Advice From A Call Center Geek 3.0!: Thomas Laird

THOMAS LAIRD
Advice from a Call Center Geek 3.0!

Rethink How You Operate Your Contact Center
First published by Expivia Press 2022
Copyright © 2022 by Thomas Laird
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Second edition
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Contents
1 WHY A CALL CENTER BOOK 1

2 WANNA BET 9
3 MANAGEMENT TRUST EQUATION- TRUE STORY 15
4 CULTURE > EVERYTHING 19
5 TRAIN ANIMALS, EDUCATE PEOPLE 25
6 CALL CENTER COFFEE 28
7 QA (QUALITY ASSURANCE) DONE THE RIGHT WAY 33
8 CRUCIAL CALL CENTER METRICS AND KPI’S YOU
NEED TO KNOW 38
9 CX METRICS THAT MATTER 46
10 10 UNIQUE BENEFITS OF SPEECH ANALYTICS 50
11 10 CUSTOMER SERVICE SKILLS EVERY AGENT NEEDS
TO HAVE 55
12 SETTING UP A MANAGEMENT TRAINEE PROGRAM 59
13 PSYCHIC INCOME- 7 WAYS TO SHOW RESPECT TO
YOUR CALL CENTER... 64
14 SOCIAL MEDIA/BRANDING TO RECRUIT 68
15 SETTING UP A NEW CALL CENTER STRUCTURE 73
16 MONITOR LIVE OR RECORDED CALLS? 80
17 9 WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR TEAMS COACHING 83
18 WEEKLY AGENT ANALYSIS 87
19 ENHANCING YOUR COMMUNICATION CULTURE 91
20 IMPROVING CALL CENTER ATTENDANCE 99
21 WHEN GOOD TIMES GO BAD 103
22 OH THE GAMES WE PLAY 107
23 MORE CALL CENTER GAMES! 113
24 TOP 5 CALL CENTER REPORTING METHODS TO FOLLOW 119
25 ERQ: THINKING OF SALES IN A NEW WAY 124
26 INCENT YOUR ASSOCIATES 127
27 CHATBOTS / DIGITAL CUSTOMER SERVICE 130
28 WHAT DOES AI REALLY MEAN FOR YOUR CONTACT CENTER 135
29 TIPS FOR YOUR VIRTUAL WFH CONTACT CENTER 141
30 COST ANALYSIS FOR NON-FINANCE MANAGERS 146
31 ADVANCED CALL CENTER TECHNOLOGIES: CURRENT
TRENDS AND BEST... 148
32 THE DIRTY WORD...OUTSOURCING 157
33 ULTIMATE GUIDE TO CONTACT CENTER OUTSOURCING 163
34 CALL CENTER OUTSOURCING PRICING 187
35 FINAL EXAM- DEEP DIVE INTO YOUR CALL CENTER:
21 QUESTIONS WE... 193
36 THIS IS THE END 201
About the Author 204
1
WHY A CALL CENTER BOOK
Think about this customer interaction:

A customer calls into the call center for XYZ company. The customer starts
in the IVR. There is a hint of frustration that begins to build when our customer
has to go through 5 prompts to get the right department. The customer is
officially frustrated when the IVR does not understand her when she keeps
saying “Change Bill Date” over and over. The customer is now angry as she
screams “AGENT” while pressing zero 10 times as hard as she can.
After finally hearing the IVR say “You are now being transferred”, our pretend
customer gets a call center associate that is disinterested, non-empathetic
and starts to frustrate the customer even more with his tone.
Even though the associate is not giving a great experience, he was trained on
what to do with this call type so he goes through the motions and handles the
customer’s issue to a tee. The talk time is actually very short, and the issue
was handled on the first call. Is that a great, world class call?
Using our outdated KPIs, on paper, it looks like a great call:

The call was answered within an 80/30 SLA…Check
The call was handled within the appropriate handle time…Check
We had first call resolution on the call as well…Check
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ADVICE FROM A CALL CENTER GEEK 3.0!
(I know what you are thinking, no there was not an NPS survey done after
the call in my example, bare with me!)
THE EXPERIENCE WAS TERRIBLE FOR THE CUSTOMER! This customer most
likely is headed straight to Twitter or Facebook and they won’t be posting a
positive review.
There are so many things that call center managers and executives do wrong,
myself included. We look at dollars and cents (so we think) and not the
customer’s experience. We look at age-old metrics to define a world-class
call center. We train on how associates should navigate a CRM and what
screen to be on but do not educate on empathy, delight, and tone.
Because of this, most call center customer service experiences stink. C’mon
you know it’s true!
The majority of centers are run poorly, are not a fun place to work, provide
average service at best, have high turnover and are looked at as low-paying,
unenviable jobs. Why?
This is why I wrote this book. Let’s try to change all that!
With all the new technologies out there that claim to give your customers a
world-class experience, why do so many companies have below average NPS
scores and legions of negative social media posts? In the era of social media,
we are now getting a true gauge of who is offering amazing service and which
companies are not, and the reason is not technology.
The reason goes much deeper. It goes to the culture of the organization but
more to the point, it goes to the culture of the call center.
In this book, I want to make you think. I want you to change long-standing
behaviors. I want you to ponder the way you have done things forever and
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ask, why? I want you to create something unique to your industry. My goal is
to give you some of the needed tools to do so!
Customer experience is next to the corporate battlefield
WHO IS THIS BOOK FOR?
I am writing this for contact center managers looking for something differ-
ent. Managers that want to create a call center culture that is unique and
customer/employee centric. I am also writing this for the next generation of
call center managers. The world you will see in the next 30 years will differ
greatly from the call center world most of us have come from. I hope together
we can prepare for this with some newer thinking.
My name is Tom Laird. I am the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing. We

