Unleashing Excellence: How to Be an Outstanding Call Center Leader

Are effective leaders born or are they developed? That question has been debated in thousands of books, articles, speeches and forums. While there are some characteristics effective leaders may have acquired early in life (I don’t believe they were born with them); I also believe that leadership skills can be developed later in life. And these skills aren’t based on personality or charisma, nor are they dictated by a person’s Myers-Briggs profile. No matter their style, effective leaders do three things very well.

1. Effective leaders Operationalize the Call Center's Mission. 

The organization’s mission is at the core of the effective leader’s actions. Whether the mission is to Create Happiness (Walt Disney World); to be Ladies and Gentlemen Serving Ladies and Gentlemen (Ritz Carlton); or to Refresh the World  (Coca Cola), effective leaders keep the mission in front of their employees throughout the hiring process and new hire and ongoing training, and they see every communication opportunity as one more tool to keep the mission on the radar.

2. Effective call center leaders involve the call center employees in the forward movement of the organization.

There may have been a time when the leader had the answers to every business issue that would arise. The leader had formal authority and was usually an expert in all phases of the operation. Due to changing customer expectations and competition, those days are over. Today's call center leaders must rely on the skills of a facilitator and call center idea champion. The effective call center leader sees call center representatives as partners in coming up with new ways to delight customers.

3. Effective call center leaders make excellence non-negotiable. 

Lack of accountability in the call center is the number one reason many (or most) organizational improvement initiatives fail to achieve their desired results. When call center leaders look the other way when a call center representative performs in an unacceptable manner, even the best improvement plans begin to collapse. One of my favorite leadership quotes is:

Intolerable performance exists when intolerable performance is tolerated.

An important behavior of effective call center leaders is that they never let the coaching moment go. If there’s a call center performance issue, they handle it without delay. A related behavior of effective call center leaders is that they never let the recognition moment go. They let strong performers know that their call center performance is truly appreciated.

While there are certainly other qualities effective call center leaders demonstrate, I believe these three provide the foundation for excellent leadership performance. Call center leaders who excel in these areas lead high performing teams that deliver superior results.

Make an honest appraisal of your own call center leadership performance. Ask yourself:

·         Do my call center representatives see me living our organization’s mission and values every day?

·         Do I refuse to compromise on our call center’s commitment to excellence? Is call center excellence “non-negotiable?”

Most of us must admit that we have room for improvement in each of these areas of call center leadership performance. Admitting it is the first step. The next step is to make a commitment to raise the bar of your own leadership performance in the call center and take action. Leaders who truly unleash the excellence of their organizations are those who see every day as an opportunity to become a better call center leader.

