Posted by Kerry Engle on Wed, May 27, 2009 @ 05:24 PM
In March and April of 2009 Knowlagent asked call center managers how they were going to address the cost reductions they have been asked to make due to the recession. The goal of this research was to determine how, or if, the use of "at-home" or "remote" agents was being considered as part of the cost cutting solution.
What we found was that indeed, the use of "at-home" agents was one of several cost cutting strategies that was being considered by call center management. The top 3 tactics identified for building their "at-home" agent programs were:
- "Hire from with-in"
- "Agents must live within a certain radius of the call center"
- "Agents will work partly at home and partly in the center."
We also found out that most of the companies surveyed were going to use a separate process for hiring, training and coaching their "at-home" agents rather than follow their traditional processes. However, the percentages were close enough 55% to 45% respectively that it indicates to us that none of these participants really had a clear understanding of what does and doesn't work with "at-home" agents.
The conclusions we made regarding how "at-home" agents can impact cost reductions were:
- Most of the survey participants are still in the early stages of utilizing "at-home" agents.
- Being early in the process call centers are still trying to "figure out" how to leverage the "at-home" agent for cost savings.
- Most of the call centers we talked to were justifying the expense of "at-home" agents through the improvement of quality and performance. Since most of the implementation models we found were requiring agents who work from home to live within the community being served by the call center, there were currently not much in savings associated with the call center's "brick and mortar" costs.
- Finally, the biggest obstacle we found to utilizing "at-home" agents outside of the call center's community was that call centers have not yet figured out how to effectively manage, coach and train their staff remotely. Once this obstacle is overcome, we should be seeing more centers move into geographic areas where they can utilize lower agent salaries as part of their cost savings model.
If you are interested in this research and other benchmarking studies please visit http://www.knowlagent.com/resource_center/.
Posted by Kerry Engle on Tue, May 19, 2009 @ 05:21 PM
At Knowlagent, we ran a set of focus groups with call center supervisors and management. The results were very enlightening. Over the next few weeks, we will share the results of those focus groups here in the Call Center 102 blog.
The first and most frequently mentioned issue that affects the quality of the coaching done by supervisors in the call center... is time. Every single supervisor and manager that we interviewed expressed a strong desire to have more time to coach their call center agents. When we asked them if they could change one thing about their coaching environment, 100% of them said, "Find more time to coach!"
And, most importantly, all supervisors strongly believed that having more time to coach would improve performance against all key call center indicators.
If you have this problem, check out Knowlagent's Coaching & Performance Management module with RightTime. This tool is guaranteed to increase your coach-agent face time.
Posted by Kerry Engle on Tue, May 19, 2009 @ 05:15 PM
Spend less and get better. Do more with less. Achieve targets at a lower cost.
This is the mantra we are hearing when we are out talking to call center leaders. It is no surprise given the economy. To some degree, this has always been the mantra of the call center. We'd like to know what you are being asked to do.
For more information on how to reduce labor costs while driving performance, visit http://www.knowlagent.com/.