According to Dimension Data’s “Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report 2007″, a massive 70% of the cost of running contact centres is related to the people who work there: the agents or customer services representatives.

The report also reveals that the UK contact centre industry wastes close to half a million pounds every month as a result of its average 24% staff attrition rate. Live testing of agents, which is called mock call. HR department need to be strict on this part, their must be a policy (can be shown as HR policy) where hiring of an agent only become final when he/she is clear the mock call test. This will in result tighten up the new hirings of agents for who are not capable enough to handle the stress and pressure of process.

As brought in a research report, many companies (25% ) still not having this mock call test as their integral part of hiring policy. Agent must know for which kind of process and responsibilities he/she is going to be hired by company, the career growth and progress must be cleared would be agent. Although there is perception for call center industry that people are not looking for call center agent as long term career option but who think about career in call center they are really care about the career development he/she can get in the organisation. Simplification and process flow must be as simple as it could be because there is a possibility that some agents might not be as good in using computers as tech savvy agents.

Work flow analyst must provide the process flow where agents not to toggle between multiple windows and application if possible as this could be a stressful and time-consuming act while a important client/customer is on call. Interestingly, although 77% of the organisations surveyed in the Dimension Data report say they have workflow solutions in place, only 32% have some form of decision support or case-based reasoning system to prompt agents with answers to customer queries.

Do you know how many people you need to achieve your service levels and create satisfied customers? Do you break this down per hour per day, and schedule staff with the right skills and experience accordingly? If not, then you are really in bad staffing policy and might be suffering from a huge hidden staffing cost, increased attrition with associated recruitment and training costs. Alternatively, you may be under-staffed, resulting in high abandonment rates, stressed staff, reduced first call resolution and dissatisfied customers.

Workforce management tools have now reached maturity and can deliver a rapid return on investment; the main issue today is ensuring the tool is set up correctly and managed by a trained scheduler. According to the Dimension Data research, the top development strategy is customer satisfaction at 87%, with staff satisfaction close behind at 70%. I would therefore suggest there is no good reason for a mid-size or large contact centre not to adopt a properly managed, industry standard workforce management tool.

Good training is key for success of a call center, poorly trained agents deliver a poor customer experience, leading to unhappy customers and, therefore, stressed employees who leave or go sick. Providing initial training is just a beginning of agents career and process, there are so many different kind of queries which came time to time while process is on the go in this case agents often need help with complex or infrequent queries. Training can be provided by professional coaches, trainers, or virtual coaching systems.

The latter essentially provide step-by-step desktop assistance through processes, with a blend of specialist staff and virtual coaching providing arguably the optimum solution. Dimension Data’s research shows that an average of around 17 hours of coaching is delivered to agents per month. This can cost-effectively be increased using a real-time online virtual coaching tool delivered to the agents at their desktops, resulting in improved first call resolution and employee and customer satisfaction. Greet the agents by giving them incentives, rewards & recognitions by various monetary and non-monetary methods. Rewards provide a great feedback mechanism and agents will do what you target them to deliver, so you need to ensure you don’t reward skewed behaviors also, rewards can be great motivators if applied correctly.