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Contact Center Outsourcer Playbook Contact Center Outsourcers From Business Necessity to Business Driver
Contact Center Outsourcer Playbook
Contact Center OutsourcersFrom Business Necessity to Business Driver
“It’s a new game now, you know, you have to bring some fresh stuff.”
Scotty McCreery
IntroductionNot long ago, contact center outsourcers had to be good at one thing above all others: controlling costs. Why? Because the business functions these outsourcers performed were viewed as necessary costs of doing business by their clients. Important, perhaps, but not something that would make or break the client’s enterprise.
But today, when more importance is placed on exceptional customer experiences, the contact center represents much more than unavoidable expense. Why? Here are a few reasons:
• Automation has removed many mundane tasks from contact centers. Customers can use automated, web-based tools instead of contact center agents to reset passwords or place simple orders.
• Contact centers now take on more complex tasks that are considered “context-sensitive.” These pose interaction-specific challenges that require greater knowledge and skill to understand and resolve.
• Customers want to interact using more channels. These include mobile communications and social media.
Costs are still important, of course. And it won’t surprise anyone to learn that enterprises want contact centers to address all the new challenges and perform a more essential role in winning and keeping customers without much increase in cost.
As a result, contact center outsourcers have to raise their game in order to compete. They must hire and retain more capable agents, take strong measures to maximize each agent’s effectiveness with every interaction, and enable their clients to easily track the contact center’s contribution. And, while keeping costs in check, they must demonstrate these capabilities to win the client’s business in the first place.
Can today’s outsourcers balance agent effectiveness, efficiency, and client satisfaction? Yes—with the right practices and technology tools.
Case in point is contact center outsourcer NexRep. Specializing in demand generation for its client companies, NexRep thinks both efficiency and customer satisfaction begin with choosing and training agents carefully (and then enabling them).
About this PlaybookIn the following pages, we’ll cover a range of ideas for increasing agent effectiveness and efficiency, in ways that are vividly clear to current and prospective clients. Some of these ideas focus on good process, others on technology and tools. But in every case, our focus is also on overall contact center effectiveness at maximizing sales, loyalty, conversions, leads generated, or whatever business performance measure is critical to clients. Contact durations and first-contact resolution rates matter, but measurable, reportable business results matter more.
Admittedly, optimizing our clients’ business results while maintaining an efficient operation is a lofty goal—but to be competitive, we have no choice. Ready? Good. Let’s see how far we can get.
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How to Draft a Winning Team
As contact center outsourcers ask their agents to engage in increasingly complex activities, it gets steadily more difficult to find the ones who will help them (and their clients) stand out.
“I am convinced that nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day, you bet on people, not on strategies.”
Lawrence Bossidy Former COO, GE
As contact center outsourcers ask their agents to engage in increasingly complex activities, it gets steadily more difficult to find the ones who will help them (and their clients) stand out.
What should you look for when you’re hiring new agents? And how can you be sure you’ll know the next star performers when you see them? We’ll get into that here—but first, let’s think about where the very best agents are.
They’re everywhere. Well, almost. And that’s important, because not long ago, the only good candidate was a local one. Contact centers were places where agents came to work—the work couldn’t come to them.
Today, technology advances have changed all that, and you can recruit and onboard agents located just about anywhere in the world. This is particularly helpful if you need agents with specific expertise that might not be common within commuting distance to your office. But there are other advantages—and risks, too.
Local, remote, or ... both? Now that you can source talent across the region, country, or world ... should you? Depends on your goals, and your tolerance for risk.
Key points
• To compete, contact center outsourcers need to find and keep the best agents
• Advancing technologies enable remote agents, expanding the candidate pool to include faraway agents and others who can (or will) only work remotely
• For all agents, soft skills and behavioral characteristics are essential. Ask open-ended questions to assess them.
• Agents that sell need selling skills. If they’re selling themselves effectively in an interview, that’s a good sign.
• Agents that help need problem-solving skills and a positive, empathetic style. Probe for true-life success stories from their past.
• Remote agents need all of the above, plus plenty of motivation and self-management skills. Once again, previous success is the best indicator of future effectiveness.
