer service quality (and as previously discussed in posts like "Offshoring and mainland Europe" and "On-shore Call centres in decline.... is that the whole story?"), that decline in customer service led to the brand value of the business being damaged. Offshoring should not be blamed purely for customer satisfaction declines though, any large change program focused only on cost would have reduced customer satisfaction. A good example is Powergen (now called EON), a big UK energy utility, who closed their Indian operations. The BBC reported their managing director as saying this was because Powergen were "...not prepared to achieve savings at the risk or expense of customer satisfaction". Six months later in Jan 2007 this seemed to have produced results as the BBC ran a story that Powergen had moved from last place on EnergyWatch's table of customer satisfaction to second place.

It's good also to see that Garlands as an onshore outsourcer recognise that they will compete on quality and innovation rather than cost. It's not just that they run Cisco technology in their call centres (they also use a number of other suppliers as well), but more that they have a strong focus on the quality of their workforce and the agents working conditions. I know recent surveys suggest that salary is a major driver for agent recruitment, but as I argued in my last post "Sometimes it's not rocket science....", it is a key factor in agent retention.

Anyway, a Happy New Year to all readers and I hope you have a pleasant work environment and successful year.

Sometimes it's not rocket science....

Now that Christmas is over (and now the bills many will be arriving for many), it seemed appropriate to comment on the CCF agent compensation survey published earlier this month.

This survey had the shock finding that cash, namely salary, rather than the Human Resources buzzword of 'total reward package' was the top motivator for attracting agents. I can't pretend I was surprised that relatively low paid, often young workers found it better to have cash to spend on their own choices than HR offering them a menu of cash substitutes.

It's noticeable that a pleasant place to work was also rated highly by agents, and that is something that salary can't buy. Work conditions, though, really depend on the quality of management. This is something that I've touched on in my posts on reporting ("Reporting - Having your cake & eating it").

My view is that while you might need good pay to attract the best agents, retaining them (and tackling the industry's appalling churn rate) will be done by work conditions. It may seem cheaper to pay a good salary than to provide a pleasant, well run organisation, but investing in the environment agents experience will be cheaper than letting HR try to get discounted gym memberships.

Happy Christmas

Unlike many call centres, this blog will not be working over the Christmas period.

If you are phoning any business during the holiday season, do spare a thought for those working to answer your call during the holidays.....

Posting will resume after Christmas.

Reporting - Having your cake & eating it

Coincidentally (given yesterday's post on reporting) I was reading a long article today on CCF, "Have your call centre cake and eat it ". The article is primarily about metrics and how they can distort call centre performance.

I suspect the article is a bit long, but the basic point is that agents do what you pay them to do. If the metrics the agents are paid on don't align with the board's strategy, then don't expect agents to sacrifice pay, read the annual report and work against their interests.

The point I think it misses is that reporting is about getting the information to manage your contact centre, it is not a substitute for management itself. Get the right information and you can make the right decisions. It does puzzle me to hear one of the examples cited,

"....one client where there was a call handling time limit of 300 seconds and staff who consistently missed the target were put on a disciplinary. At one stage, 35 per cent of the workforce were on disciplinary, and because the operation was struggling, they asked the staff to do more cross- and up-selling, while slashing the handling time to 270 per cent. Attrition was 230 per cent."

I know I've encountered dysfunctional organisations (and in the past was an agent in a call centre like that), but this still seems extraordinary. If the details are accurate (and I've no reason to doubt them), then the cost of failing to manage change was far higher than the original problems. It also seems amazing that management continued to push on with the plan when they saw results.

In short, however good your call centre reporting, you do need management to do something with that information for it to be worthwhile.

Reporting - some thoughts

I've realised that while I've written previously on Workforce Management ( Workforce Management - is it only for high end call centres? & Workforce Management - Part 2 Vendor Selection ), I've missed the major pre-requisite of reporting.

Reporting on a call centre or a contact centre's activities is the most important first step in managing such a complex organisation. One of the peculiarities of call centre is that because of the early technology it was built on it was possible to report on agents work in great detail. The PBX (Private Branch Exchange) and ACD (Automated Call Distributor), which together manage all incoming telephone traffic, could provide detailed information on each call, such as duration and the agent availability. Initially these reports were pretty user unfriendly, but driven by management demand, call centre reporting developed in complexity and detail to an extent that was unmatched in the work activity reporting in any other business area. Even in a transaction orientated environment such as a bank branch, staff are not monitored in anything like the detail that is possible in the call centre. The result is that in call cente there is a lot of data that can be reported on.

The crucial thing to remember with reporting is to differentiate what you can report on from what you need to report on. As an example, it is very easy to report on agent availability and measure how long each agent is unavailable. How useful this is as a stand alone metric might be more debatable, as it may be that agents have to do a lot of complex work with the CRM system after each call. In other words, although a good measure of contact centre efficiency, with that metric you may be measuring the poor quality of a CRM GUI and workflow rather than measuring your agents ability. Similarly, if you report on average call time, you may incentivize agents to handle more calls, but may also encourage agents to end calls before customers want to so the agents meet their targets. You would then have customers calling back, which doubles (at least) your call traffic even while you are meeting your average call time metric.

This type of distortion has led to a tendency to report on less telephony based metrics and more on CRM based metrics, such as '1st call resolution' or 'completed steps in the customer management process'. This is useful (as it is measuring a business outcome), but can risk loosing the sort of reporting 1st line management and team leaders found useful for operational management.

I would argue that contact centres should be reporting differently to each level of management. Team leaders and first line managers need real-time statistics on their group of agents performance. The higher the level of management above that, the less real-time/ operational reporting they need and the more business oriented the information needs to be.

This is one of the things I like about Cisco's acquisition of Latigent. Latigent provides the opportunity for mashups and the construction of executive dashboards from multiple data sources. For more operational reporting, as used by team leaders the existing reporting tools are adequate, but the Web 2.0 aspects of Latigent (RSS feeds) offer a lot of interesting options for more complex report creation. There's a good podcast with about Latigent here on cisco.com.

Ofcourse, others in the industry have offerings with a range of capabilities. Avaya have always been strong with their CMS product. Aspect has always had good reporting on the telephony environment (as you would expect from their ACD heritage) and have moved up into workforce management. I'm not convinced that reporting should be considered synonymous with workforce management (at least for large centres, I feel there's a case for best of breed selection for what are two very separate functions), but it has been reasonably successful for them. Genesys too provide a reporting and a workforce management product, but given the large, highly complex environments they tend to be deployed in, I feel there is again a case for best of breed for reporting and a separate best of breed workforce management product.

In short, when thinking about reporting the most important thing is to establish what metrics you need to report on and for whom in your organisation. It's also important to distinguish between reporting (which is collection, tracking & presentation of data), analytics (getting meaning out of data) and workforce management (using information to drive agent performance). These are discrete functions for separate purposes, even if one solution might meet your needs for all of them.

Dimension Data/ Cisco Speech survey

I'm in Frankfurt this week and it's always good to catch up with colleagues and partners.

I mentioned the Dimension Data/ Cisco survey on Speech automation in a previous post ("For a Friday - why are contact centres so disliked?"), but it was good to hear today Tim Pearce, one of the survey authors present the findings.

You can find the Dimension Data/ Cisco survey on CRMxchange as a webinar and it's worth watching.

The big thing for me is the difference between what vendors and consumers think of speech automation. Vendors, for example, tend to underestimate why consumers will accept automation (such as to avoid offshore). They also overestimate things like the ability of speech automation to partially meet callers needs and underestimate its ability to meet all needs for some callers. Some good research and well worth a look whether you implement telephone automated service or are considering it.