ICMI Research: Most Contact Centers Are Hindering Their Agents

ICMI’s Senior Analyst, Justin Robbins, shared this startling statistic on a recent webinar:

74% of contact centers admit they prevent their agents from providing the best service possible

This stat is scary, but not surprising. Here’s a typical scenario:

You call a customer service number. The first step is navigating their frustrating Interactive Voice Response system that’s designed to deter you from speaking with a live agent. You finally get past that gatekeeper only to be put on hold.

You’re frustrated by the time you finally get to talk to a real person.

This system puts contact center agents at a disadvantage when it comes to making you happy. ICMI’s research suggests agents face a number of additional challenges once they get you on the phone:

  • Agents aren’t empowered
  • They don’t have access to the right tools and information
  • Their contact center isn’t listening to your feedback

Lack of Empowerment

Robbins shared a statistic about empowerment that was really eye-opening:

86% of contact centers don’t empower agents

Empowerment means having the resources and authority to take care of the problem right then and there. This can be the difference between first contact resolution and a problem that takes 16 contacts to resolve.

 

Lack of Tools

Contact center agents can’t be empowered if they don’t have the tools they need to serve their customers. ICMI discovered this is another major problem:

20% of agents don’t have access to real-time customer information

This includes essential data like contact history and customer account information. It's why the airline customer service agent might tell you your lost suitcase had arrived at the airport even when it really hadn't. These agents are flying blind.

 

Lack of Feedback

It seems like we get asked to take a survey nearly every day. That’s why this next statistic was really surprising:

47% of contact centers don’t have a customer satisfaction program

This means nearly half of contact centers aren’t actively trying to find and fix the problems that frustrate us as customers. Even those contact centers that do have a formal customer satisfaction program don’t always do it well. 

 

The Webinar

You can learn more about ICMI’s research and gain insight into overcoming these challenges by viewing the webinar on demand:

2015 ICMI Contact Center Research Findings: Own the Moments

Presenters:

  • Justin Robbins, Senior Analyst, ICMI
  • Nate Brown, Manager of Customer Support, Underwriter’s Laboratories
  • Ann Ruckstuhl, SVP & Chief Marketing Officer, LiveOps
  • Erica Strother, Community Specialist, ICMI

Trend to Watch: Contact Center Quiet Rooms

Contact center agents’ brains are fried.

The cause is a production line mentality. Agents hum along like factory workers in an endless queue of customer contacts. Everything is tracked, measured, and evaluated. Efficiency rules.

Multitasking is seen as the key to efficiency. The more you activity you can squeeze into an agent's day, the more efficient you are; or so the thinking goes.

It's rampant among contact center agents. The average agent now uses seven screens to serve customers (source: ICMI). 

All this repetitive multitasking leads to a disorder called Directed Attention Fatigue (DAF). Symptoms include distractibility, impatience, and difficulty starting and finishing tasks. Psychologists have described the symptoms as being identical to ADD.

The only known cure for DAF is rest.

That rest can be hard to come by. The noisy break room? Nah. What about one of those new collaboration spaces? Collaboration isn’t rest. How about a conference room? Sorry, there's a meeting in progress.

Some savvy contact centers are giving agents a place of their own called a quiet room to decompress.

 

What are Quiet Rooms?

These are special rooms specifically set aside for quiet reflection. They give agents a place to stop the rampant multitasking and recharge. Perhaps read a book or listen to some music.

VITAS Healthcare calls their quiet room the Serenity Room. They provide hospice care services, and the Serenity Room was originally designed as a place for Chaplains to provide grief counseling to patient families. When they built their call center, they decided to include a serenity room for their agents.

According to Patient Care Administrator Joann Gawczynski, the serenity room has become a popular place for agents to regroup after a difficult call or to just take a break.

“Our serenity room allows our staff a quiet room to go and relax.  They can put on the radio or listen to a CD. It’s set up as a sitting room you may have in your own home.”

