Today, your customers seem to have it better than ever.  Through social media, online search engines, DVRs, Smartphones, and apps the customer can have nearly everything they want, when they want it – and how they want it. The world is at their fingertips.

But if customers have all this power, what does that means for our frontline reps? Suddenly, they are dropped into a world that is not only increasingly complex (as products and services become more intricate) but also has well-informed customers that are demanding more.  Customers want things faster, they want the rep to know them, and to do more of the work for them to boot.

Pretty hard for a frontline employee who only a few years ago was probably focused on efficient resolution of pretty simply issues, right?

Well, the strain on the rep is starting to show.  81% of service organizations have not seen their frontline performance improve in the past few years.  Over 25% of reps say they are currently highly disengaged in their jobs – putting forth less effort and more likely to leave their job.

So, what’s the answer?  How can the service organization get the next boost in rep performance?   Well, we’ve identified a previously undiscovered, but extremely powerful skill set that will deliver a 11% increase in rep performance.  (Hint: it’s probably not what you think it is!) Read More »

It’s no secret that today’s workplace environment is very different than it was even a year ago—many staff are working in roles that are beneath their qualifications, many wages still have not recovered to previous levels, and many staff continue to defer retirement.

In fact the changes are so significant and long-lasting that companies that once saw these trends as temporary are now embracing these changes as permanent.  And of course service and support organizations have not been immune to these changes.

Among the most major changes is the new influx of younger generations into the workplace.  With them come different expectations, motivations, preferences, and styles, leaving many organizations at a loss for how to effectively manage and motivate these staff.

But given the economic climate, older demographics also have changed their perceptions and expectations of the workplace environment, creating a complex management situation for many organizations.

In fact, organizations today are not just coping with managing the demands of individual demographics, but how the demographics interact with each other, too.  Suddenly retention, engagement, and team dynamics are quite complex, calling into question tried and true engagement and management strategies.

Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

So, you’ve been Sourcing the Retiree Labor Pool—as we recently blogged about—to help fill voids at your company left by retiring Baby Boomers. Now what?

Yes, retiree employees are known for embodying traits such as experience, perseverance and strong work ethic. But this doesn’t mean that less effort is required to keep them engaged and incented to stay with your company.

In fact, it’s the opposite—older workers, especially those employed seasonally, often lack long-term commitment to organizations. Your company must appeal to retirees’ specific value drivers to improve engagement and retention. Older age segments have more extensive work and life experiences—therefore they value unique organizational traits.

Here are some important factors to consider when planning how to get retirees embedded into the organization: Read More »

Curious to benchmark your service and support organization’s 2011 strategic plans with those of competitors?  Think frontline staff performance improvement.

Faced with growing contact complexity, continued tight budgets, and increased revenue generation mandates, optimizing frontline performance has become the underlying motivation for most major service and support initiatives in 2011.

To address this growing challenge, many organizations are following tried and true solutions: conducting engagement surveys, emphasizing coaching, improving access to technology.  Yet even the most progressive organizations that have optimized these areas do not find the performance gains they anticipated, suggesting that these traditional levers are insufficient.

So how to best maximize frontline performance?  CCC increasingly believes that companies must address the environmental factors that prevent staff from best handling the customer experience. Read More »

As autumn is well underway, companies are making their holiday season arrangements before winter arrives. These plans are often quite visible as small retail outlets pop up in airports, malls, parking lots, and elsewhere. 

The statistics are impressive: Toys “R” Us to open 600 Express locations to provide more convenient locations to potential customers. Borders is doing the same, opening 25 Borders Express outlets in smaller markets.

More eye-catching is the number of staff required for the holiday season. Toys “R” Us announced plans to take on 45,000 temporary employees, and Best Buy, also expanding, will bring on 29,000 seasonal staffers.

As customer service knows well, this seasonal expansion is often invisible to consumers when it happens behind the walls of the contact center. Customers may notice more retail staff in the stores, but may not know the company also hires more contact center staff to keep up with increase in contact volume.  And, with holiday call volumes spiking as much as 10x normal volume, many more frontline staff are required to provide high levels of service for customers who have very urgent needs for the holiday season.  

