Julie-Anne Hazlett, Author at Call Design

The importance of operational planning for your business

Think of your business as a ship. You need to make sure everything is running correctly to ensure you stay afloat - however, there's no use sailing if you have no clear idea of where you're headed, or how you're getting there. Your operational plan will be the lighthouse that reminds you which way to go, and highlights any potential dangers that could arise in the near future.

What is an operational plan?

An operational plan details the actions your different teams or departments must carry out to achieve short-term targets and objectives of the company, and is essential in effective workforce management. This plan is updated depending on your needs.

This should comprehensively cover:

What targets need to be met in order to achieve short-term goals.
The sustainability of any projects undertaken.
What the time constraints are.
Who the teams are, and what's expected of the individual team members, including personal targets.
Whether there's any risk of not meeting goals, and how these risks can be avoided.
The financial and time cost involved in meeting the short-term goal.

A man and a woman working in the office.

Operational plans tend to be updated fairly frequently, while strategic plans remain largely unchanged.

An operational plan ensures that a benchmark is in place for the meeting of these short-term objectives, and that you can refer to it in case of risks or to confirm that the day-to-day output of the company is on track with your targets. Depending on the size of a contact centre, sometimes multiple plans are executed for different departments to ensure everyone is on the same page.

What are the differences between strategic and operational plans?

While an operational plan focuses on short-term goals, a strategic plan embodies a long-term outlook for your contact centre, projecting from 12 months to around five years ahead. As a general blanket overview for your entire company, a strategic plan considers what projects or opportunities you'll need to take on to meet your long-term goal, and what changes need to be implemented throughout to support this. Operational plans tend to be updated fairly frequently, while strategic plans remain largely unchanged unless there's a major review.

Why do I need an operational plan for my business?

Having an operational plan is crucial. It's an all-star playbook for your business - reviewing the performance of key staff members through quality management, and recognising how the overall team can work together to meet targets. Without an operational plan, you're out of the league.

Being able to update and refer to a plan enables comprehensive understanding of goals.

An operational plan ensures you can identify areas that aren't generating as much revenue as they should, or are causing losses, and can help you establish what needs to change. Being able to continually update and refer to a short-term plan enables a comprehensive understanding of what the goals are and provides a guide for every step of the process. As a result, your agents should be well aware of what's expected of them and with the right tools self-manage meeting these targets.

Operational plans bring accountability into daily tasks. By having a comprehensive plan of expectations for the performance of your business, if discrepancies occur, you should be able to analyse your plan and identify where these have taken place and how they can be resolved. These plans are a great way of managing other performance indicators too: shrinkage, the number of calls or average handling time, or which of your employees are achieving higher than their targets.

How can I create a plan?

The planning process is dynamic - you need to be able to adapt your plan to a range of changes, which can be a daunting task. If you're new to operational planning, it's best to seek professional consultation or learning tools to help you step into the critical thinking role of an operational planner. There are many resources and guides from which you can draw your operational plan. Attending a workforce management course can open new doors for your management techniques, allow you to explore new avenues for staff optimisation and can help you derive the right targets to implement into your planning.

Call Design's Workforce Management Essentials course is designed to educate workforce management admins and analysts with some of the best industry knowledge and practices. This course breaks down essential workforce management operations to ensure all facets of your business are running as they should be. Examining team efficiency, staff placements and forecasting in the short- and long-term are all theories explored in the course. This way, workforce planners can optimise their staff arrangements to prevent mistakes and make sure they are meeting business requirements.

Call Design has been delivering tailored workforce optimisation solutions to contact centres for almost 20 years, and pride ourselves on our service and industry expertise. To find out how our training courses can help you implement effective operational planning into your organisation, get in touch with our team.

by Julie-Anne Hazlett

Business growth and high staff turnover: what to do about it

Losing trusted personnel is always a concern, especially when you're trying to grow your business.

A high staff turnover rate can disrupt processes, affect staff morale, and drain time, money and resources away from a company's overarching goals.

Here, we'll take a look at why you should care about resignations, the reasons they happen, and what you can do to prevent them, keeping in mind at all times the objective of business growth.

Call Design has training and solutions that will aid your staff retention rates.

How does staff turnover affect business growth?

If you type "How do I grow my business" into Google, you'll likely return a lot of results about what makes a 'foolproof' strategy, how to identify new opportunities, and different ways to get your brand out there. While there's no doubt that all of these things, and more, are important ingredients for business growth, one subject area that's conspicuous by its absence is looking after your staff.

