Why I Hate Your IVR

by: Sean Hawkins

I recently called my bank, who shall remain anonymous, in order to speak with someone regarding a deposit. As I was pressed for time, my intention was to have this matter resolved as quickly as possible. Once connected to their IVR, I quickly realized this issue was not going to be resolved anytime soon.
 
After being forced to listen to the main menu, which was too long, I was finally placed in the appropriate sub-menu for my issue. This is where my frustration took over. At no point was I given a menu option specific to my problem. Even worse, there was no prompt given to speak with an agent. Therefore, my only course of action was to go back to the main menu in the hopes of connecting with an agent.
 
The main menu had nine options, none of which were for connecting to someone in the call center. At this point, I began to say “representative”, “agent”, and “customer support”, along with some other choice words I shall not dare repeat here. As the IVR did not recognize the commands, I was promptly notified there was “difficulty understanding” what I wanted. Perfect, I thought. This would certainly route me to a customer service agent.
 
Imagine my frustration when I was told to call customer service just before the call was disconnected. Rather than endure another battle with the “Phone System from Hades”, I went to a local branch to handle my affairs. As the teller--who was extremely helpful--thanked me for coming in, she offered some advice. “Mr. Hawkins, to save time in the future, you can call our toll free number rather than coming in to the bank. It’s much quicker.”
 
I began to explain to her the pains I endured via the phone only to be surprised by her response to my unpleasant ordeal.

“Oh yes, sometimes our phone system can be a bit complicated,” she said.

That got me wondering how many times in the past this teller had already had this same conversation with other customers. As I knew she was unable to resolve this matter, I quickly jotted down the following note on a deposit slip and handed it to the manager.

I hate your IVR because:
1.    That “voice” annoys me!
2.    I want to speak to a person!
3.    Too many menu options!
4.    It’s so slow!
5.    It doesn’t recognize my voice commands!
6.    It hung up on me!

 

 

Sean is a Customer Experience, Contact Center and Help desk manager with over 12 years of experience. He has a terrific pulse on incorporating innovation into the contact center. He's implemented social, outsourcing partners, new technology, and new products, while maintaining an award-winning contact center.

In 2011, his team was awarded the ICMI "Global Call Center of the Year" for Small to Medium-Sized Centers. Follow on Twitter- @SeanBHawkins

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Insider Interview #2: Melissa Kovacevic

A Conversation with Melissa Kovacevic - Contact Center Consultant

by: Brooks Webb

Melissa Kovacevichas been a contact center consultant since 1983, and has been in the industry since the late 70s.  She got her start with Dial America Marketing as an agent, and quickly moved into a supervisor role due to her past experience with customer service and real estate sales.  She eventually managed that center and later was recruited by another company to open and run their first center.  She’s seen a lot of changes over the years and has developed a true passion for what she does. She’s worked with inside sales, customer service, tech support, as well as all channels, including email, chat, phone, and social media.  She has worked in both operational consulting as well as coaching, which she absolutely loves.  We at Call Center Weekly were lucky enough to sit down with Melissa Kovacevic last week in order to pick her brain about her many years in the Contact Center industry. 

CCW: What caused you to move into the Consulting side of the industry?

Melissa: After a couple of years with Dial America, a headhunter told me about an opportunity as a new manager to help start up a call center in Charlotte.  I jumped at the chance to do that.  I started a brand new call center, in charge of recruiting, training, coaching, etc.  I have to give all of the credit to Dial America who trained and mentored me all those years ago.  I  met a consultant while in Charlotte, and decided that I would really like to do that in the future.  So after a short while, I opened my own consulting practice. 

CCW: Did you see yourself going into Call Center Consulting early in life? 

Melissa: Great question.  My father owned a small corner grocery store, attached to our home.  It was on Main St in a small town in Pennsylvania.  At 3 or 4 yrs old, I would go with my mother for the delivery runs to houses outside of town and got my first look at customer service.  At age 10 or 11, I learned how to operate the cash register, make change, and handle money.  I dealt with customers early in life, both nice and not so nice.   I then went to college for Psychology and Art. I was going to do art therapy, but I immediately realized that it was pretty scary when people start throwing paint around the room.  So that took me into real estate but when the market dropped, I found a Dial America ad in the paper and moved into it just to make a living.  I have never felt bored with what I do with Call Centers.  I think my enthusiasm comes through in blog articles that I write.  I love what I do and I have to give thanks to Dial America for the initial opportunity in the industry. 