Image courtesy of Joann Gawczynski

Image courtesy of Joann Gawczynski

A recent ICMI poll found that approximately 50 percent of contact centers have quiet rooms. Couches are popular, but you might find a yoga room or even bunks where agents can catch a few winks.

 

Rest is Key

Many agents take a break from work but put themselves right back on the multitasking hamster wheel. They pull out their phones and text, chat, like, and play games. 

Agents don't just need a break from work. They need a break from multitasking.

That's what makes quiet rooms so useful. Unfortunately, office space is a precious commodity. Not every contact center can designate a whole room for peace and quiet. 

Some contact centers take advantage of their outdoor surroundings. Getting out into nature is an effective way to recover from DAF. 

The agents at telecommunications company Phone.com hike what is simply known as The Hill. It gets the blood flowing and offers a sweeping view of the surrounding community at the top.

Image courtesy of Jeremy Watkin

Image courtesy of Jeremy Watkin

The Hill really gets the team's creative juices flowing. It's even spurred this musical homage from Jeremy Watkin, Phone.com’s Director of Customer Service.

 

Creating Your Quiet Room

There are four characteristics of a quiet room that can help agents recover from DAF (source: Kaplan, 1995).

Being Away. The environment should feel like an escape from the normal workplace.

Fascination. It should allow for activities that are effortlessly absorbing. Examples including reading a book, working a puzzle, or listening to music. Nature has been shown to be highly effective too.

Extent. The environment should be able to rich enough and large enough to promote sustained rest. In this sense, a Quiet Corner won’t work nearly as well as a Quiet Room.

Compatibility. The space should be compatible with agent decompression. In other words, your agents might love having an Xbox, but saving the world from space aliens won’t make their brains feel any less fried.

I'll admit that the concept of a quiet room seems a bit new-agey. Perhaps too new-agey for senior executives to take seriously. 

It might be helpful to consider the payoffs when designing your quiet room. 

DAF is a huge cause of agent burnout. If you can prevent DAF, that will lead to better calls, better service, and better agent retention.

ICMI’s 2014 Contact Center Demo and Conference Re-cap

Last week’s Contact Center Demo & Conference in Chicago, IL was a blast. There were great keynotes, engaging breakout sessions, and lots of networking.

Here’s a re-cap of the conference in case you missed it.

 

Conference Overview

The conference, known as CC Demo, is put on by ICMI. They provide research, conferences, and training for contact center professionals. 

CC Demo attracts a nice blend of participants from senior leaders to contact center supervisors. You can read an overview here or check out the conversation on the Twitter backchannel.

 

Highlights

There’s just too much to cover at a conference like this. Something’s going on everywhere you turn!

Here were a few highlights for me.

 

Chip Bell’s Keynote

Chip did such a great job keynoting last year’s CC Demo that he was brought back by popular demand! He shared six strategies for delivering innovative customer service from his book, 9 1/2 Principles of Innovative Service.

One fun moment from Chip’s presentation was when he talked about staying at the Hotel Monaco in Chicago. They made his stay a little brighter by putting a gold fish named Trixie in his room. 

He recounted a return trip to the hotel where the front desk associate asked him, “Shall I send Trixie up to your room, Mr. Bell?”

It got even better when Marriah Barnett sent this Tweet:

Leslie O’Flahavan’s Email Session

Too many conference sessions are death by PowerPoint. Not Leslie’s! Her session was called Not Dead Yet: How to Write Great Emails to Customers in the Age of Social Customer Service.

It was highly interactive with great conversation and hands-on activities. Here were a few take-aways that stood out for me:

  • Critical reading is critical - make sure you understand what the customer wants.
  • Sound friendly, not stodgy by writing like a real person.
  • Integrate self-service options whenever possible.

 

New Research from ICMI

ICMI’s Senior Analyst, Justin Robbins, gave us a sneak peek at some of ICMI’s latest contact center research.

Here’s one stat that really stood out:

The average contact center agent uses seven screens to serve customers.

That’s up from five screens last year. Given the destructive qualities of multitasking, it seems like this trend is going in a dangerous direction.

