Chapter 6: Managing a Customer Contact Center

The Role of the Contact Center Manager

The contact center manager sets objectives in service quality and analyzes metrics to see if the objectives have been met.  The manager provides feedback to staff and arranges training as needed to ensure reliable, efficient support for customers. Very often someone starts out as a contact center representative and then progresses into a contact center manager role after they have gained experience in customer service and the technologies used in contact centers.  Below is a list of key responsibilities of a Contact Center Supervisor position posted at Indeed.^[1]

Key Responsibilities/Accountabilities:

• Provides leadership and guidance to the Contact Center team
• Plans, organizes, and supervises the activities of the operational unit including daily activities and Quality Assurance
• Reviews and analyzes department reports on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis
• Plans staff scheduling and workforce resource utilization
• Manages key customer service metrics
• Responds to escalated customer concerns (call queue, e-mail, online inquiries, chat social media, etc)
• Communicates any changes to policies and procedures to Contact Center staff
• Evaluates and recommends various technological changes to improve the customer service process
• Provides coaching, development, performance management, technical guidance, and advice
• Provides input into department goals and objectives
• Leads and/or participates in department projects and key initiatives to ensure quality and timely completion within budget
• Researches, recommends, and implements new or enhanced policies, procedures, and processes to improve operational effectiveness
• Ensures compliance with legislative, regulatory, and health and safety policies, procedures, and standards

Watch the “5 Qualities of Great Customer Service” YouTube video below for great service tips.^[2] Transcript for “5 Qualities of Great Customer Service: Video [PDF–New Tab]. Closed captioning is available on YouTube.

Challenges Contact Center Managers Face

As a call center manager, you will face challenges from management, customers, employees, and technology. Some of these challenges are described below.

Absenteeism

Since a call center is so dependent on people being available to answer phone calls and resolve customer issues when workers are absent it increases the workloads for other agents who may already have lots of work to deal with. This creates extra stress for the agents working and may cause them to feel overworked and underappreciated or underpaid, thereby creating low morale. Managers should develop a policy for absences. Encourage employees to give notice or make arrangements in the event of a scheduled absence.  Once a policy is enacted then managers must enforce it and hold employees accountable for being at work on time and as scheduled.

Accurate Reporting and Analytics

Call centers are a repository for customer data and typically use reporting and analytics software to analyze data and create reports that benefit organizational performance. Call center managers are mostly responsible for providing reports on various aspects to other departments. Sales and marketing require reports on outbound sales performance, finance requires reports on the operational cost of the call center, and the information technology team wants reports on the operational performance of the call center. With so many separate reports and systems jumbled together, getting accurate and consistent reporting becomes a colossal problem for call center managers.^[3]

Attrition

When a call center loses an employee, it loses all the time, effort, and training that went into developing that employee. Finding and hiring quality agents is difficult and retaining them can be just as difficult.  To help reduce call center turnover rates be more selective when hiring and hire candidates who have shown longevity and loyalty to past employers. Offer competitive pay and rewards, sometimes just offering a bit higher pay can make for more reliable, productive employees. Provide employees with the software tools they need to excel at their job, like multiple communication channels, call analytics, computer telephony integration (CTI), interactive voice response (IVR), call recording, and call monitoring.^[4]

Call Center Turnover Rates by Job Title^[5]

Bad Customer Experiences are Magnified

When customers have bad experiences with companies they often post their stories, feedback, and reviews on social media. This becomes a big problem for companies as they fear their company image will be damaged which may result in a loss of current customers or difficulty attracting new ones.  A post on Facebook or a tweet on Twitter can be read by thousands of people in a matter of minutes. Call center managers should train customer service agents to be social-media savvy so as to respond appropriately and in a timely fashion to complaints, bad publicity, or angry customers sharing their stories in the public eye.