In 2017, the average cost of rehiring mid-range positions was 20% of the position's salary.

The impacts of staff leaving your company are often felt much more widely than you may first think. When it comes to hindering business growth frequent departures can affect the following:

Costs: As anyone with any experience of hiring and training a new employee will know, it doesn't come cheaply. One 2017 study found that on average, the costs to replace an employee are 20% of that position's salary. In an organization with a high turnover, these costs can quickly start to add up and affect growth.
Productivity: With a depleted team, you can't expect to get the same amount of work done. This will, with time, start to seriously impact the productivity of your business, which will, in turn, be detrimental to your ability to grow.
Staff morale: The byproducts of this increased workload for those left behind can include higher levels of stress, and an overall drop in morale. This could create a vicious cycle of resignations if these new stresses become too great.
Leadership prioritizing: Instead of focusing on growth strategies, lengthy recruitment and hiring cycles will serve as unnecessary distractions for you and the rest of the leadership team.

Good engagement with staff can help prevent resignations.

What are the causes of high staff turnover?

A 2017 report from the Institute of Managers and Leaders showed that 10 percent of employees leave their positions voluntarily because they aren't offered sufficient opportunities to develop themselves professionally.

The top three reasons for resigning in this survey were as follows:

Seeking new challenges - 79 percent.
Limited career advancement/progression - 58 percent.
Insufficient remuneration - 45 percent.

What you can do to prevent high staff turnover?

What should strike you first as you digest this information is that all of the above are largely within your control. In this section, we'll discuss some of the specific steps you can take to reduce the rates of attrition in your business.

1. Regularly engage with your staff:

As a people manager you're setting yourself up for failure if you don't frequently take the time to talk to your staff. This is especially true in growing businesses where changes in strategy or increasing demands mean that personnel are consistently having to adapt to new ways of working. Having your finger on the pulse of your employees gives you a better chance of catching problems when they're in their infancy, rather than letting them develop.

2. Conduct exit interviews:

Whether it's the latest in a spate of resignations, or the first departure in a while, it's vital to engage the outgoing staff member in an exit interview. These forums offer the perfect opportunity to discover exactly why this person no longer wants to work in your organisation. Free from the pressure of talking to a professional superior, you'll likely find former employees are a lot more honest in this setting, providing you with valuable insights as to how you can improve staff experience for those who remain, therefore reducing future turnover.

3. Provide professional upskilling programmes

The millennial workforce is only going to grow in the coming years, so knowing how to appeal to this group is particularly important for managers who want to hold onto their staff. A staggering 87 percent of millennials rank professional or career growth and development opportunities as important to them in a role, according to a Gallup report - so establishing training programs should be high on your list of priorities.

The other benefit of this solution is that better-trained staff have more to offer your business. A great place to learn how to instigate such initiatives is with Call Design's Managers Essentials Course. Designed for team leaders and managers, this program will tell you how to set measurable goals with your employees, identify roadblocks that could prevent them achieving their objectives, and provide actionable feedback.

The existence of these initiatives not only makes your company a more attractive place to work, but also lays the foundations for a more productive and engaged workforce.

Call Design's Manager Essentials course can help managers learn how to provide useful feedback to staff.

4. Implement incentive programs

Another crucial way of increasing loyalty is to recognise and reward strong performances.

As we saw above, 45 percent of voluntary resignations come as a result of insufficient remuneration. While simply upping the salaries of all staff is financially unviable in the majority of businesses, an important step is to provide employees with a progression roadmap. By showing workers what they need to do in order to be considered for promotion you make it clear that increased wages are a tangible reality.

However, there are plenty of incentives you can offer instead of/alongside augmented earnings:

Flexible work arrangements: Millennial employees are more likely to be loyal to companies that offer flexible work arrangements, according to the 2018 Deloitte Millennial Survey. Software such as Call Design's workforce management solution ME offers staff the opportunity to take ownership of their personal schedules on-the-go.
Gift cards: Gift cards are a great incentive as you can personalize them to show an awareness of an employee's interests or hobbies.
Events: Company funded events or excursions are perfect for showing staff that their efforts are appreciated, and to bring the team closer together.

