Not So Young Frankenstein

Let's say you were a modern day Dr. Frankenstein and you decided you wanted to bring an organizational creature to life.  Let's further say you were a nefarious Dr. Frankenstein and the organizational creature you wanted to bring to life was one that continuously produced errors...lots of them...day in and day out.  What would go into the design of an error-producing organizational machine?

First, you would have hundreds of detailed processes that the people in the organization would be expected to perform.  Forcing people to execute lots of different process with lots of details increases the probability of errors.

Second, you would not define a standard of what constituted the correct way to do each of those processes.  Some processes would be defined. Others would not.  Some processes would ostensibly be defined, but people in the organization would disagree about what really was the correct disposition.  When "correct" is not clear, errors can bloom.

Third, you would have those processes change frequently.  Big changes and little changes...just constant process changes.  This keeps the workers off-balance and increases the chance of errors.

Fourth, you would have poor change control mechanisms.  Processes would change but the changes would not always be effectively communicated.  There would be no master register of changes and no way to effectively determine if all of the updated processes were being correctly followed.  The lack of effective process performance feedback is great for error making.

Finally, on the process side, you would minimize the amount of  automation available to help workers get the details correct.  If something had to be drilled they would have to do it by hand.  No machine to help employees get the exact size hole in the exact spot.  If there were a lot of details to remember, people would just have to suck it up and remember them.  Further, the job aides you did give them would not work well together.  Having old legacy systems that require a lot of cutting and pasting increases the chances for errors.

Onto the people in this error-producing organization.  A seventh characteristic of a well-designed error making organization would be a low hiring standard.  No college degree required, no employment tests to assess baseline competency.  The lower end of the labor pool is best for higher errors.

After hiring low quality workers, give them poor training.  The training around the processes would be incomplete and the acceptable performance standard for completing the training would be low.  An adequate demonstration of basic competence (70% passing score...which of course is 30% errors) would be enough.  Having poorly trained and mediocre workers makes for really high errors.

Next signal to them that they are low quality by keeping them on a tight leash...make it known that you know when they are a minute late coming back from breaks and lunches...ask them what is wrong if they are in the bathroom too much.  Further send this "you're completely replaceable" message by telling them that there is a large pool of applicants waiting for their job.

It also helps if you can make the work itself super boring and repetitive.  There is nothing that drives errors better than a boring repetitive job as it leads to steps getting skipped.  Oh and make the environment randomly stressful by, say, workers getting yelled at by customers. High fatigue and stress are great for errors.

Finally, don't pay the workers that well.  Low wages and no variable compensation for higher performance.  When everyone gets the same no matter how they do and pay is based on tenure, which is another way of saying how long they last, it really helps people not care which feeds the error machine.

And speaking of tenure...since the jobs are boring and stressful, and the workers don't feel valued, they quit...frequently.  We don't care about them quitting, because as we told them, "there is more where you came from."  We want high turnover because it means lots of inexperienced employees which is like oil for the error-machine.

What do you think of our design?  How could an organization designed like this not be a world class error-machine?

This is not a dystopian vision of some "Breaking Bad" science fiction future.  No, this error-making organization exists today.  In fact there are lots of them and they have been around for years.  It's known as a call center.

I am not trying to be Debbie Downer here.  I am trying to shed light on the fact that the 40-year old paradigm for the design and management of call centers almost guarantees a high error rate.  A call center leader who doesn't believe her/his organization is an error machine is just plain struthious.

It, of course, doesn't have to be this way.  The fixes are right in front of us...just do the opposite of what you would do in the design of the error-machine.

The problem is all of those activities drive up short-term costs and many of today's call center leaders can't see past that.  It is analogous to when American managers visited Japanese plants in the 80's where they couldn't believe that employees had the power and were encouraged to "stop the line" to fix quality problems.  They couldn't see that the long term cost reductions due to the increase in quality far outweighed the short-term cost increase of interrupting the production run.

One fix with immediate ROI is allowing the agents to use automation.  I go into detail in this post Can a Focus on Getting Calls right Have the Far-reaching Benefits Just-in-Time Had? listing all the sources of financial return that come with defining "correct" and using automation to ensure the agents handle each call correctly.

There is a lot of talk these days about customer service and getting the front-line agents to turn customers into zealots.  I think this is the right direction.  But before we ask our agents to love our customers to death, isn't it important that our agents know how to correctly resolve the customers concern?   Can you really fall in love with a car brand that delivers a great service experience if your car is constantly in the shop?

