Workforce Management Featured Article
Can You Schedule 'Empathy' as a Call Center Skill?
When it comes to managing a call center workforce, what’s good for the call center and its employees often isn’t the same as what’s good for the customers. Too many contact center build schedules and forecasts are based on the convenience of the company and not the best interests of customers. This is often where the huge disconnect occurs between the quality of customer support companies think they’re offering and what their customers say they are offering.
When managing a workforce, metrics are certainly important: controlling and monitoring average handle time, time to answer, hold time and calls per hour are indicative of how efficiently agents are working. But these statistics may not be reflecting how well they’re servicing customers. There is accepted conventional wisdom, today, that speed is the most element of quality to customers when it comes to call center transactions. A deeper look, however, may prove this wrong, according to a recent blog post by Len Markidan for HubSpot (News - Alert) Blogs.
“Conventional wisdom would suggest that the faster a customer gets help, the happier they’ll be. And in general, that’s true,” wrote Markidan. “However, there are other, often-overlooked elements that are even more important than speed. One survey by Gallup measured how engaged customers felt after getting service at a bank. While customers who felt that the bank offered speedy service were six times more likely to be highly engaged, customers who gave the bank high ratings on ‘people’ factors (like the tellers’ courtesy and willingness to help) were nine times more likely to be fully engaged.”
Empathy isn’t something you can buy for your contact center or upload to your technology platform. It’s a personality trait in agents that is often the most important foundation for an excellent customer service worker. While it may not be practical for you to fire all your existing agents and hire empathetic ones, it’s a trait you can put high value on in training and evaluations. Help agents understand that an empathetic approach is likely to boost their own performance as well as the customer’s feedback.
So how do you build empathy into your workforce management? It’s not easy, but it can be done by considering it to be a skill (just like customer retention or speaking Spanish). Rate your agents on the level of empathy they are able to offer customers (either from informal observation or formal reviews of recorded calls). Use your scheduling and skills-based routing to ensure that people with strong empathy scores are available to take more difficult calls (account closures, for example, or customers displaying a high level of ire). While it may seem like a “touch feely” idea that won’t make a concrete difference in the short-term, in the long run, it’s a way to retain customers and improve their value to the business.
Edited by Maurice Nagle