OK, to start with it’s not a desk that helps people! A help desk is a team of individuals (generally support staff) that provide solutions and resolutions to customers experiencing problems. Generally working at the 1st tier of the support model they are responsible for Incident reporting and resolution vs. Problem Management (I shall discuss those terms in greater depth below).
All posts by Hutch Morzaria
Exceptional Customer Service
One important thing to remember from a Customer Service point of view is that the last person you speak to (or chat with or email) is also the most likely to buy your service or product in the future. This is obviously not a hard and fast rule, but more an estimation of the impact word of mouth plays with any business!
Importance of Exceptional Customer Service
When was the last time you had a coffee? I don’t mean in the office, but in a regular takeout joint, one of those ones with a drive-through window? Have you gotten to the window after repeating your order to the “big talking head” only to have it wrong when you get there?
Erlang ‘C’ & Scheduling for Call Centres – IV
The key things you need to remember if you’re using Excel or any staffing program is to ensure that your minimum coverage matches your expected call volumes and coverage levels based on the Erlang ‘C’ formula and tools mentioned earlier. It ill behooves you to have too many resources at 2am when you’re only expecting 1 phone call and your SLA is 2hrs!
- It might pay dividends for you in this instance to use an outsourced party where your call is answered by the equivalent of an ‘order taker’ so that the customer at least is able to speak to someone and have an incident opened for them and then their issue is actually only addressed when your staff resume regular operations. Remember the points I’ve already made about SLA, Tiered Customers and Escalation Matrix‘. This actually brings up another point that’s worth discussing and that is ‘On Call Coverage’ which I will address in further posts.
- Scheduling Employees 2000 – a step up from the Excel route is this software package. Published by Guia International, this application is fairly inexpensive and is extremely easy to use. It allows you to input details of a single department or team and ensures that you have the appropriate coverage based on time of day. It has nice printouts and although not fully “web-enabled” it is easy enough to ensure that your staff have an up to date copy of the schedule by publishing your schedule online. With the ability to track time and labor costs by the hour and week as your schedule. And simple drag/drop scheduling that allows you to schedule in 15min increments accounting for breaks. You are easily able to see at a glance when your staffing levels do not match up with your required coverage. Now there are a host of other scheduling applications available online and I will try to review some other packages in the coming weeks/months but this one does come highly recommended by me!
- When to Work (W2W) – on the high-end side and with a host of features, W2W is a very robust application. It is fully web-enabled which means that not only are your staff able to view and access it from anywhere, it simplifies your reporting and control also. It is very customizable and not only has some very good automated staffing calculators based on Skill Based routing and also allows for staff schedules that are restrictive due to other requirements – ie. someone is not able to work evenings on mon/wed/fri but is available any other day. You can input these restrictions into the system and then forget about them as the system will then NOT allow you to schedule them for the times they are unavailable. Notifications are provided to staff whenever a change is made to their shift and you also have the capability of utilizing a company bulletin board – for example, announcing a special schedule due to the staff Christmas Party! – when publishing schedules that impact multiple departments and teams. One of the best features and most useful of When2Work is the ability to have different schedules by diffferent teams/skills all contained inside the same application. The ability to drag drop shifts and providing staff the flexibility of trading shifts with similarly skilled employees is also a great feature. Although significantly more expensive, when you have reached a certain size, having this sort of a tool available to you will prove a definite boon!
Job Search & Resume Essentials
Fortunately (and unfortunately) as a Manager you will frequently get involved in the process of hiring new staff. The unfortunate downside is that as a Manager you will also have to sometimes terminate staff – see my post on PIPs earlier – but this to some extent goes with the territory. Let’s look at the positive aspect first and let’s look at it in two parts as it might be you on the other side of that chair at some point!
Selling Yourself
Some key things to always include in a cover letter are:
- Key Accomplishments and Awards (i.e. How did you benefit your last company? How much money did you save them? What process improvements did you initiate and how successful were they?)
- Customer Testimonials – if you are applying for a Customer Service role and your customers are willing to be your advocate that says some really good things about you and the level of Service you are able to provide.
Finally, with regards to your CV/Resume and cover letter, there is probably one really important thing that I have not yet mentioned … it is extremely important so please pay attention … studies state that 85% of applicants currently applying for new positions, make this simple elementary error.
In today’s day and age with the tools we have available, there is no excuse for simple spelling and grammatical errors. Remember, Hiring Managers are looking for a reason to put you in the NO pile – don’t give them an easy out!! Once you have read it, read it again and then get your wife to read it and your brother and as many other people as you can think off. Not only will they hopefully find any errors, but they might even be able to add some additional accomplishments that you’d forgotten!