CCW:  To someone brand new to the call center environment, what would be your one piece of advice?

Melissa: Remind yourself who is paying your wage; The Customer!  We think it’s the company, but the company doesn’t exist without the customers. Remember how we want to be treated when we’re the customer.  What’s important to you when you’re the customer?  If you are upset, how do you want to be treated?  How does it make you feel if someone is just saying “Sorry”

You’ve got to have good energy, enthusiasm, be empathetic, and see how that comes back around to you.  When a supervisor has given up on an agent, I try to get the agent to agree to try some new things and answer some of these questions. They’ll come back after a couple of weeks with responses from their customers like “Thank you, you’re a great agent” and “It’s really great working with you” because they’ve learned to make the customer feel important.

CCW: What are some important qualities/traits that you look for when hiring?

Melissa: I love the idea that you can do phone screens.  It tells you a lot about how that person reacts to questions, comments, etc.  Hearing them in actual scenarios, giving them that role play over the phone is great.  When you can go outside their comfort level, that’s a good thing.  We tend to hire people who are more process oriented.  Most processes and procedures can be trained, but you can’t train someone to have a great personality over the phone.  Look for soft skills, and then train the process/procedure/technical skills.  Always make sure they can talk to the customer on their level without talking down to them. 

CCW: What’s been your biggest challenge over the years?

Melissa: Remaining flexible and keeping up with all the changes in technology and customer expectations.  I’m bombarded on a daily basis with hundreds of ideas through Twitter, blogs, and emails.  I look where the trends are and look for changes in technology.  Customer expectations are now a big part of social media and mobile interactions. 

I had to be more flexible. When I first started, it was all about outbound telemarketing. My first clients were banks and insurance companies.  One bank’s call center was in the basement of a branch.  It’s since become SunTrust.   At the time, telemarketing and outbound telemarketing was something that everyone wanted to do.  Now there are more blended calls and relationship selling.  There’s more tech support as well. 

Learning different technologies, learning more about the latest contact center systems that are out there are things I have to keep up with.  A lot of my knowledge I credit to people I’ve met on Linkedin and Twitter.

CCW: What do you see as the next big trend in Customer Service/Support?

Melissa: I love working with smaller call centers.  Large call centers have all the bells and whistles but small centers are realizing that they need to start tracking social media support.  Some companies’ marketing teams handle social but that’s not necessarily the right direction.  We need to be tracking social tickets in our centers.  There’s also Mobile support.  Mobile apps, mobile wallets for banking, and apps that put you in queue via your mobile phone and ring when an agent is available are growing in popularity.  The question for our centers is what methods are customers going to be using to interact with us? 

With tech advances, we’re seeing more remote agents, and technology that allow us to monitor people while working from home, including supervisors and QA teams as well.  For example here in Charleston, being able to go mobile and move call center activities if hurricanes come through is key. It gives us that opportunity to set up somewhere else if we need to.  

For social support, if a customer says I communicated with someone on FB, the rep needs to know what the customer is talking about.  We need to track that, and if Marketing is handling social, we need to see if we can get it moved over to the support teams.

CCW: What’s the one thing that everyone seems to get wrong?

Melissa: I’ll give you two; metrics and coaching.  The first one is either too many or the wrong metrics.  A lot of people just started realizing what matters to their customers.  I do webinars and work with companies that do webinars, and after these sessions,  some people say “Zappos does that, so we’re going to do it”. They try to duplicate it but it’s not always successful.  Sometimes you end up dealing with metrics that YOUR customers don’t care about and miss the metrics that they do care about.

  

Sometimes companies have so many metrics that the poor manager doesn’t know where to start.  One example was at a bank, where a top agent was moved to a management position in the call center. He was told to be sure to pull and print all of these reports but no one showed him what to do with them.  He ended up with 3 months of reports under his desk that he had no idea what to do with.  I told him we’re shredding these and pulling the reports from the database where everything was saved and find out what is really important. 

The other side of this relates to coaching. We find supervisors who are not given the opportunity or the time to do the job.  So much emphasis is placed on meeting time, pulling reports, doing all kinds of busy work and very little time is given for them to be out there on the floor. 

The great folks at Dial America gave only one chair to two supervisors so one could monitor calls at the desk but the other one had to “walk the floor”. Their idea was that at least one supervisor would visit, coach and encourage the reps and not just sit behind a desk.  