are a growing 500 seat USA BPO (call center outsourcer) in Pennsylvania. I
have worked in call centers my entire life from the seat of a rep, to the IT
technical side, to supervisory and management roles all the way to owning
and running my own center. I have worked with a range of organizations,
from Fortune 50 financial services organizations to small startup looking to
outsource for the first time. I have seen a lot. Some good and some not so
good. This book is a testament to all the awesome things I have seen a call
center can be when run the right way.
I am not a writer by trade. I write how I talk. I hope you feel the realness and
the passion I have for the contact center and the customer experience.
I will shy away from talking about what “new” technology you must have as
technology is always changing and I want this book to help you no matter what
technology you are using or will be using which we have not even thought
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up yet. Besides, we already agreed, technology does not make an excellent

contact center on its own!
Before we get into this, I want to tell you a little story….
This is where I came from…
In 1985 a small call center was started by my parents with 10 employees in Erie,
Pa. It was a family business where I grew up at. I was 9 years old at the time.
Business was small but steady, allowing for a company with a reputation for
quality to take hold. The company grew over the years, and a new 75 seat
center was opened in 1990 to support an influx of new business. In those
days, most of the business was dealing with outbound credit card sales for
major banking institutions. When I came on board full time during college, it
was 1994. We had just expanded to over 200 seats, and business was good. I
started with third shift positions in our IT area learning the business from
the ground up. I had to work my way up through the organization; nothing
was handed to me.
The culture was that of a close-knit family. Many employees were there since
the start, and the management team had been together for years by this time.
This group of individuals was known to me as the closest of any of my family
members, and we treated each other that way… in those days. It was a great
place to work with a strong group of people.
2000s
As the early 2000s ticked by, the organization hit its stride. At our peak, we
had over 700 employees and revenues well over 20 million dollars. Things
were going very well. We had many high-profile Fortune 150 clients including
many of the top financial institutions in the US, which as anyone in the BPO
outsourcing business knows, only goes to the best of the best. I was 5 years
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into my job of running the day to day operations of the call center floor. We
implemented many philosophies that I strongly believed in, and we were
prospering. A management trainee program was put in place which allowed
us to average over 6 years of tenure for all our middle management. Turnover
was low for the call center industry due to the family-style culture we tried to
foster. We tried to work with our associates and progress them up the ladder.
Things were going great… until 2008.
2008
When the “Great Recession” hit, we lost over 60% of all our business due
to financial organizations who were now under TARP, gutting marketing
budgets. It was a difficult time. I thought that we would get through the
troublesome times ahead though because of the tight-knit management
team we had and all the battles we had fought and won. By this time, most of
us have worked together for going on 15 years and knew each other for much
longer.
That was a naive mistake made by me. This time it would be different. People
scattered. It started with our IT personnel then to our Production Staff and
then to Client Services and HR. It was as if a negative wave had taken hold of
our team and could not be stopped. Management went looking for new jobs
at the first sign of these troubled waters.
In 2010 the company was sold
This was the most difficult and eye-opening time for me. I was still working
at the place I loved. The new owners stripped me of most of my authority.
Being part of the past owning family meant I could not be trusted in their eyes.
People I thought were my friends; people I fought side by side with for almost
20 years were now positioning themselves for a power takeover. These were
the same people we fought for and did everything we could to save their jobs
when the new owners came into the picture. The same people we took into
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our inner circle and worked with for almost two decades turned overnight.
Losing years of friendship over a little money and power was something I
could not fathom. Not everyone thinks as I do… Again, I was naive.
February 8, 2011
The plot was finally settled as I was driving home after work on February 8,
2011. I received a call I was being let go. After 25 years of being a part of the
company, all the new management team could muster was a 1-minute phone
call. They had listened to the wrong people. That’s enough of that.
The reason I tell this is not to ask for sympathy but to tell you I have learned
the saying; “life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it” is
a factual truth.
Instead of laying down and taking a defeat I got together with some decedents
of the company I was let go of. Knowing we could do a better job than most
of the call center industry from all the centers we had seen and worked with,
including the management team we were leaving, we started anew.
Greatest decision I ever made!
Expivia Interaction Marketing was born a couple of months later. We

decided since we were not burdened with the overhead and cost of an older
organization, we would do things differently. We would embrace new
technologies afforded us through the cloud. We think of our philosophy
as MONEYBALL for the call center. Many of those procedures we will discuss
in the following chapters.
We gazed into the future and have looked to position ourselves in a place to
capitalize on where we see customer interactions heading 5, 10, 15 years from
now. Social media, APP Development, video technologies, chat-bot/Texting
AI and world-class inbound/outbound sales and service could all be fostered
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to grow what we think is the NEW definition of what the contact center should
be in today’s market. We could reinvent ourselves, and boy did we.
In the first years of Expivia, we were honored to receive the Disrupt Erie
Startup of the Year Award for Northwest Pennsylvania, and we were invited to
join at that time what was called the NICE inContact iCVC board. The iCVC is a
select group of NICE inContact customers selected to join as trusted advisors
to help NICE inContact validate ideas for new products, features, and plans
for future innovations.
Currently, we are a apart of the NICE CXone Executive Board.
Expivia is different. I want to show you how you can be different too.
BOOK FORMAT
The format of the book is very casual. We will start with talk about hiring
culture. Culture is the differentiator and the organizations that get it right
have a huge advantage.
Do you want to know how to hire the best call center sales and service
associates? Want to know how to motivate and promote the right way? We
will discuss, your culture is your beacon.
Next, we will talk about the education of your associates, Management

