Go BackWhat are your contact centre agents really thinking?
Ten key lessons to be learnt from Sabio's new 'Voice of the Contact Centre Agent 2008' survey conducted by YouGov
By Kenneth Hitchen, Consulting Director, Sabio
Contact centre agents are at the heart of every customer interaction, and it's our belief at Sabio that you can't successfully optimise contact centre performance if you don't pay detailed attention to the needs of your agents and the challenges they face in their working lives.
That's why we commissioned YouGov to develop the UK's first ever survey panel of close to 1,000 independently recruited UK contact centre agents as the basis for our major 'Voice of the Contact Centre Agent 2008' project which has been put together in collaboration with Avaya. Our first 'Voice of the Contact Centre Agent' research project looked at customer service issues from the agent's perspective, and highlighted some of the key concerns facing a representative sample of the UK's 1.2 million contact centre agents who represent some four per cent of the country's total workforce.
We've just released the first results from the 'Voice of the Contact Centre Agent' programme, and came up with some interesting findings: for example, that UK agents are much more loyal than they are generally given credit for - over a third surveyed had been in the industry for five years or more. Agents also made clear that they are frustrated when they can't help the customers they deal with, and feel that they are not always given the right tools and information to do their jobs to the best of their ability.
Following on from the announcement of the results, we thought it might be useful to look beneath the initial numbers and suggest some next steps that organisations can take to address some of the key issues identified by the research.
1. We found surprisingly low levels of call coaching across contact centres of all sizes and sectors, with weekly coaching a rarity, and ten per cent of agents receiving no weekly coaching at all. This is obviously a major concern in sectors such as financial services where there's a regulatory requirement for agents to know exactly what they're discussing. If there's so little coaching going on, you have to ask what Team Leaders are up to, and we suspect they're getting tied down with meetings and reporting responsibilities that are being prioritised above coaching.
2. Another concern is the inconsistent use of agent performance metrics - while over eight out of ten agents responding have their calls measured for quality, just under a quarter of them say their monthly pay is impacted by these performance scores. Customer satisfaction scores are also only used to impact pay for ten per cent of agents. We suggest that better correlation of metrics with pay is needed if agents are to be motivated to improve their performance on the criteria that we collectively believe to be important.
3. The research also revealed a surprisingly large variance in operational efficiency across our survey panel - perhaps too big for what by now is a mature industry. There was a 30 to 35 per cent spread in the actual time that agents were available to field interactions, with the rest of the time spent in meetings, in training or on breaks - outsourcers particularly seemed to have the lowest productivity. For us this highlights the importance of effective workforce management and the need to ensure real-time adherence to cut down on effective overstaffing
4. An important requirement is for contact centres to provide their agents with technology solutions that make it easier for them to do their jobs. The two key technology frustrations most cited by agents were the frequent difficulty they had in actually hearing customer calls, and having to use poorly performing applications that are often complex and too difficult to access. According to the research over two thirds of agents have problems hearing calls, over 30 per cent of agents take more than five minutes to login at the start of the day, a third use five or more application passwords to carry out their daily role, while more than 40 per cent of the agents we surveyed said they experience slow running IT systems every day.
This suggests that although we're focusing on optimising performance with specialist components such as WFO and IVR, we still need to concentrate on getting the basics right - providing agents with calls that they can hear, and systems that allow them to get on with their work would seem like a good start!
5. Agents also highlighted their serious transport concerns, and what is increasingly looking like a significant Green issue that contact centre operators will need to address. Nearly two thirds of agents drive to work or share a lift with a friend - and when they get to work it's becoming increasingly difficult to find parking. Only 23 per cent travel by bus, 15 per cent walk and just two per cent cycle.
At a time when Government is encouraging businesses to move back into town centres, the contact centre market is still predominantly based in edge-of-town business parks. This is a big issue for agents - particularly with upcoming duty increases on higher polluting vehicles and increased fuel prices. Contact centres will need to do much more to reduce their overall CO2 footprint, and to come up with ways to encourage agents to travel to work in a more environmentally friendly manner. With approaching one million contact centre agents nationwide, this is starting to look like a significant green issue.
6. From our initial survey we found that the average use of part-time agents in contact centres is still only 19 per cent, with many centres still only targeting working mothers. Given that greater use of part-time agents can make it much easier for contact centres to meet their inbound demand curves, it's an area that could benefit from more creative recruitment targeting, rather than continuing to focus on a target group that typically wants the same shift patterns and overlapping holiday requests.
Our research showed that collectively contact centres aren't being innovative with their staffing and are placing too much emphasis on traditional 25-40 year old staff while overlooking the potential of other more flexible age groups and part-time workers. In an industry that suffers productivity and efficiency issues each and every day, we're missing out on significant staffing opportunities that we can't afford to ignore. By not looking at the broader spectrum of agents and optimising the diversity and flexibility of different employee groups, contact centre operators are limiting their potential performance.
7. Contact centres are often seen as a high turnover industry, with poor staff retention costs - however, our research showed that over a third of agents have been in the industry for five years or more, and a quarter with their current centre for over five years. We found these levels of loyalty to be encouraging - however, it also raises interesting issues around agent career paths within single organisations, and the need for agents who add additional skills and channels to have their broader capabilities recognised and rewarded.
8. Our initial survey revealed that there's still a very low percentage of agents offering a blended service approach - some inbound service staff are starting to do sales, but there's a lot of people still sitting their waiting to take calls. Clearly there are opportunities to be realised from the greater use of blending, however contact centre operators need to recognise that agents will need further skills and training to do this well.
9. While the generally accepted view is that contact centres are becoming smaller and more flexible with around 50 agents or less, our survey of agents suggested that in fact contact centres are seeming to get bigger with an average survey size of 320 agents. This suggests there larger centres are getting bigger, with issues such as acquisitions, outsourcing and integration leading to more agents working in bigger contact centres. This can of course lead to problems with limited agent catchment areas, and also that organisations are not making the most of proven contact centre optimisation techniques such as virtualisation.
10. Additional trends identified in the survey include the continued growth in public sector contact centres and the challenge this imposes on private sector agent recruitment. Among our agent respondents, 11 per cent worked for Central Government services and five per cent for Local Authorities. It's acknowledged that the public sector offers good benefits for agents, train their staff thoroughly, and being services-led offer a less pressured environment for agents. This is starting to have an effect, and is impacting private sector contact centre agent recruitment - particularly in areas with limited catchment.
As an industry we talk a lot about the customer experience, but it's rare that we actually listen to what the contact centre agents themselves are feeling. Our first 'Voice of the Contact Centre Agent' survey has confirmed that agents are an essential part of the customer service equation, and we need to listen carefully to their concerns if we're going to successfully deliver long-term customer satisfaction.