TruCallCenters: World-Class but Still an Error Machine

TruCallCenters.  It is my tongue-in-cheek version of TruTV.

My first installment was about how Call Centers use yellow smiley balloons and laminated cards as Quality Improvement strategies: http://ifyouwanttoscream.blogspot.com/2013/10/yellow-smiley-balloons-laminated-cards.html

The second was about a call center in Florida with 350% annualized turnover and suggested that we had better plan for the reality of high turnover (OK, maybe not 350% everywhere...but north of 50% is not uncommon at all) and figure out how to drive continuous improvement even with new agents:  http://ifyouwanttoscream.blogspot.com/2013/12/latest-installment-of-trucallcenters.html

This installment is about how you can be a world-class call center and still be an error-producing machine.  I ran the call centers for a Fortune 500 company a few years ago.  We had a great reputation in the industry.  But as good as we were, honestly, we still sucked.  Every single day we made hundreds of errors…wrong email addresses entered, wrong diagnostic steps, missed consumer disclosures, in appropriate/incorrect transfers, incorrect call documentation, inaccurate After Call Work documentation, accent escalations from customers, poor warranty compliance, failure to cross-sell when we were supposed.  I literally could go on and on with the list of errors we made, day in and day out.  And we had centers that were genuinely looked up to with good CSAT and Loyalty scores!

As an aside, this idea that even a great call center can be an error producing machine is related to a previous post I did called What is an Acceptable Contact Center Error Rate?  In that post, I present example after example of ridiculously bad contact center performance that is rather matter-of-fact.

Two insights have come into graphic relief for me is since I was running centers of my own.  The first is that the root cause of all the inefficiencies, errors, and customer satisfaction issues is between-agent variation in processes and therefore outcomes.  You get astonishingly different experiences from call to call, from agent to agent...even from the same agent between the beginning of her shift and the end of it...because, for a dozen different reasons, the agents don't consistently follow the correct process. 

The second blindingly clear insight is that the ability to control/reduce between-agent variation in process and outputs with monitoring and coaching is severely limited.  You can read a much deeper discussion here Call Center Coaching Remains a Labor-in-Vain)

Someday, in the not too distant future, call center leaders are going to wake up and say, "I'm tired of this.  I am tired of living the Myth of Sisyphus.  I am tired of the turnover.  I am tired of calibration meetings.  I am tired of agreeing to standards and having agents fail to comply 20% of the time.  I am tired of agent output metrics charts that never improve but just continue to tread water.  I am tired of the best call centers in the world still producing thousands of errors a day.  What we are doing is not working and I have to find a better way."

There of course is a better way and it is no more complex than baking automation into the process the agents are using to virtually guarantee that the agents do and say what they are supposed to, when and how they are supposed to do it.

When call center leaders get tired of beating their heads against the wall and implement agent-assisted automation, you will see a step function change in call center outcomes that will create a better work environment, better results for customers, and profitability improvements that will surprise the skeptics. 

Latest Installment of truCallCenters: 350% Annualized Turnover in a 500+ Seat Call Center in Florida where the Unemployment Rate is almost 8%

There is truTV.  I should start a channel called truCallCenters.  I shared this post about call centers using yellow smiley balloons and laminated cards as their quality improvement strategy: (http://ifyouwanttoscream.blogspot.com/2013/10/yellow-smiley-balloons-laminated-cards.html

In the latest installment of truCallCenters, I just talked to a guy running a 600 seat center in Florida who is trying to drive performance in an inbound, primarily sales focused call center in the face of 350% annualized turnover.  To make the math easy, that means on average every seat in his center turns over in less than four months.  Can you imagine trying to run a business where you went out and invested in a new machine and just when you got the machine tuned and running pretty well, it unbolted itself from the floor and walked out the door?  I would also be interested in someone explaining how are we getting a return on the monitors, the recording licenses, and the off-phone coaching time when agents quit before their four-month anniversary.

Now if you just want to reduce turnover, then you have to read this http://ifyouwanttoscream.blogspot.com/2013/10/why-your-call-center-turnover-reduction.html

But the larger issue for the industry is to face the fact that these call center jobs suck, the turnover is always going to be high, and therefore how are going to get better results in spite of this stratospheric turnover. 

