Interview with a Call Center Veteran: Better Quality Agents Starts at the “R” not the “T”

On Thursday, June 13th, we had the pleasure of sitting down with a senior leader inside one of our customer accounts to talk about their journey from agent to RTO Senior Manager, and everything learned along the way. For confidentiality, no individual or company names have been shared, and we will refer to our senior leader as “Jane.”

It all started back in 1998 when Jane was in school and she took a part-time job in a collections department. It was there she fell in love with customer service and quit her bachelor’s degree! Jane had a talent and a passion for helping people, which eventually led her to the Recruiting, Training and Onboarding (RTO) department for one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world. She knew then that good quality agents start at the R, not the T. We asked her to share some of these insights and her unique experience with our audience. Here’s what Jane had to say….but first some notes on Jane’s hiring profile and some key moments from the interview below:

Customer Profile:

• Global telecom company with onshore and offshore contact center partners
• Hiring 7000-8000 contact center agents each year
• Administering 400,000 continuous training programs annually
• Agents have up to ten different technology systems
  

5 Key Moments in This Interview:

• “Making sure you have the right people in the right chairs at the right time…everyone needs to understand how they’re making a difference in the greater picture.”
• “Typically we need agents to stay for at least 90 days before we start to see an ROI…we aim to bring agents to proficiency in 45 days.”
• "Confident agents will feel empowered to use their soft skills to guide the customer throughout the call with no need for putting them on hold."
• “I knew that having strong agents started with recruitment. For so many years contact centers have been focused on developing agents during training, the “T”, but I knew that only goes so far.”
• “When you can show results, identify trends and exceptions that helps with improving the business, you get the right visibility to keep innovating.  Collaborating with HiringBranch as allowed us to do this and optimize our recruitment process further more."

Interview with a Senior Call Center RTO Leader

HiringBranch: What advice would you give to other call center leaders?

Jane: It’s about your customers, numbers and service level. And making sure you have the right people in the right chairs at the right time. Let your leaders and agents know they’re not just one in a million; everyone needs to understand how they’re making a difference in the greater picture.

HiringBranch: What’s the best motivation for contact center employees?

Jane: Compensation and opportunity. Especially in regions where agents may have to travel a long way, they need to be motivated to do so. In these remote locations, it can be helpful to give agents shuttle services to assist with transportation or even medical staff and health services on-site to help with absenteeism and productivity. In my experience benefits, bonuses and payouts are the greatest motivator.

HiringBranch: How important are contact center jobs in these remote regions?

Jane: Contact center jobs are extremely important and provide a means to support families. However, contact center opportunities are typically densified in these regions, giving agents the ability to move around as they please, even using contact centers as temporary work between jobs. So while these jobs are important, agents loyalty to one center is a challenge, they will look for the greatest incentive, or the one that meets their current needs best. It is why we have to find the best plan to keep them [agents] motivated and have strong onboarding strategies.

HiringBranch: When agents leave how does that impact the contact center?

Jane: It affects the contact center’s ability to answer customers therefore work force management as well as revenue. Typically we need agents to stay for at least 90 days before we start to see an ROI. With that in mind, we aim to bring agents to proficiency in 45 days.

“Agents now have to use ten different systems and need to support technical, sales, and customer service all at once. They need to have technical skills, people skills, and be able to navigate the processes to solve customer problems, all while the customer is on the line.”

HiringBranch: How has the role of a contact center agent changed since you started your career in 1998?

Jane: Since 1998 the hourly wage for an in-house agent onshore has only increased 4$ per hour As third party contractors entered the contact centres market, salary evolution stopped due to competitive strategies. That said, the technology and the job has become increasingly complex! Agents now have to use ten different systems and need to support technical, sales, and customer service all at once. They need to have technical skills, people skills, and be able to navigate the processes to solve customer problems, all while the customer is on the line. So they have to be good at prompting the client through all this, doing it in a certain amount of seconds, and keeping good performance metrics. So the agent’s adaptability and resilience skills needs to be even stronger in this position than it used to be.

HiringBranch: Where do soft skills fit into the picture and how important is it to fill gaps in conversation?

Jane: Strong soft skills and conversational abilities is what makes a big difference on calls.  It’s not just about going through the process to fix the situation, it’s how the customer will feel from the beginning to the end of the call.  Reassuring the client, filling the gaps of silence and using small talk to gather important information about the customer will help offer a solution as well as a positive experience. Confident agents will feel empowered to use their soft skills to guide the customer throughout the call with no need for putting them on hold.

