ClearView™ – The Revolutionary Business Solution!

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ClearView™ is the revolutionary business solution that brings new levels of visibility and accountability to all levels of your organization. By allowing you to see the weaknesses and strengths of each individual agent, ClearView™ enhances communication with employees, increases productivity, streamlines the work process, increases customer service and loyalty, and drives performance to new levels! ClearView™ offers supervisor a host of features that will make their life easier. These are just a few:

Performance Summary- This field breaks down the performance of each team on a call floor over a period of time. This customizable field lets you look at up to 13 different metrics at once, which are updated in real time. ClearView™ can also automatically highlight each box in the metrics field, allowing the user to see in an instant if a team is on goal or not. Any team fields can also be broken down into the agent level by simply clicking the metric. This field’s versatility allows a supervisor to be informed in a matter of 30 seconds, or to deep dive into performance metrics if they have more time.

Historical Metrics- This field shows a team or floor’s numbers over historical date ranges. It not only shows where performance was, but also graphs that performance against actual floor goals. This gives each supervisor a complete overview of their team or floor’s performance at just a moment’s glance.

Rankings- This field tells a supervisor where each agent ranks against the other agents on their team or floor. The Rankings field can be applied to any metric, which allows a supervisor to concentrate on driving performance and competition in areas that need them the most.

Gauges- The visual images in the Gauge field allow a supervisor to instantly see if their team or floor is hitting key goals.

If you have any other questions about Focus Services or our Call Floor Metric Software, ClearView™ Just click on the hyper links.

Do Your Agents Know the Score?

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Anyone who has ever managed in a call center knows that one of the most important tasks on the call floor is to motivate phone agents to perform well. This may sound easy on paper, but the reality is that motivating agents is a difficult and ever constant job that if left unchecked can spread apathy like a plague.  Many call centers drive performance by creating a feeling of competition on the floor.  Placing emphasis on specific metrics is a great way to get agents excited about competition, which in turn drives performance.

Just like any other competition, those competing must be able to see the score or else they will lose interest.  Can you imagine playing or watching a sporting event where no score was kept?  When this is the case in a call center the competition dies out.  You may have a coach or some other floor manager try to track the competition, but it is just not possible for anyone with responsibilities on the floor to track real-time metrics for a team or floor without devoting all of their time to it.  Even if you do decide to dedicate someone to tracking the data, they can’t give it to every agent in real-time and the competitive feeling on the floor is slowed and eventually lost.

This is why Focus Services uses ClearView to provide their floors with real-time data and rankings.  ClearView provides real-time data for virtually any metric that can be tracked and then stack ranks the floor by team and agent, allowing everyone to know where they rank at any time.  The difference that this new level of vision has made in driving competition and performance on Focus Services floors is substantial.  Focus Services managers are able to use the real-time data to drive competition and performance like never before and the agents are able to self-police, or to see and manage their own trends right away.  ClearView has allowed everyone at Focus Services to know the current “score” of the game, which means that the game plan is always up to date.

Laid Back vs. Structured: Which is Better for Your Agents?

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I recently spoke with my younger brother, who is a full-time college student that just got a new job in a call center. I knew he had worked in the call center environment before and was a very good phone agent. As we began to talk further he told me about the differences between the two centers. The first center employed a management style that was very laid back. He was allowed to come in whenever he wanted and was able to take breaks when he needed them; all he had to do was hit his total hours and meet his quota. The second center is much more involved in driving agent performance. He will have set hours that he will be required to work and he will take only scheduled breaks. His performance is constantly monitored and, if needs be, corrected. Call center number one paid him a higher hourly wage than call center number two will.

As we continued talking about the differences between the two centers I was shocked to hear that he was much more excited about the second center than he was the first. His reasons for making the move were not even centered on money; he was actually taking a pay cut by moving. I never would have guessed that my lil’ bro would have been one to take on a more demanding workload by choice, but that is what he has done. To him the second call center was a much better work environment. It provides structure. He was excited to know that instead of running free, he was a part of something that ran like a real business. He is starting out at a lower hourly rate, but is still excited because he knows that hard workers are given advancement opportunities within the company. I asked him what he thought about being monitored more closely. “What if they aren’t happy with the type of performance you gave at the old center?” I asked. “Then I will work hard and they will help me become a better agent.” was his reply.

