The right attitude
"Whether it is to sell your products and services, gather information, collect outstanding moneys or simply receive calls, your contact centre is your vital link to your world of business and customers," says Diane Capazorio, director: strategic business solutions at Kelly.
Today’s contact centres are highly sophisticated business units enabled by highly sophisticated software and applications that do almost anything. Automated voice prompting even provides for basic voice-recorded responses to customer enquiries. But does this really connect you with your customer?
"At the end of the day, it is your contact centre agents that make the difference; they interact with your customers and satisfy their needs; they connect you to your world of business and customers! And, it takes a very special person to do this effectively. To really make a connection with your customer, your agents need to be empowered with as much knowledge about your products and services as possible; they need to be motivated on an ongoing basis to ensure that they deliver only the very best. More importantly, they need to be the right people with the right attitude," states Capazorio.
In the last five years, the local contact centre industry has matured into one that can hold its own in the global market. Along with that, the contact centre has evolved from merely providing agents, to filling seats, to providing end-to-end people strategies that include a mix of staffing models aiming to ensure the optimal and effective performance of the contact centre.
By taking a comprehensive approach to contact centre staffing, clients benefit from a tailored people-partnership approach that starts with in-depth strategic insight into your needs, objectives and key deliverables. "This should go beyond merely connecting people with jobs to connecting people with your world. Key to this is innovation and creative thinking aimed at not only meeting your needs, but enhancing your efficiency, effectiveness and profitability," reveals Capazorio.
This means increased emphasis on recruiting contact centre agents who are the right fit not only for the specific job, but for your customers; multi-skilled agents who can deal with all the customer’s requirements at the first point of contact. In addition to good competencies (such as communication) and skills (such as PC skills), the right personality ensures a connection with the customer and the ability to remain positive and helpful throughout the day is critical! The wrong people in the job will directly impact on the already challenging problem of attrition, and, of course, on customer satisfaction.
Hand-in-hand with having the right people in the job, is flexibility; the ability to staff up-or-down in line with business fluctuations. The month-end period, for example, often requires the contact centre to increase numbers significantly. Retaining these agents in the contact centre outside the busy periods puts strain on the business unit’s budget.
This has led to optimisation and utilisation of agents becoming a critical element in the staffing mix. This means not staffing around peak period needs and then having underutilisation during off-peak periods. "One solution," Capazorio discloses, "is to cross-train agents in other areas of the business. These agents could then work in the contact centre during peak time and work in another department during off-peak times. This not only ensures skills retention, but maximises the cost of training. Another solution could be to make use of lifestyle workers who only want to work for a few days in a month."
"Retaining talent should be the core driver of any contact centre people strategy. The cost of new starters is widely known. But, today it goes beyond this. It is about the cost of re-connecting with your world … business and customers," Capazorio concludes.
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