BT has problems returning contact centre jobs & workforce management

It was only in July that British Telecom announced that it was returning at least 2,000 contact centre jobs back to the UK. I covered it in the post "British Telecom brings back contact centre jobs to the UK" and thought it was excellent news.

Now it seems there are problems as The Times reports that British workers are unwilling to cover the shifts that the Indian employees worked. The union is arguing that it is difficult for some employees with family commitments to change work patterns. I have a feeling this story is perhaps subject to an element of 'PR spin'. The Communications Workers Union is (I suspect) negotiating hard for its members, as it should, and BT is haggling over how much it flexibility it can get from it staff. In short, both sides are doing exactly what they should, and it will tend to look ugly until they get to an agreement.

To a certain extent these issues with shift work and agent availability are relatively familiar and have long been addressed by the call centre industry.

Whether through agent skills, or personal reasons, or employment legislation there are always restrictions on which calls which agents can take. This is why there is a lucrative industry of contact centre workforce management (WFM) software and why these products are needed in most large call centres. I've gone into the subject in some depth in the post "Workforce Management - is it only for high end call centres?" back in 2007, but it may be worth a re-visit. The point is, that with this software it is possible for BT to automate the management of some elements of their call centre changes without great cost.

Does lack of management experience cause most contact centre problems? The perspecitve of the "Puritan Gift"

The blog has tackled strategic questions before, from SOA to CRM and from process to performance, but a new book has got me thinking. The book is the 'Puritan Gift' by Kenneth & William Hopper (352 pages, published by I.B. Taurus & Co.). It's on the Financial Times list of best business books of 2007 and has been extremely well reviewed.

It's a very interesting book and one that is difficult to summarise without loosing at least some of the depth that makes it so well argued. The starting point for the book are the questions: "Where does the Protestant work ethic come from? And how did America achieve such dominance in management for so long?", deep and important questions for business I'm sure you'll agree but while they might not seem relevant to the contact centre, the conclusions are very illuminating.

The book argues (very persuasively) that the rise of management as a 'profession' (rather than as a set of behaviours or values) destroyed America's management culture. It makes a strong argument that what it terms 'domain knowledge' (i.e. experience of the area in which you work) is crucial for anyone working as a manager in a given industry and that management in it's own right is not a transferable 'horizontal' skill that can be generically applied across all industries. The book is particularly acid and well targeted in its criticisms of business schools and their fads around building this belief in the 'professional manager' who has no real knowledge of the area they work in. This 'professional' can engage in high-visibility tasks like financial engineering or succession planning but does not actually understand basic business operations or know what most workers at the business actually do.

Of necessity, I've only provided a very brief summary, but there is a much better overview in this review on the Manchester Business School blog of Prof. Peter Kawalek and also the BBC is making available a short (7 min) and a long (24 min) video interview with one of the authors which I highly recommend. The book also has a website.

I hope the relevance of the book is starting to become more obvious. Contact Centres were set up to help people and yet are widely disliked. I talked about this dislike in an October post ("For a Friday - why are contact centres so disliked?"), but I feel now that I was still commenting more on symptoms than root causes.

It is my strong suspicion that many contact centre problems come from senior management setting objectives with no knowledge of what a call centre does. There are of course extreme examples, like the contact centre described in "Reporting - Having your cake & eating it", which managed to achieve a 230% annual agent attrition rate through its management system, but I suspect there is a much more general problem of unrealistic objectives behind so much of the dissatisfaction with contact centres.

A former colleague of mine, now non-executive director of a very organisation with very large call centres, confirms this suspicion. He regularly sits for a day with agents taking calls and from that he gains a far greater understanding of the problem areas for his organisation than he does from management presentations. Management have often never worked in a customer facing role and so have great PowerPoint slides on 'the customer experience' (and other abstract concepts) but no practical experience of what the customers actually do feel and which problems regularly crop up. In my experience, having worked as a call centre agent is one of my great strengths when working today with call centres. There's a big difference between talking (abstractly) about soft tools for motivating agents to perform certain behaviours, as so many consultants do, and my experience of being on minimum wage unless you got bonus for meeting your call targets. It's not that a nice environment isn't important for agent performance (see past posts like "Sometimes it's not rocket science....") but pay really does matter. As an agent I would have liked to give every caller the desired customer experience (as was suggested in various HR goals for agents), but I was paid bonus to wrap up calls in under five minutes. No surprises which mattered more to agents...!

