Learning lessons from the contact centre coalface
Why listening to your agents should be a key part of any successful performance improvement programme
By Marek Vaygelt, Head of Technology & Telecoms Consulting, YouGov, and Kenneth Hitchen, Consulting Director, Sabio
Earlier this summer, Sabio commissioned YouGov to develop the UK’s first ever survey panel of close to 1,000 independently recruited UK contact centre agents as the basis for its major ‘Voice of the Contact Centre Agent’ initiative. YouGov’s first research project looked at customer service issues from the agent’s perspective, and highlighted some of the key concerns facing a representative sample of the UK’s 1.2 million contact centre agents who collectively now represent some four per cent of the country’s total workforce.
In this article YouGov’s Marek Vaygelt and Sabio’s Kenneth Hitchen offer an overview of the research findings, with a particular focus on the areas that have a direct impact on the quality of the four-minute interaction that agents have with customers.
The initial concept of the ‘Voice of the Contact Centre Agent’ research programme came about after the growing realisation that while contact centres are now a mature business sector in the UK, the key driver for change – cost reduction – still remains the same. It seems that the majority of change programmes are all too often technically or operationally led, and that many initiatives are still justified through cost savings not the need for better service.
This probably shouldn’t be too surprising as we’re an industry that was first created to save money, and still reflects its founding principles too closely – often at the expense of a better customer experience. Our observations mainly came from listening to what was actually happening at the contact centre coalface – the actual four-minute interactions that take place between agents and customers. Simply by putting a headset on and listening to five calls in a row you can usually identify three or four areas that would benefit from improvement.
In many ways this is nothing new – put 12 agents in a room together and they can usually explain to you what needs fixing. They know what the problems are, and it was our belief that listening to agents and acting on their concerns is both highly motivating for agents and can lead to a better experience for customers.
Rather than simply second guess what agents were thinking, Sabio wanted to put a proper research framework around its thinking. With the ‘Voice of the Contact Centre Agent’ project we worked on providing a platform for what contact centre agents actually think about today’s customer service issues, and created a YouGov panel of agents to provide a statistically sound ‘Voice of the UK agent’. While this project provides new perspectives on issues, we believe it will also prove a valuable resource for longer-term research projects.
Our sample gave us a representative sample of the contact centre industry as a whole, and gave us a snapshot of who’s working in today’s centres. There’s a 60/40-female/male split, with more younger female staff, and a greater number of male agents over 50 years old. Staff in the financial services sector are typically younger than other markets, while sectors such as Central Government and Local Authorities have an older agent profile. We also found a functional age split, with outbound sales dominated by agents under 30, while tasks such as handling customer complaints were predominantly dealt with by older staff.
Surprisingly high levels of loyalty
Contact centres are often seen as a high turnover industry, with poor staff retention levels – however, the research showed that over a third of agents have been in the industry for five years or more, and a quarter with their current centre for over five years. We found these levels of loyalty to be encouraging – however, it also raises interesting issues around agent career paths within single organisations, and the need for agents who add additional skills and channels to have their broader capabilities recognised and rewarded.
From our initial survey we also found that the average use of part-time agents in contact centres is still only 19 per cent, with many centres still only targeting working mothers. Given that greater use of part-time agents can make it much easier for contact centres to meet their inbound demand curves, it's an area that could benefit from more creative recruitment targeting, rather than continuing to focus on a limited target group that - not surprisingly – is made up of people who invariably want the same shift patterns and overlapping holiday requests.
The research also showed that, collectively, contact centres probably aren’t being innovative enough with their staffing and are placing too much emphasis on traditional 25-40 year old staff while overlooking the potential of other more flexible age groups and part-time workers. In an industry that suffers productivity and efficiency issues each and every day, we’re missing out on significant staffing opportunities that we can’t afford to ignore. By not looking at the broader spectrum of agents and optimising the diversity and flexibility of different employee groups, contact centre operators are limiting their potential performance.
Agents get frustrated when they can’t help
Agents also made clear that they are frustrated when they can’t help the customers they deal with, and feel that they are not always given the right tools and information to do their jobs to the best of their ability. Time and again, the research highlights the importance of getting the simple things right – high quality audio calls, a simple user interface, and tighter application integration – before investing in further complexity.
When discussing contact centre performance improvement, people invariably focus on improving the customer experience or driving productivity growth from the business perspective. It’s rare however for organisations to look at things from the agent’s perspective, and that’s a big mistake because our agents are an essential part of the customer service equation, and we need to pay them much more attention. While it’s important to remember that these are all topics that are seen as important from the agent’s perspective, it would be foolish to overlook improvement opportunities that could all have a positive, incremental impact on the agent/customer experience.