I think this simple experience has shown me that in our industry employees really do want to be successful. My brother, the millennial, took a pay cut and an increased workload just to have a steady job where he knew he would be helped to succeed. I think that many of our phone agents are just like him. They want help to do their jobs well. They want to earn opportunities to move into management positions. And they want to feel like they are important and that they have a purpose in the company. If we can help our agents to do these things then they will help our business to perform at higher levels than ever before.

Death by Average Talk Time

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I still remember the day when call center agents were monitored by a physical person that was manually hard wired into their line.  I still remember the days of reading from a printed script and keeping track of all calls with a pen and a paper. I can’t imagined how inefficient call floors must have been back then. Metric software has now become the driving force on the call room floor. It is no longer a question of whether we are using tools to measure our floor’s performance, but what kind of tools and what metrics we are looking at. When dealing with customer service there is one metric specifically I would like to focus on. It is average talk time or (ATT) Where quality and economics often come head to head in a show down between the bottom liners and quality first.

Several years back I was building a home with a contractor that was producing 5 to 6 houses a month with just himself and a small team. At the same time my father began to build a home with a builder that built only two houses a year. My parents chose a builder that made big, beautiful, expensive homes with meticulous detail. By the time my home was finished and I had lived in it for the better part of the year, my parents home was just being completed. I soon realized that even though my house was done quickly and in a cost effective manner, it didn’t hold it’s value. It was done by cutting corners. I ended up selling my house a few years later for a loss. My parents lived in their beautiful home for 10 years and eventually decided to sale for something smaller, they sold their house for a large profit.

I am sure by now you already can guess the analogy I am going to make, I wish I could be less predictable, but I am not going to be. I view average talk time (ATT) like a contractor building a house. Economics tells us it is a number game, and I whole heartedly agree, that is why the contractor that took his time to make a better product  or “customer” makes a house worth more money. See? Still a numbers game. So do we put less weight on this metric? Heavens no! I am merely suggesting that we look at it in context.

If we see an agent that has a high average call time, average handling time, but also has a low average wait time, a low abandon rate, and most importantly, a high first call resolution rate, then guess what? I am a thrilled supervisor!  These metrics altogether show me that my agent is taking quality time with the customer, and I know that chance of that customer sticking around and gaining in value has just increased.

I would suggest that this metric is not the rope we use to hang our agents, at least not until we know what the other metrics are saying. Now I am going to shamelessly plug ClearView™  because I believe there is no better metric software in the industry. It allows you to customize your dashboard to see just about any slew of metrics side by side in real time. With cloud based ClearView™, I can manage my team in Utah whilst atop a beach chair in sunny Miami Beach and not skip a beat. I can finally put those long handle times into perspective with ease.

The Training Cure

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Training is an essential part of a call room floor, we all know that by now. No matter how much we try to create a homeostatic environment, a new training hurdle always seems to present itself.  Having been a part of countless failures in call room training procedure, I feel like this is one area our floor has finally gotten down to a science.  Are you ready for one of my fun modern day call floor parables? Too bad, you are getting one anyway.

I bought this sweet little monster of a dog for my wife for our first Valentines together. He was not monstrous in stature, he was just a little shih tzu (how cute am I, right?) but that little guy was a terror to train. Just when we thought we had overcome a training hurdle we would run into another one. We would both come home at the end of the day and find a chewed something or other or an accident. We would get mad and verbally scold him, we would put him in his kennel in hopes he would learn his lessons, but as soon as the punishment was over, he was back out doing the same things. Why wasn’t he learning! We were very frustrated.

One day we were watching the “Dog Whisperer”, César Milan finally explained something that made perfect sense. Trying to retroactively train a dog for something he did in the past is useless. Too much time has passed for both you and the dog to really have an understanding of what happened and how to fix it.  The training needs to happen in the moment to be effective. Humans beings are the same way!