HiringBranch: What does a strong onboarding process mean for a large organization?

Jane: Recruitment, training and onboarding is too often viewed as a cost center and not a revenue driver, when in reality it is quite the opposite.  We decided to take the challenge roughly 10 years ago to demonstrate to the business that with strong R,T, O processes, we could bring great ROI. Leveraging the right recruitment strategies including a strong hiring assessment, creating best-in-class task oriented learning strategies, and personalized onboarding tools helped us show the business we were on the right path. Data analytics needed to be at the forefront of all those strategies to prove us right.

HiringBranch: So what did you learn about recruitment?

Jane: What attracted me to recruitment from training was that I knew that having strong agents started with recruitment. For so many years contact centers have been focused on developing agents during training, the “T”, but I knew that only goes so far, and it’s the same with coaching. It starts with great agents from the beginning, the “R” - not to mention training can be very expensive and contact centers spend a ton on training.

We started measuring candidates with different skills assessments for competency and language. The challenges with those skill assessments were in the predictability for one, and the other was that it was difficult to have them to adjust the testing strategy which was lengthy and not mobile friendly. The goal is always to ensure that the performance predictability driving the ROI is as accurate as possible.

When we finally found the right assessment tool using HiringBranch, it had a big impact on our recruitment strategy. We can assess, in one assessment, language and skills together [previously two assessments], and this changed the game for our contact center partners because candidate drop-off improved dramatically. At the recruitment level, the partners really appreciate this change in assessment.

Candidates who do the assessment get a job preview and know what to expect so they don’t drop off later as much either, and this is happening at the “R” level. Making this correlation was so important for us. It changed the entire flow of recruitment.

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"When you can show results, and identify trends and exceptions that helps with improving the business, you get the right visibility to keep innovating. Collaborating with HiringBranch as allowed us to do this and optimize our recruitment process further more."

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HiringBranch: Do other departments now understand the link between recruiting and revenue like you do?

Jane: We are part of a large operational team and due to our effort to show performance metrics during the onboarding stage, many teams start to see the correlation in revenue and seamless recruitment.  Since we are all accountable for our own portfolio, it is important to remove all the bias and use data analytics to show progress and stability in our programs.  When you can show results, and identify trends and exceptions that helps with improving the business, you get the right visibility to keep innovating. Collaborating with HiringBranch as allowed us to do this and optimize our recruitment process further more.

HiringBranch: What about quality standardization?

Jane: This is really important for us. We have solid quality programs and reporting solutions to help assess quality. We compare all our call centers to look at global agent performance, we do call listening, we do surveys to understand what went well and what didn’t… and so on. Different locations have different challenges so they are not uniform by nature, and we take that into consideration when doing comparisons and instead we look for trends. We have quality checks for every process and ensure the guidelines are being followed, which makes sense given that we onboard 7000-8000 employees every year! Training quality as well as continuous learning is also essential to maintain high-quality standards.

HiringBranch: Is your agent training centralized?

Jane: The Learning and Development team creates and maintains all the training material and our team. The delivery is done in collaboration with our partner's Training Xelivery team. We also develop self-led training strategies to enhance the individual learning of our agents.

HiringBranch: Where do you see the future of call center training and onboarding?

Jane: Today training and onboarding is 80% trainer-led, with agents listening to someone presenting. We want to switch that ratio, so it’s 80% self-led and 20% classroom. Younger generations want to touch, do, and move fast, so we need to adapt and to change the way we train to reflect that. We are leveraging AIML-driven solutions to assist with this transition and make it successful.

HiringBranch: What about attrition? What are attrition red flags?

Jane: Attrition is a challenge in the call center industry and varies a lot from one geo to another.  It could be seasonal, personal, performance related and for many other reasons. Finding the right solution for attrition is something we do in collaboration with our partners so that we gather as much information about the reasons and the agents' behaviour and performance prior to them leaving so we can see if we can bring in proactive solutions to improve it. We are looking into the R, T, O as well to see how we can help with finding indicators that could help prevent it.

HiringBranch: During the interview, you’d said that contact centers think that agent quality is developed during training, the “T”, but with your data do you think the “R” for recruitment is gathering steam?

Jane: Yes. We are bringing in the numbers but I’m still working on dusting off the “R” for my leaders.

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Image Credits
Feature Image: Unsplash/Petr Macháček

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