Your merchandisers have found the most appropriate products. Your creative team designed an eye-popping book, and your warehouse is prepped for the onslaught of orders.
You’ve done everything you can to ensure the success of your next catalog drop. But if your call center doesn’t pick up customers’ calls efficiently enough, all of your work may be for naught.
Abandoned calls occur when customers, for whatever reason, hang up the phone before they reach a call center agent. One operations consultant who surveys roughly 30 call centers annually says abandonment rates for catalogers can range from less than 1 percent to 40 percent of all calls received!
Many experts cite a call-abandonment rate of 2 percent to 5 percent of all calls received as a good benchmark for which to strive. More than 5 percent and you may be having personnel problems; less than 2 percent and you may be overstaffed.
But Bill Spaide, senior partner at catalog operations consultancy Spaide, Kuipers and Co., reminds catalogers that making this metric a reality takes serious effort and commitment. Catalogers with smaller call center staffs will be especially hard-pressed, financially and staff-wise, to meet the 2-percent mark. In the meantime, their customers still expect fast service.
“Customers don’t know if you’ve got 20 or 200 seats [in your call center]. They just expect the phone to be answered,” Spaide points out.
Meeting these expectations more effectively requires customer familiarity, creative staffing techniques and a little technical know-how.
Limits of Customer Tolerance
Brad Cleveland, president of the Incoming Calls Management Institute, a think tank, pinpoints seven factors that affect caller tolerance when waiting in a queue:
1. Motivation, or how badly customers want what you have to offer.
2. The availability of substitutes, that is, if customers can use other means (e.g., your Web site) if they’re kept on hold for too long.
3. Your competitors’ service levels.
4. What customers expect from your brand—though generally speaking, Cleveland says catalog customers are less forgiving of delays or problems than are customers shopping in other channels.
5. The length of time available for a customer’s call: Abandonment often can be attributed to calls coming either from cellular phones or the workplace.
6. The call’s cost: Customers generally are less likely to abandon a call that’s made on a toll-free number.
7. Simple human behavior variables, such as the customer’s mood and the time of day he or she calls. As Spaide affirms, “People have different thresholds of pain as to when they’re going to jump off a call.”
Queuing Tips
To accommodate all of these thresholds, Cleveland offers some strategic advice for call center managers setting up their on-hold, recordings.
Reposition your first delay announcement. For example, if this message normally is played during the first few seconds of a call, move it to appear after 15 or more seconds to give agents more time to rescue potential fast cleardowns (customers who hang up during or right after the first on-hold message is played).
Also reposition your second delay announcement to appear just before the average time of abandonment, when it’s most needed.
Another tip: Avoid repeating delay announcements (such as, “Your call is very important to us; please stay on the line.”). Cleveland thinks customers dislike such messages, and because many waiting customers will put the calls on speakerphone, a repeating announcement makes them work harder just to hear if the voice is an agent or not.
When possible, use automatic call directory algorithms to let customers know how long their queue time will be.
One final tip: Use simple preconnnect recordings to pre-empt customer expectations (e.g., “Due to a storm on the East Coast, we’re operating with less than full staff”), or to reinforce your Web services (e.g., “If you would like to track your order online, visit our Web site at ...”).
Staffing Strategies
Call center and catalog operations experts acknowledge that while better queuing does treat the symptoms of call abandonment, improved staffing strategies may cure the disease. After all, customers wouldn’t have to wait in a queue in the first place if someone would answer their calls quickly.
Spaide outlines four ways to sharpen your call center staff and reduce customers’ wait times.
1. In addition to your full-time staff, develop a permanent flex-time staff. Assign, say, four- to six-hour-long shifts per flex-time agent, and guarantee each a work week of no longer than 30 hours.
For call centers with staffs of 50 or more, Spaide uses the benchmark of 20-percent flex-time agents. For those with a staff of 20 to 50, he uses the benchmark of 10-percent flex-time agents.
2. Schedule agents according to call forecasts for every hour of every day. Take a daily flash report to discern whether call volume corresponds to that day’s forecast. Appoint a supervisor to ensure that the number of agents is enough to handle the day’s actual call volume.
Involve your marketing department in call-volume forecasting. Have call center managers periodically meet with your catalog’s marketers to discuss the next two or three weeks’ worth of promotions. This will help you forecast call center staffing requirements.
3. Incentivize call center managers and agents. Here’s another of Spaide’s ideas: Monitor some customers’ calls, and score your agents’ performances on a 100-point scale based on the variables of attendance (whether they’re in their seats to receive calls), achievement (whether they satisfied the customer) and upselling (if they sold other products during the call). Offer agents a $1-per-hour raise for a pay period in which they score at least 90 points. Similarly, offer call center managers a $2-per-hour raise if a certain number of their agents score 90 or higher.
4. Catalogers with fewer resources can benefit simply from cross-training personnel. Recruit a few people within the company, but outside of the call center staff, to hop on the lines when things get hectic. For example, Spaide says, appoint a few people within other departments to be “the blue team.” When your regular call center agents get overwhelmed, announce that blue team members must man the phones from their desks.
Helpful Technology
Having automatic call directory (ACD) functionality is a must to switch calls to other departments as noted above. It also reports on call center operating results in terms of answer speed, call-abandonment rates and agents’ percentage of availability. Spaide says prices for this technology have dropped dramatically in the past five years.
Workforce-management software is another critical call-center tool. It takes information from your ACD and incoming calls, and couples it with your established call curves and/or forecasts. Based on this information and your service level, you can create staffing plans and individual schedules for agents.
Companies offering workforce-management tools include Blue Pumpkin (www.bluepumpkin.com), Aspect (www.aspect.com) and Pipkins (www.pipkins.com).
Outsourcing
Should applying these suggestions be beyond your company’s current capacity, consider outsourcing overflow calls. Understand, however, that this option carries both pros and cons, according to Liz Kislik, president of call center consultancy Liz Kislik Associates.
On one hand, outsourcing may give customers speedier access to agents, which will contribute to customer satisfaction and lower your call-abandonment rates.
On the other hand, ensure that the outsourcer’s customer service levels align with your own. This requires forming a strong relationship with your outsourcer, asserts Spaide. He suggests communicating with your outsourcer at least through the third and fourth fiscal quarters to establish the service level you’re aiming for, even during non-peak times. He also advises training and measuring third-party call center agents in the same way as you would your in-house staff.
If you don’t have the time or resources to build this kind of relationship, Spaide suggests outsourcing only simple calls, such as catalog requests.
As with any operations advice, implement these tips within the boundaries of your own budgets and resources. Anything that coaxes customers to hang in instead of hang up is a step in the right direction.