Cost

• Is our handle time driving up cost per call?
• Have we made Web chat cost-effective yet?
• What level of compensation should we be paying based on our center demographics?

Productivity

• How effectively are we managing rep time?
• What is an appropriate staff distribution between reps, supervisors and support roles?
• Is our turnover normal, or should I take a closer look?

Quality

• Do our customers experience more effort than customers of other companies?
• How do others measure FCR?
• Which contact channel yields the best survey scores?

To learn more about participation details, let us know of your interest and we’ll get you started.  For all of you metric buffs, what questions have I missed in the above list that you would like answered as you plan for a new year?

Observation #1: Average talk time for organizations with sales (288 seconds) is nearly identical to that of organizations without sales (290 seconds).  This is a bit counterintuitive, as you’d expect that inserting a sales pitch into a phone conversation would have a noticeable impact on talk time.  My hypothesis, though, is that these organizations with a sales component are not merely inserting a sales pitch —instead, they are seamlessly incorporating cross and up-sell opportunities into the service interaction.  When the sale is used in conjunction with a service solution, then it’s not as likely to increase talk time (and you’re more likely to gain the sale).

Observation #2: Average speed to answer a call in the United States & Canada is 44 seconds, which is more than double that of Europe & South Africa (18 seconds).  In addition, the data for average time to abandon shows nearly the same disparity, with U.S./Canada at 118 seconds and Europe/ SA at 64 seconds.  What’s interesting here is that customers in the U.S./Canada seem more willing to wait for service, perhaps due to the fact that they are conditioned to expect a longer period of wait time.  Whatever the case may be, the best way to manage your wait times is to set expectations well.  If customers have an understanding of when they are likely to receive service, then they are more likely to stick around for it.

Observation #3: Turnover at organizations with 1–50 FTEs is only 12.5%, whereas all other center size segments have turnover rates between 19–23% (51–100, 101–200, 201–500, and 501+).  This does make sense, though, as you’d expect smaller organizations to be a little closer knit.  And while larger organizations will likely always have higher attrition, there are techniques larger companies can use to enjoy some of the benefits of smaller ones. While turnover can have many different causes, this finding highlights the need to keep track of staff engagement as your center size expands.

CCC members can view more of this year’s data by visiting our Benchmarking Topic Center.  I’ll also take this opportunity to mention that next year’s version of our Annual Operational Benchmarking Survey will open in January 2012. If you are interested, then please let us know.

Related CCC Resources

• Service-to-Sales
• AHT Root Cause Analysis
• Employee Engagement

Given the unique issues that customer service professionals in the Financial Services industry face – including customer privacy and financial risk regulations – it can be difficult to know what CCC resources would be most helpful.

Wondering what others in your industry are reading? Here is a list of the CCC resources that your industry peers are downloading most often.

Top 3 CCC Resources for Financial Services Customer Service Professionals

1. Engineering a Low-Effort Customer Experience

What it is: A popular CCC download, this research outlines the most effective, up-to-date strategies for customer effort reduction.  In today’s competitive banking landscape, differentiating the customer experience may be a great way to win and retain customers.

Why your peers use it:

• To understand the sources of customer effort.
• To identify ways to reduce both the objective and subjective sides of effort.
• To coach frontline reps to employ techniques to reduce “in-the-moment” customer effort.

You might also be interested in: The Customer Effort Score – a customer experience metric that accounts for ease of customer interaction during a service request. CCC research has found that this is the most accurate measure of loyalty in a service organization. 

2. Coaching Starter Guide

What it is: A tool that helps supervisors and coaches identify rep development needs and address them through a behaviors-based coaching model.

Why your peers use it:

• To determine the objectives for coaching interactions. Given regulatory constraints in the industry, it is very important for service professionals to monitor rep behaviors.
• To decide the appropriate behaviors to coach on.
• To leverage example “starter” questions for coaching interactions.

You might also be interested in: Redefining the High-Performing Supervisor. This research provides guidance on the profile of most (and least) effective supervisors and identifies methods to replicate those behaviors.  This is a must-read if you are seeking guidance on how to engage your supervisors to improve service center performance.

