Keeping Call Staff Satisfied | BTalk Australia

(12min 38) Running an effective call centre is one of the hardest and costly tasks for most organisations. It’s a blend of technology, customer service and staff management.

On today’s BTalk Australia Phil Dobbie talks to Denise Pitt, CEO of UCMS Group, one of the country’s largest call centre specialists. Denise has also been selected as the 2008 Telstra Victoria Business Woman of the Year. She provides advice for anyone running a call centre within their business – and don’t worry, that advice isn’t to outsource it all! In a wide ranging discussion Denice talks about technology, staff morale, remote working, off-shoring and cost cutting.

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See also:
Get Customers to Help Themselves | BTalk Australia
Talk to the Machine Not the Hand | BTalk Australia

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• Today’s Transcript

Phil Dobbie: Hello, I’m Phil Dobbie and welcome to BTalk Australia. Today: how to keep your call centre staff happy and motivated. I’ve always thought that one of the most challenging part of a business is running a call centre. You’ve got staff to manage. You’ve got customers to pacify. You’ve got technology to maintain. There’s a lot to go wrong. But, probably, it’s the people aspect that’s the hardest part of it all. So, how do you keep those people motivated? Denise Pitt is the CEO of UCMS, which is a contact centre specialist for some of the largest businesses in the telco, finance, transport, and public sectors. So Denise, you’ve got a lot of people working for you, all in the call centre industry. How do you keep them motivated?

Denise Pitt: That’s a good question, Phil, but obviously all we do, every day, is run call centres, so all we do every day is focus on not only keeping those employees motivated, but attracting them, in the beginning, with the right motivations. Someone who wants to work in a call centre has a really good orientation towards service or sales, depending on what we’re trying to achieve. But it is something you cannot take for granted — you have to work at making sure they really are motivated, that they’re connected to the brand. And for us, as an outsourcer, that might be two brands because we need them connected and profiled to the brand they’re working for. So, if they’re working for a conservative financial services market or a really fun, funky IT company, we really need to profile those agents. So different things motivate them, depending on the call centre, so we have a big focus on profiling those employees before we bring them in.

Dobbie: Yes.

Pitt: Profiling the managers, because they can really make a huge difference. The connection really, as much as I’d love to think is always to the most senior person in the company, it’s usually to their team leader or their centre manager where they feel that absolute connection. They’re the person that makes them want to come to work every day — not necessarily all of us would fit in larger offices.

Dobbie: So for those sorts of people, what are the qualities you’re looking for?

Pitt: We don’t necessarily always go for traditional experience. We look for people that have a strong empathy. If we’re looking for customer service, we’re looking for people that have empathy with service people that we believe would be resilient and able to work in an environment that’s fairly heavily measured. Call centres are very measured environments and an outsourcer has potentially more than an internal centre. So we need to have someone who’s comfortable with that: they can work with a lot of information, hugely goal-oriented, and we want to see that empathy. If they really don’t have empathy, then their resilience will wear down — if they’re facing an issue that customers are ringing in repeatedly about in a particular call centre.

Dobbie: You’re right about that monitoring. Call centre work is the most monitored part of the business. I mean, you’ve got numbers for everything, how long the calls have been on hold for, how long the call queues are. Can you over-monitor some of the people who are working in these call centres?

Pitt: I don’t think you can over-monitor. What you can do is over-use the information or make it overbearing for the consultant so they don’t feel it’s actually helping them improve in their job. They feel it’s Big Brother watching and that’s when it’s absolutely detrimental to the service or how they feel about the company or the brand they’re representing. So I don’t think you can over-monitor, but you can incorrectly use that data. It should be something that’s there to coach — where do you go to from now, focus on have some smaller steps rather than the four or five KPIs they’ve got. But I don’t think you can over-monitor. It’s a way for you to hear your customers or for us, our clients’ customers; those consultants are the listening posts. They hear what customers think of the brands, the products, the pricing. So, you’re not just monitoring for the consultant, you are monitoring to hear what your customers have to say as well. So, it’s probably never too much, just make sure you use it appropriately.

Dobbie: That’s right, and it’s not there to intimidate people.

Pitt: Oh, I have known people to use it incorrectly and it has disastrous results, because it will impact how those people feel about their job, therefore how they service your customers. So you need to be wary with it.

Dobbie: In choosing the right people when the economy is hitting hard times (like it looks like we are now), do you find there’s a sudden rush of people who can’t get jobs and want to get into call centres almost because they can’t find a job elsewhere, rather than having their heart in the industry?

Pitt: Well, it has been 11 years of boom time so, it’s probably something we’re used to now, but I’d like to think not. Obviously, I’m very passionate about customer service, running call centres and sales environments, so I’d like to think that people don’t rush to us. But, we will have to make sure that we are obviously profiling correctly and we do psychometric testing to make sure we have that right motivation. So, hopefully, we’ll weed people out, because it’s not an easy job. It is a tough job and if you don’t really want to do it, it is not going to work and that’ll be flushed out pretty quickly.

Dobbie: Probably about half a day. I think that’s how long I’d last in a call centre.

Pitt: It’s a hard job.

Dobbie: I’d be wanting to interview everyone and that’s the problem.

Pitt: You might have a problem with how many calls you can take in a day then.

Dobbie: That’s right. The team spirit seems to be an important element of a contact centre. What tricks can you play to try and engender that team spirit?