Yet the fundamental reason behind the mis-aligned metrics, the agents incented to do things against the organisations interests, the poor customer experiences and the broken processes is that senior management are have often not experienced their organisations customer service or worked in customer facing roles. Were they to promote more from the shop floor or insist that managers regularly went back to the floor to take calls many of these issues might be resolved.

Yet the cult of the manager is insidious. When I suggested to one organisation that it might be an idea for the graduate managers to spend a period taking calls so they understood the business better, I got the response back that "...if we did that they'd hate it so much we'd struggle to retain them." This left me slightly stunned. After all, if the call centre experience was that bad, did they think the agents liked it much? Unsurprisingly, their high agent attrition rate reflected what the call centre was like, but lack of management understanding meant the problem not dealt with and instead was treated as 'cost'. In this case, (as Richard Dworkins describes so well in his FT article on the Puritan Gift), management decided to outsource the contact centre to save money rather than fix it. Of course they saved no money in the final reckoning as they ended up spending far, far more on advertising and brand to counter the reputation they acquired for poor customer service, and the cost of managing the outsourcer was greater than anticipated.

The core point of the "Puritan Gift" is that managing something that has not been experienced or understood by managers is likely to fail. There is no real substitute for "domain knowledge" and contact centres that are looking to achieve excellence would do well to build that into their thinking.

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!).

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.

Contact Centre and the Environment

My attention was caught today by an article on the CCF website ("Contact Centres Going Green"). In many ways this struck me as a long overdue area of comment. Given the increasing focus of the European Union on the Environment, I'm sure that green issues will soon become a high priority for European Contact Centres.

My colleagues who specialise in data centre have been working on green issues for a while and their part of the Cisco website has a whole series of free videos on demand about energy efficient data centres. Similarly Cisco provides some good white papers on the use of technology for energy efficient facilities management. Interestingly, the knowledge for both these areas has come from Cisco's own efforts to reduce carbon footprint and you can find out more on Cisco's environment page.

Of course, datacentre has particular issues with power consumption, heat and hardware disposal that are not always directly applicable to contact centre. The CCF article rather highlighted this, by illustrating that unlike data centre most green initiatives involving the contact centre are enterprise wide initiatives. Even more interestingly, Voice over IP was highlighted as one of the key technologies, with up to 82% of respondents expecting to adopt VoIP and 83% looking to adopt workforce management tools. This highlights one difference between contact centre and data centre, there is a lot of scope in contact centre to become greener by using people more efficiently (through better workforce management and call centre virtualistion through the use of IP Convergence).

This confirms one of my suspicions, namely that for achieving green objectives in contact centre the focus should be on changing business processes and while IT should not be ignored, it should not necessarily be the starting point for change. My starting suggestions would be:

• Virtualise - By moving to an IP contact centre (and using a technology like Cisco's ICM) you can divide work more efficiently between call centres, which means fewer people and workstations.
• Location - It's traditional to locate contact centres in remote areas (cheap land prices). I've blogged previously on why this may not always be ideal ("City Centre Call Centers - A European quirk?"), but specifically on green issues, remote areas tend to require the workforce to drive while a city centre location allows shift workers to take public transport.
• Thin client - Delivering applications through a browser reduces your dependency on PC hardware for performance. Although you may still need to upgrade servers, that is usually a lot greener than replacing hundreds (or even thousands) of PCs.

Of course this is just the start of a list and I'm sure there are many more things to put there. Suggestions welcome.

Workforce Management - Part 2 Vendor Selection

I was interested to see that yesterday's posting got quite a bit of interest. One question that seemed to crop up regularly was "when should you buy a Workforce Management solution from your CTI vendor ...and when shouldn't you?"

The short (and unsatisfactory answer) is that "it depends on your circumstances". That said, here are some suggestions as to what you should consider.

