Opinion piece: How motivated is your call centre on a cold winter morning

Take a minute to imagine a typical cold Winter Monday morning in our buzzing contact centres all over the UK.

How motivated are your agents and colleagues? How could you make a difference to their motivation?

The agents’ view

As an experienced agent what thoughts will trundle through your busy head as you take your inevitable place in the bustling daily pilgrimage to work?

• Are you silently begging the powers that be to let you have a day without the mindless, monotonous short calls that numb the brain and could so easily be automated
• Are you hoping against hope that Marketing has got it right this time and not sent out that confusing literature that plagues many contact centres
• Are you predicting how many times your stomach will churn as you have to apologise again and again for dumb or slow process that results in slow resolution to your customers’ problems and often ends in a complaint?

Unfortunately this scenario is what many businesses put their most valuable assets through each and every day of the week and then wonder why they lose them.

The customers’ view

Let’s also take a minute to see how we, as customers, are frustrated by the company on this dismal grey winter morning.

• The post arrives and there’s a cryptic letter telling me something.
• I read it three times in frustration and put it down.
• But it’s on my mind so I use the number to call them.
• I have a query but so do thousands of others so I have to wait in the endless queue with a bodiless person (with a lovely voice) telling me how valuable I am to them.
• The agent apologises for my wait but tells me they’ve had hundreds of calls this morning about the letter and tries to explain.
• I find out it doesn’t apply to me anyway but feel sorry for the agent.
I have used up a quarter of an hour of my valuable Monday morning. 100% of my coffee break. How do I feel? Exxxxxassspperrated!!!!!!

The business view

There is another view to consider within this unhappy scenario on this bleak January morning and that’s the effect on the business. You have to admire the poor operations manager who has had his budget slashed but is still expected to produce and maintain a headcount that is capable of responding to the fluctuating and inflated contact volumes of which, amazingly, as many as 80% are generated by their own business as “own goals”!

What a waste of everyone’s time and money, apart, of course for the beauty therapist who has to iron our all of those knitted brows later in the week!

Piling on the costs

All of the above are all symptoms of a business that is just feeling its way in the dark! It does not understand what is driving its customer contacts. It is not engaging with its front line staff and is just piling on costs. That business desperately needs help!

What “easier” generates:

• Continuous recruitment program/cost for staff and customers
• High attrition rate of de-motivated, undervalued front line staff and their managers
• Higher premises and equipment costs due to high number of FTEs
• High cost of service from “own goal” contacts and poor / slow service
• Increased customer attrition numbers and costs due to continuous irritations
• Poor customer satisfaction score
• Poor employee satisfaction score
• Disengaged front line staff
• Poor brand rating
• Excluding the customer from decision making
• Ineffective and slow process across the business driving up costs
• Blind marketing campaigns without focus.

No kidding, to change this requires relentless energy, true leadership, good communication skills and sustained focus to keep your process live. So, wouldn’t it just be “easier” to keep ploughing money into the contact points to sustain the demand?

There’s just one last question from me on this winter morning: “how can you afford not to change direction?”

It requires a different kind of thinking.

It requires implementing a culture that joins the front line to the rest of the business, listens to the customer and uses that knowledge to reduce costs and stop doing those dumb things to customers!

Good on you!

Sue Cooke can be contacted at sue.cooke@budd.uk.com or you can read more at www.budd.uk.com