The Best from 60 in 60 Ops Ideas

The general idea behind the “60 Ideas in 60 Minutes” session, a customary panel presentation at many conferences, is for attendees to come away with at least one or two good ideas. The trick is to wade through all 60 to find one worthwhile. The 60 in 60 session held during the recent National Conference on Operations & Fulfillment in Schaumburg, Ill., gave those in attendance tips for making their contact centers run more smoothly and profitably. We’ve extracted the best ones below.

* Establish a metric to measure sales per hour per rep, said Timothy Holody, COO of Seta Corp., which markets through the Palm Beach Jewelry catalog. Upsell during non-order calls when the customer is satisfied.

* Decide on your top metric, said Charlotte Roth, a senior account executive at Advanced Data-Comm, a teleservices bureau. Focus on such metrics as revenue per hour. “Keep it simple, and focus your supervisors on it,” she said.

* Post-call surveys can be a good way to reveal facts about your customer base, said Tim Duggan, strategic sales manager of Telvista, a customer support outsourcing solutions firm. “Using a four-question post-call survey,” he noted, “we discovered a major demographic for us, 18- to 25-year-olds.”

* For CSRs with perfect scores over certain periods, have the CSR and the contact center manager switch roles for a day, suggested David LaBatt, senior executive partner with USA 800, a third-party contact center. It’s an efficient way to freshen different reps’ perspectives.

* In brief, other random ideas from the session included: appointing an honorary “chief morale officer” to facilitate community-oriented activities among employees; developing plans to service the nation’s burgeoning Hispanic population; and not dismissing out of hand the “comments section” on BizRate as too small a sample of customer opinion.

What’s more, hand-written, thank-you notes, Web-based CSR training and a suggestion box that requires signed suggestions also were mentioned. “Signed suggestions mean that it won’t be a whiner box,” Roth said about the suggestion box idea. “And you can reward good suggestions with lunch and a gift card.”