Anatomy of a Contact Center Expansion
Part of the expansion was growing the contact center workforce from 25 agents to 120 agents. You obviously needed to hire a lot of new people. What qualities do you look for when bringing them on?
This is a very important question that I think most organizations miss. Identifying the right characteristics is critical. Do they align with your service expectations and company culture? Your focus needs to be on the ability to serve rather than the ability to perform a task. Yes, we have to ensure each applicant can perform the duties of the job through skills testing, but just because they can do the job doesn’t mean they’re a good fit for our organization.
When looking at potential new team members, it’s imperative to identify their views and beliefs about service. Asking if service is important is a waste of time. Asking them to describe a time when they made a guest feel special taps into feelings and values. Asking what they would do to make a 65-year-old guest feel special when visiting the casino will give better insights into the candidate.
We are big advocates of role-playing and behavior-based interviews. I would rather hire for desire and passion than for skills.
What kind of training do you provide to new hires before putting them on the phones?
Training is so important. Most casinos are looking to get new team members on the floor as quickly as possible. This is a huge mistake. Team members need time to build the service delivery habits that the company desires. That means taking the time to shadow and demonstrate service until they do it as expected.
The challenge is that too often people focus on the task and not the service. The training needs to be brief, fast-paced, fun, and highly interactive. This increases retention.
Finally, less is more. By stripping it down to the most important points and not overwhelming the learner, you’ll have more success. When a child is learning to walk, you don’t teach him to run. The same is true for great guest service. Small concepts that can easily be processed and demonstrated by the new team member are recommended.
My team and I believe in the crawl, walk, and then run method. Ensuring the team is ready to be the voice and face of our brand is our top priority, and it takes time.
What call center technologies do you have in place, and which vendors provided the technologies? What changes did you have to make to accommodate the contact center expansion?
Our workforce management is powered by Teleopti through Zoom. Quality monitoring, including quality management and call recording, is through Zoom. Our call, chat, and email routing is through Cisco’s Finesse. Our call-back software is from Fonolo. Our virtual job tryout software is from Shaker. Our guest surveys are from InMoment, and our online guest services training is provided by ICMI.
The changes we had to make included the purchase of additional licensing for the products we use and upgrades to the servers to house the additional applications. There was also the need to bring in contact center professionals to assist us in identifying and applying best practices.
What advice would you offer to other contact center managers who might also need to increase their operations quickly?
Develop a plan and goals built on being flexible and scalable. Create a road map to achieve outlined goals. Obtain feedback from all key stakeholders. Involve all key stakeholders in the decision making. Have your plan, goals, and road map reviewed by an independent third party.
Focus on developing your people. Managers need to be developed into leaders. When they are leaders, the team is more likely to learn by watching them. Low-performing departments can usually be attributed to the team that manages them.
Make it easy for others to succeed—less is more. If you want people to improve, it means changing a behavior. The best way to do that is with small steps that lead to success; recognize success.
What future developments are you eyeing, and where do you see your next biggest investment?
We plan to spend a substantial amount of resources to improve our ability to offer a more engaged, personalized, and effortless reservation experience for our guests. We want to enable our guests to engage with us through multiple channels. Having a platform that offers guests multiple channels—voice, chat, email, SMS, or video—is in our future. In addition, we are internally developing ways to harness all the data about our guests and provide that information to agents, who will then be able to provide a more personalized, seamless, and effortless experience.
Editor Leonard Klie can be reached at lklie@infotoday.com.