In addition unless you are in a highly specialized field, you want to ensure that your resume is readable AND understandable by the “lay” person – remember more often than not, the Hiring Manager in HR does not really understand the role that they are hiring for and is really only looking for those keywords I’ve mentioned before!
I hope that the above has been useful information with regards to CV/Resume creation as well as the cover letter. In later posts, I will cover the different job boards (for you and your candidates), recruiters as well as the disciplinary and termination process.
Communication and Customer Service
An extremely funny story that demonstrates the importance of listening to your customers.
This is some correspondence which actually occurred between a London hotel’s staff and one of its guests. The London hotel involved submitted this to the Sunday Times. No name was mentioned.
Dear Room 238,
I am not your regular maid. She will be back tomorrow, Thursday, from her day off. I took the 3 hotel soaps out of the shower soap dish as you requested. The 6 bars on your shelf I took out of your way and put on top of your Kleenex dispenser in case you should change your mind. This leaves only the 3 bars I left today which my instructions from the management is to leave 3 soaps daily. I hope this is satisfactory.
Kathy, Relief Maid
My day off was last Wed. so the relief maid left 3 hotel soaps which we are instructed by the management. I took the 6 soaps which were in your way on the shelf and put them in the soap dish where your Dial was. I put the Dial in the medicine cabinet for your convenience. I didn’t remove the 3 complimentary soaps which are always placed inside the medicine cabinet for all new check-ins and which you did not object to when you checked in last Monday. Please let me know if I can of further assistance.
Dotty
The assistant manager, Mr. Kensedder, informed me this A.M. that you called him last evening and said you were unhappy with your maid service. I have assigned a new girl to your room. I hope you will accept my apologies for any past inconvenience. If you have any future complaints please contact me so I can give it my personal attention. Call extension 1108 between 8AM and 5PM. Thank you.
Housekeeper
Your maid, Kathy, has been instructed to stop delivering soap to your room and remove the extra soaps. If I can be of further assistance, please call extension 1108 between 8AM and 5PM. Thank you,
Housekeeper
I have informed our housekeeper, Elaine Carmen, of your soap problem. I cannot understand why there was no soap in your room since our maids are instructed to leave 3 bars of soap each time they service a room. The situation will be rectified immediately. Please accept my apologies for the inconvenience.
Assistant Manager
You complained of too much soap in your room so I had them removed. Then you complained to Mr. Kensedder that all your soap was missing so I personally returned them. The 24 Camays which had been taken and the 3 Camays you are supposed to receive daily (sic). I don’t know anything about the 4 Cashmere Bouquets. Obviously your maid, Kathy, did not know I had returned your soaps so she also brought 24 Camays plus the 3 daily Camays. I don’t know where you got the idea this hotel issues bath-size Dial. I was able to locate some bath-size Ivory which I left in your room.
Housekeeper
- On shelf under medicine cabinet – 18 Camay in 4 stacks of 4 and 1 stack of 2.
- On Kleenex dispenser – 11 Camay in 2 stacks of 4 and 1 stack of 3.
- On bedroom dresser – 1 stack of 3 Cashmere Bouquet, 1 stack of 4 hotel-size Ivory, and 8 Camay in 2 stacks of 4.
- Inside medicine cabinet – 14 Camay in 3 stacks of 4 and 1 stack of 2.
- In shower soap dish – 6 Camay, very moist.
- On northeast corner of tub – 1 Cashmere Bouquet, slightly used.
- On northwest corner of tub – 6 Camays in 2 stacks of 3.
Internal & External SLA’s
A very important point to remember at all times is that you need to have a more aggressive Internal SLA vs. the one that you are offering to your customers. I know it sounds self-evident doesn’t it, but there is no end of organizations that I’ve dealt with where customers are offered a 4hr SLA on a 24/7 basis and the engineers that can actually fix the problem are either unavailable till the next business day or NOT even on call!!!
Let me state this once again and very clearly so that there is NO CONFUSION …
If you are offering your customers an SLA of ‘X Hours’ and your Engineering (or Development or Project Management or … etc…) team is only offering you an SLA of ‘X + Y Hours’ … YOU WILL LOSE MONEY and YOU WILL LOSE CUSTOMERS!!!
It is imperative that your internal SLA be better than the one you are offering to your customers and you need to ensure that your Sales team and Senior Management are both on board with this.