3. Average Handle Time Root Cause Analysis and Recommended Opportunities

What it is: In an industry where there are so many metrics, it is crucial that Financial Services companies focus on the right ones. This tool can help companies identify the key drivers of Average Handle Time (AHT) and provide a blueprint for ways to reduce it.

Why your peers use it:

• To manage call volume by understanding the factors that drive AHT.
• To identify both short-term and long-term action steps to overcome AHT-related challenges.

You might also be interested in: Benchmarking Portal. A comprehensive look at CCC’s latest annual survey, this portal will allow you to compare your service center operations with those of your peers.  Financial services companies can use the portal to: prioritize opportunities for performance improvements, compare metrics, and identify areas in which to manage costs.

What other CCC tools or industry-related web sites do you have on your “must-read” list?

We compiled a list of the most downloaded CCC resources that your peers in the Utilities industry are using to help them excel at their jobs.

Here are a few must-reads to add to your list:

Top 3 CCC Resources for Utilities Customer Service Professionals

1. Coaching Starter Guide

What it is: CCC’s most popular download, this tool provides supervisors and coaching staff with detailed guidelines for conducting coaching interactions.

Why your peers use it:

• To identify the reasons for rep performance gaps, and determine the objectives for a coaching session
• To decide which rep behaviors to coach on
• To help choose starter questions for successful coaching interactions

You might also be interested in: Training Materials: Teaching Supervisors Best-in-Class Coaching. This topic center offers a range of resources on teaching supervisors to be more effective with the time they’re already spending with staff, by focusing on the right mix of coaching styles and identifying high-impact coaching opportunities.

2. Benchmarking Portal

What it is: The inside scoop on your peers’ operations—our latest annual survey captured data to give you a full picture of performance across cost, productivity, and quality metrics.

Why your peers use it:

• To compare their metrics to others in the service industry
• To prioritize opportunities for performance improvements
• To identify areas in which to manage costs

You might also be interested in: Benchmarks. A comprehensive list of CCC surveys and diagnostics, members participate (free of added charge) in these various surveys—from employee engagement to customer loyalty and channel preference—to not only gather data about their own operations, but also get a benchmark data set for everyone else who has taken the survey prior.

3. Measuring the Customer Experience

What it is: A topic area about the metrics you should use, and the way you should craft and deploy customer surveys.

Why your peers use it:

• To learn how high customer effort in service interactions promotes disloyalty
• To effectively measure effort levels in interactions
• To compare which metrics work the best for improving loyalty

You might also be interested in: CCC’s compilation of post-contact customer surveys.  A rare glimpse into how 26 companies are designing and administering surveys across industries and customer types, the study discusses common member obstacles, general survey implementation tips to overcome frequent survey pitfalls, and benchmarking of survey practices.

———–

What other CCC resources or industry-related web sites do you have on your “must-read” list that you would recommend to your peers?

CCC members, don’t miss out on what your peers are discussing in our Utilities Industry Peer Group forum.

The most strategic answer to lowering costs is to reduce call volume, because it also likely means customers are finding resolution with fewer calls or they’re simply using self-service.  On a more operational level, though, there are many gains to be had in daily efficiency, which are most evident by looks at the individual cost components for each call.  When I do cost analysis for our annual benchmarking survey, it’s always apparent that rep labor is the most costly component ($4.51 of the $7.67 cost per call is rep labor).  Knowing that, it’s important to break rep labor down even further to see exactly what you’re paying, so here are the four main components:

Shrinkage Cost per Call ($.78 per call): The additional cost associated with rep absence, and includes the cost for agent vacation, illness, unplanned absence, project work, or ongoing training.  Absenteeism can be a big drain on your budget, so try curbing it with some engagement tactics.

Adherence Cost per Call ($.35 per call): The additional cost associated with reps not adhering to their schedule; the increased time reps are paid but not logged into the system and therefore not available to answer phone calls.  To increase adherence rates, consider creating a Traffic Controller/Queue Monitor role.

Occupancy Cost per Call ($.78 per call): The additional cost associated with rep idle time; accounts for the increased time reps spend waiting for the next phone call.  Our research on Workforce Optimization Strategies provides tips for increasing occupancy (as well as improving shrinkage and adherence).