Performance Tune Up for Your Service Team Engaged, high-performing service agents are the dream of every manager. Yet there's always a wide range of performance from high, to average, to low. If agents perform essentially the same job, why does their performance vary so much? When agents are measured against the same metrics, why do some agents excel while others lag behind? Obviously, the answer is that each agent is a different person—and each person brings his or her unique experiences and expectations to the job. If we recognize and accept these differences, and focus agent onboarding and development around these differences, then we will achieve performance gains faster and more successfully. A personalized performance “tune up” for each agent can raise the bar and optimize results. Without a doubt, what can drive top performance is a tune up based on what is relevant to the specific needs of each individual. A NASCAR race team would never consider performing the exact tune up for every car. Instead, the right adjustments and corrections are unique to each vehicle. Some cars need more, some less—and some don't need a tune up at all. And it's the same for agents. To be effective, service agent tune ups must be relevant to each person's specific performance levels and needs.    To help your team reach peak performance, tune up your agents with these 5 easy steps. 1)  Dust off the job description. We all have job descriptions, right? Unfortunately, job descriptions usually sit on a shelf or in a file never to surface again from a new employee packet. The job description sets the foundation for performance. It establishes common expectations for every agent. While the job description cannot guarantee performance outcomes, it is the best starting point for tuning up your team. So, don't let the job description sit on the shelf. Dust it off, and start putting it to good use! 2)  Calibrate expectations. For an effective tune up, make sure agents are all “on the same page” when it comes to performance expectations. The job description is a great place to start. Still, the job description may mean different things to different people. If this happens, each team member's response will be different—and so will their performance. A key element of an effective team is how they communicate and how they understand what is communicated. Agents need a common and consistent way to discuss and evaluate performance.  When discussing performance with your team, does each agent understand what is expected? Ask questions and check to ensure that every agent understands performance and job expectations in the same way. 3)  Diagnose current performance. While there is no substitute for day-to-day coaching and performance management, there is also a need for diagnostic tools to benchmark current performance and competency levels. In other words, before starting the actual “tune up” you need to know what to tune up. So, what is the best way to diagnose and benchmark your agents? There are a lot of available options including peer surveys, self-report, customer ratings, performance metrics, skill assessments, etc. Use tools that are calibrated to the specific competencies identified in the job description. Even more critical is to choose tools that provide an objective and independent measures of performance. Why is this important? Because subjective measures (such as surveys) are dependent on the perspective of the rater, so that personal biases and personalities influence the ratings.  Objective performance measures (i.e., performance metrics and skill assessments) are more consistent, accurate and reliable. The more precise you are in diagnosing agents' performance, the more effective their tune up will be. 4)  Create a plan of action. With an accurate diagnosis of each agent's strengths and improvement opportunities, you are now ready to create a tune up plan for your team. The goal is to create a plan of action for each agent—not generalized across the team—but specific and relevant for each person.  The key is to make it practical. You can include on-the-job activities, online learning, company training, etc. Whatever you choose, be sure the activities, priorities, timing and expectations all tie directly to the objective diagnostic evaluation. 5)  Implement the plan. Equipped with a personalized plan for every agent, the tune up can begin.  Each agent has a personal plan. Not only do they have a clear understanding of expectations, but more important, they now buy into the plan because it is designed specifically for them.  The plan becomes a great discussion document between agents and supervisors.  This goes a long way toward removing wasted training and development time and expense.  Agents are getting exactly what they need, and as a result, they are more receptive to learning.  What better way to achieve employee engagement and peak performance than to give each agent a personalized plan for success? By now you may be thinking, “This sounds great, but who has the time to put it into practice?” Or, “Seriously, is it even practical to customize tune ups for each agent?”  Absolutely.  The good news is that the costs associated with personalized tune ups are very low, while the return value—in employee engagement and improved performance—is very high. Here’s to getting your team firing on all cylinders! Contact me directly for a copy of my Performance Appraisal tool.

What to do When a Customer Turns Abusive

A recent incident with one of my support experts reminded me that we do little to arm our agents with the tools to handle abusive clients. Some customers go beyond angry and become abusive. They might start the call in abusive mode, or might escalate to being abusive from mere anger. Sometimes if you don't tell them what they want to hear, they become abusive. Being abusive is defined as verbally threatening, using foul language, and emotionally out of control. When you've used your best skills at defusing the angry customer and the customer is still out of control, or if the customer begins the conversation in an abusive manner, it’s time to utilize some specific steps for managing the customer's behavior. It's also time to protect yourself. It's more likely the customer will become abusive with call center help desk agents, as the contact is more anonymous.

Here are specific steps call center professionals can use to control poor behavior by the customer:

1. Personalize the conversation. The less personal the interaction, the more likely it can escalate out of control. As soon as you perceive the customer's anger might escalate out of control, and you've tried your well practiced defusing skills and nothing works, it’s time to use the 'personalize the conversation' strategy. Call the customer by name, and refer to their company by name. Restate your name, and remind them that (your company name) wants them to be satisfied. “Marge, at XYZ we’re here to help you. Please call me Ted. I’m on your team ready to assist!”

2. Declare your intent and boundaries. Remind the customer you want to solve the problem. Let them know you can solve the problem only when the language is appropriate, and demands are reasonable. You should never allow the customer to continue if they're using inappropriate language, or if they're totally out of control. Nothing will be accomplished, and they'll sabotage your efforts to stay composed. They'll lose respect for you, your help desk, and the company for allowing the situation to continue. If they cannot maintain enough control to conduct a reasonable conversation, it's time to switch strategies.