These are just a few ideas on how you can help to prevent staff from leaving your business. For more solutions, and information on our training courses, get in touch with Call Design today.

by Julie-Anne Hazlett

What's next? Future proofing your contact centre

Adaptability is the key to survival for all businesses, and none more so than contact centres.

With consumer habits changing constantly, and the continuing influence of technology on customer-business interactions, looking to the future isn't an option, it's a necessity.

Here we'll do just that. This article will examine a few trends that are already occurring in the contact centre industry, and some that you're likely to see in the years to come.

Call Design has solutions to help contact centres navigate the complex world of technology.

1. Increased personalisation

The likes of Spotify and Netflix long ago cottoned on to the fact that personalisation is the key to customer satisfaction, and this is a trend that's branching out far beyond the entertainment industry.

There are numerous ways that contact centres can personalise the experiences their customers have. These include:

Omni-channel approaches: Social media has revolutionised the way people talk to each other, and to businesses. These days, customers expect to be able to reach agents through the medium that's most convenient to them, so establishing which platforms are favoured by your consumer base is a great way to show you understand their habits.
Empathetic agents: Training your agents to understand a product or service is one thing, ensuring they get this information across in a manner that creates trust with a customer is quite another. Managing the quality of your staff's service should remain an utmost priority for workforce leaders.

2. New technologies

We've already discussed the impact of social media, but there are plenty of other tech-based innovations that have a part to play in the future of contact centres.

Artificial Intelligence:

Many contact centres are already taking advantages of the benefits offered by artificial intelligence (AI), and its capabilities are only going to increase as the technology becomes more sophisticated.

A few examples of how AI can be used in contact centres include:

Helping customers find useful information: In the digital age, consumers will often turn to the internet before picking up the phone. Virtual assistants can be used to direct these users to an FAQ page based on their query, or connect them with the best qualified agent.
Taking the place of interactive voice response (IVR) processes: The machine learning capabilities of AI means that it can go beyond presenting a caller with a set of choices, as is seen with IVR. Instead bots can begin to understand statements and therefore provide a better level of customer experience.

Biometric security:

Customers are often asked to give out sensitive information when interacting with contact centres, so it's imperative they trust you. As a result, It's likely that simple identification questions such as full name, age and address will soon become a thing of the past.

Instead, voice biometrics will provide agents with a quick and efficient method of flagging suspicious behaviour that could denote fraud. This works through speech recognition, meaning that even the most advanced fraudsters would struggle to gain access to the information they need.

Voice biometrics could have an important role to play in the future of contact centres.

3. Changing work patterns

It's no secret that sitting at a desk all day isn't great for your body, or your productivity. Well, even that could be set to change.

Computers and headsets are so ingrained into the stereotypical contact centre environment that it's difficult to imagine life without them, but as speech-text technology keeps improving these items may be consigned to the history books. Agents will be free to move around the office, creating a more dynamic workplace and fewer manual administrative tasks.

Going a step beyond this, the numbers of remote workers are also likely to increase. Flexible work arrangements featured in the top five factors that make an employer attractive, according to PwC's Millennials At Work survey. Therefore, finding techniques that enable staff to take greater control over both how and where they work is an important consideration for any contact centre manager.

Call Design's ME Mobile App can help with this. Accessible from your agents' smart devices, this piece of software allows employees to keep track of their schedules, apply for leave and swap shifts with colleagues to create timetables that work for them and you. They can do all of this while on the go, which also reduces the pressure on your workforce management team.

While the day-to-day takes up the majority of your time as a contact manager, it's important to keep an eye on the horizon. Call Design has a raft of training and solutions that you can leverage to ensure your contact centre is prepared for anything the future might throw at you. For more information, get in touch with our team today.

by Julie-Anne Hazlett

Call-Design-has-customised-contact-centre

Meeting your requirements: Call Design's customised courses

To an outsider all contact centres seem much the same.

However, as anyone with experience in the industry knows, this couldn't be further from the truth. Each has its own nuances and quirks, something which is also true when it comes to problems.

Call Design helps contact centres better their services by offering training courses on everything from performance management to manager essentials. However, through doing this we've learnt that it's not always straight forward to pinpoint the issues preventing a given contact centre from reaching its full potential.

Here's our solution:

Call Design has customised courses for contact centres in Australia.

1. Customised courses for Australian contact centres

Expanding training programs was listed as the second most important talent-related initiative to be undertaken in the next two years by respondents to Deloitte's 2017 Global Contact Centre Survey.