I don’t think I have brought up anything you don’t already know and haven’t beaten yourself over the head trying to fix.  It is a tough thing to train in the moment. We have tried to remedy this problem by reviewing recordings of agents calls with them. This is the best approach many of us can effectively implement and is still a necessary part of the training process, especially on an individual basis. I realize we are not dogs here, we are dealing with intelligent agents and the lifeblood of our business, but the principle is the same. When we show them the recording it is a little bit like pointing to the mess on the ground the dog did hours ago and say, “stop doing that!” They are now out of the moment, so are you and let’s face it, it is just not going to be as effective.

Our remedy was to set certain benchmarks in our metrics and to note specific trends of each agent. We do this using our ClearView software. The moment they fall below a certain standard, our system is notified and a training is assigned to them to address the issue. You still have the option of training them now or later, but either way the agent is notified that they need training in that area. They now know what they did wrong when they did it, and we were not limited to a set of human ears

I understand we don’t all have ClearView, we could, but we don’t. So while you are coming to your senses and getting ready to get ClearView, try using the current metrics you have now. Set a few standards that must be met in every metric. When an agent drops below those metric standards, send them a quick message that you want to train them on that aspect. It may be a tap on the shoulder, and email, or a phone call to their cubicle, but let them know now rather than later. It is much more effective and they will appreciate it the correction.

Motivating Agents Through Competition

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The one consistent element that is present on every call room floor is competition. Whether you like it or not, it is there in some form. It is those call room floors that learn how to harness the competitive spirit that get the best out of their agents. Competition is one of the best producers of success. There are three things to remember when embracing and utilizing competition on your call room floor.

  1. Be ready to reward
  2. Be ready to reprimand
  3. Be ready give them the tools they need

Be ready to reward!

If you are going to let your agents compete against one another, be ready to reward your top performers. There are the select few that enjoy being the best for no other reason than bragging rights, but more often than not the average performance will be delivered by our agents if we don’t give them a reason to succeed and some recognition of their performance. The awards don’t have to be anything significant. We have had success just giving out gift certificates to restaurants. Just the fact that you are willing to recognize a good performance with any reward says a lot to your employees.

If you are going to let your agents compete, be ready to reprimand. This makes your job as a call floor supervisor both harder and easier. It becomes harder because someone is going to be at the bottom and you are going to have to make the tough decisions. You are going to have to put time in to some corrective training. You are going to have to invest in the kind of software that will allow them to monitor their behavior. Hopefully these are things you are doing already, but if not, get ready for a rude awakening.

Using competition to stack rank your agents will make your job easier. When you have to let someone go you can blame the metrics. If only we could do this in real life relationships! If someone is consistently performing at the bottom of the pack, they will most likely not be surprised when they are let go and you don’t have to be the bad guy (although let’s face it, you’ll still get blamed a little bit).

Lastly, you must give them the right tools to compete. Studies show that agents on call floors respond much better to in the moment correction than they do to after the fact correction. Invest in something where your agents can see how they are doing compared to everyone else right now in real-time.

One of my first jobs was in a call center. I always remember how annoying it was when I received the end of the day report and some of my stats were not up to par.  I couldn’t think of any reason as to why they were low, it didn’t make sense to me. I needed that “in the moment “ correction. I needed to see who was performing better than me and see how they were doing it. If you are going to have them compete, let them have visibility into the real-time action of the call floor. We all need a carrot dangled in front out our faces to keep us going. They need to see right now how they measure up to everyone else.

Our company uses software called ClearView that easily allows us to do this.  We have found great success giving our agents real-time insight into how the rest of their team is doing. Agent productivity has shot through the roof since we have started this approach.

Happy Competing.

If you would like to get a live demo of ClearView just click on the link.

 

 

Managing Millennials in 2013

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Anyone who runs a call center is probably managing several millennials falling in the 18 to 25-year-old range. At Focus Services, over 70% of our call floors are dominated with millennials. Call floors already face the challenge of a high turnover ratios, but as the millennials have joined the workforce over the past few years, this ratio has sky rocketed.

