Call center staff faces increasing challenges as Internet comes of age

BOSTON-When setting up a call center of any size, one important consideration is who will staff it. Obviously, calls must be handled professionally if the call center is to be a success. This can be quite a challenge in an age of increasing Internet usage, said Chris Stanvick, a consultant with Kowal Associates Inc. of Boston. Kowal Associates, founded in the mid-'80s, is a firm that lends its expertise to financial institutions or other companies planning to set up a call center or wanting to assess an existing call center's performance level. One guiding principal in call center staffing: "You never, ever want your customer service representative to know less than your customer (or member)," Stanvick said. But even before staffing questions are raised, other things must be decided during the earliest stages of setting up a working call center. One of the first questions Kowal Associates consultants work to figure out is whether new clients want to do a totally in-house call center, or whether they would prefer to try to out-source all or part of their calls. For one thing, the expense of doing a call center can be daunting, Stanvick said. And often, a financial institution's staff has other projects that are too time-consuming to get involved in something as comprehensive as setting up a call center. "What Kowal Associates (and other consulting firms in other areas) can do as a company is help our clients to find partners to handle their calling for them," Stanvick said. One well-known New York City financial institution that has taken the approach of having its own call center, but outsourcing some of its calls as well, decided upon this approach because outside of urban areas like New York, high-quality service representatives are more available than in the city. "If you look out in the Midwest, you can find people who are very happy to have an office type of job, or a corporate job," Stanvick explained. "It's a great opportunity for any company to set up a call center either for internal purposes or if they would like to be an outsource provider of those services. But you will find that most call centers are going to be in areas of the country where there are lower and mid-income brackets." While one might find a call center in places like New York, Boston or other large cities, it becomes a challenge to staff them in areas where many potential employees have college degrees, or perhaps even advanced degrees such as masters of business administration degrees. So a company's regional location, therefore, would be one consideration in forming their own call center, because location has such an impact on the employee pool available. If the decision is made to outsource, this raises additional questions, Stanvick said. For one thing, call centers that accept outsourcing clients typically might have as few as just two of them, or as many as 50. Level of training for customer service representatives would depend upon the types of calls expected to be handled. "Certain programs demand dedicated representatives (representatives who only work on one company's program)," Stanvick said. "They don't work on anything else. But then you have programs where it only makes sense to have representatives working in a shared environment." The concept of sharing a call center often is most cost effective because facility, equipment and staff are shared. Service representatives will make better use of their time as they take more numerous in-bound or make out-bound calls during the time they are on task. "Typically, (in a shared call center) when you have dedicated reps either making out-bound calls or waiting for in-bound phone calls, depending what your volume actually is, you can tell them, `Hey, we have another client and it's a very similar product.' If we are able to share resources by allowing these reps to handle phone calls from several companies, then these companies will be paying out less for the service, and we'll be more efficient as a call center," Stanvick said. Another challenge to deal with-avoiding call center staff boredom. The challenge is "to create an environment in which they will enjoy doing their jobs, and also give them the ability to work on a couple of different things," Stanvick said. Because employee retention is an important part of building and staffing a successful call center, part of setting up such a center is to assess the tasks that staff would be required to do and then to hire people with the education and expertise to complete the task successfully. When the task is to sell a basic product, the service representative might merely be called upon to take basic information from buyers who may have seen an advertisement of a product and already have decided to purchase it. "You probably wouldn't want to have a dedicated work force handling those types of phone calls," Stanvick noted. "You are not really providing the customer with anything other than information as to when he might expect to receive what he has ordered." While setting up a call center is a big project, staff at a company such as Kowal Associates can help things go smoothly. Consultants with expertise in these areas might consider different angles of the project than a credit union's regular staff. "The first thing a consultant might do is look at what the client's needs are, or what the objective of the client's program is," Stanvick said. "Most companies have multiple programs. "You ask them to consider what might be the best channel for providing information to their customers, or for receiving information from them. You may find that having a face-to-face conversation with the people you are dealing with is the best way you are going to be able to get their information. "Or maybe it would be a combination. Maybe you need to do one part face-to-face, another part using the phone, and another part through the mail," Stanvick said. "So, now you are moving toward taking an integrated approach, where your customer (or member) is sending you e-mail, for instance. They might say something like, `I read that this product is available, and I am interested in it. Can you please call me?' Then you do a follow-up. That's the approach a lot of call centers are beginning to move toward." Once a credit union has researched their members needs (how to contact members, how they want to be contacted), then it's the time when company (or CU) staff probably will come to the realization that the telephone is going to play a large part in their communication with members or customers. Once the basics are established, then other questions come up. Would the call center be staffed 24 hours a day? How would emergency calls be handled? Do you want or need an integrated voice response system? "In the financial institutions industry, that is something people really enjoy now, the fact that they can call anytime and check pertinent information about their accounts, such as balances," Stanvick said. "Some people like to do these things without having to bother talking to a real person. But then, there are some times when you do need to talk to somebody, like, for instance, should you think you are missing money that should be in your account." As questions arise during the call center set-up process, credit unions might find that seeking outside help leads to answers. This provides the benefit of experience in a project where so many possibilities exist, Stanvick said. -lide@cutimes.com