Collaborating Across Departments

“Like any business, call centers require the support of multiple departments. When it comes to problems outside answering phones—like shopping issues or defective products—your employees can only do so much. In those situations, it helps to recognize your employees’ limits but to also look for opportunities to improve relationships between departments. One way to accomplish this is to integrate databases across departments so every employee has a comprehensive view of your call center’s interactions with a customer.”^[6]

Employee Engagement

Maintaining employee enthusiasm in a contact center is difficult because the work is stressful and monotonous, and it’s easy for employees to become demoralized, which leads to absenteeism and turnover.  Managers need to empower employees to help customers. Agents need to feel they have the authority to efficiently help customers. Automation can help by assisting agents in offering excellent service, often reducing the time needed to deal with each customer. Providing incentives for excellent service and meeting performance goals will help engage employees. Delivering timely feedback by letting employees know how they are doing on a regular basis and providing coaching and training as needed is also a way to engage employees.

First Contact Resolution

Most contact centers strive to resolve customer issues on the first call (contact) as this is the most efficient approach and customers prefer not to have to call back several times or be transferred to several employees to resolve their issues. As customer issues become more complex, it gets harder to solve them during the first touchpoint and may take several follow-up calls or additional contact to resolve.

Some ways to help agents solve issues on the first contact, include:

1. Building a common knowledge base for agents to refer to when they need answers to common customer questions or specifications about specific products.
2. Engaging in root-cause analysis to identify the top reasons why customers call the contact center and using that information to populate the knowledge base.
3. Assessing key performance indicators (KPIs) by reviewing metrics often and determining whether or not they are providing the insights needed to improve customer service.

Increasing Customer Expectations

“With digital and social channels reshaping customer expectations and increasing business competition has made it harder for call centers to meet customer expectations. And with evolving customer expectations, customer attrition tends to increase. Customers expect immediate service through the channel of their preference.”^[7]

Many customers prefer to use self-service channels so it is important to make it easy and efficient for customers to serve themselves. Increasing opportunities for customers to serve themselves frees up agents to handle more complicated customer issues, and it may increase customer satisfaction as well.

Software Integration

Much of an agent’s day-to-day operations entail continuously switching between multiple software systems and databases.  This is only a problem if many failed first-call resolutions are because of an inability of agents to access data. Managers should integrate systems as much as possible to increase efficiency and training time. It is also important to buy from vendors who support their software, have user-friendly interfaces (GUI), and integrate their various systems into one system.

Metrics

How does a contact center know it’s consistently delivering high-quality service? It begins with setting metrics. Metrics is a method of measuring something or the results obtained from this. The right metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) should effectively measure a business’s specific capacities. Call center managers rely on historical and real-time data to make decisions. Traditional call center metrics include first-call resolution, speed to answer, and average handling time.^[8]

Here’s a list of the most crucial metrics that inbound call centers must measure.^[9]

• Abandoned Call Rate (ACR)
• Average Speed of Answer (ASA)
• Average Handle Time (AHT)
• Average Call Transfer Rate
• Cost Per Contact
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
• Customer Retention and Churn
• First Contact Resolution (FCR)
• Service Level

Abandoned Call Rate (ACR)

In an inbound call center setting, the rate of abandoned calls refers to the total number of calls where a caller hangs up before an agent answers. The most common factors that lead to abandoned calls are lengthy wait times and unnecessary hold times. An inefficient IVR system may also cause callers to abandon the queue. To ensure compliance with the SLA, a 5% or lower abandoned call rate needs to be maintained. To compute the ACR, divide the total number of abandoned calls by the total number of inbound calls.

A method of reducing the number of abandoned calls is to start the call by ringing rather than going straight to the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. Pre-occupying a caller with the traditional ring can buy agents some time to wrap up current calls and handle the next call in the queue. It’s also best to set expectations and be transparent with the wait time. Callers tend to wait longer when they know exactly how long they need to wait.