• How strategic is your CTI supplier? - If you route calls on a relatively simple basis then you probably have a lot of freedom in your choice of WFM provider. If your CTI supplier is a critical part of your business (e.g. many, many skill groups, all overlapping spread across multiple sites) then it makes sense to take a WFM solution where you can export your skill categories straight from CTI into WFM.
• Are you wanting to monitor workforce skills, education and interaction quality? - If so, then you are probably looking to go the level beyond Workforce Management, which is referred to as Workforce Optimisation. This is best from a specialist provider, (like IEX or Calabrio) rather than your CTI provider.
• Where are you deploying your WFM solution? It may seem obvious, but unless it is localised, it will be difficult to use for non-English speakers. So for example in Europe, Calabrio (which supports English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, and should support German and Dutch by year-end 2007), Holy-Dis (very strong in the French market) and Teleopti (very strong in the Nordics) all have to be considered ahead of some of the large, but not localised US providers.

I'm sure there's plenty of other things to consider (all suggestions welcome!) but that should get you started....

Workforce Management - is it only for high end call centres?

Looking back at my posts I notice that I've written a lot on speech and self-service, a bit on CRM and a bit on e-mail. I've written nothing, though, on one of the major contact centre application areas of workforce management.

For those not familiar with it, workforce management is primarily about managing staffing levels so that they handle call volumes efficiently. What might appear a straightforward calculation becomes much more complex when call volumes peak and trough dramatically, calls can only be handled by agents with the right skills (in financial services, for example, this is a regulatory requirement) and the workforce (with these multiple skill types) might be spread across several sites and perhaps timezones.

For many call centres (especially the smaller ones that are the majority in Europe) the single largest workforce management tool is Microsoft Excel. This has great advantages in being familiar to most managers, relatively easy to use and a simple tool.

Once you get above 100 seats, or have a high degree of complexity in what your agents are skilled to do, I feel that workforce management tools become essential. As an example, a small stockbroker might have 100 seats. On Monday they need 70 or so of those seats to have trading skills to handle the call volume for market opening. Tuesday needs only 40 seats to have trading skills, but 50 seats need to be have qualified financial planning skills and 30 need to have trade settlement skills. Once you have multiple skilled agents (as in this example) it is good for the business, but it can quickly become very difficult to manage, especially where holiday planning and exceptional events need to be built into shift patterns.

The big players that I've worked with are Calabrio Work Force Management , Genesys Work Force Management and Aspect Workforce Management. What I find quite interesting is that the Aspect and Genesys offerings are traditionally pitched at the very high-end call centre, e.g. not the stockbroker in my example where a few agents handle a very complex possible set of interactions, but more the retail banking model where thousands of agents handle a smaller, though still complex set of interactions. Admittedly this high-end is Aspect and Genesys' heritage and where demand for management tools came from but I'm not sure it's the future, especially once multi-media traffic is added to the traditional voice traffic mix. I suspect that as Genesys has always positioned itself for highly complex call routing in very large centres there is a natural market for Genesys Work Force Management plugged into Genesys CTI. The problem for most European centres is that they are not large enough to need the Genesys scale of solution, but are too complex for a simple switch or a PBX and ACD.

One of the interesting things I've found in my work is that small call centres (especially in the B2B environment) can be highly complex and handling very large value transactions and are not just small call centres for small companies. As an example, I worked with a very large cosmetics firm who managed all their European wholesalers from a 70 seat call centre. That (small) call centre ran over 100 product lines, several $B of business a year and did so in six languages. In terms of European call centres, language is obviously a key agent skill and scheduling the right mix of languages is crucial before any other skill can be considered. It might have been a small call centre but it was highly complex.

One of the things I like about the Cisco Contact Centre Express is that it's restrictions are mostly around scale rather than function and there is the option to buy with built in Workforce Management. As an OEM from Calabrio it has a nice look and feel for the user and avoids a lot of the integration issues that happen for any call centre solution when a 3rd party workforce management application is used. There's a good overview here with some screen shots. Importantly, it addresses a call centre market segment (small but complex) that has traditionally been required to either take an over-engineered solution designed for larger customers or a simpler solution for small users that didn't meet their needs.