3. Transfer the call. Whether you transfer the call to a supervisor or to another help desk agent, the customer has the opportunity to regroup. When you transfer the call, tell the customer you've done all you can, and its time for them to speak with another agent who will now handle the problem. This serves notice to the customer that they cannot continue to abuse you, and that behavior will be interrupted. When the second help desk agent handles the customer, typically the customer will try to appear reasonable and soft spoken.

4. Discontinue the call. If there's nobody to transfer the call to, or you've been the recipient of the transferred call and the customer is still out of control, it's time to end the cycle. Remind the customer you're there to help, and also willing to discuss a solution in a reasonable manner. Let them know your company wants them to be a satisfied customer, but also does not allow help desk professionals to continue in abusive conversations. Ask them to please contact the help desk at another time, and tell them "I am now terminating this call."

Remember the customer behavior has nothing to do with you, so don't take it personally.

Re-branding the Help Desk and Creating the Value Proposition

As a director of a customer care service center or help desk you accept the reasonability to craft, and then safeguard your organization’s value proposition. Is it best value, best quality, best service? Do you deliver on promises? Do you differentiate from your competition?

Here’s a checklist that I’ve used to help engineer a business process improvement initiative that focused on assessing the status of the helpdesk within the organization, evaluating internal processes, and identifying human resource management opportunities.

Using this checklist as a guide I was able to re-brand the center, re-educate staff on what matters to the client, and impact the real business side of the equation by improving retention and extending the customer-life cycle.

ORGANIZATION

1. Value recognition

• What value does your organization provide to the company?
• How is the call center's impact on customer retention measured?
• Do agents understand the primary goal of your organization? What are other key goals?
• Are your center's goals consistent with the company's objectives?

2. Stakeholder involvement

• Do you communicate regularly with other company departments? .
• Do you have an organizational chart?
• How is the staff organized?
• How are company managers involved in day-to-day operations?
• How does company management ensure that the call center is achieving its goals?

3. Unique functionality

• Which other units have responsibilities similar to yours?
• What customers do you serve

PROCESS

1. Policies and procedures

• Are call-handling policies and procedures documented?

2. Hours

• What are your hours of operation?
• Do they match your customers' needs? How do you know?
• What options do customers have for contacting the center?
• How do customers know how to contact you?
• How many toll-free numbers do you publish and where?
• Do customers always call the right number? If not, why not?

3. Contact management

• Are customer contacts tracked? If so, how?
• Are contacts tracked through provision of services?
• Is contact management automated?

4. Quality focus

• Do you have a quality-monitoring program in place?
• Do you measure agent performance or customer satisfaction?
• How is data collected and reported?
• What action is taken?

5. Performance measures

• Are performance measures established?
• Are the measures linked to customer satisfaction? If not, how do you measure customer satisfaction?
• What are the trends?
• Does an agent quality-monitoring program exist?

6. Call-handling consistency

• Do agents follow procedures consistently? How do you know?
• Are call-handling procedures available online?
• What resources do agents use to handle contacts (manuals, memos, training guides)? How are they updated?
• Do agents have to search through multiple sources to piece together responses to customer queries or requests?

7. Workflow

• What other departments/groups/individuals do your agents rely on for assistance or to fulfill customer requests?
• How do you track fulfillment?

8. Managing call volumes

• Are processes in place to ensure real-time response to changes in call volumes?
• How do you minimize customer wait times?
• What methods do you use to review how many calls are in queue?
• What do you do if calls are waiting?
• Are readerboards visible to agents?
• Are the agents required to react to the readerboards? How?

9. One-call resolution

• Is one-call resolution a goal of your center?
• How do you measure one-call resolution?
• What is your first-call resolution rate? What is the trend?
• Are there any bottlenecks in the current process?
• Do you have any recommendations for these bottlenecks?
• Why are calls transferred? Where are they transferred?
• Are calls transferred on a blind or warm transfer?
• How long do transfers take?
• What percentage of calls is transferred?
• On average, how many times is a caller transferred?

10. Issue escalation

• When are issues escalated?
• Do agents follow special guidelines to ensure issue resolution?
• Are dissatisfied customers referred to a supervisor? Yes.
• Is the goal customer satisfaction?

11. Market intelligence

• Are product and service issues collected and forwarded to the appropriate departments?
• Is customer demographic data collected and forwarded to the appropriate departments?