Offering self-help options via the website through your IVR system also reduces the volume of calls received. Aside from this, offer customers the option to leave a voicemail message to facilitate a callback. Lastly, curb abandoned calls by making sure the headcount during peak hours is enough to handle incoming calls.^[10]

Average Speed of Answer (ASA)

The Average Speed of Answer (ASA) refers to the average amount of time wherein a call is required to be answered. It’s an essential part of the Service Level Agreement (SLA) where the service vendor promises to answer an X amount of calls within an X amount of time. Generally, a contact center’s ASA should not exceed 28 seconds.

To calculate ASA, divide the total amount of waiting time by the total number of calls received within a certain period. For example, the total wait time is 30 minutes for 20 calls received, therefore, the ASA in this instance is 1.5 minutes.

The lower the ASA score, the fewer times customers spend waiting for their calls to get answered. A higher number indicates inefficiency and poor customer service. This metric affects Customer Satisfaction as today’s customers tend to lean toward immediate resolutions to be delighted. In fact, 82% of customers decide to discontinue doing business with a company that provides substandard customer service.^[11]

Not only is this crucial to achieving a high Customer Satisfaction score (CSAT), a lower ASA lowers the occurrence of abandoned calls while increasing the First Call Resolution rate.

Reducing the number of abandoned calls improves a contact center’s ASA score. Also, a contact center can easily improve its ASA by having streamlined call routing in place. Getting ahold of the right person the first time also ultimately improves the customer experience.^[12]

Average Handle Time (AHT)

Average handling time (AHT) is the average time spent by an agent in handling customer issues or transactions. This also includes the amount of time a customer is placed on hold within the duration of the call and the after-call work time which the agent spends doing back-office tasks.  The AHT is calculated by adding the agent’s total talk time plus the total hold time plus the total after-call work time. This is then divided by the total number of calls.

Watch the “Average Handle Time: Managing Metrics” YouTube video below to learn about call center metrics.^[13] Transcript for “Average Handle Time: Managing Metrics” Video [PDF–New Tab]. Closed captioning is available on YouTube.

Average Call Transfer Rate

The Average Call Transfer Rate is a metric that monitors the number of calls transferred to another department, a supervisor, or a different queue.  Customers can become frustrated when repeating the same issue to different representatives so it is important to monitor this metric.

Cost Per Contact

The Cost Per Contact metric refers to the expenses related to running a contact center (i.e., operational costs, wages, benefits). To calculate the average cost per contact, the total cost associated with operating the business is divided by the total number of contacts handled. Whenever an agent picks up the phone, it costs a contact center money—salary, software, hardware, electricity, etc. This metric helps determine which channels are the most effective including phone, email, live chat, SMS, and social media.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value (CLV) is one of the key statistics to track as part of a customer experience program. CLV is a measurement of how valuable a customer is to your company, not just on a purchase-by-purchase basis but across the whole relationship. CLV is often used by marketing managers to determine who the company’s best customers are and target these customers for specific promotions, services, or perks. The CLV may be used in a contact center to prioritize callers. For example, customers with higher CLV to more experienced contact center representatives or specific segment representatives to ensure the best service, while customers with lower CLV may be directed to the general representatives or less senior representatives. To measure CLV take Customer revenue per year x Duration of the relationship in years – (Total costs of acquiring  the customer + total cost of serving the customer) = CLV “CLV is distinct from the Net Promoter Score (NPS) that measures customer loyalty, and CSAT that measures customer satisfaction because it is tangibly linked to revenue rather than a somewhat intangible promise of loyalty and satisfaction.” ^[14]

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

The goal of every inbound contact center is to keep customers happy. The customer’s happiness equates to the organization’s profitability. A great indicator of customer happiness is the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). This metric is calculated by asking a question that pertains to the customer’s feedback on a particular interaction with an agent, “How pleased were you with your experience?” or “Was the agent able to handle your concern satisfactorily?”^[15]

CSAT scores can be improved through personalized coaching and training as well as ensuring that the best practices are observed for all other metrics.