Intelligent Cold-Calling

In a hurry?  Here is a summary of this blog post:  1) Cold-calling is necessary, few businesses, let alone fund-raising businesses, can live without it, 2) it is really hard and it can eat your staff alive,  3) it can be done dramatically more intelligently than the way most do it, which means much more efficiently, more effectively, and in a way that makes the task much less stressful on your team.  Sorry, but you have to read on if you want the How's.

There was a discussion recently on a LinkedIn group I am a member of about whether cold calling was still a viable marketing strategy and whether it was needed. What was particularly curious about this post was that it was posted on a fund raising forum.

There aren't that many B2B businesses out there that can grow without cold-calling in all its various forms.  In the fund-raising space, the only way for you to grow without cold-calling is to reduce the attrition of existing donors and/or to increase the contribution from donors.  These are both important considerations, especially the idea of framing your relationship with donors as a long-term one.  According to the Fundraising article on Wikipedia, "the sector generally loses 50–60% of its newly acquired donors between their first and second donations and one in three, year on year thereafter. The economics of regular or sustained giving are rather different, but even then organizations routinely lose 30% of their donors from one year to the next."

Still, to not have cold-calling in the mix seems 1) risky and 2) likely that you are leaving money on the table as there are bound to be people who are not aware of your organization and what you are doing and/or just need to be asked.

Point #1:  In my view, I don't know how you get by without outbound solicitation.

It may not need to be said...I didn't think that first point needed to be said, but someone found it discussion worthy...but cold calling is really, really emotionally challenging and very fatiguing work.  I don't care if you have the skin of a rhinoceros, people hanging-up on you, yelling at you to leave them alone, and just saying No to you and the cause you believe in all day long is draining.  You can sit in a Tony Robbins Sales Training class for four days out of five and it would still be hard to not "take it personally" after a day of "No's" and hang ups.  A generous compensation package can certainly help your people power through, but it is a slog that forces you to marshal a lot of inner resources to keep pounding the rock. That is draining and it leads to turnover.

To illustrate, I spoke to the leader of a call center recently.  He was running a 500 seat center that was mostly inbound sales.  Not cold-calling, but similar as they were selling something the caller didn't really want.  His turnover was 350% annually.  That means, on average, an agent only lasted about four months.  That is business spending a lot of money on hiring, training and coaching only to watch the investment walk out the door probably before it ever hits its stride and certainly before it pays for itself.

So the job is hard, so what?  Lots of jobs are hard.  Your job is hard. But I think we too often lose sight of this fact.  I wrote this piece Why your Turnover Reduction Efforts are Not Working describing how leaders seem to forget that call center jobs are ridiculously hard and believe their window dressing efforts to improve the environment will reduce turnover.  It won't.

Point #2:  If you are tired of your Myth of Sisyphus efforts...hire, train, coach, exit...with your outbound sales team, you might start by looking for ways to make the job easier and less emotionally taxing.

So what's a leader to do?  You certainly care about your people, but you also have a job to do...grow revenue/donations...and a business to run...which, in part, means continuously looking for ways to cost effectively increase productivity.  Isn't it impossible to do all three?  Not at all.

The first step of any process improvement effort is do identify value- and non value-added work and to eliminate as much of the non value-added work as possible and streamline the NVA work you can't eliminate.  Obviously, value-added work is talking to a real prospect.  You won't always convert them, but the more time your agents spend doing that, the better.

But outbound agents have to spend a lot of time on tasks other than talking to a qualified prospect.  For example, as good as outbound dialing technology has become a lot of "wrong calls" still come through....calls still get made to "Joe's Pizza" or you get the nanny's number by mistake.  When this happens the agent has to spend valuable seconds dispensing with that call.

Another example of NVA work is reaching an answering machine, waiting for the message to play, and leaving  a message.  While there can be real value in leaving a message, most just hang up as it is not as potentially valuable as moving on to the next call.

The use of agent-assisted automation, pre-recorded audio and pre-programmed system actions will allow the agent to politely end the call with a wrong number, leave a targeted message on a machine, update their system and signal to the dialer they are ready.  Shaving 15 to 30 and more seconds on every call like this adds up to more time spent on value-added activities...an immediate productivity lift.

Anyone involved in cold-calling, especially in the fund-raising arena, knows that "wrong" numbers and answering machines are actually the bulk of what the agents do.  If you make it easy for them to handle these non value-added aspects of the job, you realize the agent can actually handle more than one call at a time.  I know that does not sound possible, but it is.  As soon as an answering machine is hit, the agent presses a few buttons, and...while that call is being politely completed a new call is coming in on a second line.