• Cloud contact centers offer the best tools for leveraging remote agents
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Chapter One
Hire locally and you can meet personally with candidates, and that can be an advantage in gauging suitability. But a geographically limited candidate pool is, well, limited. If you’re in an area with higher labor costs, you may also find it difficult to compete—on price, at least—with other outsourcers.
Opening the door to remote agents lets you be more demanding—requiring certain skills, background, experience, languages, whatever. But judging suitability is a little tougher, and you’ll want to adjust your interview process and techniques accordingly (more on that soon).
There is a third option: hiring locally, but allowing (even encouraging) agents to work remotely most of the time, coming into the office for staff meetings or other adventures.This strategy lets you avoid the physical space costs of housing all agents all the time, while agents save both time and costs associated with commuting, work attire, and child or pet care.
How to get the agents you really wantCheck the fit. Whether you are hiring for outbound sales, customer service, technical support, or flex positions, there are some universal qualities—reliability, professionalism, collaborative ability, and positive mindset—that you’ll want your candidates to posses. To evaluate these “softer” attributes, you should always (no exceptions!) obtain and check references from previous employers. And be sure to ask behavior-oriented questions such as:
• In your opinion, what (two or three) guiding principles are most important for an agent? How did you demonstrate each in your previous experiences?
• Tell me about a time that you landed a new customer through cold calling
• What did you do in your last job to contribute toward a teamwork environment?
• Describe a situation in which you were able to positively influence the actions of others in a desired direction
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Chapter One
These behavior- and culture-oriented questions are important, even for remote agents. If the answers you hear don’t give you a warm feeling, keep looking. If they do, focus on the tangible attributes.
Can they sell? They’ll need to if they’re going to be star performers in telemarketing, inside sales, collections, or other persuasion-oriented roles. To find out what your candidate can do, pay attention, during and after the interview:
• Are candidates effectively selling themselves and “closing you” during the interview?
• Do they ask if you have concerns they can address?
• Do they ask about next steps in the recruiting process?
• Did you receive an effective thank-you note that calls out the candidate’s suitability for the role?
Let’s hope so. If they can’t (or won’t) sell you, they’re not going to sell to your prospects or effectively serve your customers.
Can they help? For customer service, technical support, and help-desk coverage, high-performing agents need empathy, professionalism, a positive attitude, strong communication skills, and a general curiosity for solving problems. To spot the winners, start by asking for a success story (an example ofthe candidate helping a customer solve a tough problem) then listen for clues in the answer.
Did they ask a teammate for guidance? Were they resourceful in finding a solution? Was the customer pleased with the result? Now you know how the interviewee approaches problem solving—and how well he or she communicates.
Can they stand alone? For remote (or sometimes-remote) roles, always ask questions around time management, self-discipline, resourcefulness, and communication. Make sure the candidate is able to operate independently, but is also a team player and will engage with other employees for assistance when needed.
For these cases, you want to make sure that candidates will push themselves to keep call volume up, log and route calls appropriately, and contribute (as best a remote worker can) to a positive culture in your contact center.
“We find agents who are already customers of our clients, because those agents are going to be better at selling a client’s products and converting prospects into sales. We optimize agents for skill and performance, which provides better results and a better agent experience.”
Teddy Liaw CEO, NexRep
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Chapter One
Some final thoughts on recruitingWhich is more critical—skills or experience? Experience is an indicator and skills get things done. That said, experience often means agents need less assistance, coaching, and supervision. That’s why experienced agents are often the better choice for remote team members.
One more point, recruiting never really stops (especially for outsourcers), so you’ll get plenty of practice. And you’ll develop your own interview techniques and questions that help you find the team members you’re looking for. Once you get them in the door, concentrate on making those first days really count. That’s our focus for Chapter Two.
To learn how cloud contact centers and the right practices can help you enjoy the benefits of “agents anywhere,” view this on-demand webinar.
Remote agents: how technology can helpWhen it comes to staffing with remote agents, your contact center infrastructure can be enabling—or limiting. Cloud solutions like the Five9® Virtual Contact Center are the obvious choice for outsourced contact centers that want to leverage the best talent, no matter where it’s to be found. Why?