But, a fast ramp up in staff size presents a tall order for the service organization: How do we quickly recruit and train seasonal staff to meet customer demands without a gap in service? Read More »

This is a guest post by Vanessa North of the  Communications Executive Council, our sister program for communications leaders and their teams. While applicable to all employees in a company, it’s got some great tips for contact centers whose employees are contantly multi-tasking with technology as they work with customers.

I  just got back from a glorious ten days in Croatia (which by the way, I would HIGHLY recommend– totally beautiful and so far, unspoiled) and now that I’m back, I am noticing more than ever the constant bombardment of information, emails, & instant messages that distract me from doing any true thinking.  Matt Richtel has coined the term the “three-day effect” when you are away from all technology and distraction.  After three days you start to relax, sleep better, and lose that nervous twitch of checking your blackberry every 3 seconds.  This is probably why the average weekend just doesn’t feel long enough; you get close to relaxing and then get pulled back to reality with a thump.

The New York Times reports that the average computer user checks 40 websites a day and can switch programs 36 times per hour.  Think of what that means in terms of how much information that you are subjecting yourself to on a daily basis.  It’s no wonder we hear, “I haven’t had time to think” so often.  It is only when you actually stop reading and taking in new information that you can sit back and really think what it all means, and actually process it.  By constantly rushing from one idea to the next without giving ourselves the time to think, we aren’t giving ourselves time to know what we really think.  I’m probably not the only one who sits there and has revelations when I’m on holiday.  You realize opinions you never knew you had.  You make life-changing decisions (or at least come up with the ideas for them).  In short, you think.

So as companies are striving to add more channels to reach their employees from all angles– are we actually doing more harm than good?  Read More »

By Hannah Hellebush

In speaking with members we hear that many service center professionals are interested in the merits of rep-level certification programs. There are a lot of programs available—most offer an online course for frontline reps who become “certified” after the completion of a test. The courses take a few weeks to complete and are priced per individual rep.

Certainly, rep-level certification programs could potentially help in skills training and upskilling.  But many companies we talk to say it’s hard to measure the gains from these programs in terms of direct rep performance gains.  And of course, CCC has long held that coaching (not training) is by far the best skill development lever you can pull. 

So, I’ve got to wonder – if the jury is out on rep-level certification programs to drive performance, what are some other benefits the programs could have? Read More »

At CCC we recently completed our annual performance reviews, and it’s gotten me thinking about talent.  More specifically, our high-potential talent and how to keep them around.  Sure, some folks tell me career options are limited in the service world – and there’s ‘healthy’ attrition of individuals who aren’t good fits.  But our top frontline staff, the ones who can just get it done – don’t we want to do everything in our power to keep them?

And the news from one of our sister programs, the Corporate Leadership Council (CLC), isn’t good.  In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, their study of over 20,000 ‘emerging star’ employees found some startling facts:

• 1 in 3 high-potential employees are disengaged from their job – and are far less productive as a result
• 1 in 4 intends to leave their current company within the next year
• 1 in 5 see a misalignment between what the company wants and their own personal aspirations

Sound scary?  Well, it definitely got my attention.  And it got me thinking about what we can do to swing these statistics back in our favor. Read More »

Big revenues and the CEO’s upcoming book release are winning Zappos loads of public press. Zappos doesn’t approach customer service like most organizations. In fact, the company makes it publically clear they have a culture that qualifies as more than just little bit quirky.

One of Zappos’s core principles is to promote employee and customer happiness. Of note on the employee side: Zappos values happy employees so much that at the end of new-hire training, trainees are offered $2,000+ to quit. Read More »

While reading The Economist last week, the cover story on developing countries and innovation caught my eye.  The gist of the article: developing countries are not just low-cost sources of labor, but are in fact increasingly the source of product and service innovation.  Everything from Kenya’s leading use of money transfer by mobile phone to Bharti Airtel’s partnership with competitors to share radio towers was mentioned. 

This idea got me thinking more specifically about the service organization.  No, not about offshoring or outsourcing implications, although Dan has written on that topic recently.  I actually started thinking about times when new ideas come from previous unexplored or even unlikely sources.  Just like the world is waking up to the insight potential within developing countries like Brazil and India – service leaders are beginning to realize the untapped ability of their frontline reps to bring new ideas to the business. Read More »