However, unless you specifically know which area of your contact centre workflow needs improving, blindly picking a course and hoping it yields results is just a shot in the dark.

63 per cent of respondents to Deloitte's Global Contact Centre Survey want to expand their training programs.

That's why Call Design has developed customised courses to meet your unique requirements.

In these instances, rather than adapting our tried and tested teaching modules to your contact centre, the impetus comes from you. Simply reach out to one of our team with a question, and they'll get back to you to discuss exactly what you need. From there you can work to build a training program that will best suit the unique situation in your contact centre.

2. Why Call Design?

Call Design has worked with contact centre managers and leadership teams for nearly 20 years to help improve their workplaces.

We combine our industry experience with innovative technologies and a consultative approach to ensure all bases are covered. This means we're equally well positioned to offer soft skills training in areas including leadership and communication, as we are to implement enterprise-wide digital solutions like workforce management software.

Our emphasis is on woking with you to identify what is going well, and what could be done better. This builds a solid platform for future growth.

For more information on how Call Design's customised courses can enhance your contact centre, get in touch with our team today.

by Julie-Anne Hazlett

Inbound vs. outbound contact centre channels

There used to be a clear division between inbound and outbound contact centres - one was for customer service, the other for sales. But with the increase in initiatives like inbound marketing and a greater call for proactive customer support, these lines have blurred. Sales people are as likely to receive inbound communication as to reach out themselves, and to some degree, the opposite applies to customer support agents.

So in this contemporary contact centre space, what channels are most important? We examine inbound versus outbound channels and discuss how agents can be prepared to use them.

47 per cent of customers would sooner go online to complain than place a phone call.

Inbound contact centre channels

Social media

All modern contact centres should incorporate social media into their business. And we're not just talking about direct chat, but monitoring comments, tweets and the like, too. According to an eGain report, 47 per cent of consumers would sooner go online to complain than place a phone call, and 18-35-year-old customers are twice as likely to use the web for complaints than those over 55 years.

But do you create a dedicated social media monitoring team or train your existing agents on the relevant platforms? There are mixed recommendations in the industry on this. Where the former may let you hone the expertise of your team, the latter integrates social media into the wider business - which might help you track queries and record data alongside other channels.

Chatbots

Chatbots are a growing trend. This is where customers talk with a system powered by artificial intelligence instead of an agent. Chatbots solve simple problems and let humans focus on more complex, important duties, allowing you to improve customer turnaround and increase their satisfaction.

That said, a business has to be ready for chatbots. They require a team of engineers (in-house or otherwise) and regular upgrading in order to operate effectively. On top of that, chatbots tend to work best when limited in scope; if a chatbot has to do too much, it can struggle, but a simple task it can repeat over and over will help it excel. For anything more complex, it must escalate to a human handler - which is where your agents will require additional training.

Inbound contact centres are increasingly featuring social media and chatbots.

Content

Content - i.e. blogs, whitepapers and the like - may not seem like channels for your sales or customer service agents, but it's vital that your contact centre staff keep up-to-date on what content is being published.

This is because the goal of content marketing is typically to attract more users to your website, answering their queries and educating them on topics relating to your product. Many of these customers will continue through the marketing pipeline to your contact centre staff with questions relating to what they've just read or watched. If your agents aren't aware of what is being promoted, they may be unable to help further and this could cause a negative customer experience.

Traditional channels

Of course, no inbound versus outbound list would be complete without the traditional channels. Phone calls, emails and IVR remain important parts of the inbound contact centre environment even as new technology takes greater importance - this is especially true of older generations, who eGain found still prefer phone calls. So while chatbot and social media training may be exciting, it's important never to let your fundamentals drop.

When was the last time you optimised your forecasting and scheduling system, or your IVR software?

Social media can be an effective tool for outbound contact centres chasing warm leads.

Outbound contact centre channels

Social media and email

Social media and email have grown into strong inbound channels, but they should be integrated into your outbound centre as well. This is to fit in with a warm calling strategy, where agents are reaching out to sales prospects who they've already made contact with online.

Most warm calls will likely follow an email request for a quote or demo, but contact centre agents can also start warm relationships with social media. This could be in the form of replying to prospects' posts, or sending direct messages. Achieving this in your business will require basic social media training for agents, plus expanded training on how to research relevant prospects online (i.e. via LinkedIn).