It’s important to spend a little time with each person, not to necessarily distract them, but to have that interaction and that coaching time.  It’s great just to sit side by side with them to help them with something when you can.  Some supervisors spend most of their time in their offices and have yet to take that first phone call in order to help the agents.  

The coaching, the way the supervisor sees their job role in terms of that, and then the metrics are probably the two biggest areas that I see people failing in, and areas that I love to work with them in.  It’s all about the customer experience and all of their interactions.  What your agents and supervisors need to understand is that end result.  How do we make the end result the best possible, and how do we remain successful and stay in business in order to pay everybody?  Setting the right metrics and coaching/motivating our agents are both a big part of this success.

CCW: What do you think are the essential metrics for a call center to track?

Melissa: Any metrics related to customer experience blended with your operational needs. Customer satisfaction, Individual agent quality skills, metrics related to service levels, agent availability (time in idle and on calls vs. not available) and wait times in queue.  Things that your customers are complaining about to agents or on your surveys and other customer feedback tools.

CCW: What metrics do you think can hurt more than help?

Melissa: Focusing too much on talk time can be a problem.  If not balanced with quality/results of the call, the agent may rush and have incomplete calls (customer not completely helped resulting in call backs), soft skills are dropped in favor of quick processes done and the agent has reduced upselling and cross-selling efforts made.  Too many short calls may mean the agent isn’t taking the time to empathize and show interest and appreciation.  Calls that are too long may mean  the agent is unsure of the product information or processes or needs training on how to personalizetheir call without talking too much about personal things.

CCW: Final question, what’s more important to you, Agent Satisfaction or Customer Satisfaction?  Regarding Agent Satisfaction, what do you feel motivates them most?

Melissa: The chicken or the egg!  If you have good happy agents, you’ll have good happy customers for the most part.  You have to know what motivates agents.

Studies on motivation will tell you that money and gift cards are popular, so I don’t take away from that, but I say there’s a lot more to it.  I do want my agents to be happy, but I don’t want to just make it about the “pizza party.”  For example, “every week we’re going to have a pizza party and that’s going to motivate everybody.” 

It’s not necessarily  just money or gift cards, but recognition by their supervisor, and time spent with their supervisor.  Great feedback from customers too that shows that their efforts are being recognized and that goes a long way as well.  We need to make our agents feel valued if we want them to do the same with our customers.

When you keep agents happy and motivated, and reward them for the great things they’re doing with customers, then your customers are going to be happy.   Your customers aren’t going to be happy if they’re talking to agents who either need to go or need better coaching.  It’s either one or the other.  

And I’m happy with “happy turn over”,  the kind that occurs when someone leaves because they are a problem.  Other agents around that person will be happy that they’re gone and so will your customers.  

How motivating can it be if I’m an agent and I’m doing what I need to do, but I’m sitting next to someone who is treating the customer poorly and hates their job?  You’re going to lose good agents that way.

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The 53 Best Social Media Quotes from Jeremy Waite

The 53 Best Social Media Quotes from Jeremy Waite

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The Value of Customer Retention

The Value of Customer Retention infographic by dcassa.

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A "Bad" Ticket Just Needs a Little Context

by: Claire Talbott

We’ve all been there as support agents. The dumb question, the demand “add this feature or else” or the cryptic ticket with a single sentence that tells you nothing.

The fifth ticket like this is no big deal. The 75th and you feel like you’re going crazy. After a 100, you’re asking yourself, is this person crazy? Do they think I’m a genius and can figure this out from a single word? We’re not building a feature just for them!

(If these thoughts haven’t run through your head, you probably haven’t been doing support very long)

You can’t say any of those things, and so you write out a civil email (not necessarily super nice) and say, “No we don’t have that feature.” Or “Here’s an article that will help.”

Not bad, but it doesn’t get to the root of the issue. With tickets like this, there’s usually more going on than you realize.

I recently got a ticket from a customer asking to use one of our premium features for free.

The first thought that went through my head is, “You want to use one of our top features, but not pay us a dime? Um…no. “

Instead of saying, “It’s not possible,” I asked for more details about why they didn’t want to upgrade to a paid plan. Did they just not want to pay us anything?

Then I got their response. Turns out they were a start up, were still waiting on funding, and couldn’t afford a paid plan yet. And in order for them to use the tool, they had to have the premium feature.

I wasn’t dealing with a “cheap” prospect, but a new company that would most likely turn into a great long-term customer.