We asked our agent panel what they felt were the most annoying and stressful parts of their job, and they came up with five key areas:
1. IT systems,
2. Being unable to help the customer,
3. Having to carry out repetitive tasks,
4. the pressure of dealing with customers who are complaining,
5. The contact centre’s management approach.
Addressing key agent frustrations with their IT systems
IT systems performance seems to be a universal problem for today’s contact centre agents, with slow systems impacting 41 percent of them daily and 86 percent weekly. Agents have grown accustomed to these high levels of interruption, with many just accepting this is how it’s always going to be or that ‘the system’s always slow on Friday afternoon’.
We believe agents are right to highlight this issue. Symptoms such as slow performance, applications crashing and hardware freezing are all signs of poorly designed and incorrectly configured systems. Similarly, complex non user-friendly processes and incomplete systems integration mean that it’s the agents who have to join everything together – the ones in our survey used four different applications at the same time on average, with the frequent need to cut and paste data between applications.
Too many passwords
At the same time, agents are plagued by passwords – a third are using five or more application passwords to carry out their daily role, while 30 per cent of agents spend more than five minutes each day logging into applications at the start of their shift. This volume is exaggerated by regular password changes and the need for frequent password re-entry when web applications are held up by browser time-outs.
Another surprising topic was that of agent audibility, with 69 per cent of agents reporting having regular issues with hearing customers – primarily those on mobile phones. When compounded with background noise in the centre, compression issues on IP calls and comprehension issues, many agents simply couldn’t hear clearly what customers were saying!
With basic systems and audibility concerns, it’s hardly surprising that IT frustrations turned out to be a major issue for agents, and we believe that it’s time for the IT Systems team to start spending more time in the contact centre. Organisations wouldn’t accept this level of poor performance from their e-commerce operations, and given that the contact centre typically handles higher value transactions, then any delay that makes agents less productive is storing up a major performance problem for the business.
Keeping agents engaged
Our initial survey revealed that there's still a very low percentage of agents offering a blended service approach - some inbound service staff are starting to do sales, but there's a lot of people still sitting there waiting to take calls. Clearly there are opportunities to be realised from the greater use of a proactive approach when centres are quiet, however contact centre operators need to recognise that agents will need further skills and training to do this well.
Getting the management basics right
Agents additionally reported a wide variety of productive time across both market sectors and different work types, and it appears that as an industry we’re still not getting basic demand versus staffing correct. According to our research, lots of operations appear to be overstaffed, and managers seem to be spending too much time making sure that next week’s forecasts are being prepared to spare the time to look at basic measures such as the accuracy of predictions against actual performance.
We also found surprisingly low levels of call coaching across contact centres of all sizes and sectors, with weekly coaching a rarity, and ten per cent of agents receiving no weekly coaching at all. This is obviously a major concern in sectors such as financial services where there’s a regulatory requirement for agents to know exactly what they’re discussing. If there’s so little coaching going on, you have to ask what Team Leaders are up to, and we suspect they’re getting tied down in too many meetings and reporting responsibilities that are being prioritised above coaching, or else they are on the phones when the call volumes get ahead of the schedules.
Surprisingly low levels of call coaching
Agents were also concerned about the inconsistent use of performance metrics. Over eight out of ten agents said their calls were measured for quality, but just under a quarter of them said that these performance scores impacted their monthly pay. Customer satisfaction scores were only used to impact pay for ten per cent of agents, while over half our respondents had no performance related rewards in their pay. We suggest that better correlation of metrics with pay is needed if agents are to be motivated to improve their performance on the criteria that we collectively believe to be important. This should involve the creation of new agent scorecards that are personal and linked directly to rewards.
As an industry we talk a lot about the customer experience, but it’s rare that we actually listen to what the contact centre agents themselves are feeling. Our first Voice of the Contact Centre Agent survey has confirmed that agents are an essential part of the customer service equation, and we need to listen carefully to their concerns if we’re going to successfully deliver long-term customer satisfaction.
About the authors:
Marek Vaygelt - Head of Technology & Telecoms Consulting, YouGov
Marek Vaygelt has 20+ years experience of conducting market research studies and has worked for research agencies and their clients in the UK, mainland Europe and Africa. Specialising in technology markets, Marek is a well regarded speaker and consultant who provides clients with added-value advice based on data-driven analytics
Kenneth Hitchen - Consultancy Director, Sabio
Kenneth Hitchen is one of Sabio’s founding directors and is responsible for developing Sabio’s unique technology services proposition and consultancy strategy. Focused on Sabio customers and their contact centre systems and application requirements, Ken has become a leading advisor to businesses on how to get the technology element of their contact centres right.
