Beyond Phones

With a personal goal of selling $1,000 of home and car electronics every hour from the Crutchfield Corp.`s call center in Charlottesville, Va., Greg Telep helped add more than $1 million to the company`s top line last year. Other agents have longer tenure and some sell even more, but what makes Telep a star is that he does something that relatively few other agents do—at least so far: he moves with equal ease among the customer contact mediums of phone, e-mail and chat. Not only does he handle all three, but he`s applied the skills he developed for one medium to improve his performance in the others.

A phone agent for several years at Crutchfield before e-mail and chat came along, 51-year-old Telep sensed that more business would shift to the Internet and took every opportunity to learn the electronic mediums when they were added to the call center. While he spends most of his time on the phone, because that`s still where the best selling opportunities are, he now also puts in three to four hours a week on e-mail and about as much on chat, spelling other agents dedicated to those mediums or helping with overflow there if the phones are slow.

"I like the different challenges with all three mediums—that`s helped me," says Telep. "You`re talking on the phone, and you may go back and forth, getting 12 responses. With e-mail you don`t want 12 responses; you want to move it along. So you have to think ahead and give the best possible answer. When I started doing e-mail, I also did better on the phone because I was thinking in a different way."

More than orders

Yesterday`s call center agent was an order-taker with a pleasant phone voice. But with the growth of Internet retailing and web-enabled call centers, tomorrow`s best call center agents will fit a profile more like Telep`s. As in past times, an attitude of service to the customer is bedrock to the success of agents working in any medium, online or offline, but that`s just the first tier of what retail call center recruiters look for now. That`s because today, the call center agent`s role has changed.

"Particularly for Internet retailing, it`s changed as we`ve refined what we are looking for those reps to do," says Rebecca Gibson, manager of educational services at consultants and conference company Incoming Calls Management Institute. "What a lot of retailers want now is somebody who can sell their products and go beyond taking an order to build value in a customer`s selection."

Beyond the ability to sell, the new skill set includes computer and Internet literacy. At some call center facilities, agents can expect to wrangle with an increasingly complex set of inventory and customer data on their screens. Then there`s product data. Depending on the product category, they`ll train for weeks or even months before initiating regular customer contact.

The web and chat functions add more training requirements to what`s already one of the industry`s longest training programs at the two web-enabled call centers that support Crutchfield`s catalog and web site. The home and automobile electronics retailer sells a complex, highly-configurable product that requires deep category knowledge on the part of agents. In fact, because agents are so heavily schooled in the product and the company, Crutchfield`s call center has become a route to jobs in other departments.

The typical agent gets four weeks of product training, followed by a few weeks of live sessions on the phone, and then an additional four to five weeks of phone and basic e-mail training. On average, Crutchfield agents have 12 to 13 weeks of training before they ever have regular customer contact. With the exception of some reps such as Telep who are cross-trained in three mediums, Crutchfield`s agents are phone-dedicated or chat- and e-mail-dedicated. "We try to keep the mediums segregated because it seems to help the agents stay focused on the tasks at hand," says George Wade, web sales manager.

Some agents move off the phone onto e-mail and now chat, added in June. Training for those agents starts with a closer look at typing and writing skills and goes deeper into how to operate the online customer interface. "We encourage phone advisors to have a good knowledge of what happens on the web site as well because the customer who is having trouble with the site may well pick up the phone," adds Wade.

Compensation for phone-dedicated agents at Crutchfield is largely commission-based. The agents accept risk and a certain amount of pressure in exchange for the opportunity to earn more. Online agents swap out both the risk and the potential of higher reward in exchange for a salary and a more predictable workload—though they are still expected to sell online as needed. The addition of chat and the effort to find a compensation system that balances commission with salary has caused Crutchfield to reexamine its whole compensation structure for call center agents. While phone reps currently have the most earning potential, Crutchfield is redesigning its compensation plan to better support the contributions of agents across all thee mediums.

The goal of the call center agent compensation plan in development is to find the right balance. "The agents who are the most valuable to us are able to make a lot of money on the phone (where compensation is commission-based), but also can do chat and e-mail efficiently," says Doug Smythers, director of Charlottesville operations. "We can keep them busy all the time. That`s part of the struggle, to figure out how to compensate them because they are being the most efficient."