The same happened with a user who asked an obvious question about how our product worked. I was surprised at such a basic question, but it turns out (when I got some context), they knew how it was supposed to work, but couldn’t get it to function as expected. It was a bug.

Being able to really help customers requires getting context, so you have all the pieces to the story. And customers often forget that you need that context to really help them.

Instead of getting annoyed with those “bad” or “frustrating” tickets, ask for context ;)


Claire Talbott started out as nanny and spent several years as a copywriter before falling in love with customer support at UserVoice. When she’s not helping customers or putting together documentation, she enjoys writing fiction and hanging out with her dog, Mr. Knightly.

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Transitioning from Call Center Agent to Team Lead

by Jeremiah Methven

Many organizations utilize the role of team lead in order to provide a management career path for their internal agents. These agents already know the ins and outs of their company’s call center and can be a great resource for their peers. However, the transition from being an agent to leading a team can sometimes be a stressful and challenging one as the team lead has to find a way to balance their management responsibilities with their responsibilities as an agent. Having made this transition myself, here are some tips for new call center team leads or those interested in the role:

   Look out for your team

Sometimes it can be difficult to get buy-in from your team as a new team lead, especially if you were promoted from within and they are still used to seeing you as a fellow agent. With your new responsibilities, you probably won’t be able to spend as much time on the phone, putting a greater weight on your team. It’s important to acknowledge that and use your new role to help relieve them whenever possible. If you can jump in and take some calls, great, but maybe you won’t always be able to. In that case, get creative. Find them projects or training time that will get them some relief from the phone while still contributing to the department. If you can get them an extra break on a slow Friday afternoon or let them go home early, go for it. Just make sure you keep your manager in the loop with whatever you choose to do, leading into tip #2…

   Stay on the same page with your manager

The team lead role is often a hybrid position between manager and agent. Thus, it is important to make sure you discuss with your manager what their expectations are for balancing your role. Sometimes a team lead might be 80% manager, 20% agent and sometimes they might be 80% agent, 20% manager, and it’s important to know where you are on the spectrum. I’m fortunate to be in a position where my manager takes a fairly hands-off approach due to the very technical nature of my team’s job duties. I am empowered to make management-level decisions as long as I keep my manager posted on any actions I take and can explain the rationale behind my decisions. If I make the wrong decision, it is OK as long as I learn from it and can grow. And as any manager could tell you, there usually aren’t clear ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ decisions. But even in my role, the amount of responsibility I have has increased substantially from when I started as team lead, so it’s important to have ongoing dialogue to make sure you and your manager are in sync.

   The customer is still your top stakeholder

The ultimate purpose of the call center is outstanding customer service. It’s easy to focus on winning approval from above and below (your direct reports and your direct manager), but don’t lose sight of the bigger picture. Make sure your actions and decisions start with the customer first. As team lead, you may be the escalation point for dissatisfied customers or difficult to resolve issues. This is a great opportunity to set the customer service standard for the rest of the business. If there’s a policy or problem that’s resulting in customer dissatisfaction, try to correct it! This will lead to both internal and external recognition of your efforts and inspire those around you to focus on their customer service as well.

Jeremiah Methven is the Team Lead for iContact's Support Engineering team, who handles support for the iContact API, the iContact for Salesforce integration and social media channels, all while documenting product bugs and issues and assisting internal agents. Follow Jeremiah on Twitter at @methvenj

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Opposing Viewpoints: The Helpdesk and Service Team Take On Training

Call Center Weekly's very own Brooks Webb and Jeremiah Methven were interviewed by ICMI.com to provide two different perspectives on the call center training process, one from the support/service team (Brooks), and one from the helpdesk (Jeremiah):

(This blog post originally appeared on ICMI)

ICMI: What tools and technologies do you use to monitor your teams for QA?

Jeremiah: We record all calls and log all chat transcripts and email conversations so that we can perform QA. It is fairly easy to download an mp3 of a call for review or pull up an archived chat or email. Due to the highly specialized nature of my team’s work, I actually perform QA myself whereas we have a QA department who evaluates other Support interactions. We even set up an internal ‘hotline’ that second-level agents can call for assistance. Since a large part of my team’s job is to act as a point of assistance for other agents, I find it very useful to be able to listen to and QA these calls as well. 

