Managers Share Secrets of Success

From setting schedules for supervisory duties, to mystery-shopping overflow call centers, to setting bonus structures for seasonal workers — four catalog and contact center managers reveal how they tackle daily challenges.

Debbye Schneider, contact center manager,
Fire Mountain Gems, Grants Pass, Ore.
Merchandise: jewelry-making supplies to consumers and businesses
Contact center employees: 85 to 104
Overflow/after-hours contact center: Donnelly Communications

Catalog Success: What are your top challenges, and how do you overcome them?
Schneider: We’ve been steadily ramping up for the past five years. My staff of customer service reps has tripled since then. Because of the growth, I have to pay close attention to the staffing needs of the call center, the interviewing, hiring and training processes, all of which can be time-intensive. I have to remain flexible with my own schedule, so I can interview and do some training.

Second, balance is needed in this type of job. We have to train our staffs to look at our mission statements and create a magical shopping experience for our customers. That’s a daily challenge for any call center manager.

A third challenge is working with multiple deadlines in the call center. This is especially true for our supervisory staff. I’ve created a daily schedule for supervisors, so they see in living color what’s to be done hour by hour. The schedule is like a support system for them.

CS: What tasks are listed on the schedule?
Schneider: For example, in our call center, reps who are in a tough situation on the phone are instructed to put up a red flag. Supervisors are scheduled for set blocks of time to roam the call center floor helping those reps who’ve put up flags. This is one way in which the schedule helps keep a good workflow going.

CS: Tell us about your staff recruiting.
Schneider: Our HR team, which does a great job, recruits from colleges and job fairs, places local ads — wherever it can find good candidates. HR does the initial screening of applicants.

CS: What one call center accomplishment are you most proud of?
Schneider: Ramping up has been challenging, and I think we’ve handled that well. We’ve expanded our returns processing team and e’Service teams, which are incorporated as part of the call center. This has helped us ensure quality in our customer care.

Also, we’ve moved the call center twice in the past four years, and yet customers weren’t impacted at all by that. And we did all of that moving of people and technology while keeping everyone sane and productive.

CS: What was the most important lesson in call center management that you learned?
Schneider: As a manager, you really are the barometer for the call center. A call center is full of people who can affect your customers’ shopping experiences. So as managers, we want to be sure we’re listening to reps, laughing with them, celebrating their successes, watching and measuring their performance. My attitude on any given day can be transferred via the reps directly to customers. So I have to be sure I’m upbeat, happy and full of energy.

CS: Happy with your overflow contact center?
Schneider: Absolutely. We’ve been using Donnelly Communications for about five years now. Donnelly’s reps use the same call scripts that our in-house reps use, so it’s a seamless customer experience. They train their reps for us.

CS: What advice can you share with other catalogers who are shopping for a call center?
Schneider: I monitor [Donnelly’s] calls regularly, and offer feedback when it’s needed. We have direct contact daily with their managers. Communication is key. They’re willing to listen to us, and vice versa. They’ve had to keep pace with us and our technology upgrades, and they’ve done that. In fact, five years ago we didn’t have an IT department in the traditional sense, and Donnelly helped us with our call center technology needs. We’ve grown with them.

CS: If you were training a new contact center manager, what advice would you offer?
Schneider: Be passionate about giving excellent internal and external customer service. … One thing we do that’s very helpful: We shut down our call center for an hour and a half a week, sending calls to Donnelly. During that time, we have a meeting with the reps, and that’s really helpful, because it’s so tough in a call center to be able to get everyone in one room at one time. During the meetings we recognize people’s accomplishments, celebrate them, ask questions, get feedback and provide training.

Ellie Perry, sales and service team leader
Fairytale Brownies, Chandler, Ariz.
Merchandise: gourmet baked goods
Contact center employees: five to 24

Catalog Success: What are your top challenges, and how do you overcome them?
Perry: The biggest challenge for any call center manager is to whom you report: marketing or operations. Even if it’s one or the other, you still have to communicate effectively with the other department. As a manager you have to be an advocate for your call center. If something is wrong, we’re the first ones to hear about it from customers. It’s not always recognized that call centers are profit centers in a catalog company.

