Making agents responsible for their own actions

Helping agents to manage their time more effectively can make a real difference when it comes to cutting down sickness and attrition levels within contact centres – Adam Faulkner looks at some of the technologies that are making this possible.

With all today’s leading brands focusing on the quality of their overall service offering, it makes sense to look at the key role that contact centres must now play in delivering on brand promise. What’s surprising here, is just how often organisations seem to overlook the essential role that contact centre agents play in making high quality service a reality.

To me it seems a fairly simple equation – if you give the agents the training they need, give them the tools they need to do their job, and give them a certain amount of flexibility and control over their work and how they do it, then it’s much more likely that they’ll provide a higher quality service.

Over the last few months, I’ve visited a range of contact centres up and down the country, and what’s clear is that the best performing centres are the ones that empower their staff, however there are lots of different ways to do this. One of the first signs of an organisation that’s got this right is that they make a point of communicating, either through daily briefings, or regular business updates which help ensure that contact centre operations remain focused on overall business goals. It’s also important for this communication to be two-way, as agents need to know that there are channels available for them to air any issues they may have.

Obviously some businesses are more enlightened than others, with some organisations providing stress awareness programmes, personal trainers, health advice and even fresh fruit during the summer months. Personal support like this is great, but there’s also a requirement for more structured professional support to help agents do their job better. At Sabio we work closely with contact centre operations across the UK, and one of our key areas of focus is Service Personalisation, or ensuring that organisations structure themselves correctly to respond better to individual customer concerns.

I don’t see any reason why the same precision focus can’t be applied internally, and it’s an area where I believe that technology can deliver real benefits. Survey after survey shows that while of course pay is a key concern for contact centre agents, they also care deeply about issues such as career development, open communications, a supportive working/team environment. Clearly there’s a message here, and those organisations that have been listening are seeing impressive performance improvements.

While it’s sometimes difficult to quantify how investments in employee engagement can contribute directly to the bottom line, it’s hard to escape the fact that agent attrition, sickness and absenteeism still remain the biggest cost and management issue that contact centre operators face, with industry average attrition rates still running at between 25 and 30 per cent of staff each year. I recently came across one financial services sector contact centre where employee engagement had support at the highest level, and it was interesting to note that sickness and attrition levels were running at just two per cent – that’s an impressive statistic, and one that can make a huge contribution to a contact centre’s overall performance.

Here the focus is all about enabling agents, and giving them the flexibility and freedom to do their job to the best of their ability. Far too many contact centres still spend too much time collecting numbers to assess agent performance, while overlooking that if you treat people like battery hens you’re likely to get a poor quality performance level.

One of the ways that you can move away from this scenario is to start giving agents some more control over their working life. Some of the latest WFM solutions, for example, feature advanced scheduling and shift management capabilities that allow agents to look at a wider agent calendar and see whether a holiday request is likely to be accepted before selecting their holiday dates. This means that they can request and confirm their holiday dates themselves, without needing to wait for approval by their team leader or contact centre manager,

A solution that removes the need for management referral is the concept of the shift swap, where agents with similar skills can arrange shift swaps with their colleagues using a central exchange capability. Giving them the power to do this directly saves team leader time, and again provides them with much more control over their work environment. Organisations can also take advantage of another approach – preference-based scheduling – to make sure that shift patterns reflect individual agent preferences. Of course, there are certain shifts that always have to be worked, but it helps if organisations are seen to be accommodating in other areas. For example, if an agent always likes to play a football on a Saturday afternoon, it makes sense not to schedule them for shifts at that time.

What these approaches show is that it is possible for organisations to give their agents the tools they need to manage their own schedules, effectively personalising their own shift patterns while gaining more control over their working life. And by giving agents more control, organisations can in turn provide a far more positive environment for real customer Service Personalisation.