Brooks: Premier Support’s QA is handled by our QA staff.  I’m only heavily involved if coaching is needed as a result of the QA score.  However, our QA team utilizes call recording technology, chat transcripts, and email history to review interactions.  Within our CRM, they’ve created a checklist associated with a series of points.  Based on the key points that are missed, points will be deducted from total score.

ICMI: Tell me a little about your training process for new employees/team members. 

Jeremiah: Our training process is very hands-on and team-based. The typical new hire is someone who has already worked in the Support department for a year or more so we assume a strong level of familiarity with our application and the operations of the department. Thus, although getting the new hire up to speed on the new skills they will need is important, it’s even more critical to get them used to operating in a less structured, more collaborative small team environment. I find the best way to do this is by having them nest with the team and letting the team be responsible for getting the new person up to speed. 

Brooks: Each new hire in Premier Support goes through 2 weeks of classroom training with our Learning and Development team.  Training days typically consist of 6 hrs of training and 2 hrs of shadowing agents on the floor.  This gives the agent time to see the material put into practice. Following the two weeks of training, the agent goes through a nesting period in which they do a little bit of everything (phone, chat, and email).  During that time, they have a tenured agent close by to assist them with any questions they might have.

ICMI: Do you offer continuing learning opportunities?  What type of programs do you have in place?

Jeremiah: We  are more informal in this regard, and to a large extent, I expect my team to take initiative in determining their own training needs. We do have a large online, interactive curriculum covering different technologies and skills so if a team member expresses interest in a particular area, I will often point them towards a particular course. These are generally 3-4 hours in length and can be completed in multiple sessions.

Brooks: I like to provide additional training opportunities to those who are interested.  If someone wants to take their career in a certain direction, I’ll recommend or assign additional training to help them get there.  The training typically includes online tutorials, recommended readings, and/or interactive courses via our L&D Portal.

ICMI: What advice would you offer for training tenured agents on new technology and techniques?

Jeremiah: Joining my team comes with the expectation that the agent will become the expert on any new attributes of our application or new techniques we are emphasizing. If working with a tenured agent who may be more reticent to embrace new technology, I would ensure that that person gets consistent exposure to that technology. In that sense, working in a call center has its benefits since an agent will rarely have the option to try and avoid change. If they are on a call with a customer asking about a new issue, they are expected to be able to answer that call.

Brooks: It needs to be hands on and interactive.  Tenured agents know as much as they know because they’ve been doing it for so long.  Watching a webinar or a presentation isn’t going to cut it. 

ICMI: How has new technology changed the training process for contact center professionals?  What do you see as the challenges and benefits?

Jeremiah: We increasingly rely on recorded video and online interactive courses for training purposes. The benefits are that it allows you to work at your own pace. Especially with recorded video, it can also be used for customers when appropriate. I feel as long new technology isn’t being implemented only for the sake of using new technology, then benefits will accrue. Challenges could occur if an agent is required to go out of their comfort zone for the purposes of training, but if that is the case, the problem might be with the training rather than the technology.

Brooks: Interactive online courses that are available 24/7 have had a huge impact.  Agents can review the training material one at a time during different intervals throughout the day/week.  This means taking fewer agents off of the phones at any given time, which results in better service levels and a better customer experience.  While this is a benefit for the customer’s sake, there is something to be said about classroom training.  In the classroom, agents are more engaged with one another and they get to hear the thoughts and questions of their peers.

ICMI: It’s becoming increasingly popular to use gamifying methods for training—especially to motivate millennial—what, if any, gamifying techniques have you used?

Jeremiah: I haven’t really used any gamifying methods in my training, although I am certainly intrigued by the idea. We generally use quizzes and tests as our means of monitoring training progress, along with general monitoring and QA. 

Brooks: We have interactive course work via our L&D portal, but I wouldn’t say the courses are using gamifying techniques.  Most interactive course work that I’ve experienced has been fairly outdated.  I would love to see the new trends in this field, and I’m sure it would have a huge impact on the new generation that’s coming into the call center industry.

Brooks Webb is the Manager of the Premier Support team at iContact, where his team handles all second level support inquiries, including Billing Support, Level 2 Technical Support, and Support for all Top Level Managed Accounts. Follow Brooks on Twitter @WBrooksWebb

Jeremiah Methven is the Team Lead for iContact's Support Engineering team, who handles support for the iContact API, the iContact for Salesforce integration and social media channels, all while documenting product bugs and issues and assisting internal agents. Follow Jeremiah on Twitter at @methvenj

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