Minor Feature
Call centres: powered by people
29-09-2000
by Elaine Larkin
Polite, helpful people staffing the other end of phone lines are now the norm, and it's expected that thousands more jobs are to be created in the booming tele-services industry.
However, the high turnover rate of contact centres has paved the way for another booming industry, contact centre consultancies. Earlier this year Eircom's consultancy arm, Eircom consult, teamed up with Bell Canada to provide professional services to Irish Contact Centres. Eircom now boasts over 100 pan-European call centres.
Eircom's contact centre services acts as a one-stop shop by customising a package to meet a company's needs, giving companies a choice between a purpose-built, fully equipped telephony facility developed by IT Solutions and an outsourcing unit which takes calls on behalf of a company.
However one of the key areas of retaining staff in the tele-services industry, which has a significant turnover rate, is proper training of staff. At agent level Eircom offers training in areas such as excellence in customer service and contact centre sales skills. Training of management is also covered in areas such as performance management, service level management and coaching.
"The training solutions play a significant part in increasing agent confidence in their ability to handle customer calls, and this improves customer service and overall customer loyalty," said Ruth Farrell, senior consultant with Eircom consult contact centre solutions. This she said makes the agents' job easier by "giving them the skills and knowledge to perform to the best of their ability." "The objective of the training is to support the contact centre's goal of reaching optimum levels of performance."
Farrell estimates that typically there is a 20 per cent attrition rate in the contact centre industry. Derek Corcoran, country director with technology solutions company Avaya, agreed that staff turnover is a grave issue, and said that turnover ranges from less than 10 percent to 20 percent.
Avaya provides technology platforms for a number of clients in Ireland and claims to have a 65 percent market share of the larger call centres -- those with 300 or more agents. Its professional service wing provides business consultancy to call centres as well as client training.
He believes how employees are rewarded is important. Because it is such a heavily monitored environment Corcoran said it is crucial to provide the agent with queue conditions and their own performance and to let them decide what they should be doing. "Empowering the agents to control their own activities to some extent is important," he said.
Taking repetitive tasks away from agents using interactive voice response systems also improves their performance. Grooming of agents is tied in with giving them performance related bonuses, which in turn, in his experience, reduces turnover. Voice recording and playback of a call is a way for grooming agents and pointing out where they can improve their technique, he said.
Performix Technologies claims that its software Acumen Performance Manager is the only software that can measure the complete performance of employees, integrate it with the targets set, give tailored on-line feedback to each employee and clearly show where performance needs to be improved. According to Raymond McGloin of Performix, Acumen is a unique solution. He said it is "the only software that delivers bottom line improvements using people rather than process and technology."
Acumen gives managers the complete overview of performance by automatically integrating data from existing systems and linking this data to the business objectives. Contact centre agents can also keep up-to-date with their performance. It "improves staff morale by improving the consistency and objectivity of the performance management process resulting in a perception of fairness amongst staff," he said.
The importance of the solution in getting staff to meet their targets he explains "helps to create a more open and transparent culture by providing all employees with visibility of performance expectations and their results."
Elaine Larkin is at elaine@electricnews.net
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