The Customer Touchpoint

Hiring and retaining qualified staff in the right numbers can be perennial problems for those who own and manage catalog contact centers. With more and more emphasis on customer service as a competitive differentiator, finding and keeping the right staffers to deal with your customers is critical to cataloging success.

Unfortunately, there’s no single answer or approach that can work for everyone. But here’s a list of best practices and software solutions that may help.

Best Practices for the Hiring Process

• Pre-employment testing. This can predict how an individual will react in certain situations and his or her style of relating to others. It also can help you evaluate the applicant’s core values. All of these can indicate how an individual will fit into your organization.

In addition, some HR managers have developed a profile of the type of contact center employee that succeeds in their companies and seek to find applicants with those same characteristics and profile.

• Employee referrals. Use an incentive-based referral program in which some form of compensation is given to employees for referrals that result in successful hires. For example, some companies give employees a bonus of $50 to $100 if someone they refer as a potential employee is hired and stays through the season.

• Advertising. Radio and Internet ads, job fairs and festivals, promotions at sporting events, brochures and flyers, and job ads at community colleges are among effective recruitment tactics to try.

• Expand the potential labor pool. Look beyond the obvious applicant base to consider the following: retirees, college students, staff of competitors, employees of companies that have announced cutbacks, last year’s temporary staff at your own catalog, disabled and handicapped individuals, and, of course, outside agencies.

Best Practices for Employee Retention

After the hiring process is complete, the next important facet is retaining those contact center staffers:

• Good communication. Whether in the form of positive feedback as part of weekly performance reporting, general information about what’s going on in the company or involvement on a regular basis with other employees, good communication is the key to keeping employees informed and happy.

• Ongoing training. This should include cross-training, skill-based progressions and seasonal merchandise training by buyers. These tactics effectively show your contact center employees their value to you and may offer advancement opportunities.

• Coaching/counseling. Use goal setting and performance evaluations as motivators and for help in retaining good employees.

• Rewards/incentives. Strategies to try include: pay for performance, incentive-based pay, longevity rewards, raffles and prize drawings, and celebrations such as pizza parties to keep the work environment fun. Surprises and contests all aid in retention.

Best Practices for Handling Seasonal Spikes

Almost every catalog has some degree of seasonality associated with its business. Some seasonal trends are more severe than others, with some extreme cases seeing more than 75 percent of their annual order volume coming in an eight-week period. To address this spike in staffing requirements, utilize some creative thinking and management practices. The following ideas come from catalogers who have faced this issue in their businesses:

• Maintain a database of past temporary employees, and attract them back with bonuses or higher pay scales based on their experience.

• Employ the recruiting techniques outlined above. Tactics used to attract full-time contact center employees can work equally well for part-time or temporary workers.

• Provide financial incentives for seasonal employees who remain with you for the entire season.

• Search for labor pools in which part-time or seasonal work is attractive. This can include parents with school-aged children, those seeking second jobs, college students and retirees.

• Outsource the work for either all of the year or during peak business periods. Where outsourcing makes sense, finding the right situation and vendor requires careful analysis and research. But many businesses find the practice a good one for handling peak seasonal business volume. Partial outsourcing typically consists of 5 percent to 15 percent of order volume for overflow, after hours and weekend service.

Scheduling and Staffing Software Can Help

One tool that can help maximize contact center staff time is scheduling and management software. We see a significant difference in the cost per call for those companies using a scheduling package compared to those who don’t use it. From our proprietary research, we have found that companies using contact center software experience a cost per order in the $3.30 range, while those not using it are faced with costs in the $3.95 per order range.

Reduced call abandonment is another benefit of implementing a scheduling package. Our research shows that catalogers using such a package saw their abandonment rates drop from, on average, 5 percent to 3 percent when using the scheduling software. An abandonment rate of 3 percent or less is considered best-of-class service.

Most of the sophisticated and effective packages available focus on the overall management aspect of the contact center, as well as the details of the scheduling function. There are many companies that offer appropriate software solutions.

Below we’ve listed four of those that often are mentioned by the segment of catalog companies represented in our research. Please note: F. Curtis Barry & Co. does not endorse any of the products mentioned. You’re encouraged to perform your due diligence and select the solution that’s right for your contact center and budget.

• Blue Pumpkin Director Enterprise is a forecasting and scheduling product designed to help optimize your contact center’s schedule. It uses an integration platform to collect data from key contact servers for forecasting, scheduling and reporting. It provides agents with desktop access to information such as schedules, time-off requests and shift swapping. Visit www.bluepumpkin.com.

• TotalView Workforce Management Solutions from IEX Corp. provides a centralized platform for optimizing the performance of your contact center. It helps your center forecast and plan more accurately and schedule more effectively. The software supplies real-time information, integrates data seamlessly across your enterprise, and automates many time-consuming and labor-intensive processes. Visit www.IEX.com.

• Maxima Advantage Vantage Point, Pipkins’ premier product, is designed to provide answers to complex contact center scheduling and forecasting problems. Among the software’s features is a new agent-notification module that sends pop-up alerts for intra-day schedule adjustments. Visit www.pipkins.com.

• eWorkforce Management software from Aspect (formerly TCS) is a comprehensive solution for automating the complex tasks of forecasting, scheduling and tracking contact center activity.

It uses mathematical models, and automatically will recognize and accommodate seasonal variations. The software tracks contactcenter performance throughout the day, so you can make adjustments to maintain efficiency. And it allows you to tailor input and output parameters. Visit www.aspect.com.

Conclusion

In today’s multichannel business environment, maintaining a high level of cost-effective customer service is essential to success. One key aspect of meeting the challenge is to have a contact center operating at peak efficiency. By addressing the staffing requirements of the contact center and providing a quality working environment, many of the difficult issues facing today’s catalogers can be satisfied.

Contact Center Costs Per Order

Given the costs associated with contact center labor, it’s no wonder controlling staffing levels is a key focus for catalog managers.

For typical catalogers, contact center costs per order range from $3.25 to $4.25, according to research provided through the Call Center Benchmarking ShareGroup and our database of operational benchmarks. This includes all costs associated with the order, e.g., direct and indirect labor, occupancy costs, benefits, incentives, training, recruitment, fixed and variable telephone expenses, third-party call center services, correspondence, and software and hardware costs. It excludes credit card processing fees.

Interestingly, we’ve found that out of the total cost in the customer contact center (including credit card fees), 50 percent to 55 percent of the cost per order comes from labor expenses.

Curt Barry is the president of F. Curtis Barry & Co., a Richmond, Va.-based firm that specializes in operations and fulfillment consulting for catalog and e-commerce companies. Contact him directly at (804) 740-8743 or by e-mail at cbarry@fcbco.com. Or visit his Web site: www.fcbco.com.