Advanced diallers

Diallers have of course been around for years, but modern systems greatly surpass their legacy counterparts in terms of functionality. Modern computer algorithms allow systems like Alvaria Predictive Dialler to be forward-thinking tools, detecting busy signals and no-answers, modifying campaigns dynamically, tracking and managing consent, and providing proactive outreach via voice, email or SMS.

These features are designed to maximise agent effectiveness and productivity, and they fit readily into a modern data-centric contact centre.

Advanced predictive diallers are a valuable asset to outbound contact centres hoping to improve productivity.

In conclusion

Inbound contact centres are growing in size and importance, but outbound centres are still going strong and their success rates can be bolstered with smart digital channels. For local contact centres looking to improve their services, technology and training is a must.

If you need help installing either of these in your business, reach out to Call Design today. We've been a leading consultancy in the Australian contact centre space since 1999, with a raft of advanced technology solutions and best-practice training sessions available to optimise your workforce and improve your customer experience.

To learn more, contact us today.

by Julie-Anne Hazlett

How to measure good customer service

Customer service is a very measurable activity. There is an almost endless supply of data that can be measured to assess overall performance and quality: call volumes, chat times, resolution rates for a start.

But while it may be tempting to simply measure everything, sifting through mountains of data is unlikely to be an effective way to determine how good your service really is and highlight areas for improvement. So what exactly should you be measuring to get the most enlightened view of your customer service performance?

Let's have a look at how you can choose the best metrics for your business and some examples of the metrics for success.

Choose your own metrics

Quantifying your customer service efforts is a fantastic way to maximize your potential to improve the way that you communicate with customers and ultimately your brand image. However, not all metrics will be useful for everyone.

Every company is different and while there are some general rules, simply copying another business's metrics is unlikely to give you the best results. Instead you should carefully consider which metrics will be most useful for your own goals and deliver useful insights into your own processes.

When deciding which metrics you should be measuring within your business first consider:

Why are you reporting? It seems like a basic question but it really gets to the heart of your ultimate goals. Understanding 'why' will give you a solid foundation to pave the way for later detailed decisions.
What are the desired outcomes? Everything you're measuring should have a direct link back to your overall objectives. If a number isn't helping you to achieve the insights and actions you want to see, it is effectively useless. Be ruthless with your metrics - fluff numbers waste everyone's time.
Who will be looking at these reports? Understanding who your audience is can help you to better leverage your insights. If it's a C-level who has little on the ground experience, broader data points will be more useful than specifics. However, someone with a deeper insight into customer service may benefit from an overview of the nitty gritty. Also consider how often these reports will be communicated and in what format.

An important point to remember is that there is no single magic metric that will be able to show you the whole picture. Your metrics are most useful in relation to each other. Choose them based on the combined insights they give you, rather than their perceived unique value.

What makes a good metric?

There are several key attributes that good metrics have. They should be:

Actionable: It is not only pointless but frustrating for your team to be measured on things that they can't impact. Make sure your metrics reflect your customer service performance and highlight avenues for improvement.
Authentic: All of your metrics must tell the true story. Fabricating results to create a more pleasing picture is not useful for improvement.
Meaningful: We have mentioned this before, but it's worth doing so again. Everything you are measuring should have a direct link back to your overall objectives. If it's not then it's a poor metric for your business.
Consistent: Trends over quarters or even years often give a more useful insight into your processes than specific daily or even hourly data. Metrics that can be measured consistently over prolonged periods will be much more use to you in the long run.
Contextualized: Raw data presented in isolation isn't desperately useful when looking at a complex process like customer service. Make sure that your metrics can be contextualized at every stage to give them more value.

Customer service metrics should give you the best insight into your processes.

Metrics you can measure for success - some suggestions

For those actively looking for some tried and tested metric ideas to monitor your customer services, here are some suggestions:

1. Resolution rate

This metric represents the overall percentage of issues that your customer service staff resolve. A higher percentage indicates efficiency and expertise from your staff and lower percentages could indicate a number of issues preventing a resolution.

When tackling this result you should consider whether you need to hire more staff, or whether there are systemic issues that take up time or hold up processes.

2. Reply time

This simply refers to the time taken for customers' queries or complaints to be followed up. This metric is often a great indicator of customer satisfaction and your businesses' success at effectively communicating with customers.

If it's taking a long time to reply, you may wish to consider whether you need to increase your number of staff or whether there are broader issues that are preventing reps getting back in touch with people sooner.

