Category Archives: Automation

All summer we’ve been geeking out on the latest season of HBO’s Silicon Valley. This week’s episode highlights a challenge companies face when looking to simplify their products, sales, and communications. For the unconverted and for the purposes of this conversation: Silicon Valley is about Pied Piper, a file compression algorithm that’s supposed to dramatically free-up storage space without compromising quality.

In this week’s episode, “Daily Active Users”, the guys at Pied Piper have tested their platform with a select group of betas and finally released the app to the public. Although it’s the talk of the town and gaining a high volume of downloads, users aren’t returning on a daily basis to actually use the app. That daily use metric is what determines corporate growth and profitability.

CEO Richard Hendricks has a focus group to figure out why people aren’t using Pied Piper. And the answer is clear. The platform is too complicated and ahead of its time for the average user to appreciate. Hendricks is enraged – he tested a beta version with his friends (other engineers) and got near universal praise. When asked why he only sent the beta to other engineers, Hendricks explains to his VC pal:

I wanted to give it to people who would understand what I’m trying to do, so I could get useful feedback. And with all due respect, I gave it to you – the one person without a computing background – and you said it felt ‘engineered’.

Then the lightbulb moment occurs when he realizes they wanted to market their product to Average Joe, but they never actually tested it with him. And herein lies the brilliance of Silicon Valley. Art imitating business.

We come to the very real question of consumer value during all points of the product development and distribution lifecycle. If you want a “normal” person to understand your product, or how your services work, or why their life will be dramatically improved, don’t just circulate feedback around the internal organization. The audience community can provide a better glimpse into actual market response.

For the most part, technology and CPG companies know this to be true. But others – like financial services, healthcare, and insurance – really struggle to bridge the gap between insider admiration and consumer approval.

Multitasking has been under scientific scrutiny since the 1960’s. Diverse and web-centric channels for work and play have questioned the brain’s ability to do more than one thing at a time. MIT neuroscientist Earl Miller explains that, “When people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost in doing so.”

There is no better proof that multitasking – or, rather, the attempt to multitask – is alive and well than the contact center industry. If you spend any time peering over the cubicles of call center agents, moving between two or more computer screens, jotting down notes, and plugging digits into their calculator, you have to wonder, what’s all the fuss about? They seem to be multitasking whizzes! (Side note: In one Rapid Ethnographic study of a call center, SBR found that agents migrated between an average of two computer screens and seven different windows during a single call!)

When production value is prized above salesmanship or consumer engagement, the most effective call center agents have to become adept at managing multiple activities in quick succession. The problem is that most companies want call center agents to engage with consumers. The skills required to do so are inherently at odds with mechanical dexterity. You can easily determine whether agents are more focused on the computer than the consumer by the amount of “dead air” during a call. Such is the dilemma for the modern call center.

One big issue is that when people try to multitask, they make more mistakes. Worse yet, when agents switch between different activities, they could be losing the very skills needed to sell and/or support consumers. Researchers at the UK’s University of Sussex found that frequent multitaskers had less brain density in the areas that control cognition and emotional resilience. Sure, an agent might do okay for the first few minutes of their day, but they will soon get burned-out and bummed-out, lose focus, interest and overall job satisfaction. What to do?

• Experience the agent environment firsthand. Automation can help, but should be built with and for the agent. Too often call center tools are created in a vacuum, often by technical geniuses that know little about or invest no time in appreciating the day-to-day work of a call center agent. An intimate understanding of the job starts with an immersive assessment (our method of choice is Rapid Ethnography) to get an inside look into the agent’s environment. At this point it’s possible to design technological solutions that can do more of the heavy lifting, so agents can focus on the caller.
• Measure the impact of multitasking on performance. The attempt to multitask is a big time-waster. If you gauge the average amount of time wasted in searching around for information while on the phone you can quickly track the cost associated with multitasking, not to mention the impact it has on the consumer experience.
• Give agents a chance to recharge. Psychology says that there is a limit to optimal performance and we all have a set point at which all goes south. The best breathers engage the creative part of our brains. If you have or manage a call center, consider a break station that includes games such as pool tables, adult coloring books (all the rage) and other “toys” that help agents switch gears. Even if you can’t set aside a large dedicated space, give agents portable care packages that they can take to the cafeteria.

