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.

La perspective Francais et la performance au service du centre de contacts

Je lis mon blog ce matin et je découvre que le dernier post que j'ai ecrie sur la situtaion en France "Calabrio expanding in France" et mon dernier post en fracais "Pour le weekend - un site tres intéressant" n'étainent pas tres récent. C'est trop long et je suis désolé pour mes lecteurs francais que je n'écris pas en français. Le problème est maintenant que j'ai oublié beaucoup de mon vocabulaire français et maintenant je le trouve très difficile d’écrire en français.

Je a eu une discussion sur le sujet de reporting dans mes posts "Reporting - some thoughts" et "Reporting - Having your cake & eating it". Je voudrais introduire le travail de mon collègue Philippe, qui travaille pour Cisco France. Philippe a écrit une très bonne dissertation "La gestion de la performance au service du centre de contacts" dans l'édition du Ciscomag pour janvier. (Le Ciscomag est le bulletin de Cisco France, et il y a un lien ici).

Il donne beaucoup de détailsparce que les centres de contacts francophones ne sont pas seulement un sujet qui intéressera la France, mais aussi la Belgique, le Canada et l'Afrique du Nord.

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!).

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....