Marginal Cost per Call ($2.39 per call): The incremental cost for a company to answer one additional live contact given the average handle time of the phone call and average hourly wage per rep.  While this is the biggest component of rep labor, it’s important to note that it is the customer facing portion.  You may save a few cents per call by reducing handle time, but avoiding a call-back is the most valuable thing you can do.

The dollar amounts for this data seem small, but even small gains in these productivity measures can have significant impact on your total annual expenditure.  For example, let’s assume your annual call volume is 1M and you reduce shrinkage by just 10% ($.08 per call).  This small improvement will save you $80,000 a year (well, that’s assuming you follow-though with it!).

Please note that this data is based on our specific cost analysis, so if you would like to obtain apples-to-apples values for your own organization, then we invite you to participate in our annual benchmarking survey going on now.

For those executives trying to close out 2010 business, CCC presents a quick recap of its best research of 2010, with the hopes that it helps refocus and fulfill organizational priorities in the coming year.

1. Drivers of a Low-Effort Customer Experience—Many companies wanted to know what causes high and low effort customer experiences so we researched this and find that companies have more leverage over customer experience scores than they ever imagined and the way to take advantage of this is by influencing how the customer interprets the interaction.  The best technique to do so is experience engineering, or actively guiding customers through an interaction designed to anticipate and preemptively react to emotional responses for mutually beneficial outcomes.

2. Modernizing Quality Assurance—CCC finds that efforts to improve the quality of the customer experience are fruitless if companies do not overhaul their quality assurance processes and bring the customer closer to the process.  Leading companies are successfully rebuilding QA by: asking the customer to measure quality, using evaluations to identify staff performance trends rather than isolated missteps, and embedding QA teams within organizations to build better relationships.

3. Best-in-Class Coaching Training Materials—CCC turned our Redefining the High Performing Supervisor key findings—which finds the highest performing supervisors develop staff primarily through integrated coaching, or short bursts of in-the-moment coaching—into a training curriculum to teach individual coaching coaching skills.  The curriculum has slides, exercises, and tools needed to implement this new coaching method.  We also created a series of related e-modules to further embed the concepts.

4. Measuring the Customer Experience—Find all CCC benchmarks, definitions, and research related to measuring CSAT, NPS, FCR, and CES, along with customer experience survey design principles in this resource center.

5. Developing Staff Skills—CCC consolidated all of staff development resources in one place.  Find research, data, and tools related to coaching, training, and frontline metrics/scorecards.

6. Voice of the Customer—Ever a front-of-mind topic for companies, find all of CCC’s research and tools on VOC: how to share VOC with business partners, how to gather VOC from customer interactions, and how to use VOC to anticipate customer disloyalty.

7. 2009 Service and Support Cost, Productivity, and Quality Benchmarking Database—CCC’s latest benchmarking tool allows companies to examine cost per call, AHT, CSAT, and 45 other efficiency and quality metrics by business model, industry, and geography.

8. Inside the Low-Effort Service and Support Organization—Learn how to operationalize effort reduction by reviewing this research on the six principles of low-effort service and support organizations, which is based on a compilation of 4+ years of CCC research.

So that’s a recap of 2010 key research findings and initiatives—certainly enough to keep you busy for a long time.  Learn more about what we’re working on in 2011 here: Creating a Low-Effort Service Environment by Transforming the Frontline Rep Role in the Customer Experience.

We featured a webinar this summer on customer service trends, which includes things as adapting QA programs to better align with customers and incorporating VOC in a more actionable way.  These types of trends are what we hear through conversation over the years, but one resource I find interesting to use for surfacing trends is our benchmarking database (for CCC members), which is now five years old.  For its fifth birthday, I thought it would be a good idea to see what has changed since 2005.

Trend #1:  Average Speed of Answer (ASA) is faster than ever.  In 2005, ASA for consumers was 57 seconds, while now it is 30 seconds.  For business customers, it has gone from 51 to 14 seconds.  Interestingly enough, that’s right around what our conjoint analysis on customer preferences indicated as the preference for wait times: 30 for B2C and 15 for  B2B.

