Unfortunately in my many on-site assessments of call center operations, the majority of supervisors are doing everything BUT agent development. We do find that in our certified Centers of Excellence agent development IS top-of-mind with all supervisors. I have over the last 18 months developed a list of ten characteristics that Centers of Excellence do consistently very well..one of them is that supervisors are dedicated to agent selection, training, motivation, and development. In fact, many of these supervisors are paid performance bonuses based on them being agent “retention champions” by focusing on agent development.
-Dr. Jon (answered 8/22/05)
We do not do Agent Certification. Two of our partners do offer excellent Agent Certification programs:
1. Human Technologies
2. STI Knowledge
Hi,
Good question.
All testing and certification depends heavily upon proper training and preparation of the applicants. Purdue has a CSR certification program, and our target is that 70% will pass the assessment on the first attempt. There is not a negative stigma for "not passing," i.e., it is not thought of as being a failure. If they do not pass, they hit the books again and then try the examination again.
I greatly support the concept of certifying CSR with a combination of on-the-job experience and "theory" about the practice of satisfying customers.
I would love to know more about the company you are serving, and about their certification process. Let me know if I can assist you.
Hope this helps.
Dr. Jon
Robin, there are so many career paths/progression options in contact centers that I am not sure where to begin. For agents to move up the call handling “ladder” there are the logical steps from Level 1, 2, and 3 (mostly skill dependent) to Team Lead, to Subject Matter Expert (SEM), to Supervisor, to Queue Manager, to Contact Center Manager. Branches in this progression can include moving into the analytic world of report preparation, workforce optimization, contact forecasting, and the like. If neither of these are functional progressions, a career path could be going into technical solution support for the contact center.
--Dr. Jon
FairCompare is our agent satisfaction and feedback service. Currently there are between 50 and 100 customers in the pipeline. We have received “rave” customer reviews on this unique product.
Outsourcing companies have their own challenges with agent turnover, but they do not experience turnover nearly as high as the average in-house call center. Outsourcers that handle inbound customer service calls have an average turnover in the 15% to 20% range as compared to in-house centers where turnover ranges from 35% to 70% depending on the type of call center and the industry. Outsourcer are able to retain their agents longer because there is more room for growth, not only across product lines, but also vertically into center management, sales, and client management. By contrast, outbound tele-sales centers, either in-house or outsourced, have very high turnover, averaging 50% to 100% per year.
-Dr. Jon
Answered: 11/05
Our benchmark data shows that call centers that require agents to enter data achieve an error rate of fewer than two errors per 10,000 data fields entered. For example, if you have a center with 100 agents responding to 40 callers per shift with an average of ten data fields per call, you would want to achieve a rate of no more than eight errors per shift.
Mark,
A simple and often used approached is to use standard statistical sectioning of the performance on any one metric or group of metrics rolled up into an index. What this means is as follows:
a. Two standard deviations away from the mean would be the really excellent performers and would represent the top 5% of the Bell Curve.
b. One standard deviation would equate to the top 45%.
c. The remaining would essentially represent average performance. Please have a look at my book “Minimizing Agent Performance” for more information on performance compensation.
--Dr. Jon