• Minimal equipment. With cloud contact centers, all your agent (remote or on-site) needs is a headset, a PC, and an Internet connection.
• Fast start. Provisioning a new agent can take just minutes, and modern cloud contact centers are easy for agents to navigate, learn, and use—so they’re up to speed quickly and easily.
• Easy training and coaching. Good cloud contact centers let you monitor agent activity and listen in on and record calls. Coaching tools are available too, so even faraway agents get the help and guidance they need.
• Confirming performance. With cloud contact centers, supervisors and managers can track agent, client, and campaign metrics with ease—so you can ensure your new hires (and veterans) are performing as wonderfully as you hoped.
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Chapter One
“A coach is someone who can give correction without causing resentment.”
John Wooden
Starting agents off on the right footSo you’ve hired a great team of agents. Initial onboarding activities are critically important, so don’t do this without a plan. See the box below for some tips:
Onboarding tips
• Onboarding in a structured way produces real ROI as agents get up to speed faster and stay on the job longer
• A well-planned first week helps more people than just new hires—everyone else involved stays more productive, too
• Do they ask about next steps in the recruiting process?
• New hires need to learn about company culture, client objectives and preferences, and campaign/program specifics, big picture, and details
• Consider some kind of outsourced contact center “boot camp” if you hire entry-level agents
• Use cloud contact center tools like listen-only mode and call recording to help agents listen and learn
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Training and Coaching Your Agents for Maximum Success
Key points
• Coaching agents is one of the most cost-effective ways to boost contact center performance—and please clients
• Supervisors, managers, sales managers, and agent-peers can all make good coaches
• Time your coaching to enhance new clients/campaigns, performance reviews, and promising agent careers
• Keep coaching grounded measurable, definable goals, closely related to client objectives and SLAs
• Use cloud contact center tools to monitor agent performance, listen in to live and recorded contacts, and track agent progress
Chapter Two
Constant improvement through coachingNow—your agents are making and taking calls, and clients are satisfied. But there’s always room for improvement, and your clients want to see that you’re working at it.
Coaching your agents is one of the most time- and cost-effective ways to get this improvement. Be a good coach and everyone will thank you—your agents, your clients, and those folks in the boardroom.
Who should coach?Supervisors are a natural choice—they have a vested interest and (we hope) they know the agent. But coaching doesn’t just have to come from supervisors, contact center managers, or sales directors. Standout agents can also provide guidance to their peers—and this doubles as a good growth exercise for those agents who want to move forward in their careers.
How to coachRemember, coaching is different from training (or re-training). It’s about helping agents apply skills and knowledge they already have in their bag of tricks. Here are a few things to try.
• Share with your agents why coaching is good, and be sure to relate everything about your coaching session to specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, and time-related (SMART) goals. Also, take advantage of client objectives and service level agreements to spell things out clearly.
• Don’t focus too much on reporting and performance data during a coaching session (they may be the reason for it, but they won’t make the session more effective). Instead, concentrate on solving problems and refining approach.
• Plan to listen a lot—it’s one of your most powerful tools. Listen carefully to your agent before, during, and after a contact or two.
• Ask agents to describe their performance (on a contact) in their own words—both high points and low points. If possible, play back a recorded call from an agent and go over all the key elements: the crucial first few seconds, the agent’s demonstration of empathy for customers, and their tone as the call progresses.
• You’re not finished yet. Discuss the contact’s result, and any follow-on disposition or escalation issues.
• Now go back and share your own impressions. Follow the same sequence, and tie your assessments to those grounding client SLAs.
• Ask agents what issues or roadblocks might be holding them back from maximum performance. Then, enthusiastically help overcome them.
Remember to document the highlights of your coaching sessions and share them with clients. They’ll appreciate your focus on serving them well.
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Chapter Two
Monitor, Listen, Coach: The Modern ToolsThe best cloud contact center solutions include quality-monitoring technologies and processes that make it possible to coach agents, whether they’re on-site or remote.
These tools enable authorized users to listen to call recording—often through a monitoring and reporting application. Supervisors can silently monitor live calls for a selected agent, or randomly monitor calls for campaigns or departments (but only those they’re authorized to monitor).