Trend #2: Average Handle Time has increased by 100 seconds, while hours of operation per day have decreased by nearly four hours.  There are many things that could be causing this counter-intuitive finding.  My assumption, though, is that call volumes are down, but the calls that we do still receive are increasingly complex and so take more time to resolve.  Much of this is probably because customers are increasingly handling simple issues in self-service, which would reduce overall call volumes while changing the mix of calls to more complex.

Trend #3: Rep to Supervisor Span of Control is shrinking.  With decreases from 17 to 14 for B2C organizations and 20 to 11 for B2B organizations, we have a clear signal that the supervisor role is increasingly important.  Having enough supervisors to effectively coach frontline staff should be a key priority, so it looks like most centers are coming to that realization.

While these data nuggets may not signal massive shifts in strategy, my general take away from them all is that customers are becoming more difficult to serve – they want to reach us faster, their issues are more complex, and we need more middle management staff to handle it all.  How is your organization working to address these new challenges?  I would imagine the playbook has changed a bit since 2005.

I’ll also take this opportunity to mention that the sixth version of our annual benchmarking survey will open in January. If you are interested, then please let us know.

My trainer is providing me with guidance on where I can get better (shed some unwanted weight), and how specifically to do that (which exercises to perform, along with a proper diet). 

And this kind of guidance is exactly the same sort of help many contact center leaders are looking for now that the 2011 planning season is under way.  Interestingly enough, though, few companies have an effective way to identify and narrow their list of potential initiatives for the coming year.   

Instead, often companies have “strategic” brainstorming sessions resulting in a laundry list of initiatives to tackle.  This list includes “pet projects” and well known opportunity areas, but often doesn’t reveal what to tackle first, and rarely uncovers previously unknown opportunity areas.  It’s similar to a person in my situation (wanting to get in better shape) going about it without a plan or a solid understanding of what to improve/how to make those improvements. 

The end result?  Companies make decisions about initiatives that haven’t been fully vetted, and often go in the wrong direction with their strategic initiatives. 

In order to build a solid game plan for the coming year contact center leaders should:

1) Identify opportunity areas: Group brainstorming can actually hinder creativity; ask staff to determine opportunities individually, then come together as a team to discuss.

2) Determine which opportunity areas have the most potential impact on the business : Also ask staff to determine, individually, which opportunities have the most potential (and ask them “why” that is).

3) Gauge consensus on these opportunity areas: Discuss results of 1) and 2) with the entire team & address any inconsistencies that exist; failing to gain consensus can lead to inaction.

4) Determine a course of action to improve the opportunity areas: Having a clearly defined road map will help to ensure that improvements stay on course.

And while this approach is pretty straightforward few organizations have a plan to execute on the four steps above.  Ultimately, time gets in the way of getting these steps right.  There’s not enough time to fully diagnose opportunities, nor enough time to build consensus around planned initiatives.  The lesson here is: start the process earlier than you’d think.  You’ll need more than a few days to get through these steps.

For CCC members, the Anatomy of a World Class Contact Center is an excellent prioritization tool to help contact center leaders achieve the first three of these objectives, and partnering with CCC will successfully lead you to achieving the fourth.   

Regardless of where you are in the planning process, it’s important to have some guidance for your preparation, and just like a personal trainer helps guide you to success, some basic planning will help shape up your strategy for the coming year.

CCC Members, want to learn more about this incredibly popular diagnostic that’s available to you?  Just contact your account manager to begin implementing this survey at your organization.

I believe we have a tendency to look at individual data points in relative isolation (for example, tracking higher handle times or lower resolution rates) which can lead to a myopic point of view that doesn’t take into consideration the context of that data point, nor connect with what the customer is actually experiencing.

Instead, I’ve found that every data point has a rich story behind it – a story that better explains what customers actually need to have a positive customer experience (as opposed to what they may say at any singular time).

The key is to recognize the difference here – and to dig a little deeper to get a true understanding of the customer.