Training and Quality Assurance. All the things that are the lifeblood of
the center and concepts you must have in place before we talk about actual
operations.
In the last part of the book, we will talk about the actual operation of the call
center. How you should meet and greet associates. How you prepare for each
day. Most importantly, with operations, how should we praise associates,
deal with confrontation and have fun on the call center floor?
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I have some other miscellaneous topics I think will interest you as well that
get more into the back end running of the center. This includes doing a full
cost analysis (oh yes, we will!) to looking at the cost difference of outsourcing
locations around the world.
This is a fast read. Take notes… highlight this bad boy up! Let’s improve your
call center!
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2
WANNA BET
I bet you I know why your call center is struggling!
In helping companies with call center outsourcing, we have seen many

reasons call centers and customer service struggle in many organizations.
I bet as you read through this section, some of these will ring true in your
organizations. The first step in correcting a problem is knowing you have one.
This is not meant to be an absolute list, but these tend to be the seven cardinal
reasons we see why call centers struggle. We will address these (and many
more) as you get deeper into the book. Take a second and circle or highlight
some issues you see in your call center. This way, when you get to the chapter
on fixing these, you can drill down on what is most important to you and your
call center.
It’s okay if you have issues in your center, that’s why you downloaded this
super expensive eBook… lol!
The first core reason we see centers struggle is an unneeded focus from
specific organizational departments that don’t understand the impact they
are having on the call center and on the customer experience.
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1) WHO HAS THE SAY IN YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE CALL

CENTER
Who is running your USA customer service call center? Is it your financial
department, your marketing department or your sales execs? Who has the
most say, who is the squeaky wheel that always seems to have to be appeased?
The mindset of the people running your center has a lot to do with the culture
and the personality of your center.
Now a great center can still balance all these different aspects but when one
takes over as being more important, as what happens in a lot of companies,
you can have a disconnect, and the customer takes the brunt. If…
FINANCIAL IMPORTANCE IS THE KEY DRIVER
When this happens, you feel the pressure of being efficient even to a fault.
High service levels do not mean as much as low AHT, Wait Times, and Wrap
time. You get pressure to handle more calls in a shorter period. When this
happens, you have a couple issues, first; you already have irritated customers
before they even get to an agent because of long wait times in queue, second;
when reps feel the pressure of quicker calls the service of the call drops. This
has a snowball effect as well because the bigger the queue, the more pressure
you and each of your supervisors put on the reps to handle the next call!
ARGHHHHH!!
We have all been there! It’s funny when you look at the SLA and Wait times
for people calling in to buy something from the company, those skills/queues
(I will use “skills” from now on) gets overstaffed while the customer service
skills for questions is understaffed.
This is true in so many companies. COMPANIES STILL DO NOT REALIZE SELLING
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WANNA BET
TO AN EXISTING CUSTOMER WHO IS HAPPY WITH THEIR SERVICE IS SO MUCH

EASIER AND CHEAPER THAN GETTING NEW CUSTOMERS TO BUY FOR THE FIRST
TIME!
In these companies run this way, it’s like pulling teeth to add staff yet there
is little technology spend either. I am sure a lot of you can relate.
MARKETING/SALES IS YOUR KEY DRIVER
So many USA customer service centers, rightfully so, are trying to make their
center not just a customer service center but a profit center. Nothing is wrong
with cross-selling your customer service calls if we all understand it is an
add-on.
Some mistakes we see here is when:
A) Your cross-sell effort does not match your call type (we have seen crazy
things clients have tried to sell just for a quick buck)
B) Your selling effort takes over as the main reason for the call:
Then this happens not only are you not getting a sale, but you may be losing
a customer. You must handle the customer’s issues first; build a rapport and
then try to cross-sell a product that meets the needs of the customer. Do you
just keep track of how many sales your reps have in a day, probably posted in
the room right? Do your top salespeople get all the rewards? I hope you have
your quality scores and reps satisfaction scores posted as well… most don’t.
2) EDUCATION
Most companies put all their education (Notice we said Education, not Train,
you TRAIN animals, you EDUCATE people) in how to run a specific program,
skill or channel, (What to look for, what screen you have to be on, what
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button you have to click.) They do NOT do a great job of facilitating tone
and delight in their calls. Most companies want to educate as fast as they
can, so they can have reps producing quickly even to the detriment of the
customer. Remember you must understand that in the age of social media
your customers will talk to others. We want them to be evangelists for our
brand. We must understand this as we educate.
3) NO FLUID PROCESSES
Large and small companies can all have this issue, but most of the time,
you see it in large companies. When multiple departments have a say
in how the customer service for their specific channel is to be handled,
you can get inconsistent and confusing service. Different 1-800 numbers,
transferred calls, multiple call resolution. It’s super frustrating! When told by
a company associate, “they do not handle that issue in his/her department”
the frustration level rises, and you may have already lost that customer.
Disjointed departments all handling sales/service is a huge reason for the
lack of service in the marketplace.
4) WRONG METRICS (Moneyball stuff!)
So many companies have in-house USA customer service centers stuck on

metrics such as First Call Resolution, SLA, Talk Time or proprietary formulas
to tell if they are good at service. These metrics should diagnose and put service
issues and techniques under the microscope, not be the goal. Your goal for
world-class service should be to have your customers become so loyal they
become evangelists for your brand to all their friends. In the age of social
media, this is the direction your company must be moving towards. NPS and
speech analytic sentiment reporting are ways of accomplishing this.
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WANNA BET
5) DEPENDENCE OF SELF-SERVICE CHANNELS ONLY
Many organizations believe by FORCING self-service they are saving money