Five9 quality and monitoring capabilities are a good example. A supervisor (or peer-coach) can escalate from passive, silent monitoring to “whisper coaching” advice (agents hear it, but other parties on the call don’t). If things get dicey, the coach can even break in to a call and speak with all parties. During busy coaching periods, a dashboard enables all supervisors to see who is currently being monitored. Learn more about Five9 quality management features.
How to coach even more effectivelyIs coaching even more difficult than being a great agent? Maybe. But as with most any activity, you can improve—and “coach-the-coach” sessions work well. Have your best coaches observe an agent coaching session, then follow it up with a review process similar to the approach discussed above. It works.
Is there really time for coaching?Absolutely—especially if you’re good at managing the relationship between agents, supervisors, and time. Our next topic is scheduling, and we’ll explore some good ways to do that.
When to coach• Got an important new client or campaign in the offing?
Use coaching to position your agents for success.
• Want to help an agent reach their potential? (If so, you’re a born people manager!) Schedule a coaching session. Bonus: you might learn something, too.
• Time for a performance review? Integrate a coaching exercise. Even better, have a coaching session before writing a review, then follow up a month later with another. It’s a great way to make a review part of the improvement process, not just a box to check.
• When performance reports hint at a problem—long call durations, not enough first-call resolutions, unusual escalation volumes—nip it in the bud with coaching.
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Chapter Two
“There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.”
Henry A. Kissinger
Key points
• Scheduling contact center agents effectively helps control costs, improve program and campaign results for clients, and raise both agent and client retention rates
• Scheduling is more complex than it used to be thanks to more interaction channels and increasing use of remote agents
• For all agents, soft skills and behavioral characteristics are essential. Ask open-ended questions to assess them.
• Forecasting demand requires intense data collection and analysis. As campaigns, clients, channels, and customer expectations multiply, this task becomes more complex.
• Automate the tasks of schedule generation and volume monitoring so your management team has more time for coaching
• Use an intraday system to monitor for spikes and lulls and automatically adjust schedules
Chapter Three
An old story—with a tangle of new twistsFor outsourced contact centers, coverage has always been a big issue. Too many agents costs too much. Too few agents costs even more—in lost sales, lost loyalty, and lost clients. So predicting demand, staffing to match, and shifting staff around on-the-fly aren’t just important—they’re crucial. Outsourcers do have the opportunity to spread agents across clients—but it’s hard to say whether that makes scheduling easier or more difficult.
So many factors play into getting that coverage right. Seasonal, day-of-week, and day-of-month shifts along with planned sales promotions might be somewhat predictable. But external events like competitive actions, product recalls, and natural disasters are a little tougher to forecast. Multiply all this by the number of clients you serve, and you’ve created the ultimate scheduling challenge.
Scheduling for Maximum Agent Effectiveness
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Chapter Three
Two more trends have upped the ante even more. Your clients’ customers expect more from you, and new communication channels (chat, social media, email, and whatever’s next) have joined the traditional voice mode. How many contacts must we accommodate—and how will those contacts be spread across all those channels? A few more wrinkles make agent scheduling even more interesting. There’s the impact of remote agents, in as many as two-dozen time zones (remote agents can be a huge advantage, but they add complexity as well). Finally, there’s the increasing emphasis on overall contact center performance and the need to present “winning numbers” to clients.
Can optimal scheduling enhance customer and client satisfaction, increase first-contact resolutions, boost sales and market share, increase customer loyalty, and help reduce service, warranty, and other operational costs—all while preserving an outsourcer’s overall profitability? Yes—and when we get this right, we have just enough resources to keep all those KPI and SLA readings where we want them. All we need to do is optimally match our agent resources to demand.
Put another way, we must forecast accurately (across clients, campaigns, business functions, channels, and time zones), staff accordingly, and adjust readily when inevitable surprises arise.
Forecasting comes firstTo effectively predict traffic on voice, email, chat, social, and other channels, your focus will be on data. Lots of data—both historical and real-time. That’s what you’ll need to analyze customer and prospect traffic, and to identify trends. Don’t forget to look for relationships across channels: social, voice, and chat definitely play off one another, but recognizing the patterns is tricky.