PEOPLE

1. Hiring profile/compensation policy

• What is your agent recruitment and hiring process?
• Is the agent's job description and profile documented?
• How long do agents/supervisors remain in their positions?
• What is the cost of hiring?
• Is pay performance-based, time-in-title, or pay-for-skills?
• Do you use team-based bonus programs?

2. Training/career path

• What is the training provided to new reps?
• How do you train call management/customer management/call handling techniques?
• How much time do you spend on call management training?
• Do you train customer advocacy?
• How do you reinforce training on the job?
• Do agents have to pass a test to graduate?
• Does each agent have a training plan?
• How do you measure training effectiveness?
• What is the frequency of training classes?
• What is the average size of training classes?
• How long does training take?
• What is the cost of training?
• Do you provide continuation, refresher on-the-job-training?
• Do agents receive software training?
• What career paths exist for reps and supervisors?
• What is the average time in title/position?
• What career development programs exist?
• Is the training staff professional and well-trained?
• Is the staff focused on customer satisfaction and retention goals?

3. Attrition

• Why do agents leave?
• What is the rate of attrition of agents?
• Describe your employee recognition programs.
• What is the policy on full-time vs. part-time employee usage?
• Are agents hourly or salaried?

4. Workforce management

• What system do you use for workforce planning and scheduling?
• Do you measure agent adherence to the schedule? How?
• What percentage of the agent's day is spent on the phone?
• What activities are completed during non-phone time?
• Are the activities done between calls or at specific times?
• How is after-call work measured?
• What is the estimated volume in each channel?
• What is the average percentage of occupancy?

5. Performance standards

• What are the standards against which agents are measured (call length, hold time, adherence to schedule, etc.)?
• Do they know that they are measured against these standards?
• How frequently are agents measured?
• Is there a performance planning and appraisal tool in place and used?
• Does customer satisfaction affect compensation or promotion?
• Do agents understand their role as customer advocates?

Creating Help Desk Superstars by Tailoring Learning Systems

Although there are many learning styles, my experience with developing people over the last 25 years reveals that three styles predominate. These three are not mutually exclusive; certain employees may rely on a combination of two or perhaps all three. Nonetheless, staying attuned to each employee’s style or styles will help focus your coaching.

First, there’s analyzing. Paul S. is an analyzer. He understands a task by taking it apart, examining its elements, and reconstructing it piece by piece. Because every single component of a task is important in his eyes, he craves information. He needs to absorb all there is to know about a subject before he can begin to feel comfortable with it. If he doesn’t feel he has enough information, he will dig and push until he gets it. He will read the assigned reading. He will attend the required classes. He will take good notes. He will study. And he will still want more.

The best way to teach an analyzer is to give him ample time in the classroom. Role-play with him. Do postmortem exercises with him. Break his performance down into its component parts so he can carefully build it back up. Always allow him time to prepare. The analyzer hates mistakes. A commonly held view is that mistakes fuel learning, but for the analyzer, this just isn’t true. In fact, the reason he prepares so diligently is to minimize the possibility of mistakes. So don’t expect to teach him much by throwing him into a new situation and telling him to wing it. As expected, I’ve found that this style conflicts in a help desk environment where ‘in-call’ training is prevalent or the norm.

The opposite is true for the second dominant learning style, doing. While the most powerful learning moments for the analyzer occur prior to the performance, the doer’s most powerful moments occur during the performance. Trial and error are integral to this learning process.

Jeffrey L. is a doer. He learns the most while he’s in the act of figuring things out for himself. For him, preparation is a dry, uninspiring activity. So rather than role-play with someone like Jeffrey, pick a specific task within his role that is simple but real, give him a brief overview of the outcomes you want, and get out of his way. Then gradually increase the degree of each task’s complexity until he has mastered every aspect of his role. He may make a few mistakes along the way, but for the doer, mistakes are the raw material for learning. Where ‘in-call’ training is the status quo for new hires, the doer is willing and able to pick up calls on his first day. Having a support system that fosters success for the doer ensures a win-win for both him and the clients he helps.