Believe it or not, most fund-raising agents we work with can handle three lines at once and some can even do four.  If you have three fishing poles in the water you are going to catch more fish than if you only have one.  It is that simple.

So we did Process Improvement 101 (eliminating and streamlining non value-added work) and just made your outbound group at least 3x more productive.  We are far from done.

While you needn't, you also might decide to transfer legitimate prospects to a closer team.  If you do so, that front end team turns into a real prospector group.  This enables a completely different hiring profile.  You dont need prospectors with the gift of gab and mellifluous voices, you need someone who can push buttons and execute rules.  You could hire prospectors with a speech impediment for that matter.  This will lower the total cost of your outbound team (productivity increase plus skill mix changes, enabling you to hire those with lower salaries to grind through getting an interested prospect on the phone). 

We talked about the debilitating effects of turnover on agent productivity, not to mention all the HR, training and monitoring staff that is needed to on-board, coach, and exit agents.  As I discussed, a big contributor to that turnover is how hard it was to hear No's all day, and worse get cussed at and hung-up on.

Agents using pre-recorded audio for the initial set-up and offer don't report any bad feelings when the hang-ups and curses come.  It doesn't feel personal to them.  The way they describe the feeling, the customer is not saying No to them, he/she is saying No to the software.  The audio adds a kind of protective suit that increases agent satisfaction and decreases fatigue and burnout.  (You can read more here:  Almost Human:  The Surreal, Cyborg Future of Telemarketing).

Also, your higher-priced closers are hearing much fewer No's and virtually no cussing because they are only being handed calls where the potential donor has shown some interest.  You have also virtually eliminated non value-added activities for this important group.  They are selling on every call and their conversion rates go up (and their pay goes up too if you use variable compensation).  Turnover goes down in this group as well.

Finally, it is possible to build intelligence into the pre-recorded audio that is used.  Calling to a zip code with higher home prices?  You can increase the amount of the initial donation you request and similarly lower it, if calling into an area with lower net worth.

A second example of building in intelligence is through the use of multiple pre-recorded voices.  You can record multiple voices with different accents (you can record different languages for that matter, but the agent listening in has to be able to recognize the language enough to follow the appropriate branches.)  The value of the multiple accents is that when you are calling a zip code in the South, you can use a Southern accent and when you are calling into the Bronx, the agent can sound like he/she is from the Bronx.

Or you can experiment with different pre-recorded voices and just go with the one that converts the best.  Adding the ability to perform real designed experiments is an additional way this approach helps you ratchet up conversion rates.

Point #3:  Cold-calling is a noisome, but necessary task.  But being smart about it can completely change the effort needed and the outcomes.

Let's see...lower costs, higher conversions, and a more pleasant working environment for your employees.  Though the Audubon Society may call, not to raise money, but to yell at me about my metaphors, I'll take three birds with one stone any day.

What is an Acceptable Error Rate in Call Centers?

There are two diametrically opposed answers to the question posed in the title. Here is the first one: a jaw-dropping level of contact center errors is completely acceptable, even when those errors involve breaking the law. "Preposterous!" you say.  Please keep reading.

First the big picture: in contact centers no one talks about Six Sigma or Five-9s, or Taguchi's "on target with minimum variation." Those ideas are constantly being discussed in manufacturing, but are risible notions in call centers. Variation is everywhere...call volume, call arrival, call types, agent process variation, agent output variation.  Rather than try to measure it and reduce it, most call center leaders are just completely defeated by it.
 
"OK, we don't try to reduce variation.  So what?" you say. "Why don't we just go from center to center, get their error rate and call the average acceptable?"  You wouldn't even be able to do that because no one measures and tracks their error rate.  Why?  Because they don't want to know!  Next time you get an email from someone pitching call center KPI offerings or benchmarks, open it up and see if "error rate" is one of the metrics they suggest, offer or track.  It ain't in there.  

In manufacturing, specs, i.e., what constitutes correct, are sine qua non and performance against those specs is constantly measured. But for some reason, contact centers rarely define what a correct call is...what the agents need to do in their systems and say to customers...by call type...and even less often, measure performance against those standards, weight that performance by the volume of calls and/or track that performance over time.  It is absolutely astonishing and no one is talking about it.