Stay at it, and you’ll be able to lay out average traffic volumes, on each channel, by hour, day, week, and month. That alone will help you reduce staffing costs—by knowing when you’ll need fewer agents—and service degradation costs associated with understaffing.
One more thing to search for in your data: the variance, and drift, in customer channel preferences. And while you have the advantage of multiclient customer pools, they may be operating in markets so divergent that you can only analyze them separately. Either way, these preferences are evolving (and will continue), and you’ll need to understand the trends for your next task—assigning staff.
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Yes, you can (and should) automateIf you think all this data-crunching and schedule-massaging sounds difficult to achieve manually, you’re right. Larger outsourced (and even some in-house) contact centers have frequently used automated workforce-management tools to uncover patterns, create statistical models, and forecast demand.
A good workforce-management solution does most of the repetitive work involved in monitoring traffic and generating schedules, and this frees up supervisors and managers to spend more time coaching. These solutions can also perform demand analyses in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take, so you can have accurately forecasted contact volumes—and agent requirements based on those projections—much earlier, and much more frequently.
Now, thanks to cloud technology, growth-mode outsourced contact centers can take advantage of these same tools. One shining example: the Five9 Workforce Management solution (learn more about it here).
Chapter Three
Getting staffing levels rightNow that you know (as best you can) when and where you’ll need resources, it’s time to match people to roles. You probably already have an idea about where each of your team members excels. Some agents may be great with inbound calls, but lost when it comes to social media or chat interactions. Some may be knowledgeable or flexible enough to serve multiple clients and campaigns, while others might work better in dedicated roles.
If you’re not clear, work with your supervisors and star performers to find out where an agent will do your clients (and their customers or prospects) the most good. And be on the lookout for those (rarer) crossover agents who can effectively cover several interaction types.
Ready? Match people and skills to clients, channels, and demand. It’s an iterative process, but worth the effort. Agents are happier, more loyal, and more effective when they’re doing work they naturally do well. They’re also more productive, helping you keep costs down. And remember, they’re more effective too, helping you keep business results and client satisfaction higher.
Finally, be sure your schedule accounts for staff meetings and other resource sinks—which should be slated, of course, for historically slow periods.
Schedule in place? Watch and listen. Monitor how well your agents stick to the schedules, and make adjustments.
Responding readilyEven the fully optimized schedule goes out the window when the unexpected occurs—a rumor gone viral on social media, a product recall, a sudden heat wave, a client strategy shift. Traffic can dip and spike for almost limitless reasons.
That’s why you’ll need an intraday system that monitors demand and alerts you and your staff, when adjustments are called for. Ideally, the same system that detects these trends provides tools to recommend immediate shifts.
Sharing the good newsNow that you’re optimizing schedules, seeing improved productivity and generating better business results for your clients, it’s time for some combined fine-tuning and good-news-sharing. In our next chapter, we’ll take a look at the reporting and analytics processes you’ll need.
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“It’s not bragging if you can back it up.”
Muhammad Ali
Key points
• Clients and prospects demand visibility into the services provided by outsourced contact centers
• Of particular interest: campaign and program performance, the service levels you provide, and billing info clients can slice and dice
• Good visibility—reports, dashboards, access to data for integration—is a critical aspect of the service you provide, and can be a key differentiator
• Make sure the visibility you provide tells an interaction-based story, since interactions are the heart of what you provide
• Also, be sure to highlight the balance you achieve among agent effectiveness and efficiency
• Use automated tools for most of this work.With today’s interaction volumes, you’ll need them to be sufficiently responsive.
Chapter Four
Efficiency and quality: you’ve made them happen, now make them visibleOne of the most important aspects of the service you provide your clients is reporting and visibility. Why?
First, clients need to know how their campaigns are doing— so they can evaluate which programs to continue, expand, or cut short. Second, they want to know that you’re doing the best you can do for them—achieving just the right balance of effectiveness and efficiency. Finally, clients like to have ways to audit and verify that they’re being billed correctly and fairly—in short, to make sure they’re getting their money’s worth.
Aside from keeping clients happy, what’s in it for you? More clients, of course—because clear, attractive reporting and tracking are important selling points when you’re after new business.