by stopping calls going to a live agent. Show me a company doing this and I
will show you one with low Customer Sat and Net Promoter Scores.
Just because huge companies such as Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook go this
route does not make it right for you. When you get a monopoly on a specific
service like those big boys do, it’s another story. You are competing with
many other companies, and your service will be a HUGE factor in a customer
doing business with you. I will say though that just because they can do it
still doesn’t mean they should do it.
Self-service is a powerful tool when done the right way. It is a needed channel;
it’s just not done correctly. Too many organizations frustrate customers by
forcing you into a long, painful IVR, or even worse; they HIDE their 1-800
numbers. YOU WANT TO TALK TO YOUR CUSTOMERS!!! You have limited
chances to build loyalty with your customers… don’t push them away!
6) POOR CALL CENTER CULTURE
If your customer service call center is a miserable place to work, then how
can you expect great service from its associates?
The contact center can be a place where you can do things you cannot do in
any other department. You can yell out loud, high five, cheer each other up!
You can’t do that in accounting! Show me a quiet contact center floor, and
I will show you one with high turnover, low quality and more importantly,
one that reflects associates are not enjoying themselves.
It does not matter if you are running a center with an insurance, banking,
pure customer care or sales vertical. You can, and in my opinion, must make
the environment enjoyable.
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7) POOR MANAGEMENT TRAINING
How do you educate the supervision in your USA customer service center?
Do you have an education plan at all or do you just take long-tenured
associates and make them supervisors/team leads when a supervisor leaves
with minimal education? If you hire a supervisor off the street what education
do you give them?
Most call center organizations I have seen do not do a good job in preparing
their supervision for the job at hand. Many call center managers assume
because an associate did a tremendous job on the phones they will be a good
supervisor. Big mistake.
We have found having a solid management trainee program not only educates
your future managers on their job but also shows career progression to all
employees limiting turnover.
Customer service is as much an art as it is a science. Many impressive

companies do a fabulous job with this. Unfortunately, there are also too
many companies not understanding the impact of what poor service has on
the company.
In the coming chapter, we will look at how to fix these problems with solutions
maybe you have not thought about yet. I bet you want to know how to hire
AMAZING call center associates huh… well, turn the page… let’s go!
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3
MANAGEMENT TRUST EQUATION- TRUE

STORY
Call Center Management Trust Equation — A True Story
Call centers have a lot of working parts and a lot of people who try to keep
everything running smoothly.What is the best way to manage a call center?
Do you know? Let me tell you a story of how I learned what works best for me
and my staff.
Let’s go back to 2002. I was a young, naive, 20-something with a total “Type
A” personality, who was put into a supervisory role in a call center. I became
the AM Production Coordinator—which means I had progressed up the ladder
until I was in charge of 15 supervisors and up to 175 associates.
It was up to me to be sure my AM shift was hitting its qualitative and