The second challenge — and this may be unique to us because we’re part of the marketing team, but we have different functions from the other team members — is communicating the fact that we can’t all go to lunch at the same time. And we have to chip in when needed to work on other projects between taking calls. We’ll proof the catalog and e-mails, and resticker and stuff envelopes going to our gift-giving customers. I think it’s good for the sales and service team, however, to learn other functions of the company besides just the phone.

A third challenge is helping team members understand that sometimes we can’t involve them in decisions. We try whenever we can, but sometimes we just can’t. We’re a small company, and we have a group of smart employees. But they can’t always get their way. Sometimes they do have to follow directions.

CS: During your peak season, do you bring back temporary staff from previous years?
Perry: Yes, and we have a bonus structure for seasonal help. They get $100 for each year in which they come back to work for us. We have one coming back this year for the seventh year, so she’ll get $700.

In addition to our sales commission structure and attendance bonuses, team members are well taken care of. We also get referrals. An employee who recommends seasonal help gets $100 if the seasonal worker finishes the season with us.

CS: What one call center accomplishment are you most proud of?
Perry: Developing a cohesive team. I had worked at other call centers before I came here two years ago. When I got here, I defined what would make a perfect team member, what skills that person would need, and then I looked around at the existing staff to see who fit that model. We had to let some people go. But I think having that model helped us to build the really great team we have now. The original team members were not motivated by money, and so the commission incentives weren’t working. But now we have team members who are motivated by that.

CS: What was the most important lesson in call center management that you learned?
Perry: Train your replacement; otherwise you can’t advance in your company if there is no one who can take your position.

CS: Tell me about your overflow/after-hours call center.
Perry: We recently changed. We wanted a call center in which we wouldn’t be a small fish in a big pond, and that had familiarity with catalogs and gifting, including multiple ship-tos and getting catalog source codes.

CS: How did you select the one you use now?
Perry: We sent an RFP, and then narrowed the list to seven call centers. I mystery-shopped them. Some didn’t take calls quickly. Some had a lot of noise in the background. One criterion we looked for was how easily their agents could communicate updates to team members. For example, did they have a intranet site where we could post our shipping charges, contact list, etc.?

CS: What advice would you give a new contact center manager?
Perry: Thank people for a job well done. You don’t have to give prizes and pizzas, although that’s nice. People really just want to know you appreciate their hard work.

Also, be available, listen and provide honest feedback, even when it’s tough to do.

Finally, plan effectively. Of our annual total shipments, 60 percent go out in one week: the first week of December. We have to be ready for that. We start in January, reviewing where the bottlenecks were, tweaking plans. The call center goes to 12-hour shifts. It’s exciting to be hitting our sales projections. Our owners bring in snacks and make a festive time of it.

Mike Pitkow, executive vice president, chief operating officer
Holt’s Cigar Co., Philadelphia
Merchandise: premium cigars and smoking accessories
Contact center employees: 12
Overflow/after-hours contact center: AnswerNet

Catalog Success: What are your top challenges as they relate to call center duties, and how do you overcome them?
Pitkow: First, maintaining a staff of premier service reps who know our products well and stay up on their product knowledge. Our call center is staffed mostly by women, and few women in general smoke cigars. And yet some of the customer questions they field are pretty tough, such as the different tobacco blends. So one challenge is keeping sales associates who can talk about the product and have been through the training.

A second challenge is maintaining our housefile. We do some telemarketing with our customers. If someone who has bought from us for, say, several of the last few months, and then suddenly stops, we’ll give that customer a call to try and reactivate them.

CS: How do you train sales associates?
Pitkow: We do most of it in-house, but sometimes we bring in sales motivation trainers or call center trainers.