3. Customer satisfaction

This can be a complex metric to measure as it has some subjective aspects. It also relies on a lot of external factors such as how the measurement is designed and even how people are feeling on the day of the survey.

This metric is most often measured by a quick, simple survey after a significant interaction with a member of your team. The results of these surveys are most useful when aggregated over a substantial period of time.

However, it is important to think seriously about how you can most effectively measure customer service in relation to your own specific business structure and customer base. For example a younger, digitally-savvy customer base may prefer an online survey, while an older demographic may like to give their feedback on the phone. Also take time to think about your questions and how ranked levels could be interpreted by the audience. For example,four out of five may be very good for some people and only OK for others.

With this measurement, you should consider whether your staff may need further training to improve their customer facing skills. It may also indicate more systemic issues with your user interface.

To learn more about improving and measuring the quality of your customer service get in touch with Call Design today. Our training and solutions in areas such as performance and quality management can help you identify measurable weaknesses in your delivery, and work to improve them.

by Julie-Anne Hazlett

4 features to look for in your next workforce planning tool

Workforce planning tools are essential to the smooth running of any contact center or back office. Choose an effective workforce planning tool and you'll have access to a suite of human resource features that help you get the right staff in the right place at the right time. Choose an ineffective tool and you're at risk of falling behind the competition.

When it comes time to upgrade your suite, it is essential to choose software that doesn't just meet your needs now, but that will continue to do so long into the future. So today, we discuss what features to look for when investing in new workforce planning software.

Your new software must be quick to scale or upgrade if you are to keep up in the future.

1. A solution that is future-proofed

Business needs are always changing, and you must be able to keep up not only with the wider market, but with your own growth. By moving your business away from clunky legacy systems (like spreadsheets) to a modern, intuitive suite, you're laying a foundation that you can build upon in the coming years.

For example, choosing a cloud-based workforce planning solution enables you to access the scalability and ease of use that is inherent with cloud tech. Cloud-based software can be installed easily into your business (requiring little to no on-site infrastructure), upgraded in a timely manner by the software host, and scaled up and down depending on how many users require access.

2. A solution that is easy to use

If your new software is hard to use, people aren't going to use it. It's as simple as that. And if this is the case, you're not getting the most from your investment.

So, it's vital that you find a suite that makes life easier. Take Alvaria WFM for example. Alvaria WFM is one of the global leaders in workforce management and planning not only for its functionality, but its usability too. The user interface is designed to be fast to learn and quick to use, pulling inspiration from common UI designs such as those from Microsoft, Apple and Google.

3. A solution you can use on any device

Being able to use smartphones at work could increase staff productivity by 34 percent.

The modern office is a multi-device office. Your workforce planners are using multiple devices everywhere in their lives, so why not at work too? In fact, a combined Frost & Sullivan/Samsung report found that enabling staff to use smartphones at work can increase their productivity by 34 percent.

Combine your next workforce planning suite like Alvaria WFM with a user-based mobile app such as Call Design's ME. This would allow staff to access the software from their mobile device even if they are out of office, without sacrificing the security or administrative oversight that on-site software would provide.

4. A solution that packs bang for buck

Finally, like any major software investment, your next workforce planning tool must come packed with a host of modern features. That means strong, data-backed forecasting and scheduling, accurate productivity and performance monitoring, and robust leave management and shift swapping - all the foundations of any good contact center or back office success story.

At Call Design, we believe Alvaria WFM is the tool for the job. And we back that decision with expertise - we have vast amounts of experience in the workforce optimization and management space, with a team of consultants who have an average 15+ years of experience. If you'd like to find out more about how Alvaria WFM and Call Design's accompanying apps can help you business, contact us today.

by Julie-Anne Hazlett

Retaining staff: A guide for contact centre managers

It's no secret that attrition is one of the biggest challenges facing contact centres, and it's something the industry acknowledges. In fact, 40 per cent of contact centre managers want to improve retention rates among staff, according to Deloitte's Global Contact Centre Survey.

So what can you do to hold on to your top performing agents? Let's explore.

Contact centre managers need to know how to deal with unhappy staff.

1. Analyse your hiring process

Reducing contact centre attrition starts with your hiring processes.

It can be difficult to know from a resume how well a candidate may suit your company, but it's important to begin building an idea as early as you can. Cover letters in particular should allow you to gain an understanding of how their past experience sets them up for life in your centre, but also what they expect from the role, and how they might fit into the structures you have in place.