quantitative goals for our clients. The AM shift had always outperformed the
PM shift. Soon after taking this new position, my shift started struggling. Our
numbers weren’t as good, our quality scores were dropping, and our turnover
rate was going up. All of this meant we were less profitable.
I was summoned to see my boss. When I got into her office, she asked what
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had been going on. I told her I was doing everything “right.” If someone had
a bad monitoring score, he/she was written up immediately. If her sales were
down, she got put on a corrective action plan. There was literally no one on
my floor who hadn’t been talked to about what they were doing wrong.
She asked, “Do the people on your floor trust you?”
“Absolutely!” Then, she asked me to define what trust was. “Trust means
you don’t lie to people. You are honest and trustworthy. That’s what I am
doing. I am giving them honest feedback to let them know what they are
doing wrong, so I can help them.”
“Yes, that’s part of it,” she said. “It’s a very small part of it.” She told me she
had learned something important through the years: Trust=Character+Competence+Moti
She asked me to consider what other word could be substituted for Trust. I
was supposed to come back and tell her when I figured it out. I obsessed over
this. What could it be? After much longer than I like to admit, it came to me;
but, I had to start by breaking down what the words in her equation meant to
us as management in the call center world.
Character
Character: that’s a lot to think about. Your work character starts to grow as
you come into the workplace but is honed when you come into a management
role. You have to make your job your own.
It begins with making sure you are on time every day, that you are dressed
appropriately, and that you show that you care about the job that you do.
Character comes through in how you are viewed while you are on the floor.
It’s about not backstabbing people, not using bad language, and not lying to
coworkers. It’s about letting your team know that they can depend on you to
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MANAGEMENT TRUST EQUATION- TRUE STORY
do the right thing.
Competence
Many managers equate competence to being a person who knows more than
everyone else. However, the truest form of competence is being able to make
more good decisions than bad ones. It’s not about knowing everything; it’s
about making better decisions because you can see what the outcome could be.
This knowledge comes when you take time to listen to your team. Listening
allows you to make suggestions alongside your team before you put together
the best answers to take back to management.
When I first started, I felt threatened when someone else had an idea.
If this sounds familiar, know that you are not alone, but then just listen. You
really need to listen to what the people on the floor are telling you—they live
and breathe this job on the front lines and often have really good ideas.
Motivation
To be trusted, you have to be motivating. Not every manager is the cheerleader
type, but you still need to stay positive with your team. When you are
positive, your team will feed off of your positive energy. Negative energy is
counterproductive—spread lots of positive vibes in your call centers!
You still give corrective actions when warranted. But, you are coaching in a
way that gets your point across, without the employee getting defensive. If
they get upset, don’t take it personally. Keep your positive attitude when you
are out on the floor, show that you have the motivation to get things done in
the right way for the entire team.
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Trust comes from showing that you are real and want to help others succeed.
Competence shows when you make good decisions that benefit both the
company and the reps. Motivated people are positive and others naturally
gravitate towards them.
This brings me back to the word my supervisor wanted me to figure out. When
I finally had my light bulb moment, I went back to see her. I knocked on her
door, poked my head inside, and said: “RESPECT.”
“That’s the word! THAT is management.” She was right. Knowing everything,
being bossy, and correcting everyone is not what gives you power. True
power lies with the supervisor who is respected and trusted because they are
competent in their job, have high character, and are positive and motivating.
This idea is the bedrock upon which Expivia is built. This experience from my
20s is something I use now with all of my supervisors, especially when they
are having a rough time.When I see someone on the floor not performing like
they should, or having issues on their team, I will ask them one question after
they tell me they are “doing everything right.”
Do your reps trust you?
Keep this in the back of your mind as we make it though the next couple
chapters.
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4
CULTURE > EVERYTHING
No one likes to talk about culture because it is so hard to define, right?
Let’s take this in small pieces starting with the individual you are hiring. The
beginning point of any call center culture begins with people, so it seems like
the logical first step. So, raise your hand (seriously, raise your hand) if you or
your HR team look at a resume, ask a few questions, maybe has the candidate
take a little personality test, and off this data, you decide… oh, this person is
a “fit.” The first question you need to ask is FIT FOR WHAT? What do they
need to fit in to… again can you describe your culture?
Your culture is how you operate, it’s how you treat people, and how they treat
people, it’s what is accepted and what is not and how you get that across. It’s
the people you are allowing into your world and how they are to operate. Once
it’s well defined it starts to be something all your employees self-monitor.
It’s amazing to see when you get full buy-in on your culture.
Anyone can glance at a resume, see experience in the same job and hire.
Just basing your hiring on that is a HUGE mistake especially in a call center
environment where there are close quarters, and the job can be difficult.
Personalities can clash, and customers will pay the price for mistakes. It is
more important to have the RIGHT person that fits your company than the
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so-called BEST person. I know that sounds crazy, but we have found it to be
true.
It’s abstract when talked about but tangible in action.
I hear you through the Internet thinking “Ok, Tom, that’s all well and good…
now will you please tell me how to hire awesome reps! ”
Our Hiring Culture
Through the 25 years of running a contact center, we have tried many methods
of trying to figure out what methods and what traits we look for when
hiring customer service associates for our center. Through all the years
of trial and error, of trying everything from personality tests, job test and
different interview tactics, we believe we have found what we think is the
best method/system for getting the best associates in our contact center.
The culture of our company and our hiring is that we want associates with a
“Sunshine Attitude and an Entrepreneurial Mindset.” This statement is the glue
that holds our company together and what we believe is a huge advantage for
us. This boils down to “attitude and effort”.
We know exactly the individual that fits our standard and creates the working
environments where our employees enjoy each other (for the most part… lol)
and come to work because they have the attitude we are looking for. It also
means we have a competitive atmosphere where many of our associates want
to be the best and want to move up in the company. Every employee we hire,
no matter if they have 10 years of experience or no experience, must meet
this standard. We believe this standard is more important than experience.
This is true for call center associates, management, programmers all the
way up any C-level executive we would hire. This is also how we incent and
promote.
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REFINE YOUR HIRING PROCESS
Do you and your HR team look at some resumes, ask a few questions, do an
interview, administer a test, and decide from this if that person is a “fit”?
For most organizations, a fit is simply someone who can do the job. That is
not what you should be looking for.
You need to look for someone who is the right person for your organization,
not just the best call center rep. To get that, look at what’s important to you.
You must define your culture.
We try to pull a personality out of potential hires, such as by asking them

odd questions like, “If you were a Crayon, what color would you be?” We’ve
worked hard to come up with a list of about 25-30 questions that get at if
someone has the right culture for us. Experience does not matter to us. If our
training and education are good enough, we should be able to help you get
where you need to be if you bring an awesome attitude and give maximum
effort.
Takes Patience
You can never stop interviewing once you target a specific type of individual.
That’s the hard part. It takes a consistent effort to bring people in to interview.
It becomes more difficult to hire quickly because you limit the pool of who
you allow into your company’s world. Is that a bad thing???
One benefit of this though is you have the right people in your organization.
Referrals and word of mouth become a great tool for you because your
employees will talk. We have found over 50% of our new hires are referrals
from our employees. You’ve heard of the saying; you are the sum of the five
closest people you hang around with? Well if we have done a great job of
hiring in the first place then bringing in the same types of individuals is a
no-brainer for us!
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We believe in hiring the right way, you must know who you are. You are not
hiring people to do a job. Anyone can do that. You must hire to continue to
grow your culture. Every day we try to add people with Sunshine Attitudes
and Entrepreneurial mindsets…. Our favorite kind of people!
I am sure you will find that our interview process is unique for a call center
environment. We have taken a lot of pride in developing techniques to see if
our standard of attitude and effort are ingrained in the candidate. That my
friends I will not give out (unless you want to pay me to consult… lol). That’s
part of the fun of running a call center . You get to bring on the people you
think will fit your company.
INCENT OFF OF YOUR CULTURE
While sales goals and KPIs are important, it’s also important to make sure
everything you do adds to your culture. To incent our reps, we have what
we call “proficiency pay”. This does not mean commission, or hitting your
service level, or getting a certain amount of sale. We look at the things that
are important to us: attitude and effort.
Number one is attendance. Clearly, you can’t show attitude and effort if
you’re not here. So every week, our employees have to work 100% of their
schedule. If they don’t, they’re not up for proficiency pay.
It is also based a small amount on KPIs, likes sales and service programs, and
hitting those numbers.
We also use speech analytics to score our reps based on their sentiment:
positive or negative. Reps know that if they’re in a bad mood, their scores
will show it. This is a great way to incent attitude.
Next we score on engagement. We do a weekly agent analysis with all our
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associates, talk to them, and find out if they’re into getting positive feedback,
training, and education. They must be giving that effort. People who fit
our culture and don’t give that effort don’t last long. Those who do, get
recognized for it with proficiency pay.
Be sure you’re incenting the right things for your associates, otherwise you
may be sending them mixed signals about your company culture.
ENGAGING YOUR ASSOCIATES
Your call center has leaders. Treat them like gold. If they are always very
helpful, people respect them, listen to them, they’re leaders, make sure you
talk to them weekly. Have a relationship with them and get their opinion and
buy-in to your company culture. Others will follow.
Make your employees feel involved by considering their suggestions. We