As part of our work in this regard, we go into centers and we get agents, trainers, monitors, supervisors, etc together to help us map out how a call is supposed to go.  Inevitably, at some point, a food fight breaks out with the various groups arguing over how a call is supposed to be handled.  Obviously, if you haven't even bothered to define what correct is and your team is confused about the standards, "incorrect" has to be happening all the time.

Consider a quotidian price change for a service where we decide to check the agents' accuracy in giving the new price. Hate to break it to you, but on the day after the price is changed, there is no way all the agents will quote the right price 100% of the time. They have memorized the prices and disclosures and probably didn't read the email you sent out or the note on their chair that you left.  So then what would be an acceptable level of correct performance on a price quote? 75%? 80%? Would 45% be OK? What would be acceptable two months after the price change? 

We know of one consumer electronics company, one of the biggest technology companies in the world, that listened to 10 out of 10 of their outsourcer's agents give the old price for a service. The outsourcer didn't even know their agents were making so many mistakes. The client, of course, was none-to-happy, but the outsourcer didn't get fired. De facto, the outsourcer's performance was acceptable. (For more on the sloppy process changes in call centers and the flagrant errors that occur for months, see Inside Jokes:  What process changes in call centers and lost house pets in Tucson Arizona have in common)

I know what you are thinking. A price change? Come on! What's the big deal? If the agents get this wrong it is unfortunate, but not the end of the world. 

OK, then what would be an acceptable error rate on, say, debt collection calls which, in the US, are regulated by the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act (FDCPA)? 

According to the FDCPA, debt collectors are required to disclose to the debtor 1) they are calling from a debt collections agency and 2) their mini-Miranda rights ("...anything you say can be used to help collect this debt.").  Failure to disclose could result in lost collections and stiff fines against the agency. Here we might need to be a little better...how about 90%? Would 85% be OK? We work with multiple collections agencies and their performance on just these two disclosures (prior to deploying our software of course!) is highly variable and all are less than 90%, despite the fact that it is a law!  

You are thinking that is one highly specialized example and you are not convinced there is a problem here, are you?   Before using our software, one financial services center we worked with averaged 88% on legally required disclosures when they measured it and once got as high as 92%. This was their performance for years!

Since it is happening all the time and not improving in most centers that bring us in, you have to conclude that breaking the law 10-15% or more of the time is acceptable.  You can argue it is not acceptable, but when a problem exists for years with no change in tactics or results, it is, de facto, acceptable.

Let's talk a little more about defining correct.  I just described a call type where there was a legal definition of what constituted correct.  But that isn't the only thing that makes a call correct.  There are lots of things to get right on phone calls and it changes by call type, which is why I keep harping on measuring correct by call type .  Some calls have required consumer protection disclosures...this is huge in collections as mentioned but also in health care and financial services (financial service disclosures are becoming a huge issue is the US with the advent of the new Consumer Protection Bureau).  Sometimes these are required by law, but sometimes the company is delivering the disclosures to limit its own legal liability or to limit repeat calls or calls to another department.  This is a shareholder definition of correct.

Sometimes doing the right cross-sell based on the product and the customer profile is what constitutes "correct," and not doing it means a company loses revenue.  Again, the shareholders say correct means doing the right cross-sell every time.

On other calls, it is the customer who hopes you know what correct is and who is counting on you to get it right.  The right price.  The right address for returning a product.  The right diagnostic steps taken to troubleshoot their issue and get them up and running again.

Who is tracking "correct," by call type, from these various stakeholder perspectives...not just on a monitoring form for a single agent...but across agents.   Beyond the calls with legally required disclosures, I would bet few, if any.

The question about an acceptable error rate for call centers begs another issue: not just measuring it but tracking those error rates over time so 1) they can be improved, 2) so we can make sure our improvement strategies are actually working, and 3) so we can make sure we are getting a return on investment for those improvement initiatives.

For most centers, the only way to determine the error rate, just for a point in time, is to dedicate a group to listen to 50 or 100 calls with clearly defined Required Call Components (RCCs) and estimate the center-wide quality rate from the sample. This alone is a lot of work.  To track this error rate over time, you would have to repeat the process every day or every week. Fat chance.  And if you ever tried to do this, by call type, you would end up with a monitoring team larger than the size of your agent population.

