Stoffer's Soapbox

Fighting Temptation to Compromise

I am hiring for a number of sales positions right now and the big temptation is to compromise - you need X hires by Y date and it's tempting to chuck away all those visions of only accepting the best of the best and instead settle for "they could end up being good with an equal dose of training and prayer." It's great that I read Seth Godin's blog this afternoon as it gave me a well needed jolt of reality.

Seth urges marketers "to refuse to market mediocre stuff if that's the best the folks in R&D and production can bring you. The first time, they'll be shocked. Your job will be at risk. But then you'll notice something... the stuff gets better. Fast. In Japanese car factories, this is called kanban. You trade production efficiencies for quality. If a part isn't perfect, the worker refuses to install it. And the entire assembly line stops. Detroit was horrified by this idea. Keeping the assembly line going is the holy grail. Guess what? The line doesn't get stopped very often. Things get better, fast."

The same principles apply with HR - if the cadidates aren't good enough, I will press for more and more and more until I get the ones that meet my needs.

Ending Call Center Scripting as We Know It

I have shopped all the major online schools and the only consistent thing across them all is the scripted nature of the conversations with admissions advisors. In the vast majority of calls to schools like UOPX or DeVry, there are several minutes of conversation that are scripted - so scripted in fact, that many admissions advisors seem to place their primary focus on asking the next question on the script rather than listening to the potential student. The best advisors are very different - they concentrate on building rapport with the potential student and addressing that person's specific situation and concerns.

I came across a great article from Brazilian publication RC&C, titled "Is It Time for Call-Center Workers To Ditch the Script?", which addresses this very question.

There is a balance to strike between scripted and free flow conversation, but I believe - if you hire high quality inside sales professionals - that a simple call flow guideline works far better than a script. Of course, this call flow can be combined with call monitoring & coaching - regular monitoring will balance any concerns about advisors getting the university into regulatory problems and calls from your best advisors can be broken down to determine the best practices that can be coached to increase productivity.

What experiences have others had moving to this less scripted environment?

Best Buy: Succeeding in a Virtual Office Environment

As someone who has always gone into the office each day and values face to face contact I have  been somewhat skeptical about whether a virtual office is viable. I understand the benefits of expanding your labor pool and attracting/retaining talent that wants more flexible work hours, but I have trouble grasping how it all operates. After reading this article on Yahoo! about the success of Best Buy's virtual office, my skepticism is quickly fading. Highlights are as follows:

Virtual Office is Becoming More Prevalent in the Fortune 1000

• At IBM, 40% of the workforce has no official office;
• At AT&T, a third of managers are untethered.
• Sun Microsystems Inc. calculates that it's saved $400 million over six years in real estate costs by allowing nearly half of all employees to work anywhere they want

Best Buy's ROWE ("results-only work environment,") Virtual Office Program

• The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours.
• No schedules and no mandatory meetings
• Productivity is up an average 35% in departments that have switched to ROWE.
• Employee engagement, which measures employee satisfaction and is often a barometer for retention, is way up too, according to the Gallup Organization

Skill-Based Routing: How Much is Too Much

Wouldn't it be beneficial if a mutual fund company had representatives who specialized in certain types of asset classes? How about an online education company - shouldn't they have admissions advisors who are experts at business, IT or health care? Well, today's telecom technology allows calls to be routed to agent groups with specified skill sets - via an IVR, using caller ID to pull customer data from a CRM system or via a telemarketing front end where a low skilled individual screens the caller to determine which agent can best meet the caller's needs.

However, skill-based routing also has its downsides - if all agents are cross trained to handle all calls, required staffing levels and customer hold times will be much lower than if only 10% of agents have the skills to handle a certain type of call.

A great example of skill-based routing's upside and downside is in the quote from a white paper titled Skills Based Routing: An Industry Survey, published by the Customer Service Group. "One company discovered the impact of using Skills Based Routing was to divide their call centers into 60 to 70 virtual teams. The number and complexity of the virtual teams changed each time an agent logged in or out. With these large numbers of teams, call centers lose the efficiencies of having 700 to 2,000 agents."

I encourage you to read the white paper to learn more about the benefits and risks of skill-based routing.

America's Veterans as At-Home Agents

If my post on at-home agents piqued your interest, read a great article on a Plantronics-sponsored program to train America's injured veterans in call center-related work. The Veterans Business Training Center provides combat-wounded and disabled veterans with 15-weeks, 600 hours of web based, on-line classroom and practical call center training.

This is a great program to participate in to do social good while hiring some great employees. Ken Smith, Program manager for Plantronics, says "Companies are hiring graduates as soon as they complete the training”. Your company could hire them too. Veterans are located all over the world. North America, Philippines, Africa, Europe and Central America. Soon veterans will be training from Thailand. Sponsored by Plantronics, disabled and combat wounded veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are featured trainees.