Remember, also, that this must go all the way up the chain … your Engineering team has agreed to an internal SLA of ‘X – Y Hours’ (woohoo!! That will solve 80% of your problems) but the Development team is only offering them an SLA of ‘Z’ (assume ‘Z’ is a multiple of ‘X + Y’) … for those 20% of customers and problems that cannot be solved by your Tier 2 (Engineering team in this example) group … you are still going to be in trouble.
The question, now becomes how much are you & your company willing to invest in protecting yourself from that 20%?
I hope that this gives you the ammunition that you need in your discussions with Senior MGMT. Any help you need or further suggestions, please feel free to contact me using the form on the right side of the page.
Erlang ‘C’ & Scheduling for Call Centres – III
Skill-Based Routing
Simpler to say than actually execute, SBR is a way of ensuring that your contact reaches the agent best suited to deal with and address their issue. This assists in first call resolution but is also key when it comes to things like languages and specific technologies. An easy example is ensuring that a French-speaking customer with a data problem reaches your agent in your call center in Montreal (or France for that matter) vs your agent in an English speaking call center.
Skill-based routing allows for significant granularity and focus, but it is only as good as the information you know or are supplied with by the customer. This can either be from an existing customer database or from your initial ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) system where the customer is responsible for determining what problem they have.
Scheduling Tools
There is a multitude of free & paid for scheduling tools available and obviously, you get what you pay for with the ones requiring a monthly/yearly fee offering significantly more tools and services than the free ones. However, depending on the size of your center and your budget, some of these free tools (reviewed) are extremely effective and useful. I have provided links to some of the better subscription-based tools also, but have not included a review of them as their websites are fairly descriptive in and of itself.
- Excel (or other) Spreadsheet – hopefully your budget includes at least one copy of Microsoft Excel, but if not, you can still get access to free spreadsheet applications either through Open Office or even Google Docs or Zoho Docs. Depending on your chosen product/solution, the formula’s and look of the product will be slightly different, however, for simple call/support centers any of these will suffice. Your main measurement would be determined by your total required staffing level. You can also build a schedule based on specified Tiers of customers or skillsets. Don’t get too complicated with Excel as it would pay you to get a specialized tool to do this right. A sample Tiered schedule is provided below.
Erlang ‘C’ & Scheduling for Call Centres – II
Escalation Matrix –
OK, great, we’ve got an SLA, we have the appropriate staff in place to take the call when they make it … now, what happens if they are not able to fix the problem? Easy! You get the problem to the right people that can fix it in a timely manner. This is where the escalation matrix comes into play.
Assuming that its 2am and you’ve got a Tier 1 customer (remember, your definition of Customers was made before this) that has no telephone service (hard down etc…). This is impacting them and potentially costing them $$$/hr. Your engineer has taken the call and started working on the issue.
Now as this company is paying you lots of money for the service (that IS why they are Tier 1 after all), you need to ensure that you’ve got ALL the right people available and working on their problem as quickly as possible. A sample 2 Stage Internal Escalation Matrix that I’ve used with great success in the past is presented below. You will need to have a separate matrix that is provided to Customers which I shall provide you with in a later post.
Provided below is a table detailing the different groups & times that they need to be notified at based on the problem & its impact.
Please note – its fairly easy to remove the additional Escalation Group step mentioned below, if your escalation is to only one group! This type of structure only applies to larger companies where the problem and responsible party could be in a variety of different locations. The groups mentioned below also vary based on the type of organization – for example, Ops/NOC is applicable to a telco environment but not necessarily a manufacturing one.
ESCALATION GROUPS
SLA & Tiered Service Levels
SLA – this is a difficult one. You obviously want to offer all of your customers the premier, best in the world, platinum level of service, but unfortunately, that does not always make financial sense. Customers need to be tiered dependent on the amount of money they pay you (see my post on the 80/20/30 rule) and incidents/problems need to be tiered dependent on the impact to their business.
It makes for an interesting measurement or matrix but a basic one that will need to be customized for your business is provided below.
Tier 1
|
Tier 2
|
Tier 3
|
|
Priority 1 | 70% + Service Impact or Total Loss of Service 5min Response 4hr Resolution |
70% + Service Impact or Total Loss of Service 30min Response 8hr Resolution |
70% + Service Impact or Total Loss of Service 1hr Response 24hr Resolution |
Priority 2 | 50% – 70% Service Impact 15min Response 8hr Resolution |
50% – 70% Service Impact 1hr Response 24hr Resolution |
50% – 70% Service Impact 4hr Response 72hr Resolution |
Priority 3 | Up to 50% Service Impact 30min Response 12hr Resolution |
Up to 50% Service Impact 4hr Response 72hr Resolution |
Up to 50% Service Impact 24hr Response 96hr Resolution |
Erlang ‘C’ & Scheduling for Call Centres
Erlang ‘C’ is a Nobel winning formula used in the Call Centre and Operations industries to determine the correct and appropriate level of staffing based on key call metrics. The scary looking formula for this is below and the even scarier explanation from Wikipedia is here.
