Proper Metrics and Focusing on Your Niche

I have been working with a business whose customer contact center has been hampered by corporate downsizing. They were having trouble getting through the volume of work needed to produce the revenue the corporation was used to seeing.

My assessment of the situation was that they were truly standing on the precipice of elimination from either replacement by inexpensive outsourcing, or corporate implosion from the downsizing.


The Task:


Tasked with staving off both of these I began to look at the information at hand. This contact center was built over the last 5 years, and had clearly found the right answer to their niche's problem. They could take a large portion of the credit for taking business over and over again from their main competitor. When the cash was plentiful, and budgets were plump, the performance was top-tier. But once the budgets became razor thin, the weaknesses began to show.

I learned that over the last few years, the metric used to evaluate the customer service reps' performance was minutes on the phone per day and the past management had found ways to effectively double this metric over the last 12 months. The problem that still remained was that they were still leaving massive amounts of revenue on the table due to an inability to contact sufficient quantities of leads in each market area. What I determined was that they were breaking a fundamental rule, which is that the employees have to be compensated and evaluated in such a way that their goals naturally become the company's goals.

The Tools:

The assets in place were 2 of the 4 original managers, and 6 of the original 12 customer service agents. Fortunately this left a core of knowledge and group of dedicated employees to draw from. The corporation had already decided to outsource the distribution aspect of the business, which cut costs and should also reduce the man-hours needed to handle that operation.


The Solutions:

I took these bits of information that I'd uncovered, and started doing some digging, followed by reflection. I started to formulate a game plan that consisted of cutting any non-core functions, and focusing on that which they did best. I needed them to view the corporation as a customer, and for them to understand that they needed to provide a world-class service to that customer.

They were duplicating efforts in the contact center in NY that were being done in the corporate headquarters in VA. There was no reason for the NY office to be doing any HR, since the HR department was in VA. I simply spoke to all HR related parties, and worked out a streamlining of efforts to avoid duplication. The time freed up by this was then allocated to the supervision of the customer service agents.

The next step was to outsource the "night shift". They are contractually obligated to staff the call center from 8am - 8pm EST. The staff hated working the 5 - 8 shift, and the numbers all pointed to it being a waste of 3 man-hours. By outsourcing this shift, I was able to cut the per-hour cost from $12 to $5.50 with only a few hundred dollars in up-front setup costs. They will recover this in just over 2 months, and save significantly thereafter with an added bonus of happier employees.

In addition I was able to shift an additional 3 man-hours per day during the most effective calling times, which brings me to the most significant and effective change. By simply looking at historical data they already had, I was able to see that from about 8-11 and 2-4 was when they got the largest ROI on their agents' time. This explained why the increases in phone time had no effect on outputs. They were calling the customers during fruitless times of the business day. I enacted "call blocks" where the agents would focus on calling as many customers as possible, and minimize all other activities. This simply meant that they would do all prospecting, data entry, and any other non-calling activity outside of these two call blocks.

The Results:

The effects of these changes were immediately felt. The morale was higher because the agents found it much less monotonous, and they were able to be in better spirits when talking with the customers. Call times actually increased, but more importantly, output increased. They were closing approximately 25-30% more leads than before, AND they were able to help out with other miscellaneous tasks.

Lessons Learned:
Sometimes the little things really add up. None of the changes made were earth-shattering or even difficult, but they were based on an assessment of the data, rather then emotion. It's critically important to utilize the empirical data at your disposal, and to listen honestly to what it's telling you. All I did with this company was rearrange the employees' day, and eliminate non-core functions, which is something businesses do every day. Treating the corporation as a whole as a customer of the NY division, and focusing on the core value that the NY division can provide led to lower costs and higher outputs.