Better efficiency

QVC uses the same rationale as Cruthfield in managing the workflow of its 800 dedicated customer service reps, a subset of its estimated 4,000 call center agents. Agents are largely focused on either online or offline customer contacts, though a few dedicated e-mail and chat agents are cross trained to move to the phone as needed. "You want to make sure people are comfortable with the technology they are using," says Gary Ormont, QVC`s manager of customer service. "Not all the skills are required by everyone. So from an efficiency standpoint, dedicated processes seem to work the best, at least at this time."

IRCE 2008 Conference Multi-Media CD-ROM

Other retailers believe that with the right approach, agents can become proficient in handling all mediums randomly. At the web-enabled call center of multi-channel retailer Palm Beach Jewelry, agents handle the phone, e-mail and chat, staying on course with the help of detailed scripts developed to cover most customer situations.

"I don`t think there is too much different in handling a call for Palm Beach Jewelry versus the same type of inquiry on chat or e-mail, because it`s all scripted," says Tim Holody, call center manager. "There is a bit more training required before agents learn to handle chat and e-mail, but it`s just a few more hours."

The typing, spelling and grammar requirements of working in written online mediums don`t constitute an issue for Holody, either. "We have pretty high requirements going in. If agents don`t have good English skills and pass a typing test, they are not even going to get on the phone, let alone e-mail," he says.

Palm Beach`s call center function is outsourced to Margate, Fla.-based Global Response Inc. After the multi-channel jewelry brand of Seta Corp. decided to consolidate its two contact centers four years ago in order to save on redundant capacity, it tapped Global Response to handle overflow. Today, it`s assigned the entire function to the outsource provider after it measured Global Response`s performance against that of its in-house center.

Holody says the outsource provider did "as good as or better than" its own internal call center on metrics such as the percentage of calls answered without going on hold and the order abandonment rate. Holody also looks at sales generated through the call center given that Palm Beach Jewelry has developed tightly scripted upsell and cross-sell language for agents. Of customers given the chance to learn about additional offers, such as complementary items or discounts on additional purchases, 85% agree to listen, says Holody. Of that number, 15% to 20% accept the offers. "That`s what we were getting in-house, and Global has been able to maintain that," he says.

Though the Global Response agents dedicated to Palm Beach Jewelry multi-task among the phone, e-mail and chat, Holody and Palm Beach do observe one distinction among channels. Currently, e-mail and chat are primarily vehicles for customer support, and upsells and cross-sell offers are to phone customers only.

When the jeweler launches its new web site this fall, however, that will extend to e-mail and chat; again, with the help of some scripted responses. Holody believes that offering the same upsells and cross-sells through web-based touch points to customers poised to order will eventually produce a sales lift similar to what the company now experiences in upselling by phone, about 10%.

"That will depend on how well the products are presented on the web site as well as how it`s handled by agents through chat and e-mail," he says—one reason Palm Beach Jewelry will wait for the improvements in its site before expanding e-mail and chat into active selling channels.

Multi-talents

Global requires Internet and computer literacy as well as voice and customer service skills of its blended agents who work across phone, e-mail and chat. Rick Fairchild, workforce management/quality assurance manager, says they`re held to a higher standard of performance than agents who simply take phone orders. "They are more like help desk representatives; someone who has more problem-solving skills and is a little more analytical," he says.

Attitude, an aptitude to learn, the ability and the desire to sell, writing skills and technical proficiency across online and offline mediums constitute the dream retail call center agent. When call centers do find such people, generally they will pay them more. At Global Response, for example, Fairchild says talented agents can make upwards of 150% of their base salary, with commission.

In the future, suggests Gibson, the universal agent who can easily move among phone, e-mail and chat could be easier to find, as a generation that has always known computers will move into the workforce. In the meantime, web-enabled call centers will likely continue to experiment with the best way to juggle the workload, train agents and compensate them so as to cover the growing requirements of multiple routes of customer contact.

mary@verticalwebmedia.com

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