Optimizing and Reporting Your Success
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Chapter Four
So now that you have processes in place to ensure agent effectiveness and efficiency, what will you need to communicate it successfully to clients?
• Real-time information, in a mix of formats
• Historical reports, plus tools for analyzing their content
• Accurate, billing-oriented reports and dashboards that let clients track telephony (and other) costs by program
• Flexible, customizable dashboards that give clients and contact center managers at-a-glance information on programs, campaigns, and costs
• Mobile apps for clients (and your own managers) who spend time on the go but still need to track contact center activity and performance
• Easy access to much of this data, for use in other analytics tools as needed, and for sharing with other enterprise applications like CRM
It’s fine to have a stack of reports and an array of dashboards ... but it’s just as important to ensure these tools tell the right story. Today’s clients know they must provide a great customer experience. They’re looking to you to make it happen—efficiently and affordably. When they look at reports and dashboards—whether they’re already a client or just evaluating your services—they want to see how your contact center optimizes quality, agent effectiveness, and efficiency.
That’s the story you want your reports and dashboards to tell. And that story begins and ends with interactions. With a high-quality interaction you’ll see that:
• The customer or prospect feels well served
• We sold everything we could sell, for the price our client wanted
• We didn’t break any laws or put ourselves or our clients at risk
• We reinforced our client’s brand
In short, we said all the right things, at the right moments, to get the best possible result.
To achieve this for our clients, we record interactions—and accompanying screen and keystroke activity—then use those recordings for coaching and training.
Now, add in efficiency. To serve our clients (and our bottom lines) efficiently means ...
• The fewest possible contacts (where appropriate, first-contact resolution)
• The shortest possible contact durations
• The lowest demand on other resources (supervisors, other agents, client staff)
When you design reports for your clients (and your management team) and when you show prospective clients the kinds of visibility you can offer, make sure your reports tell this story, in this way.
What to look for in a reporting solutionA good cloud contact center offers a range of quality reporting and data access and integration features—some of which may be part of a core solution, while others are packaged as an add-on. Here’s what to look for:
• Standardized and customizable reporting capabilities
• Flexible, customizable dashboards for supervisors, managers, and clients
• Complete analytics: speech, call flow, customer feedback, screen content, and text and data mining
You can see a good sampling of powerful cloud contact center reporting tools—including more than 100 predefined reports—in action, on the Five9 website.
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The Five9 Cloud Contact Center Solution
For Sales and Marketing
• Predictive Dialer
• Progressive Dialer
• Power Dialer
• Preview Dialer
For Service and Support
• Automated Call Distribution (ACD)
• Integrated Voice Response (IVR)
• Screen Pop (CTI)
• Voice, Email, Chat, Social, and Mobile
Affordable, easy-to-use—and powerful
• Hundreds of standard and customizable reports
• Prebuilt integration with popular CRM platforms
• Easy-to-use desktop tools for agents and supervisors
• Remote agent capability
• Highly secure and reliable
• Deploys in just days
Let’s get to workWe’ve seen how modern contact center technologies and best practices can help an outsourcer’s agents, supervisors, and managers get more done—and to identify and focus on doing the right things. And we’ve said that cloud solutions are particularly well suited to improving agent effectiveness and efficiency—and then both optimizing and reporting that success to clients.
Why? Because cloud contact centers bring all of this capability to outsourcers of any size—cost-effectively. Growing companies can use (and pay for) only what they need. And, for outsourced contact centers, flexibility is essential: no contact center understands the value of fast, easy infrastructure expansion and contraction like outsourcers do.
For these reasons and others, Five9 Cloud Contact Center Solutions are particularly well suited to contact center BPOs—helping them reap the rewards of both efficiency and effectiveness.
To learn more, visit www.five9.com.
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Five9 and the Five9 logo are registered trademarks of Five9 and its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Other marks and brands may be claimed as the property of others. The product plans, specifications, and descriptions herein are provided for information only and subject to change without notice, and are provided without warranty of any kind, express or implied. Copyright © 2014 Five9, Inc.1247_plbk_BPO_cmpgn_10_14
To view a live demo, or learn more about how to pull ahead from the competition using cloud contact center technology:
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