Your hiring process should determine whether someone will slide seamlessly into your culture.

This information can then be added to at the interview. As well as digging deeper into their professional skills, a substantial proportion of this time should be allocated to determining whether the candidate will slide seamlessly into your culture. A good indicator comes in the form of their soft skills.

Soft skills is a category that includes attributes such as communication, leadership and collaboration, all of which permit people to work well alongside others and produce an atmosphere where people want to stay and develop.

2. Establish clear objectives, and clear rewards

Opportunities to progress finished second only to a good work/life balance in the list of factors attracting millennials to a workplace, according to Deloitte's 2016 Millennial Survey. Once hiring is complete, therefore, part of the onboarding process should involve giving your new recruits a clear picture of not only their own role, but what they can do to advance.

Crucial to this is having well-defined and easily available employee handbooks. Among other things, these should detail incentives for good performance, as well as Key Performance Indicator (KPI) targets that need to be met. This approach gives your staff something to aim for beyond their day-to-day targets. Though, as we will see in point four, these are also important when it comes to improving retention in contact centres.

Having a clearly defined progression for employees is a great incentive.

3. Personalise incentive schemes

A great way to go the extra mile for your staff, and increase their loyalty to your business, is to personalise the incentives you offer.

This could be something as simple as giving employees a range of options if they're eligible for a reward, showing that you take these processes seriously and aren't simply going through the motions.

Digital rewards are also a great option. Acknowledging high achievers on social networks such as Facebook or LinkedIn provide public acknowledgement of good results, and even a well thought-through email can be an effective way to build manager-staff bonds.

4. Stay on track

Using trackable metrics is an essential aspect of managing agent performance and the quality of client interactions.

This not only ensures that your customers experience a consistently high standard of service, but also allows you to catch potential problems and turn them around.

Tracking performance using metrics gives you the chance to catch problems and provide a solution.

Using metrics allows you to identify areas of weakness and provide the necessary training to bridge gaps. As well as showing interest in the professional development of your individual agents, this proactive management can halt the disenchantment that often comes with poor professional performance. Ultimately this may result in preventing an employee from leaving the company.

However, even when employees aren't missing targets, providing regular commentary to staff, based on the insights gained from metrics, is highly recommended. In fact, 51 per cent of millennials surveyed by PwC said that feedback should be given very regularly or continuously, and the more detailed, the better.

5. Open up your culture

Vital to preventing unnecessary loss of staff is creating a culture where agents feel comfortable talking to management about problems they may be having.

As these issues may range from professional to personal, it's vital that leadership are properly trained to make these interactions productive. As with feedback on trackable metrics, these are opportunities to catch issues before they snowball and provide a resolution that aids with retaining the staff involved.

However, sometimes enlisting the help of outside experts can be the best solution. Call Design's Contact Centre Consulting service is designed to help managers who are too close to identify the root cause of what is preventing an easy fix to culture problems. This service will optimise the running of your contact centre down to the smallest details, including leadership skills that could help you better understand the challenges facing your staff.

Exit interviews allow you to get insights on what went wrong,

6. Conduct exit interviews

Even if you adhere to all the guidance mentioned in this article, from time to time staff will leave. Rather than view this as a failure of your retention initiatives, use it as an opportunity to learn why this employee felt it was time to move on.

This is a golden chance where the individual in question is likely to be far more honest than they were during their tenure at the company. If there was no single reason that led to their departure, you can still gain valuable insights on what they feel your organisation does well, and what could be improved.

Learning from past mistakes and engaging with your staff is integral to reducing attrition in your contact centre. However, if you want more information on the relevant professional services you can make use of, get in touch with the team at Call Design today.

by Julie-Anne Hazlett

Aspect Software Named #1 Workforce Management Market Share Leader in North America by Pelorus Associates

Date: 11/13/2018, Phoenix, Arizona

Alvaria retains top spot in North America in Pelorus Associates’ Workforce Management (WFM) rankings for the 12th consecutive year
Alvaria recognized for a reputation of delivering excellent customer care, most complete contact centre portfolio in the industry and commitment to technology innovation

Alvaria Software, a leading provider of fully-integrated consumer engagement, workforce optimization, and self-service solutions, announced today that Pelorus Associates, an independent consulting company specializing in the contact centre space, has named Alvaria^® Workforce Management^™ (WFM) the WFM market share leader in North America in its 2018 World Contact Centre Workforce Management Systems Market report. Alvaria’s share of 29.8 percent is the largest of the North America workforce management market. Since Pelorus began tracking WFM market data 12 years ago, Alvaria has consistently held a top market share ranking for the North American market.