The modern call center is a motley environment where human-centered communication, technological agility, and product knowledge converge to form the “ideal” agent. But humans are limited and for long-term agent retention and satisfaction, consider how you can create an ecosystem where performance is based on realistic factors. Folks on the receiving end of the call will thank you and so will your bottom line.

If you’ve been in the call center business for more than two minutes you know that the word “scripting” is about as detested as background noise. For the most part we understand why: leaders worry that their agents will sound like mindless, monotonous robots.

While this fear is real, it doesn’t mean that the problem is scripting itself. In fact, let’s just throw out the word scripting altogether and instead focus on crafting compelling communication guides. The latter equips agents with a clear path to engage callers and ultimately focus their attention on sales or customer service (or both). A successful call guide actually makes for a more natural conversation, especially when the product or service is complex. A powerful guide will allow for individual agent personalities to shine.

This is not just lip service. In call centers that lacked a call guide, we’ve been able to increase sales by 5% to 27% simply through streamlined communication guides and associated training.

So you want to make your agents better? Here are five things you can do right now to boost your call center communications. You can pick and choose from this list but instituting all five will give you the most bang for your buck.

1. Create a Callflow

Organization isn’t just relegated to your closets. When it comes to drafting call guides, creating a callflow and outline is
the first step. This will also help cut down on call time if that is your goal.

Brainstorming callflow for a complex service product

Let’s take the example of health insurance sales. A prospect calls the Health Insurer to get help selecting a health insurance plan. This is a high stakes decision and they want an expert to help. The agent needs to take charge and get from point A to B so that the caller’s needs are uncovered in a way that leads to the ideal plan for them. By deconstructing the flow of a call in advance, you can be sure that key topics are attended to in a logical fashion. Otherwise the agent can go on making extraneous comments or worse yet miss key information.

With pen and pencil, identify your callflow for a general sales opportunity. In the adjacent snapshot you can see our Communications Specialist brainstorming the big picture guide for a complex product sale.

A call guide can be written verbatim for more junior staff or when you are launching a new product. Bullet points will achieve the same goal for more expert and seasoned agents.

2. Design the Right Questions

Asking questions is a foundational sales method simply because it works. Frankly, most people like to talk about themselves and asking them questions will make them feel part of the process.

Big word of caution here: in a call center environment you want to ask closed-ended questions (as opposed to open-ended ones). For example, asking someone, “What are you looking for in a health insurance plan?” is far too general and can lead to responses like, “Free, 100% coverage” rather than a realistic fielding of the person’s needs. Closed-ended sales questions include:

• About how much are you comfortable spending on PRODUCT TYPE?
• Are you planning on using this PRODUCT TYPE mostly for home or the office?
• Thinking about the year ahead, about how often do you think you’ll be visiting your doctor? (Health insurance sales)

All of these questions will lead to a response that helps the agent vet the products available. We’ve built algorithms for our clients to automate this process and it makes the Q&A process that much easier for both agent and caller.

3. Slay the Opening, “How are you today?”

This is SBR’s biggest pet peeve. Asking, “How are you today?” is one of the first things agents say over the phone. Managers like to fight us on this one so if you’re a Doubting Thomas here’s why…

Asking “How are you today?” is perfectly fine during in-person exchanges and can work quite well in field sales when one can gauge the situation through body language, energy and the like. But over the phone this phrase often stifles the exchange. The caller feels the need to synthesize their day, or, even worse, complain. Either way, it impacts time.

Instead, acknowledge the caller and move to find out how the agent can assist. After all, that is the reason for the call. Don’t get us wrong; there is nothing better than a smart, kind, warm agent who is interested in helping the caller.  But asking, “How are you today?” lies flat when, “How can I assist you today?” is really what people want to hear.

4. Cope with Legalese

Sometimes your Legal team mandates certain clauses in order to meet adherence requirements. Fighting with lawyers is usually a lost cause so we typically concede. But when faced with long, complex legalese, break up the content with pauses to the caller:

• “Do you have any questions before I continue?”
• “Do you have any questions about the information that I’ve just covered?”

This prepares the caller for any clarifying points and the next phase of heavy content.

5. Test & Then Test Again

Expert agents are an invaluable resource. Involve some of your top agents in testing the call guide. Some are excellent at crafting the ideal communication. They can help work out the kinks and test the most natural sounding call guides.