Finally, there’s watching. Watchers won’t learn much through role-playing. They won’t learn by doing, either. Since most formal training programs incorporate both of these elements, watchers are often viewed as rather poor students. That may be true, but they aren’t necessarily poor learners.

Watchers can learn a great deal when they are given the chance to see the total performance. Studying the individual parts of a task is about as meaningful for them as studying the individual pixels of a digital photograph. What’s important for this type of learner is the content of each pixel, its position relative to all the others. Watchers are only able to see this when they view the complete picture.

If you’re trying to teach a watcher, by far the most effective technique is to get him out of the classroom. Take him away from the manuals, and make him ride shotgun with one of your most experienced performers. Your phone system in the help center may have an option that allows one agent to listen to another and if you are using a remote desktop tool that software may allow sharing of support sessions between clients.

To ensure that everyone on your team contributes at their highest possible level, you as the leader must recognize and adjust for unique learning needs. Meeting the needs of your new hires may require tweaking the environment but your success as a manager will depend entirely on your ability to do this.

The Do’s and Don’ts of Setting Up a HelpDesk

1. Don’t: Configure the help desk application in a vacuum

You can imagine how difficult it is for a dedicated help desk manager to be gung ho about their new product and processes, spending hard-to-find time with great intentions designing something they think will accomplish the needs and goals for their service center, only to find out they’ve missed the mark completely. Reality is that a lot of people interact with the help desk and their needs for data from the application can vary wildly. Not taking those perspectives into account and having a myopic view on configuration is a sure-fire killer to the success of your new plans.

Do: Design and configure in a team environment and build it together. Be aware that your application is probably powerful enough to be used by other departments. Check with members of HR, procurement, facilities, etc. to gather their input at the beginning and see how seamlessly processes are adopted and utilized when everyone gets buy-in upfront.

2. Don’t: Implement too much of the application too fast

Solution feature sets today cover wide ranges of functionality such as incident, problem, change, asset, knowledge, service levels, customer self-support, reporting, and more. Implementing everything at once may make your support team feel like you’re trying to wash their faces with a fire hose. You end up with staff trying to use a new tool they are not familiar with, getting requests from users on how to do things, and becoming frustrated. You inadvertently create a culture of confusion.

Do: Implement gradually! Pay particular attention to how technically savvy your staff and users are. Start by getting your techs up to speed on basic incident and knowledge management features and then go from there. As a good rule of thumb, allow 30-60 days between enabling additional functionality. Also, don’t overuse the notifications. If a technician is flooded with an email every time an action is taken on an incident, the importance of those notifications is lost in the massive amount of mail received.

3. Don’t: Under estimate the power of knowledge management functionality

You have as much investment in your staff as you do in your ticketing system. Why incur the loss of that investment when the eventuality of employee turnover occurs? Not using the knowledge management capabilities of today’s solutions only exacerbates the problem and makes techs continually reinvent the wheel. Oftentimes the problem is simply a lack of communication about whose responsibility it is to capture the knowledge.

Do: Begin by realizing there’s a greater long-term cost to continually re-engineering the technical know-how of your support staff than there is a short-term cost of establishing an efficient and automated process for capturing and categorizing knowledge. Designate a weekly knowledge approver and give that person a specific day and time to maintain the knowledge base. This harvesting of knowledge will save you time and money in the long run.

4. Don’t: Categorize at too granular a level

Your new help desk software probably has the ability to categorize tickets to varying degrees. Many service teams get far too granular in their level of categorization. When this occurs it creates an inefficient use of the data you are collecting as well as excess clicks. It also often confuses techs who have to scroll through endless tree structures looking for the proper category to assign to a ticket.

Do: Think of what is most important for you to report on. Hardware failures? Printer failures? Training? If your application has decent searching capabilities, you don’t need to categorize to the nth degree. Start out with the minimum requirement of your reporting structure and add on later as the need arises. To assist in building a solid category structure, leave out actual problems, like “can’t print” as a level – that information goes in the Description field. If you find that for every category you are being redundant in your lowest level, you might be using a category field for data that needs to be captured elsewhere – such as a ticket level custom field. You might even consider inverting your category list!