Robbins also shared the results of a survey outlining the top ten challenges faced by call centers. Captured here in two grainy phone photos:

ICMI’s next big conference is the 2015 Contact Center Expo & Conference. It runs May 4 - 7 in Orlando, Florida. There’s already big buzz for this one! 

Here's what your contact center agents are really thinking

Do you know what your contact center agents are thinking?

Do you know what your contact center agents are thinking?

A study from BenchmarkPortal reveals new insights into what contact center agents are really thinking.

The Agent Voices study was based on over 5,000 surveys with contact center agents in North America. It reveals that overall job satisfaction among contact center agents is 76.2 percent. Not surprisingly, the thing agents like best about their jobs is working with customers.

There are a few interesting highlights that deserve attention from contact center managers.


New agents need more support

A whopping 92.9 percent of agents gave their new hire training program high marks, but only 60.8 percent felt their transition from training to the contact center floor was adequately supported.

The training program itself may be part of the problem.

Call center agents must simultaneously use a wide variety of skills to do their jobs. This may include recalling product knowledge, navigating a variety of software programs, and interacting with the customer in an appropriate way. Many call centers train their new hires on one skill at a time, which makes them easier to learn.

Unfortunately, this method can also cause agents to experience a form of mental gridlock when they first try to use all the skills together at one time. This typically happens as agents make the transition from training to the contact center floor.

Call centers can overcome this problem and speed up new hire training by moving to scenario-based training. I’ve used it to cut new hire training time by as much as 50 percent while still improving new hires’ performance. You can learn more about this approach from an article I wrote for ICMI earlier this year.


Agents want a better work environment

Most call center agents really want to do a great job for their customers and 83.8 percent said they’re proud to work for their organization. The survey also showed that call center agents generally gave their co-workers high marks and felt a strong sense of teamwork.

These results were tempered by some signs that work environment needs improvement in many centers. One of the most striking findings was that only 44.6 percent of agents agreed that their working atmosphere is usually optimistic and positive.

One explanation is the way responsibility is structured in many contact centers. Agents often solve problems caused by another department, such as a shipping error made in the warehouse or a bug in a new software program. They must also frequently rely on someone in another department to implement the solution. 

It can be discouraging to repeatedly face problems that appear to be outside of your control. Many contact center agents are susceptible to a condition called Learned Helplessness where poor service seems like a foregone conclusion. Agents experiencing Learned Helplessness can stop trying to serve their customers if they believe their efforts will be fruitless.


Good relationships with supervisors, but not executives

A contact center agent who works for a financial services firm recently told me that executives routinely ignore contact center agents when they see them in the elevator. This may be a wider trend - only 56 percent of agents said they trust the messages from senior management.

Things are a little rosier on the relationship front when it comes to agents’ direct supervisor. A total of 77.6 percent reported they had a good working relationship with their direct supervisor.

The lesson here is executives must be visible in the contact center. They need to take time to listen to their frontline agents and explain their strategies and policies. Acknowledging employees in the elevator probably wouldn't hurt either.


Agents don’t feel heard

A majority of contact center agents don’t feel heard. Only 39.1 percent felt their leaders exhibited effective listening skills and only 45.7 felt their opinion was valued.

This may help explain why many employees don’t pass along feedback to management. I uncovered this trend earlier this year in a post titled Why Employees Don't Pass Along Customer Complaints.


Customer service needs work

Agents tend to feel their own teams do a pretty good job on customer service, but the company as a whole needs work. Only 47 percent felt that decisions in their organization were aimed at achieving the highest possible level of quality for their customers, but 71.3 percent felt their customers could trust them.

This disparity may be a product of two things. One, contact centers can sometimes be an outlier where other parts of the organization aren’t nearly as focused on service. Anothe possibility is contact center agents may suffer from the Dunning-Krueger effect where they overrate their own ability in comparison to others. 


What do you think?

If you are a contact center agent, or manage contact center agents, it would be great to hear from you. Are these results true for your center? Or, is your environment a little different?