Here are a few examples of a data that says one thing when simply taken at face value, but something very different once we figure out the story behind it:

• High Web site satisfaction scores and click through rates: These figures are observable and easy to collect, but they only measure what a customer actually does on your customer service Web site, not what they were trying to do.  Higher scores here might initially indicate a successful customer service web site, but actually doesn’t capture if the customer’s issue was resolved.Additional questions about the customer’s intention (and if they were successful) provides a fuller picture of their experience – and identify possible web failure points that could drive the customer to other, more expensive channels to ultimately resolve their issue.
• High customer-reported FCR rates: Asking the customer at the end of the interaction “Was your issue resolved?” captures a part of issue resolution – the customer’s perception about their experience.  It can lead service organizations to feel comfortable in their issue resolution performance if most customers feel as though they got the issue resolution they need. But, the customer simply doesn’t know what they don’t know.  Maybe the check takes two weeks to clear, or maybe they customer will have to call back about a related, downstream issue in a few days.  Tracking callback rates along with customer-reported data (and even QA analysis) can triangulate a more accurate issue resolution rate.
• Higher average handle time and lower first contact resolution rates: Together, even these two data points sound like our service organization isn’t performing well against their goals – a reasonable conclusion from this data is the center is less efficient and provides a lower customer experience.But, what if the call mix is changing as well?  If easier calls are successfully resolved in self-service, the live phone channel will end up only getting the hardest of the hard issues.  Naturally, these would lead to longer calls with lower resolution rates.  By looking at self-service data and channel usage (as well as these phone metrics), service organizations can get a more complete picture of their performance.

So, the moral of the story?  Don’t just a single data point by itself, in isolation of changing customer preferences and needs.  Take some time to connect that data point to the larger customer experience – and you might be surprised with what you find.  Have you ever gone through a similar exercise in your organizations – and what have you found?

For CCC members interested in learning more on measuring the customer experience, visit our resource page on this topic.

“What level of cost savings can we expect after offshoring?”  It’s a question I get a lot.  The unsatisfying answer: “It depends.”  AT Kearney recently released a fascinating exploration into why.  In their Offshore Success Study, AT Kearney gathered data from 35 offshoring companies and analyzed what differences explain the drastic variability in performance across the high performers (who averaged 64% savings and often improved service quality) and the low performers (who only had an 18% average savings).

What’s responsible for this difference?  The Offshore Success Study finds that “execution strategy” – how you handle the transition – is more influential in determining success than variables like offshore location or process complexity.  In short, how you offshore matters more than where or what you offshore:

• Winners don’t focus on savings. The best performers emphasize improving operational performance rather than generating savings (and paradoxically achieve greater savings in the process!).
• Winners invest more to save more. Companies investing more in managing their offshore programs (bigger management teams, more internal on-site resources, strong cultural integration) achieve better performance and savings results.  The best performers had one onshore manager for 50 to 75 offshore FTEs (a ratio that may improve after the operation has stabilized).

So how do you become one of the ‘winners’ – one of those companies with the right execution strategy?  I would have three pieces of advice for someone transitioning to a new offshore location.

1)  Train quickly, coach constantly. CCC benchmarking reveals outsourced reps receive longer periods of new-hire training than a domestic rep performing the same tasks.  Unfortunately, a majority of training material is not absorbed and never used (our research finds that if a rep doesn’t put learning into action within 2 weeks, he/she loses that knowledge).

CCC Members: CCC has great best practices from Friends Provident on how to reduce onboarding training without harming customer satisfaction and from EarthLink on how to implement a customer-focused coaching scheme with outsourcing partners.

2)  Place more emphasis on retention than recruitment. Retention means lower turnover costs and improved performance.  In fact, CCC data reveals that companies that place extra emphasis on retaining high performers have higher performance levels than those similarly focused on recruitment.  Creating advancement opportunities significantly increases agent intent to stay, but offshore agents’ satisfaction with advancement opportunities plummets after six months in role.

CCC Members: Learn how Dow Chemical uses a clear career path to clearly communicate advancement opportunities and increase retention and tenure.

3)  Use contracts to drive quality and focus on results. Too often, contracts reward speed rather than quality. One promising trend we’ve noticed is outcomes-based outsourcing contracts – in other words, charging for the results achieved rather than the number of hours it takes to do a task (e.g., for a travel company, paying per reservation completed, not per call or per hour).  The benefits to this model are increased flexibility, improved incentives for outsourcers to be productive and drive issue resolution, and potentially reduced costs.

CCC Members: Access our white paper on vendor metrics that drive high performance.

What do you think is key to offshoring success?  Were there any steps that your company took that you felt were particularly effective at ensuring a smooth transition?