5. Don’t: Fail to create an end user or customer self-support portal

There are definitely organizations where self-support does not fit. If your company is already capturing valuable knowledge content and your users are fairly tech savvy, though, you are costing your service desk time and money by not making that information available to your users. Why encourage calls if the users are able to help themselves?

Do: Create specific portals/desktops for your various sets of users. Allow them to view knowledge/FAQs and submit their own tickets. Be prepared to have to evangelize this new means of self-support to foster us¬age.

6. Don’t: Overlook importance of multiple escalations and notifications (SLAs)

Escalations, notifications, and service level agreements (SLAs) are fundamental parts of providing excellent support. Many of today’s help desk applications allow you to set up very complex, fully-automated SLAs, but oftentimes support desk personnel don’t take the time to set them up accurately or thoroughly. Tickets should not escalate and notifications should not be sent unnecessarily. They are also not one size fits all; an order request shouldn’t escalate the same as a “something’s broken” ticket.

Do: Use care in building your escalations and SLAs, and set up notifications according to the actions required. Identify the special cases where time is a factor, such as a critical hardware failure. Use caution when applying a time-sensitive SLA; for example, if a mail server fails, how will notifications be effective if they can’t be delivered? A page notification could be used instead.

7. Don’t: Let your product choice drive your process

If a help desk software application is so complex that you have to change all your processes and service culture, there will be too many costs involved and not enough buy-in from users. This often leads to the out¬right failure of the implementation.

Do: Don’t be too consumed with standards or immense feature sets. While you may feel like it’s a safe play to buy something that’s “standard certified” or has the most bells and whistles in the industry, if it doesn’t fit with your processes or culture and prove to be easy to use and manageable over time, it’s ultimately your job on the line if it fails.

8. Don’t: Under utilize templates and auto-population

Let’s face it, your service center directive will always be to do more with less. So make sure your staff are not manually entering data that can be pulled in automatically, or typing the same information again and again on common tickets.

Do: Create the most efficient and automated use of your staff’s time by setting up templates to record frequently occurring issues. A good templating tool that uses dependencies can be even better, especially if you can tie approvals to templates.

9. Don’t: Overuse queues

Many service desks will use queues to assign tickets to a group, which often results in everyone thinking the other person is working on the ticket. This common occurrence often causes confusion and misuse of time. This lack of accountability and confusion is easily avoidable.

Do: Designate someone to monitor the queue, reassigning incidents as appropriate. If your help desk software allows, use a distribution method that automatically assigns incoming incidents to remove the chance of incidents being overlooked.

10. Don’t: Be process rigid or bad practice addicted

Not to be confused with #7 above, don’t be afraid to evolve your service processes either at the implementation of your new help desk application or over time as your use of it changes and grows. Too often, when a software package is rolled out, it feels easier to simply get it going yet continue with the status quo service processes. This can create an inefficient use of the new package’s feature set.

Do: Change is often inevitable, so try to keep a fluid mentality towards the processes you rely on in your service center. Re-evaluate your procedures on a set basis (i.e. yearly or every two years) and determine if they still apply. Try not to carry forward processes or procedures just because ‘that’s how it’s been done in the past.’ Any good help desk software vendor will continually work to increase the power and efficiency of their solution, so don’t be so rigid in your ongoing processes that you aren’t willing to consider evolving them over time. Also, leverage content delivered from thought leaders in the industry to see how others are evolving their processes. Read whitepapers, search industry portals, attend industry events, view industry blogs, etc. to gain valuable insight.

11. Don’t: Sacrifice training your staff

Nothing undermines your service efforts faster than under-educated help desk staff. For example, if a technician isn’t aware that ticket information is automatically emailed to the customer, the wrong information can be released, causing irreparable damages. If they are un¬aware of what the SLA time values are for each priority, tickets can be misprioritized and agreements can be missed. If techs are unaware of the category structure, they may not know how to categorize a call without having to do a lot of searching for the correct selection. The possibilities for inefficiency and waste are too numerous to consider.

Do: Seek out training opportunities for staff in need, and be sure they are educated on the specific options available to them in your help desk software and the effect of those options. Remember that it’s easier to train/educate your people than it is to apologize for bad information sent to a customer. Also, put an emphasis on increasing the accuracy of your ticket information – for example, don’t include work history information in a ticket resolution because the resolution can be used on a knowledge entry. It’s not useful to read things like “called and left voice mail” when searching for a solution.