In the book Titled “Keeping the millennials: Why Companies are losing billions in turnover to this generation and what to do about it” by Sujanski and Ferri-Reed (known experts in human relations) note that the inability for management to understand how to properly manage this generation has been an expensive mistake. I would like to share a little bit about how we have successfully managed our millennials.

1. Up and Down Management vs. Cross Management

2. Stimulation and Motivation

3. Value vs. Seniority

We have seen the age-old war of generation versus generation since kids bought Beatles albums and freaked their parents out with crazy Rock ‘n’ Roll. The generation gaps have varied in size and scope, but this gap is never been wider than it is between the Baby Boomers and the Millennial. Gen X had their moments with the dawn of the cell phone and grunge rock, but it still wasn’t that far off from where there parents had come from hair metal of the late 70′s and the internet boom of the 90′s. Millennials came and smashed the chasm wide open. These kids are smart, they are tech savvy, they are on the cutting edge and they interact with other people in completely new and different way. We can spend all the time we want trying to mold them to our way of thinking, but we might have more success trying to lick our elbow.

Up and Down Management vs. Cross Management

Up and down management is what us old folks are used to. The manager hands down orders, there is a communication line, we follow it. It has worked just fine and there is no right or wrong here. It is simply a human relation thing. We move up and down this line.
Millennials are not used to this type of information sharing. They are used to a more of a cross management style where everyone’s contributions matter. This isn’t to say everyone should get a reward for playing, but instead it is merely a manifestation of the wiki phenomenon of the information age of which they are all products of. They know how to get info just the same as you do, and sometimes better. Yes, experience matters, but we are talking to generation that lives in flat world and they know a lot and they want to share it.

Managers would be wise to keep an open line of communication with their Millennial employees, these kids are smart. Ask for feedback and make sure you give it, they need to hear it, they want it.  They want to know that if something didn’t work, why didn’t work. The old 1950′s boss style does not fly with these kids. Think Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. These are the business leaders they know and admire.

Stimulation and Motivation

There was a time where a television playing ESPN on call room floor was crazy, where putting a video game system and couch in the break was considered a major distraction. While I am not saying you have to do this, it is the mentality behind it that I want you to understand. This group of Millennials like to be motived and stimulated. These are the kids that play x-box, text, and listen to music at the same time. They have learned how to multi-task, it is a part of who they are. Create an environment where they can be motived with goals and objectives that are tied to rewards. Give them a place that they like to be. Stop worrying about slacking off, that is what coaches and team leaders on the floor are for. Create the environment they will like, give them incentive to stay (other than pay) and you will create a valuable employee.

We order our employees lunch on a regular basis, we have fun contests daily, we have relaxing break room where they can unwind and hang out. These are just a few of the things we have implemented, many at the request of our younger employees. We love our employees and we have some of the best agents in the world and we want to treat them like it. Our turn over rate is among the lowest in years and in the industry.

Value versus seniority

This sounds like a threat to the old folks like myself as I have placed them at odds against each other; however, they can be harmonious if the structure is in place; but the bottom line is you can’t ignore talent. We see millionaires being made younger and younger. They want to be recognized based on their ability and talents, not seniority. If they don’t feel rewarded according to their abilities and talents, you bet they will go somewhere where they can get it. Show them you value ingenuity and ability over seniority.

I hope these tips help. We have implemented these strategies with great success. We have among the highest retention rates among the Millennials in this industry. If you have any other questions about Focus Services or our Call Floor Metric Software, ClearVIew. Just click on the hyper links.

 

Never be afraid to replace yourself.

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“You must be willing to risk your own business to do the next thing,”  This  philosophy dictates that good innovators replace their own products–before someone else beats them to the punch. “We’re constantly asking: How can we out-do, out-smart, out-innovate ourselves?” We have to stay three steps ahead of the competition–and be open to risks in the name of a better product.

