Bob Cowen at Snowfly alerted me to the July, 2011 issue of Con­sumer Reports Mag­a­zine. On page 16, there's a list of the best and worst com­pa­nies in 21 dif­fer­ent busi­ness cat­e­gories (hotel chains, on-line retail­ers, phone com­pa­nies, tech sup­port, etc.) com­piled from 3 years of sub­scriber surveys.

If you work at one of the com­pa­nies in the "best" col­umn, con­grat­u­la­tions! You're doing things right. If you're work­ing at a com­pany listed in the "worst" col­umn, this is a wake-up call that presents an oppor­tu­nity to make some changes. If your com­pany isn't listed, keep read­ing to be sure you qual­ify for the "best" side of the list next year!

Abide by the GetH­u­man Cus­tomer Ser­vice Standard

The GetH­u­man Cus­tomer Ser­vice Stan­dard, pro­vides spec­i­fi­ca­tions for mak­ing the phone sys­tems used in cus­tomer ser­vice and sup­port eas­ier, more effec­tive and more effi­cient for cus­tomers. Call your own company's num­ber. Is the IVR help­ful? Can you find your way to a human being? Or do you end up in IVR-loop hell?

Hire the Right People

The skills peo­ple dis­play when they're inter­view­ing are not nec­es­sar­ily the skills they need to have in order pro­vide top-notch cus­tomer ser­vice and sup­port. Yes, it costs to use stan­dard­ized assess­ments dur­ing hir­ing, but the costs of hir­ing and train­ing a rep who isn't suited for the job are much, much higher! Check out the assess­ments for con­tact cen­ter reps and super­vi­sors from by Furst­Per­son and ImpactAchieve­ment and com­pare the cost against replac­ing a rep who isn't per­form­ing up to par at your company.

Make Train­ing an Ongo­ing Event

Most com­pa­nies pro­vide cus­tomer ser­vice train­ing for new hires. How­ever, the skill level they leave class with degrades sig­nif­i­cantly over time. One major com­puter man­u­fac­turer we worked with, for exam­ple, had aver­age scores of 72% for first call res­o­lu­tion (FCR) and 81% for cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion (CSAT). Thirty days after we trained a pilot group of 30 rep­re­sen­ta­tives, the pilot group had moved their scores to 82.4% for FCR and 94% for CSAT. How­ever, with­out on-the-job rein­force­ment and a con­tin­u­ous improve­ment pro­gram, within 60 days, the scores of the pilot group started falling back to the center's norm.

Don't For­get the Supervisors!

One of the things I love about con­tact cen­ters is that they fre­quently pro­mote from within. How­ever, we've observed that unless they've had a strong men­tor or train­ing in proper call cen­ter coach­ing, most agents pro­moted to super­vi­sor tend to super­vise as they were par­ented —and that doesn't work out very well.  Super­vi­sors need to learn how to cre­ate a cli­mate for suc­cess, set team and indi­vid­ual goals, coach to mea­sur­able per­for­mance stan­dards, and han­dle dif­fi­cult employee situations.

In sum­mary, if you hire the right peo­ple, pro­vide con­tin­u­ous train­ing to keep agent knowl­edge and skill level high, and train super­vi­sors so they have the skills to inspire and moti­vate agents to pro­vide stel­lar ser­vice, you, too, can make it to the top of the list next year.