12. Don’t: Cut the communication ties to your help desk software vendor

If your service desk is not utilizing the full functionality of the help desk application you’ve purchased, you are not experiencing the maximum ROI available to you. If you have a feature request that could make usability more favorable, your vendor should be requesting that information from you on an on-going basis. If your staff are not proficient in the use of your help desk application, greater gains may be available with minor investments in training.

Do: Call your help desk software vendor and communicate your needs. When you have only partially implemented your tool, put an emphasis on seeking help to get it 100% optimized. If you have a vendor that doesn’t respond in a favorable or timely manner, con-sider that the next time your software is up for renewal. These soft costs are just as much a part of the value of your solution as the purchase price.

Six Ways to Get Smart Handling the Help Desk

Your help desk is staffed by productive workers. You expect your call volume to increase because of a new system update that affects a good chunk of your user base. But your budget doesn’t allow for additional headcount. What do you do? While the conundrum is hardly an enviable one, it isn’t the end of the world. In fact, there are some basic steps to take to get out of the bind.

1 User, help thyself. Put together a sample group of affected users, help desk technicians and project team members to brainstorm a sizable list of FAQs, and post the results on the help desk website as part of the launch communication. And strongly encourage the use of online knowledge bases and self-service ticket management capabilities.

2 Keep it simple. Make sure your online knowledge base is simple and easy to use by focusing on the 10 percent of problems that account for 40 percent of the calls. A too complex online knowledge base just brings users back to the telephone hotline.

3 Work those metrics. Make sure you’ve got very clear metrics around average handle time and average speed-to-answer, and train your team to use these metrics effectively. You’ll get more calls handled by the same number of people even those you already assumed were productive.

4 Go into triage mode. Ensure ahead of time that your help desk reps can recognize the difference between a low-priority and high-priority issue, and deal with the former quickly by opening a ticket and getting off the phone. Too many times, help desk techs do not discriminate the way they should during spikes, and the truly needy wind up waiting in queue excessively.

5 Bring on the superusers. Enlist some great business users early on in the project, and train them alongside the help desk. They can help with the surge of calls for weeks after implementations at their respective sites. Not only will this help you deal with the call surge, but it can also build a team environment between IS and the business at another level in the organization.

6 Show your support. Good morale boosts help-desk productivity. Most people leave a little in the tank each day, but help desk crunch time is when the staff needs to go home on empty. Showing how much you value your team will go a long way.

Making the Case for Self-service

Three or four years ago the retail landscape started to morph, led by the ubiquitous ATM machine, self-service kiosks started to pop up at airports for check-in and fast food restaurants for order entry and gas stations for pump and go. With those changes my thinking was “what a great way to off-load rising labor costs by training the unsuspecting public….”

At first there was reluctance but as experience increased more and more customers sought out the consumer-friendly devices to make quick work of checking in, fueling up or ordering their favorite combo meal.

Today, consumers value self-service and attitudes have changed, but here is a disturbing thought, maybe it’s because consumers don’t want a relationship with companies any longer and that self-service gives the consumer the out they have been looking for.

To self-serve or not:

Walk in, find what I'm looking for, go to the counter to checkout.

Associate: "Hello, did you find everything you were looking for?"
Me: "Yes."
Associate: "Do you want to get our extended warranty on this product? It already has one year, but for..."
Me: "No, thank you."
Associate: "Do you want a bag?"
Me: "No."
Associate: "Do you have our rewards card? It's only $10 to signup and it will..."
Me: "No thank you."
Associate: "Will you be paying with your Branded-to-this-store Credit card?"
Me: "No," as I'm holding out my debit card.
Associate: "Would you be interested in donating $1 to charity?"
Me: "No."
Associate: "Okay, thats $10.87. No, it goes the other way." which always seems to be the opposite way it shows on the device.
Me: Tap tap tap.
Associate: "Do you want the receipt?"
Me: "Yes."
Associate: "Have a nice day.

versus

Walk in, find what I'm looking for. Go up to self-serve, scan, swipe, pay, walk out.