CS: Is yours a seasonal business?
Pitkow: Our big seasons are Father’s Day and fourth-quarter holiday.

CS: What one call center accomplishment are you most proud of?
Pitkow: Cigars comprise a niche market; there are only a couple million cigar-smokers in the country. We’re recognized as superior in customer service in the cigar business, and so it’s great to get e-mails, letters and calls from customers lauding our associates for turning a negative event into a positive.

We empower our associates to make customers happy. When someone calls with a problem, associates are allowed to offer free shipping, a credit on the customer’s next order, and even free cigars. Associates don’t even need to ask a manager. We give them parameters of course, but then we have complete trust in our associates that they’ll do the right thing. When gray areas crop up or the associate thinks a customer is trying to take advantage of a situation, there’s always a manager on duty who can make the judgement call.

CS: Happy with AnswerNet, your overflow contact center?
Pitkow: They have fantastic people. I was skeptical of using an outside call center at first, but I also know that we wanted to have 24/7 coverage, and yet we’re a small company and couldn’t afford to keep our in-house call center open that many hours.

AnswerNet has a good management philosophy. They’ve been a great adjunct supplier for us. We have monthly phone conferences with them, and they’ve helped us in many ways by, for example, pointing out things in the catalog that need to be fixed or offering suggestions in some way. We have a lot of great personal interaction with them, and it’s been a cost-effective plan for us.

CS: What’s the most important lesson in call center management that you learned?
Pitkow: The customer is always king. I learned [that] from our owners pretty early in my career here. You should bend over backward, twist yourself into a pretzel and then bend over backward again for customers to feel they’re getting the service needed to come back and shop from you again. So great customer service is No. 1. And then hiring and maintaining employees who can give that level of service is the second most-important aspect of this business.

CS: What advice would you give a new contact center manager?
Pitkow: Always be fair to employees. Treat them with dignity and respect, because that’s the way you want them to treat your customers. Instill steady behavior, and do so in a firm and loving way.

Second, know every single aspect of your company and its products. Be an encyclopedia of its strategy, merchandise, policies and thinking.

Finally, make sure you create a fun environment. Keep the mood light. Maintain perspective. My motto: Work hard, and play hard. For people to enjoy their jobs and look forward to coming to work, there has to be a sense of fun in it.

Paula Arnold, general manager
The Americana Co., Gardena, Calif.
Merchandise: blank, imprintable apparel products sold to screen printing shops and other businesses
Contact center employees: 15 to 25

Catalog Success: What are your top challenges as they relate to call center duties, and how do you overcome them?
Arnold: Finding qualified customer service reps is always a challenge. When we find them, they’ll train with other reps, watch the daily workflows, and hear what customers ask and want. Periodically we have mill reps come in to give product presentations for us.

Attendance is another challenge. We have three call centers: Gardena, Calif., Commerce City, Colo., and Oklahoma City. The centers are networked to one another, and so can take overflow calls when necessary. This helps us to deal with absenteeism when it occurs. We do not use an overflow contact center.

CS: What call center accomplishment are you most proud of?
Arnold: I get a lot of personal satisfaction when customers say our reps were friendly and helpful to them. That’s satisfying to me because I think it reflects management’s message of: “We want you to do a good job for our customers.” We’re always trying to widen an employee’s experience and knowledge base, to help develop them so they can grow in their jobs.

CS: Is yours a seasonal business?
Arnold: Not really. We’re steady throughout the year. We have two lull periods, though: July and late December through January.

CS: What advice would you give a new contact center manager?
Arnold: Be patient, because not everyone learns the job in the first day, or even in the first week.

Second, provide both positive and negative feedback. People need and want to know where they stand.

Third, be fair and consistent in your management approach.

Finally, weed out the bad seeds early. Otherwise, they can create havoc in your call center. If you have someone with a bad attitude or work habits, and the person can’t correct those things, it’s better to cut them loose. The culture in the office definitely will improve as a result.