We like to test calls with the top agents while the content is still in development. Once we feel pretty secure with the call guides, we then move to middle-level agents to be sure that the guides are scalable to the entire agent-force.

A final suggestion on lawyers: Because of our many years in the complex product arena we are accustomed to the requirement that the legal staff must approve the call guides. If this is the case in your organization, we find that engaging the legal team in the process and educating them on how call centers work either by having them sit with agents or monitor calls is worth the time and effort.

One Final Thought…

If you institute just one of these activities your call guides will invariably improve. Do all five and you should see a boost in productivity across the agent pool. Of course there will be those bellicose agents who will rant and rave about having to follow a call guide. When their call monitoring, quality and sales all improve, they will thank you.

Anyone in the business knows that call center management is a demanding (if not a thankless) profession. Irregular call patterns could require immediate staffing changes, one-off questions can stifle a manager’s work for hours and industry alerts (like the first year launch of the Affordable Care Act) can put the queue in backlog. In short, something can happen every minute that moves the operation from calm to chaotic.

With all of these demands it’s a tall order to review operations from the consumer’s perspective. The good news is that it’s also relatively easy, quick and cheap to assess an inbound contact center operation. Contact center experts can ramble on for hours about shrinkage, AHT, ACDs, WFM and a litany of other acronyms, but ultimately a critical performance indicator is the exchange between the agent and caller. To get a real “inside look” into this exchange (beyond random call monitoring which is usually relegated to quality control), it’s important for those responsible to assume the position of the consumer.

We have recommended this exercise to countless individuals, from c-suite executives to directors and sales and marketing managers. People are consistently astounded by what they experience when they take on the consumer’s role. SBR’s Lead Ethnographer who helped design our rapid ethnography studies created a methodology for secret shopping contact center operations. The exercise itself is simple and just takes some planning to determine the areas to assess in an inbound call center environment.

Here are four areas we typically include when evaluating call centers via the secret shopping method:

1. Interactive Voice Response (IVR): IVR messaging and call-flows are important to lead a caller to the appropriate agent according to any number of factors, such as line of business or experience level. Ideally, a consumer-centric IVR is meant to efficiently direct calls and simplify the caller experience from the point of call entry. A well-designed IVR should also minimize caller confusion and “bouncing around” between different agents. As the consumer, identify how easy it is to arrive at your desired destination (the right agent). Did you get “bounced around” or reach an agent without making too many selections?

2. Agent Scripting/Communication: It’s not always clear whether an agent is actually using a call guide but we know from years in the business that some form of a “guide” or “scripting” is needed to keep agents on track. Tested call guides/scripting can also enhance performance because agents are operating off the same language and a proven sales approach. Identify how well the agent communicates: are they clear and concise, delivering logical information that most people could follow or do they use illogical descriptions and clumsy filler terms (“like”, “um”, “yea”)? Did the call follow a systematic path to get you the information you need or take illogical paths? Was the agent able to help you arrive at your desired destination or did you hang up frustrated?

3. The Human Factor: Sure, product knowledge is critical to performance but sincerity, kindness and interest in supporting the caller are just as important. These factors and others are considered “soft skills”. Think about what it feels like when an agent opens the call in a lackluster tone asking, “How can I help you today? The agent might be following the prescribed training or scripting but failing to emit the necessary kindness and enthusiasm. When calling, determine whether the agent was warm and professional, showed a willingness to help, was knowledgeable about the products/services and gave you the information you were seeking.

4. System Interface: Many call center agents operate off of multiple monitors and applications (two monitors is not unusual and we’ve witnessed agents access up to 15+ applications during a single exchange). There is a direct impact between the number of applications, screens and competing locations needed to find information and an agent’s ability to assist callers. For example, “dead air” (long pauses in communications) can occur while an agent searches for information. There are techniques to keep the conversation flowing but this can also extend talk time. As the consumer, take note of breaks in the conversation, how long it takes the agent to locate information you request and overall call time. You can greatly surmise whether system overload exists with just a little calculation of hold and waiting patterns. 

Over the years SBR has developed a variety of methods for clients to put themselves in the shoes of their customers. Even the busiest executive has had their eyes opened by this exercise. Click here to learn more about maximizing contact center operations.