So where does this leave us?  Ask a center leader, just for the most frequent call type he/she gets, what is the error rate (performance against legal, shareholder and customer RCCs)?  And, is the error-rate over the last year on that one call type getting better, getting worse or treading water?  They won't be able to tell you.  

Let that sink in.  They haven't defined correct, they aren't tracking correct performance over time, and they aren't doing anything differently to increase the percentage of correct calls.  Management won't say it with their "outside voice," but I hope now you understand the answer given in the first paragraph to the question posed in the title:  a jaw-dropping level of contact center errors is completely acceptable, even when those errors involve breaking the law.


Lowering the Error-Rate Once You Know It
Should you decide to wade into this murky water and try to determine the error rate for some call types, the number you come out with will likely not be too flattering. You may find yourself motivated to try to lower that error rate. You have a couple options.  One is terrible, hasn't worked, and will never work and one works perfectly every time.  Guess which one Call Centers use?


Call monitoring is the same as trying to "inspect in" quality in manufacturing, a practice manufacturing abandoned a long time ago (see What the Call Center Industry Can Learn from Manufacturing: Part II). The only way monitoring can drive increased compliance is if you monitor almost every call, publicly track error rates, and dismiss agents statistically worse. This is a lot of work in and of itself.  It would result in a lot of expensive turnover.  And it would only have a slight impact on your average error rate.  

Sadly, this is the go-to method for improving agent output metrics.  In my view, it is the reliance on monitoring and coaching that is huge contributor to the ridiculous amount of errors made in call centers every day.  In all the examples given in this post, every single one of these centers had extensive monitoring and coaching programs.  Do you think they weren't doing it right?  What sane person can argue that more monitoring and coaching will solve this problem when it hasn't solved it in 40 years?  (For a full discussion on why one-agent-at-a-time Monitoring and Coaching can never improve error rates or other agent output metrics, see this discussion Call Center Coaching Remains A Labor in Vain.)


Instead of paying for a bunch of monitors to act like cops with radar guns trying to catch people doing it wrong, why not just make it easy for the agents to do it correctly...every time? 


Stealing a page from manufacturing's playbook, centers can use error-proofing to make it impossible for agents to skip key steps. Desk-top consolidation and agent-assisted automation are the best practices here and with these approaches, error-free quality is easily achievable. (See Fixing Between Agent Variation Can Make All the Difference and Agent-assisted Automation.) 

For example, disclosures are pre-recorded and integrated into the CRM so that the agent cannot complete the call until the information is "read" to the customer.  In the case of the collection calls mentioned earlier, once the debtor was on the line, the agent could not open the record and begin to discuss the debt until the two legally required disclosures were provided to the customer using the pre-recorded audio.  Once the software signaled the CRM that the messages had been played, the record opened up and the collector could see how much was owed and could discuss options with the customer.  Legal disclosures at the end of financial services and health care calls work the same way...the call cannot be completed and the order cannot be submitted until the software signal the CRM that the required information has been played to the customer. 

Think the customers wouldn't like this?  Think again.  We have experience with thousands and thousands of agents handling hundreds of millions of phone calls and the customers rarely even comment, let alone complain.  In the rare instance a customer does comment, the agent says something to the effect that "I am using software to make sure the call is 100% correct and easy to understand.  Is that OK?"  Customers are delighted by that.

Think the agents wouldn't like this?  Think again.  They hate having to read the same information over and over again....80 calls a day...five days a week.  This approach gives them a chance to rest and do some of the After Call Work and lets them worry a little less about having to get everything right.  The boredom and repetition and stress is one of the reasons the turnover is so high in call centers.  (See Why Your Turnover Reduction Efforts are Not Working.)  Letting the agents use automation is one of the most anodynic tools that has ever been implemented in call centers.

Some days it seems as if there are an overwhelming number of problems in this world. So many you almost hate to turn on the news.  But you know what? Polio isn't one of them (though sadly it is making a comeback (Polio's Return after near Eradication Prompts a Global Health Warning). It used to be a huge problem until they invented a vaccine. Asking what is is an acceptable number of polio cases in the world and making excuses for the cases you do have makes no sense, because the answer is that since polio is completely preventable, there shouldn't be any cases.

Arguing and worrying about what level of contact center agent errors we should tolerate also makes no sense because there is a way to deliver error-free performance every time.

An alternative answer then to the question posed in the title? Zero.

