Hi all,
I have given an interesting challenge at work, one I'm hope to get some good advice on.
We have a team of approx 66 reps who all come from an Outbound background -they are great sales reps. However, the dynamic of the project is about to change from an outbound environment to an Inbound customer service role with the possibility to upsell at the conclusion.
Te project is contracted to achieve an AHT of approx 700secs and get penalised if it drops below just 5% of that target which equates to about 36 seconds. The project currently is sitting on a weekly average of about 500 seconds.
I have been tasked with getting the AHT back up and over 720 seconds.
All the reps have to be educated on 'required line" and the importance of schedule adherence as they really don't have an understanding of grade of service etc.
Anyone have any ideas? one of the first things I'm looking at introducing will be a quality framework to try and fluff out their calls. Agents who achieve an AHT of above 700 will be utilised but anyother ideas would be greatly appreciated. I come from a background where we were always trying to reduce AHT, not increase it!Thans in advance

Andrew,

I find this whole concept quite fascinating and have never come across an organisation who want to increase AHT unnecessarily, especially with a target and penalty clauses. Like you say, most companies are desperately trying to reduce AHT.......

From a customer experience point of view, it only makes sense to increase AHT if you are adding value. If you have resolved my issue successfully and made me feel like a valued customer, you will have earned the right to upsell to me, otherwise I want to get off the call as quick as possible - unnecessary delays will just make me hang up and potentially go elsewhere next time.

If your agents are used to selling, they will know when to upsell during the call - I would concentrate on getting them to resolve the service issues and measuring first call resolution. If they are resolving the issue then not offering the upsell, you have something to work with - if they are, and the AHT is still not exceeding 720 seconds, why extend the call unnecessarily?

I would be curious as to why you need to do this and my first instinct is that you need to renegotiate the metrics with the client - extended AHT tends to lead to poor customer satisfaction, especially if linked to low FCR.

However, if you really need to do it, you could always put the client on hold for a couple of minutes - that would do it! ;-)

Dave

I'm not sure it is fascinating, it certainly weird.

Let me guess at the root of this clause in the contract. They think that unless you spend a minimum amount of time on a call then you won't have bothered or had the chance to do any up selling. So they stipulate a minimum AHT to ensure that you up sell.

Trouble is by setting a targeted minimum AHT they are not ensuring that you are up selling they are ensuring that you hit the minimum AHT. And they don't realise that you will do what it takes to comply with the contract whether that is good or bad for you, the client or your customers.

In your post you said you were considering trying to "fluff out their calls" and Dave suggested putting people on hold. Now I think he meant it in jest, but I have seen a lot worse being done to meet targets.

And as Dave says your agents will want to pick an choose who they up sell to. The ones who are annoyed with your service aren't going to buy anything extra so you shouldn't try to up sell to them.

But you may have an opportunity. They have set a target about AHT, not about the number of times you up sell. So use this to your advantage. Don't change the quality framework to fluff out the calls. Just let your agents deal with the service calls as they see fit. Let them spend as much time as they need to listen to the problem and solve it to the best of their ability. This will give the customer better service and hence they will be more amenable to being sold to. But also stipulate that an agent should only up sell if they feel a caller will be receptive and leave it to the agent to decide.

Give the agents the genuine space to deal with the calls and everyone will win. Your oddball contract gives you the licence to do what most call centre managers would never dream of doing.

Best,

Rob

Rob,

Totally agree! When you look at it from that perspective, the opportunity of giving the agents more time to resolve the customer issue (and hence adding to the AHT) and still giving them the decision on whether it is appropriate to upsell is a great opportunity. If they are skilled sales agents, as Andrew implied, they will know whether it's appropriate or not based on the call itself not "procedure". The focus of any "fluffing out" should be really understanding and resolving the customer's issue first time.

And, yes, I was only joking about putting the caller on hold............

Dave

Hi Andrew

I'd get whoever is the main decision-maker behind the AHT minimum requirement to listen into the calls, alongside the agents. If you're right then that would prove what you, Dave and Rob all suspect and leave a greater opportunity in the operation.

One word of caution. It could be that the decision to set a minimum AHT target is driven by maintaining the cost base in the operation. This could be for a number of reasons e.g. securing budget for next year, maintaining the workforce at a paticular level for government grants or a future project that you may not know about etc.

Eamon

There's no need to "fluff out" calls in customer service. All it takes is 1 question: Is there anything else I can help you with today? That's good for at least 1 extra issue on every other call.

You do have a huge opportunity here. CSRs are always getting grief over handle time and, the better the rep, the more grief they get. If you are skilled at customer interaction and FCR, you find yourself taking responsibility for YOUR customers and fixing everything. Your agents already have good phone skills. Now, with AHT not an issue, you can teach them to interact well with the callers, take ownership of issues, and fix everything possible for the customer (within demarc, naturally). That way, you will have a huge batch of highly skilled Agents in six months time when they start setting AHT maximums. ;)