Inova Solutions Executive Vice President and Co-Founder Wendy Hubbard recently sat down with CRM Magazine to discuss the current economic climate and its effect on call centers.
Here is an excerpt from the article:
Remember the 80:20 Rule? Eighty percent of total potential value can be achieved from just 20 percent of the effort. General Electric’s former chief executive officer, Jack Welch, took a different tack and said 20 percent of the people in an organization simply do not need to be there. To Wendy Hubbard, executive vice president and founder of Charlottesville, Va.–based communications provider Inova Solutions, letting underperforming agents go may be hard but it can reap great benefits. “The most difficult job is to cut people,” she says. “Often when there is a downturn, we are forced to do so, and it turns out to be very positive. When you’re left with the top 80 percent of performers you can have a more efficient operation.”
Ensuring agents are informed isn’t the only way to keep them in the seats, though. Empowerment—giving agents the ability to take actions to solve a customer’s problem that mere empathy can’t cure—is another low-cost way to continue to innovate in service. “Giving CSRs the power to make decisions that there aren’t necessarily business rules for, the exceptions in which the customer relationship may be most at risk, is important,” McGeary says. “They then have the power to exceed the customer’s expectations or make good on what may have been a bad or unfortunate experience for them.”
Inova Solutions’ Hubbard agrees, adding agents are a contact center’s largest expense. Consequently, any investments in technology should help empower your most expensive asset. “If you can add a bit of technology to optimize these folks’ performance, you’re way ahead of the game and being proactive as opposed to firefighting,” she says, explaining optimizing agent desktop technology to publish real-time information about the callers can make a great impact.
Create a real-time communication system where agents understand call queue and then the second step, that many call centers need now, on reader boards, desktop, and digital signage,” Hubbard adds. “Develop a culture around the real-time information, one of execution. Then, you walk into the call center and feel the buzz…people are really going for it because everything is in alignment.”