The Unturned Stone: The Profits Hiding in Plain Sight amidst Poor Call Center Quality

No matter how much you have already saved with customer self-service, offshore outsourcing and workforce optimization, there is an astonishing amount of operational profit remaining to be tapped from your call center operations.  The cause of this untapped profit:  agent call handling is still wildly inefficient and error-prone.  This white paper will go into detail about the specific drivers of excessive costs and lost revenue, how to systematically and permanently fix them, and will share real results.  The bottom-line?  Your call centers can be 40% more productive.

Click on this link to download my free whitepaper originally published at CFO.com.  We won't even make you do that annoying registration step:

http://www.kombea.com/docs/WP-CallCenters_Uptapped_Profit_Vein.pdf

Collection Agencies, It's Gut-Check Time

You have been promising your clients and maybe even the regulators that you are working to get your disclosure and mini-Miranda percentages higher:  you know you have a problem and you are implementing changes to fix it.  Your colleagues have heard you whine about why HR keeps hiring recalcitrant agents that can't get this stuff right.  And they have also heard you joke about public humiliations and executions for non-compliance as a way to "get [the agents'] attention."

Let me say up front that collector compliance is actually an easily fixable problem, but the first step is a gut check:  Do you want to fix this problem or not?  I don't care what it is, but inside your own head, give an honest answer.  Yes or no?

It seems weird that this would be a choice, but with any longstanding problem, you have to wonder if there are incentives reinforcing the undesirable behavior.  And in fact, there are perfectly good reasons to say no.  One reason to say no is that you have tried to fix this problem and you haven't been able to do it and you are not willing to put any more effort and investment into doing it.

While it's a little disingenuous, it is perfectly normal to talk about wanting to do something and not be willing to make the effort.  I had always wanted to be the bass player for the Allman Brothers Band, but I haven't seriously practiced the bass in almost 20 years.  And truth be told, I wasn't all that good to start with.

Being the Allman's bass player is something I talked about wanting to do, but I never really did anything about.  The truth is, I think it would be fun, but I never did anything to make it happen...didn't practice that much, didn't get into bands that played that kind of music, didn't network in the industry, etc.  I might have wanted it, but I never made the effort and needed trade-offs.  Maybe this is your story with the disclosure compliance of your collectors?

There is another reason not to fix your compliance problem.  This one is a little more self-serving.  Your experience and perhaps even some data you have indicated that when you have agents with high disclosure compliance, they collect less money.  You believe that what logically follows is that if you increase your compliance rate across the center, you are going to lower your collections.  I am not saying that is true, but you might have concluded that and therefore have decided not to do anything more to improve compliance.  The lost revenue is not worth it.

Again, perfectly normal.  Businesses make trade-offs all the time between their various stakeholders.  They short-change customers to return more profit to shareholders.  They "liberally interpret" regulations to do something for their customers or again to lower their costs and return more to shareholders.  Sometimes it is just a tradeoff that is made while trying to balance short-term and long-term objectives and sometimes it is a decision you have to hope you don't get caught doing or not doing.  Cue Morpheus from the movie The Matrix saying:  "Welcome to the real world."

I am not here to judge your decision or the reasons behind your decision.  I am suggesting that you and those around you will be happier if you make conscious decision about your choices and stop pretending it is important when it is not.

On the other hand, there might be some agencies who have really tried to fix this.  They have recorded calls, they've hired monitors, they've taken the agents off the phone to coach them, they've used speech analytics, they've installed complicated variable compensation schemes that pay a certain percentage for revenue collected and another percentage for compliance, they have recognized and rewarded the best agents with preferred parking places, and even fired the worst offenders despite the huge expense associated with hiring and training a good collector.  And after all this, their compliance rate hovers in the 80th percentile.  These agencies have made a real investment and seem to have earned no return whatsoever.

Is this you?  You want to fix it, you have tried to fix it, but you don't know what else to do?  If yes, there is a way out of this wilderness.

The solution is so simple and so bullet-proof that you will wonder why you lived with the problem for so long.  It involves the use of pre-recorded audio, linked to the CRM so that the agent, literally, can not get access to the rest of the data in the file or advance/complete the call until the mini-Miranda is read to the customer and acknowledged.  Not expensive.  Works every time.  Problem solved.

If you don't want to address agent compliance, no problem.  Just acknowledge it.  My friends were glad when I finally stopped talking about being The Allman's bass man.  If you really do want to fix it, the problem can be permanently fixed in a matter of days. You don't have to live with this problem for even one more day.