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Call Center News
In this regular column we review the latest news, predictions and trends impacting on the Customer Interaction Industry.
Call centre jobs scam in India
Indian police have busted a job racket with the arrest of two persons who were allegedly involved in
cheating unemployed youths with false promise of getting them lucrative jobs with a call centre.
Animesh Raghav, 30, a resident of Meerut, and Amit Kansal, 26, resident of Ghaziabad, had opened a
fake company Matrix Tele services and given advertisement in local Hindi dailies that a call centre
needed youths with a minimum qualification of intermediate. It offered salary between Rs 10,000 and
Rs 15,000 per month. As hundreds of job aspirants flooded the office, the accused took their formal
interview and asked them to submit Rs 10,000 as deposit.
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The jobless youths were promised that initially they will get a stipend for four months and after
that they will get the promised salary. On a tip-off, the Crime Branch interrogated the duo and
found that not only the accused did not have any connection with an international bank, HSBC, for
which they were supposed to open a call centre here, but also they were operating under fake
identities.
Police said that the accused had planned to cheat 1,000 persons. By getting Rs 10,000 from each of
them, they would have amassed Rs 1 crore, police said. However, the duo was going slow so that
nobody suspected any foul play. But when an applicant expressed inability to pay Rs 10,000, the duo
asked him to pay Rs 5,000 instead. This bargaining raised suspicion in the mind of the aspirant and
his relatives did some groundwork only to find that the claims were false.
Originally published in Asia Pacific Call Centre News
Indian outsource faces 90% staff turnover
Indian outsourcer Wipro forecasts plenty of growth in IT services, but warns its BPO services,
such as call centres, would suffer in the fourth quarter due to a huge staff turnover rate.
Wipro vice chairman Vivek Paul said his company's BPO business faced annualized attrition rates
as high as 90%. "We have to get that under control," he said, adding that it was trying to reduce
the BPO unit's focus on call centres, which now represent 90%.
"The high attrition rates we have really limit our ability to continue to add people once we get to
the scale and range we are in," Paul told reporters from Bangalore.
Originally published in Callcentres.net
Temporary Staff Overused
More than 33% of North American call centers employ temporary labor in their call centers.
When you consider the average agent tenure to be between 12-24 months and the average agent training
to be between 3-4 weeks we can see why many centers experience problems with low proficiency agents,
low customer satisfaction, higher turnover and high recruiting costs.
Temporary staffing must be employed tactically and judiciously in order to be effective. When
temporary staff is employed as panacea for the real underlying recruitment and or staffing issues
the organization can suffer.
Service Dissatisfaction is the leading cause of customer defections
According to a recent Purdue University study 68% of customer defections can be linked directly
to service dissatisfaction. This is well above the product dissatisfaction at 16% and pricing at 9%.
Only 30% of Call Centers provide Supervisory training
According to a recent IICM survey only 30% of call centers provide Supervisory training for their
front line Supervisors.
Other key findings include: only 62% of centers train Supervisors to motivate and retain reps even
though 93% of the respondent identified this as critical.
Ask the Experts
The following are actual questions posed to the TRG experts. You can pose your questions on
our website.
Distributed Call Centers
Question:
I currently manage a Wireless Voice support team for a Telecom company. Under a recent
re-org I will now also manage a Wireless Data support team as well. Both are call center environments.
My challenge is the Voice team is in eastern US, and the Data team is in Central US. No possibility
of consolidating in one state. I'd like to cross train the two teams to create two regional teams
proficient in both Data and Voice support. This includes using a centralized knowledge base tool,
cross training forum, and issue tracking tool for statistical trending and analysis.
Any suggestions on "best practices", different approaches, and/or tools to help in my new charge?
I'm open to almost anything except off the shelf products (budget constraints). All tool development
would have to be in house.
Expert Response:
This is a big task you have before you. My thoughts are as follows:
1-First you will need to map the skills/competencies, required for both of these functions;
2-Then map the transactional processes that are completed by each group;
3-Map the education/knowledge required for each group;
4-Develop assessment and testing tools to identify proficiency of each group in each of the above areas;
5-Identify agent 'gaps' and develop up-training curriculum to bring the agents up to speed over a relevant period of time;
6-Test again to confirm the training has 'taken';
7-Start swapping calls.
A few other points to think about;
1-You will need to invest resource time to develop the systems (knowledgebase etc.), training and mapping. Remember to budget it appropriately over your year;
2- factor in the lost handling time for training/testing in your forecasts and schedules;
3- Remember that this type of cross-training or universality can reduce you overall labor expenses (through queue efficiency), but you won't see this for 60-90 days after you have completed the implementation;
4-Once you are directing calls to the 'non-native' centers you must continue to deliver these. Skills and training that is not kept current will atrophy and die...losing this capability to handle these calls;
5-The agents will expect additional compensation based upon additional skills. I would recommend that you assess not only the 'if they can do it' in the assessments but also the 'how well they can do it' and use an "Adequacy, Competency, Mastery' model to determine compensation or performance pay.Let us know what you think of this response;
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