use a suggestion AKA Culture Board where we have a dry erase board that
any one can add a suggestion to if it enhances our company culture. Once a
month we vote on which ones we want to implement. We create a committee
to implement the changes and help employees feel more involved and come
to care about your company culture on a personal level.
TIME TO THINK!
What is the culture of your organization right now? Is it healthy? Do people

enjoy the culture or is it miserable? What is wrong with your culture? Is
it a nice place to work or is there no discipline at all? Are you looking for
individuals or team players? Are you more service or sales oriented?
Take a minute to write down all the things you can think of that describes the
current center. Then write down how you would like your ideal, world-class
center to operate. Next, slowly but surely get more of your lead people on
board. Generate a different hiring profile based on the culture you deemed
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ideal. Implement policies that express that culture. Most importantly hold
people accountable to those standards. (more on that later!)
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5
TRAIN ANIMALS, EDUCATE PEOPLE
How are you educating your new associates? Do you have a specific on-
boarding plan for them?
Most call center turnover happens in the first 90 days of hiring. When this
time is not handled properly, the organization spins its wheels in having to
hire and train more, and the employee has a miserable experience. A no win
situation. Let’s fix that.
1) Initial Training
One HUGE mistake is starting program training too early in the new hire
process. The first 30 hours of training should be spent on instilling culture
(We talk about attitude and effort all the time!), getting to know the associate,
talking about the company as it relates to policies and procedures. We also
talk about legal call center stuff such as DNC, TCPA and recording laws. We
want the associate to understand we know what we are talking about and
have them understand who we are and what is to be expected.
We also educate on tone. We drill the tone. If you really think about it, the
tone of the call is 90% of the message. If your associate’s tone is off, then it
doesn’t really matter what words are being communicated as the customer is
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going to tune you out and become defensive. The tone is huge! We drill into
each associate that the:
“TONE IS THE MESSAGE!”
We fix any lingo or “street” language. Our standard is a world-class center.

We make sure before we start program training the actual program that the
associates buy into that. If they can’t, then we part ways at this point before
we get too deeply into the process.
If you start program training right away, you are not getting to know the new
hires, and you will get the culture they will impart, not what you demand.
2) Program Training
Most of our clients have extended training windows for 4-6 weeks. That’s
a long time. You must make sure you are having fun in the training room.
The atmosphere needs to be light, and you need a trainer that understands
the culture you are trying to instill. Make sure you are not just teaching
your associates which buttons to press and where to press it but are actively
talking about tone and engagement. You must keep drilling tone, delight,
engagement.
When we role play, AKA Scrimmage (I’m a sports guy), we focus more on how
things are said than anything else.
The last step is to create tests that must be passed at 100% before they can
move to live calls.
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TRAIN ANIMALS, EDUCATE PEOPLE
3) Incubation
When new associates go on the phones for the first time, we move them to a
room right off the floor, what we call, the Incubation Center. Here we have
a controlled environment that has a supervisor ratio of no more than 8:1
although it’s much less if you include the training staff. They are heavily
monitored and coached. Once we feel they are competent enough to join a
team, (the timing is different depending on the individual), then and only
then will they have to join the regular team on the main floor. We will never
let someone out on the floor that we do not think can be at the standard we
demand.
4) Graduation
We believe in ceremonies, certificates, balloons and high fives for awesome

accomplishments. Passing through training and going to your permanent
team is an awesome accomplishment. We sit the newer associates with the
management trainee (our team leads… remember), and they are now a full-
fledged associate that will receive a raise in pay.
DON’T RUSH EDUCATION. When you do, it’s bad for your bottom line,
employees and most importantly your culture.
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6
CALL CENTER COFFEE
Starting the day the right way (When you are on-site)
Controlling an associate’s first 30 minutes is the number one operational tip