From a Call Centre and Staffing Point of view, the primary elements considered are as follows:
- Average Talk Time
- Calls/per specified period (15min is a good benchmark)
- Specified Service Metrics or SLA (ie. 80/20 <- 80% of calls answered in 20s or less etc…) … correspondingly, you want to consider your abandon %’age here also. Are you willing to accept that some of your customers will hang up? If so, how many & consider what impact that will have on your business in the long run!
With this information in hand and using the formula, you are able to determine how many resources you need in a given period to meet your customer demand. Using some free online tools (links provided below), you are also able to determine your required resources based on a specified timetable and rotation. For example, if the formula states you need 8 resources between 8am-9am and you are running a 24/7 call center the actual number of staff you need to employ is ‘X’.
Some Good Free Erlang ‘C’ Calculators –
- Online Traffic Calculators
- Erlang ‘C’ Calculator
- This last one is a downloadable application & HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Holiday/Vacation/Sickness –
With this in mind, you still need to plan for excess capacity relevant to staff absenteeism either planned or unplanned. So although the formula only called for 8 staff & your overage based on a 24/7 call centre is ‘X’ … you should actually plan to have ‘Y’ resources available to cover these gaps!!
KPI’s and the Importance of Measurements (part 2)
Continuing from my previous post here, we’re going to get more in depth into KPI’s and their measurement now.
How do I measure KPI’s?
Get the data (whatever is important to you … if you use the examples previously mentioned, then track service outages by minutes for example vs. a specified date) into your spreadsheet or other tracking tools, then keep on adding more and more information every time you have another service interruption or outage.
The key here is consistency and ensuring that you reflect as realistic a picture as possible so the more information you can capture the better. If you are measuring outages, then make sure you reflect the customers impacted, the total amount of time, the volume of calls or interactions it created and the reason for the outage (even a simple 3rd party vs. internal tag is important as it tells you where you need to focus your attention). Once the data has been captured – make sure you have and are using the right tool for this … (a spreadsheet as mentioned is great in the early stages but if you can tie this back into a good Incident & Problem Management system like Freshdesk or something similar (I’ll get into ITIL and Six Sigma in later posts) you’re going to do really well!) – then you need to come up with an appropriate means of analysis.
We are all familiar with the disparaging quotes about statistics (including “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics”, attributed to either Mark Twain or Disraeli, depending on whom you ask), and it’s no secret that many people harbor a vague distrust of statistics as commonly used.
Averages don’t tell you very much. One data point that is extremely far outside the curve will skew everything towards it so care must be taken to ensure that you are measuring information correctly. Good analysis is an ongoing process, so set targets and assesses whether any changes you make are improving your KPI’s or not.
KPI’s and the Importance of Measurements
There is a great quote that goes something like –
“If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it!”
… this is so true and especially so in the Technical Support, Customer Service, and Operations areas.
There are great KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) and not so great ones. The key is choosing the right one for your business and you need to choose it from a CUSTOMER point of view.
There is no use in choosing your KPI from any other area as if you lose your customers, you lose your revenue and obviously you lose your business!!
When defining a set of KPIs to control and measure performance, the most likely debate is probably around measuring KPIs. Another way to think about KPIs is that they are measurements designed to assess performance.
The Traditional Mantra is –
“Measure. Analyse. Act”
What KPI’s should I use?
Your choice of KPI’s depends on your intention and target audience. Which problem or issue are you trying to solve, whom is it impacting, what is the impact and what outcome would you like to see afterward are all good questions to ask when building a KPI plan.
Two common KPIs are 1st Call Resolution and Downtime (please note I have not said these are good ones – that is something you will need to determine for yourself depending on your interpretation of what’s important to your customer … this is something I shall discuss in greater detail in later posts).
Similarly, KPI’s should be measured over time and you should not expect your initial snapshot to give you the full picture as you will frequently have to ‘massage’ and/or revise your measurement criteria and focus until you are measuring the correct information.
1st Call Resolution –
Measurement of the %’age of customer issues resolved at the first call.
% Uptime/Downtime –
Measurement of the %’age of time the service is available (or not).
These are just 2 of the hundreds of different KPIs out there … a great place to find more is here and it is well worth your time to visit!
Another problem you might have though is that you don’t have any way to measure this … that is something I will discuss further in later posts.