Customer Retention & Churn Rate

Customer Retention (CRR) and Customer Churn (CCR) rates go hand in hand. Customer retention rate refers to the percentage of existing customers or users that are still part of the organization’s pool of consumers over a certain period of time. Customer churn rate refers to the percentage of customers you have lost over a certain period of time.

To calculate the CRR, you would need the total number of active customers you have in a given period (30 days, 60 days, 360 days, etc.), and subtract the newly acquired customers during the same period. The result would be the total number of customers an organization has retained. For example, the number of customers you began with 2800 customers. During a 60-day period you acquired 300 more and ended with 2600. {(2600-300) / 2800} x 100 = 82% retention rate.^[16]

The churn rate can be determined by dividing the number of customers who left by the number of customers you had started with and multiplying it by one hundred. For example, in a span of 30 days, the client has lost 150 customers while you started with 1,500. The formula would look like this: (150/1500) x 100 = 10% churn rate.^[17]

These metrics determine whether an inbound contact center is capable enough to retain customers by providing excellent customer service. Generally, a 5-7% churn rate annually is a healthy average. This means an organization’s monthly churn rate should only be .5% or lower.^[18]

To help increase retention rates and reduce churn, it’s important for an inbound contact center to have a Customer Retention team or department that handles complicated issues and cases that could possibly lead to customers churning.

First Contact Resolution (FCR)

The First Contact Resolution (FCR) metric shows how many customer requests were solved during the first contact. The industry standard is around 70-75%. First Contact Resolution (FCR) is an essential part of managing your company’s relationship with your customers.^[19] It is a direct reflection of an agent’s and a center’s capacity to solve problems, answer questions, and provide support the very first time a customer calls. Simply put, it’s getting it right the first time and reducing customer effort.

Watch the “First Contact Resolution: Managing Metrics” YouTube video below to learn how to handle customer inquiries the first time you connect with them.^[20] Transcript for “First Contact Resolution: Managing Metrics” Video [PDF–New Tab]. Closed captioning is available on YouTube.

Service Level

Service level is the percentage of calls that are answered within a given time period. To calculate the Service Level divide the total number of calls answered within the time period by the total number of calls and the total number of abandoned calls. A Service Level Agreement (SLA) documents the agreed-upon level of service between a vendor and a client. Numerical metrics are often assigned to determine the success or failure of the agreement, along with clear repercussions for failing to meet the service level standards. It’s most commonly used by technology and customer service providers.^[21] Then multiply the result by one hundred.  It’s imperative for companies to enable customers to help themselves. This is achieved by maintaining a comprehensive knowledge base (FAQs) that customers can use as the first line of support.

Workforce Optimization

Agent Productivity

To calculate agent productivity take the total time the agent is working (answering calls, doing administrative work, doing after-call work) and divide by the time the agent was scheduled to work, then multiply by 100.  Formula = (Total Output / Total Input) x 100 = Labour Productivity

Using automated workforce management tools and agent scheduling software help to collect accurate data that will help a manager forecast labour needs accurately.  Analyzing records will help identify busy times and slack times in customer service needs so that under-staffing and over-staffing do not become big problems costing the company money and customers. By precisely predicting the number of agents required at a given point in time, call centers can optimize scheduling to keep costs as low as possible while providing the best customer service possible.  Automated workforce management tools also help track an agent’s non-productive hours and take the necessary steps to remedy the problem; thus, increasing the agent’s productivity.  Managers do need to recognize that some customer issues require additional time and after-call work which would be measured in the productive time for the agent.

Work-From-Home Agents

While many companies have inbound and outbound contact centers some also have work-from-home agents.

Companies benefit from the work-from-home agent setup as it makes it easier for them to provide customer service across multiple time zones. Since the customer service team is working from various locations, businesses with remote call centers can provide coverage during off-hours without having to put employees on different shifts. This makes employee scheduling significantly easier for companies that provide 24/7 customer support.^[22]

Some contact centers not only offer support online, on the phone, or through social media they also offer in-person support. Some companies outsource their contact center needs either locally or globally and pay to have trained agents answering calls from company customers, or to have trained agents calling potential customers to make sales.