I can give. If you get nothing out of this entire book, I hope you implement
some daily shift starting procedure. It will INSTANTLY improve your call
center.
Our Supervisors know it is their responsibility to control the first 30 minutes

of an agent’s day. I originally got this idea from Dan Coen in his book,
“Building Call Center Culture” but have evolved the original idea a bit.
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CALL CENTER COFFEE
IT BETTER BE LOUD! (Relative to culture for you lame call center

managers)
First thing is that the call center room needs to be a dynamic place! The call
center should be loud, music can be playing at the beginning of the shift. If
music is not your culture, then find what would be the equivalent.
Your supervisors must have energy and be very positive, and you should be
out there leading. Maybe you have balloons or special charts/pictures up.
Whatever you do, do not have a dull, boring room. Electricity must be pulsing
through the room, especially in the morning.
WELCOME WITH ENTHUSIASM
I can’t stress how important this is.
All associates should be greeted as they come to their teams by their supervi-
sor.
They need to get welcomed with a handshake and a SMILE with a GOOD
MORNING/AFTERNOON. Maybe you are a high fiver like I am, don’t be afraid
to dole those out if that’s your personality!
Honestly, I am not joking here, I really mean greeted! Not some lame head
nod or a quiet “hi Jane” but a “WHAT’S UP JANE!”, “How was the birthday
party over the weekend!”.
I understand that in an outbound world, that can be much easier to do as they

have standard start and stop time for the most part. Inbound can be a little
more difficult as you will have reps that come and go all day depending on
how their schedule is made, which is normally based on volume. IT MAKES
NO DIFFERENCE!!! Your associates are important; they must be treated as
such.
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I like a little personal talk here as well (So Jane how was Austin’s birthday
over the weekend). This is the time when we can see who is in a great mood
and ready to work and who we need to work on to get in a good mood (humor
works well here, more on that later). You cannot be a good supervisor and
be blind to personalities and moods. Doing this as your associates come in
shows that your supervisors care about their team members and hopefully is
one small way to help respect to be given to your supervisors as well.
TAKE THE TEMP AND RECAP
Now that we have greeted our associates and understand the daily mood
we can get on with the day. Daily team recaps are a MUST. Each of your
supervisors should know the KPIs that their team must hit. They should
recap yesterday’s production, any great monitoring/goal performances. Keep
everything positive here. If you must talk about a lackluster day, that’s fine
but do not do it in an angry or disappointed manner. Remember that was
yesterday and you don’t want that same vibe to attach itself to today.
Individual rep recaps should be done here as well focusing on yesterday in

a one on one setting. Talk about the individual goals given out yesterday,
where they did well and where the opportunities for improvement are. We
also will need to be giving out individual goals for the present day to each rep.
This is a 30-60 second talk with each rep that should be done at some point
during the first half hour. Some of my supervisors like to hand out post-it
notes with an individual’s goal on it so they could look and focus on it during
the day.
(A quick note on individual goals) Whether your KPIs run the range of just
being quality based or hard nose sales-based goals, each should be assigned to
the skill level and personal plan (see the previous blog) that matches each rep.
Every center has a few stars, mostly average employees, and a few laggards.
You can’t make a goal for someone who is struggling equal to the stars on
your team. If you make everyone’s goals the same, you will frustrate certain
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CALL CENTER COFFEE
employees who are struggling, and you will see a higher turnover. Stars are
not born, they are created. Some will get there quicker than others but know
your reps.
Now we have greeted our reps, recapped the day from yesterday on the team
and individual level, and now have daily goals for the team. We have focused
our team on what we need for them to accomplish.
I like to make sure that two more things are talked about to each rep during
the first 30 minutes as well. The first one being…
ENJOY YOUR JOB
HOW ARE WE GOING TO HAVE FUN TODAY!
Each supervisor on my production floor must have a game or competition

going at all times. This is not the same as a week long or month-long
motivation to give away baseball tickets to the room for the top performer
or highest quality score. This is something that each team likes to do, and
the personalities on the team dictate these motivations. These are just little
things we can do during the day to make work fun.
Little things such as the top rep for the hour gets to sit in the supervisor’s
comfy chair. Have bingo cards that are made up of KPIs. We have a whole
section coming up on games that can be played in the call center that cost
nothing - yes, I said nothing! Your supervisors have awesome ideas for this
as well. Keep a library for all your supervisors to use. Our library is up to over
125 games all from my supervisors!
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WORK TRANSITION
The last topic for the first half hour is going over any issues/topics related
to the program(s) they will be running. I like to do this last and right before
they take their first call of the day, so it is fresh in their minds. Our company
has an intranet program called “Coaching Briefs”. This is updated all the
time with program information. Things like “Yesterday a mailing went out
for XYZ bank that was sent accidentally so expect calls on…” This way we all
know what was going on and how to deal with the situation.
As you can see, We place a huge responsibility on supervision to be PREPARED

and to be ready for a shift….so should you!
Starting the day the right way (When you are WFH)
Most everything still applies from the above with a couple exceptions when
we talk about the differences with starting the day with WFH agents.
Each supervisor has a team video chat before the reps go live, we then do
individual video calls with each rep for 2-3 minutes to check on them, make
sure they are ok, give goals.
Every 15 minutes we have a supervisor check in with their team in our IM

channel. We want reps to know we are there. They just need to say things
like “Great start team”, “Amazing Call Gracie”, “We need to watch our AHT
team”.
We want to touch base as many times as we possibly can, so about six or seven
times during the day.
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7
QA (QUALITY ASSURANCE) DONE THE