“Alvaria offers the most diverse set of solutions in the contact centre industry and maintains one of the largest and most comprehensive service and support organizations of any vendor,” said Dick Bucci, Founder and Chief Analyst, Pelorus Associates. “Only Alvaria has native solutions for virtually every core application required in the modern contact centre. Alvaria leaders recognized that by tightly integrating these applications into a complete suite, delivered within a flexible and economical architecture, they could bring to the marketplace products unmatched by other WFO vendors.”

Alvaria has retained its market share leadership due to the company’s ongoing technological innovation, success of the product portfolio and reputation for exceptional customer care. Pelorus also highlighted that Alvaria WFM software can be tailored to unique customer needs, sports a modern user interface and is available in numerous deployment models, from on-premises to private and public cloud environments.

“From introducing the industry’s first workforce management solution in 1973 to developing an AI-driven intelligent assistant for workforce management, Alvaria has consistently recognized key emerging technologies that would help our customers deliver truly exceptional workforce solutions. By engaging customers, employees and contractors, Alvaria has been able to maintain our leadership position for so many years,” said Mike Bourke, SVP, Product Management, Alvaria Software. “Newly added features address how the gig economy is changing the way agents work and companies hire. By weaving the power of AI throughout the management of our workforce solutions, Alvaria will continue to help our customers address the challenges they will face as the market evolves.”

To learn more about Alvaria WFM, please visit: https://www.aspect.com/solutions/workforce-optimization/workforce-management-software.

About Alvaria
Alvaria helps enterprises break down the walls between people, processes, systems and data sources, allowing organizations to unite around the customer journey. By developing fully native interaction management, workforce optimization and self-service capabilities within a single customer engagement centre, we enable dynamic, conversational interactions and create a truly frictionless omni-channel customer experience. Leveraging the agility of our worldwide cloud infrastructure and over 40 years of industry ingenuity, Alvaria conveniently and easily connects questions to answers while helping enterprises keep service levels high and operational costs contained. For more information, visit www.aspect.com.

Follow Alvaria on Twitter at @AlvariaSoftware. Read our blogs at http://blogs.aspect.com.

by Julie-Anne Hazlett

According to Customers, Alvaria Workforce Management Leads the Pack

November 13, 2018 Shelley Hofman
Workforce Management, Workforce Optimization

The G2 Crowd results are in: Alvaria has the highest customer satisfaction rating of all leading WFM solutions.

The growth and popularity of crowd-sourced customer review and recommendations sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor are where consumers go for authentic, unbiased, user-driven information about products and services they are thinking about purchasing. So nowadays, when you are looking for a hotel, you don’t just want to hear how a hotel describes their rooms, you also want to hear from someone who’s actually stayed in them.

So as is often the case, consumer trends find their way into the enterprise space. The growth of peer-to-peer business solution review sites like G2 Crowd enable organizations looking for software to hear directly from existing users in a forum with an objective and bias-free environment.

G2 Crowd is one of the world’s leading providers of online business software reviews. With more than 500,000 reviews, they offer easily understandable rankings of a wide variety of software products using objective criteria combined with the actual reviews from verified users.

What do G2 Crowd reviews show about Alvaria Workforce Management software? As you can see from this real-time G2 Crowd Grid, Alvaria Workforce Management is ranked in the Leaders quadrant and has achieved the highest ranking for customer satisfaction among those leaders. In the Enterprise view of the grid, Alvaria is the only leader.

G2 Crowd also makes comments, ratings, and actual customer reviews available so users of the site can really get inside the heads of the people working with the software. You can find the full list of reviews here, but below are some examples of what Alvaria customers are saying:

Every day, thousands of businesses and hundreds of thousands of agents rely on Alvaria Workforce Management to provide accurate forecasting of interaction volumes, flexible and personalized agent scheduling and insightful daily tracking of real-time agent productivity and adherence. We think it’s the best in the industry but don’t just take our word for it, ask our customers!

https://blogs.aspect.com/according-to-customers-aspect-workforce-management-leads-the-pack/

by Julie-Anne Hazlett