Best Practices for Contact Center Managers

Strategies for effective contact center management:

1. Create an employee-friendly and customer-centric environment. “Low levels of happiness in the workplace lead to high agent attrition rates, poor performance, and decreased productivity.”^[23] Companies that take care of their employees, through compensation, benefits, work perks, and friendly environments see their employees giving more commitment and effort in the workplace. At Zappos for instance, employees get free healthcare, free coffee and vending machines, and fun and colorful places to lounge and take a nap. In turn, employees give back to the company by providing positive customer experiences.^[24]
2. Set goals and create a game plan. Contact centers deal with huge contracts and losing one might be detrimental to the health of the organization. As a manager of a contact center, it is a good idea to create a list of challenges you have faced over the last year as well as a list of accomplishments over the past year.  This will help you see where you need to focus your attention.  Once you know what you need to focus on for improvements you can make a plan identifying what needs to be done to eliminate the causes of issues and improve processes that have contributed to the problems.  To succeed at this, a contact center manager needs to be analytical while having the ability to come up with out-of-the-box solutions. Also, the different stages of planning and implementation require teamwork. Being open to employee feedback and having the ability to delegate tasks to all the right people helps with the goal-setting process.^[25]
3. Hire the most suitable employees, provide a solid onboarding program, and continually coach and train.“Train your employees to work with different communication channels–webchats, email, and messaging apps. It will allow them to develop new skills and make their work more diversified. Also, your customer service department will be able to deliver higher quality service, increasing customer satisfaction. A more diversified daily routine can have a positive impact on your employees’ sense of fulfillment and their productivity as a result.”^[26] Practice constant coaching and monitor calls regularly. Managers can monitor calls and create scorecards for agents’ performance, provide feedback to agents,  and provide coaching and mentoring or training whenever necessary.  Managers can share calls to support new hires during the onboarding process by giving them some tips during the conversation, providing them with feedback right after a call, or jumping into the conversation if necessary.^[27]
4. Prioritize effective agent scheduling. To make sure your scheduling method is effective and beneficial for the team, take note of each agent’s availability. Figure out shifts that have gaps and fill them. Sometimes it is not productive to provide too much overtime to agents as they become exhausted and their productivity decreases, understandably, but paying for a tired agent who is less productive than a fresh, new agent is not the best choice. Putting forecasting reports to good use also helps contact center managers gain better insight into staffing requirements, inbound traffic, and KPIs.^[28]
5. Use the right technology. “Leverage your customer relationship management (CRM) with a customer telephony integration (CTI) and your employees then have access to a 360-degree view of the customer across different channels within one simple interface. Doing so shortens handling times while it improves user experience and customer experience. Both of these play an important role in contact center success. When agents have a hard time using the tools, it greatly affects the quality of the customer experience they provide.  Unified contact center technology also allows agents to handle concerns and access data from different channels in real time. The omnichannel approach has scaled throughout these years, and to only way for a contact center to adapt to this change is to adopt technology that supports it.  Other features of CTI include automatic call recording and logging, call rerouting, voice recording integration, automatic dialing, and many more. If it makes your agent’s life easier, it’s guaranteed to make contact center management–and the jobs of agents –a lot easier, too.”^[29]
6. Improve your self-service strategy. Use interactive voice response (IVR) and chatbots to provide customers with self-service. It will reduce your agents’ workload and make them more productive. If you already have these self-service options, you should continue to ensure your customers do not experience difficulties while interacting with them. It is also important to regularly update the FAQ page on your website because it can reduce the number of repetitive queries.^[30]

References

(Note: This reference list was produced using the auto-footnote and media citation features of Pressbooks; therefore, the in-text citations are not displayed in APA style).