Pitt: I don’t know if there are any tricks, but allowing them to have time, making sure they’ve always got time for some socialising, some time to support each other — a buddy environment. We have people, when they come out of training and they go to join a team, they get assigned a buddy or are put into consolidation where their buddies come and assist them as they adapt to the technology and the call times. And that really helps because they see the other people on their teams as a support, someone that can help them. So that when they get into trouble on a call or they’ve had a particularly difficult call, then they can turn to each other. So there’s a natural bonding that does happen in a centre if you have got people with the right empathy and profiling.

Dobbie: What about the team spirit with the rest of the organisation? Very often, a call centre is an adjunct, isn’t it, to an organisation? There’s a lot of the “us and them” mentality. How do you break that down that big barrier that seems to exist?

Pitt: For us, we don’t have to break down the barrier, which is why it’s good to work for an outsourcer. Our customer service consultants, they are how we earn our money. They are the number one in our business so they are our product. So here, there are no barriers. Everyone else has the barriers. We have to support them because that’s how we earn our income. So I think if you’re going to work in the call centre industry and have it as a career, you’re probably better an outsourcer.

Dobbie: Yes.

Pitt: Because in traditional companies where I have come from, often they’re just seen as a big cost centre, or even worse, if it’s a department that’s in charge of customer service, there isn’t a department in charge of customer service, everyone should be trying to drive customer satisfaction or customer service.

Dobbie: Now, obviously, technology’s allowing call centres to be a lot more dispersed these days. People are even taking calls from home, but I guess that does create some problems, again, in terms of making them feel as though they’re part of the team. They may not actually physically be seeing anybody else from the team.

Pitt: We have a remote workforce, we have a remote offering, and we found that was great to provide flexibility, but it’s not for your traditional Y-gen workforce. It has allowed us to attract a very, very diverse workforce, people, perhaps with other challenges in life, so that perhaps shorter hours are necessary for them. They may have a disability or a phobia — anything says that they wouldn’t potentially come into a large call centre, but they’ve got unbelievable skills. They could even be a more mature employee that is fantastic at customer service, even very complex problem-solving, but they’re just not able to work in the centre. But they have to have strong motivation because they do miss working with others, so you have technology to allow them to videostream to their team leader, but it’s not the same. So you do have to be very careful with who you put in your remote workforce because it’s fantastic, but it’s not for everyone.

Dobbie: Now you’ve mentioned cost a couple of times and for businesses, I think they do just look at the call centres as being often a very significant cost, which is why a lot of people turn towards off-shoring. I’m sure in lots of circumstances that’s the right thing to do, but what do you see as being the pros and cons to moving at least part of your call centre offshore?

Pitt: I do agree that a lot of people look at their call centres as a cost centre, but in fact, if you realise that the majority of service interactions or the majority of touch points with your customers now are done through the call centre, not face to face and not necessarily automated, then you may change your approach to that contact centre because it is likely to be the only thing or one of the few things that makes your clients feel very attached to your brand, to your offering in the market. So I think people need to weigh that up when they decide whether they are going to outsource domestically or outsource offshore. I think there is a place for off-shorers, but if you are in a market that’s still very competitive, if you have a proposition that is about data protection, service orientation or customer intimacy because you have a high-value product, then you’ve got to stay onshore. You’ve got to make sure they’re either held internally or held with a domestic outsourcer who is under the same laws, has the same cultural aspects and will service your customers with the same quality but perhaps more efficiently than it would in-house.

Dobbie: So, the CFO is looking at the call centre, he’s got his pencil sharpened, and he’s going to make some cuts and you don’t want him to make disastrous cuts.  What would you be suggesting? I mean, are there efficiencies that he should be looking at before he starts getting rid of people?

Pitt: Yes. There are a lot of efficiencies and potentially a lot of the cost that does creep into call centres is the hours they operate, perhaps the flexibility they need, so they need to carry additional staff. So you can look to augment that with some outsourcing. I would also suggest they look at technology. We have a large technology arm here here specialising in the contacts into space.  There’re ways you can automate some of your low-value calls or highly repetitive calls that allow the consultants to then focus purely on the high-value customers or high-value interactions. So there are usually other ways before you just take the whole thing and throw it all out the window.

Dobbie: Right. Finally, just getting back to the whole question of motivating people. If you’ve got somebody in a business who’s working well — they know it and they know they’re on the road to promotion. What about those people who are pretty much going to be doing the same job forever, for the rest of their lives? How do you keep those people motivated?

Pitt: It depends on if that person is satisfied with that career aspiration, and many people are. They have different challenges in their lives or different priorities in their lives so they want to be good at their job. But, potentially, they don’t want to be a team leader or overseer and it’s great if you can attract those types of people.  But they still need to be recognised, I mean you look for your key talent and you must always have programs to support your key talent. Those people that are willing to do their job and perhaps, for us, move to different contracts or a new launch product for us, they backbone, they’re fantastic. So it’s important that you recognise them. They do need recognition.  We have, obviously, our Kudos program, which is about recognising those people, allowing them to have perks through other components. We provide flexibility as they go through different stages of their lives. But you’ve got to look for what’s motivating them because if it’s not the career, there’ll be other things and it might be flexibility — it might be just being recognised for being good at what they do.

Dobbie: Or just helping people on the phone, I think that’s a motivation for a lot of people, isn’t it?

Pitt: A lot of people really do know they’re pretty good at what they’re doing and you move them to the clients or the contracts that really value that customer intimacy and they’re fantastic at it.

Dobbie: Right. So now I’ve got a flashing light telling me I’ve been talking to you for far too long now. Got to move onto the next interview.  Thanks very much for your time today, Denise.

Pitt: Thanks Phil, appreciate the call.