 

The Best Call Center Software You Aren’t Using

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ClearView will change the way the industry views customer relationship management. Below is a demo of ClearView, see for yourself how you can realize the untapped potential of your customer support.

ClearView following features:

  • Customizable Data Views
  • Color Coded Objectives
  • Sortable Tables
  • Front-line Rep Data Viewing
  • Multiple Filtering Options
  • Historical and Real-Time Data
  • Graphs
  • Visual Objectives
  • Competitive Ranking
  • Create and Approved Schedules
  • Real-time Call Length Data
  • Automatic Data Refresh
  • Personalized Dashboard

Request a free demo from one of our experts and find out how you can maximize your call center efforts.

Focus Services has been dedicated to transparency and accountability to all their clients, the launch of ClearView not only exemplifies this mission, but gives their clients insight to their campaigns they have never had before and can only get from ClearView.

Read more about us click Focus Services

Top 5 Reasons Companies Choose Outsourcing

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The Top Five Reasons Companies Outsource:

Lower costs

You might have assumed this was the leading reason and you would have been right. Cost decrease is ulitamtely the number one factor in the decision for companies to outsource. A vast majority of companies currently outsourcing states that decreasing expenses is their principle goal. According to researchers at the Gartner Group, 80% of companies cite reducing costs as their primary reason for call center outsourcing.

The Duke University study of the Fortune 500 companies found that 63% saved greater than 30% annually. In fact, 14% reported savings greater than 50 percent. This finding matched company expectations. This is also the primary motivation of many of our current clients at Focus Services.

Up-sell/cross-sell opportunities

Cold calling and blind telemarketing are becoming obsolete. Inbound calls are an effective and incredibly powerful tactic to increase profits. Businesses miss huge potential earnings by not up-selling and cross-selling during inbound conversations. Call center outsourcing to an experienced organization increases your profitability as a result of up-selling and cross-selling.

Let’s take, for instance, this example: you call in to your internet company to change your wireless speed. After your request has been successfully fulfilled and you are pleased and satisfied, they offer you a simple option for a home telephone. You as the customer are pleased already, you now have a connection with the customer service rep, and this is the point when you are most likely to purchase additional services. This is just one example of something we do everyday at Focus Services. Century Link is one of our clients who we are able to successfully up sell and cross sell to their users to maximize their benefit of using a company’s services like Century Link.

Retention

Customer retention is a frequently neglected but absolutely necessary piece of you company’s profitability. With the absence of a solid and innovative retention team, you might as well be referring customers to your competitor. Customers all ready have your products or services, why let them go some place else? Quality customer support services can turn an unsatisfied customer into a satisfied brand new customer for a second time.

Scale

Scaleability is an enormous benefit when considering outsourcing components of your company. Business owners recognize that things can’t all happen at once, they take time. Building an office takes hard work, hiring new personnel takes effort, and scaling up and down takes significant planning and flexibility. Smart business owners recognize that particularly in today’s fast moving environment, time is money. Scaling up or down becomes uncomplicated when you partner with a proven call center outsourcing company with a foundation of talented personnel around the globe. An influx of customer service needs often occur during a holiday (Christmas, Mother’s Day) and marketing promotions can spike demand for a short time frame to uncharacteristically high levels. Are you planning to build up a significant amount of more infrastructure back home, or would you prefer pay a low hourly rate a couple of times a year to increase your call handling ability? How about after hours or weekends? Quite often business owners are left trying to make the hard decision of whether it is fiscally advantageous to staff after-hours and weekends; outsourcing is often the perfect solution.

Diversification

Many companies want to maintain a section of their in-house infrastructure and outsource different components of their business. This could be because the company successfully facilitates an internal call center but would like to supplement or expand their program through call center outsourcing. Diversifying call center operations can be an excellent way for a company to preserve quality values will expanding in a cost-effective manner.

Are you in need of outsourcing? Could outsourcing be just the X-factor that you need to push you business to the next level? Outsourcing your call floor could be the answer to saving money, expanding your business, and increasing your bottom line.

If you have questions about the process feel free to contact us for a free evaluation of your outsourcing needs.