Solving Hiring Woes With At-Home Agents

In managing an outbound call center, it is very difficult to find and retain agents. Everyone who has homegrown call centers has probably experienced the effects of "burning through" a local labor market. If you rated each of your original hires a 9 out of 10, are you now settling for 5s or 6s? According to the Call Center Cafe blog, 64% of all North American Call Centers now find it a “Major Struggle” or “Somewhat of a Challenge” to Find Quality Applicants for Call Center Agent Positions.

Using home based call center agents could be the solution to your hiring needs. A new article from the Society of Human Resources speaks of successful companies like JetBlue that are using the home agent model to expand its potential labor pool and hire the highest quality employees. Highlights from the article are as follows:

• Home Agents are More Educated. According to Gartner Inc., 70 percent to 80 percent of home-based agents have college degrees, compared with 30 percent to 40 percent of workers in conventional call centers
• The Labor Pool is Much Larger. Alpine Access, an outsourced provider of at home agents received more than 100,000 applications in 2006, but fewer than 10 percent made it through Alpine’s hiring process. Airline JetBlue only opens the application process for agents once a year for a 24-hour period, and receives 1,200 to 1,400 applicants
• Employee Turnover is Lower. Alpine Access reports a turnover rate for its employees of 10 percent to 25 percent—including seasonal employees. And JetBlue? 4 percent.
• On-Site Meetings can Build Team Cohesiveness. At JetBlue, several times a year teams meet face-to-face for social events and further education through JetBlue University.

The Call Center Rep. Is Your Brand

In outbound consultative sales environments, your call center rep. is your brand. This is especially true in education - as a consumer how can I realistically choose between Kaplan, DeVry, ITT, UOPX, Capella if they all offer an accredited B.I.T. degree, have similar curriculums and do not have significant differentiating qualities. The university with the best rep. and best overall customer experience on the phone will get the student.

This show just how important increasing brand differentiation will be in the long run, but also shows the importance of treating every hiring decision and call center rep. like gold. The Perfect Customer experience blog has a great post bringing out this point. It states that "that every customer touch is a test of the service organization as a whole... All the advertising, promoting, manufacturing, marketing, and selling are challenged when a customer and your representatives make a connection. That one experience will be the culmination of all the time, money, and materials invested by both parties - and the outcome of that encounter will be the memory the customer has of your company and therefore his/her propensity to return."

Hiring Better Call Center Agents

David Filwood has an insightful post on how to hire better call center agents. Below, I have listed his seven step nuts to bolts recruiting strategy for new agents:

STEP 1: Create an Agent Success Profile – What are the Core Competencies, Personality Traits, Skill Set(s) and Demographics of your Optimal Performing Agents?

STEP 2: Create a Recruiting Strategy – Create a Recruiting Communications Plan that Identifies & Targets the Job Seekers that Meet your Agent Success Profile Criteria.

STEP 3: Deploy an In-Depth Telephone Screening Process – All of your Recruiting Advertising should use as the Call-to-Action a 24×7 Automated “Employment Information Line”/Phone Screen which is then followed by a Structured Telephone Interview.

STEP 4: Deploying Pre-Employment Assessment Testing – to Confirm Personality Traits/Job Fit and Skill Set(s).

STEP 5: Using a Structured Face-to-Face Interview – based on Core Competencies, Personality Traits and Skill Set(s).

STEP 6: Having Your Candidates Experience a Job Preview – Depicting Day-to-Day Activities, Responsibilities and the Environment of the Call Center.

STEP 7: Reference Verification - (also Security Clearances / Drug Testing if required).

Top 10: How to Staff the Contact Center for Consultative Sales

A great consultative sales force is key to success for companies that sell big ticket items in an outbound online environment. Some companies that immediately come to mind are Quicken Loans and Countrywide in online mortgage, Kaplan and UOPX in online education, e*Trade and Schwab in financial services and CDW in direct IT retailing. The big challenge is how to develop such a salesforce. Below are 10 things to think about when staffing up call centers for consultative selling:

1. Experienced versus Young and Hungry. Should I hire experienced and skilled consultative inside salespeople or should I hire young people with the right profile and train them to be great. Of course, you have to pay the experienced folks higher base and commission off the bat...

2. Urban versus Rural Call Centers?. Do I staff my call center in an urban area with lots of job opportunities or are there some mid-size cities and rural areas where I can actually source people with strong sales skills. It could be hard to find good sales folks in some rural communities, but if I find the right people a rural area would allow for lower labor costs and lower attrition. See a great piece of research on site selection from call center expert Jon Anton.