RIGHT WAY
Most companies focus all their education on how to run a specific program,
skill or channel. What to look for, what screen do you have to be on, which
button do you have to click. They do NOT do a great job in facilitating tone
and delight, empathy and engagement in their calls. Most companies want
to educate as fast as they can so they can have reps producing quickly even to
the detriment of their client or customer. Remember you need to understand
in the age of social media, your customers will talk to others. We want them
to be evangelists for our brand. We must understand that as we train.
If you truly want to have a world-class center, this model needs to be flipped
on its head.
Before I talk about measuring quality in your center, there are some amazing
tools that we utilize at Expivia that you may want to look into yourself when
it comes to benchmarking quality.
In our center, we use advanced speech analytics that trend customer con-
versations. We also can pull agent sentiment reports to see who really is
creating a great customer experience. Advanced speech analytics allows us
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to basically listen to EVERY call that comes in, not just the small percentage
that get scored. It has revolutionized the industry.
Most companies do not have this technology (at the time of publishing).
This will help those looking for a cost-effective way to enhance customer
experience. The only thing this will cost you is the time it will take to
implement.
This chapter is for the smaller call center that either has no QA area at this
time or has rudimentary processes. This really will show you how to start
your first QA monitoring area from the ground up.
“THE TONE IS THE MESSAGE” Remember that?
Delight for me is that certain element that makes great customer service
representatives. It’s the tone in the voice that wants to give quality; it’s an
actual thought process as to truly wanting to assist that customer as if it was
a family member they are helping; it’s a quality call flow process that meets a
customer’s needs.
The great associates can tell a customer “NO” and still be thanked. Most are
not born with this skill, but it can become part of how they approach their
mindset.
The first thing you need to attack when looking to change the quality of
your calls would be to listen to as many associates/calls as you can. Make no
changes, just listen. It is okay if you become frustrated. Remember this is the
stuff we must fix.
So many call center managers don’t monitor, and many others do not know
what they should be hearing. You want to get a good feel for the different
types of calls that you take and how your associates respond to these calls.
This would include meeting with all call center middle management as well
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QA (QUALITY ASSURANCE) DONE THE RIGHT WAY
to get feedback, and to get them on board to understand how we will raise
our quality standards.
CALL BREAK DOWN
What you need then to get started after you understand the calls, is to break
down each vertical by call flow. You would also want to know what the main
goals are to focus on. Where are you weak, where do you need to focus on the
quality effort? Is it overall rep satisfaction, one call resolution, length of call
satisfaction, or other things of this nature?
Let’s say for example we are having many associate complaints, so we neet
to get our associate satisfaction scores up. I suggest you break down the call
into segments and find out where you are having most of your complaints.
For Example:
• Opening/Greeting
• Verification
• Issue handling
• Resolving stage
• Call to action
• Upsell/cross-sell
• Close
EDUCATE WITH A PURPOSE
You would then come up with an education plan to train these areas separately
from a DELIGHT standpoint. How are we greeting customers, are there
specific words to use during the verification, how is our tone when we resolve
their issue, are we empathetic to their need no matter if it was our fault or
not, do we know of lag times during calls where we MUST make small talk?
Small talk is huge in engaging your customers if done well. How do we form
a relationship quickly with each call? All these segments must be educated so
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the rep understands how the customer should be treated during each segment.
Even if your calls are more free-flowing, you can always break them down to
emphasize certain elements.
If you have major issues with quality and delight, I suggest being more specific
with what an associate can say (more scripted) and make them focus solely
on their tone. The better they get with the tone, the more freedom they get to
go off script.
DON’T BE TONE DEAF
An associate tone is the number 1 factor (IMO) to a high-quality call center.

We have talked about this but it cannot be stressed enough.
The next step would be to come up with a QA monitoring form to score all calls
this way. You then do weekly benchmarking sessions to make sure your team
understands the scoring method and are all on the same page. Your form
should break down the segments and score each one from a delight factor. I
like a 1-5 scoring, but it doesn’t matter if you score and you are benchmarked.
INSTANT FEEDBACK PLEASE
The last step will make a huge difference. You must make sure that you or your
monitoring team is giving instant feedback to the supervisors and associates.
All scored calls must be sent directly to the floor from QA right after the call
is scored, do not wait! Develop a simple rule as well to make sure that all reps
are heard in a certain period of time. Any rep that fails the minimal level of
satisfaction on a call must be pulled immediately and retrained on the specific
areas where they have issues. This needs to be done in a positive way. They
are also re-monitored within a half an hour of going back on the phones. That
is very important.
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QA (QUALITY ASSURANCE) DONE THE RIGHT WAY
I am not a fan of recording calls then a day or two later talking to the associate.
Instant feedback provides the greatest benefit. It’s a lot more work, but it is
very worth it. Don’t be lazy.
POST QUALITY
If quality is to be improved, then you should post daily and weekly quality
ranking in the center. You can do daily team and weekly center motivations
around this topic.
If you have a Net Promoter Score program (which is highly recommended)

make sure your associates understand it and have it posted for their viewing.
This is the first thing that I would do in coming to a new center with quality
issues. There are many other things we can do to help with quality, but this
gets right to the heart of how you can educate your associates and “fix” your
center.
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8
CRUCIAL CALL CENTER METRICS AND

KPI’S YOU NEED TO KNOW
The success of your call center depends on the list of key performance
indicators (KPIs) you follow. If you know what your performance metrics
are, you know how well you’re doing. Without call center KPI tracking, you’ll
never know if you’re running your call center effectively.
While there are a lot of different kinds of call center metrics, the following
KPIs are the most crucial to monitor. Make sure you track and optimize them
to ensure you run your call center successfully.
What Is a Call Center KPI?
A key performance indicator (KPI) in a call center is a number that measures

the performance of an agent, department, or method. It’s the numerical way
to confirm your success.
Below, you’ll see a list of important call center metrics you need to know
about and track. Ideally, you should set a call center KPI goal you and your
team can work towards. Compare your performance to accurately gauge how
well your call center is performing.
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CRUCIAL CALL CENTER METRICS AND KPI’S YOU NEED TO KNOW
Inbound Call Center KPIs
Inbound calls are when customers call into the call center. These are very
important because they often require problem resolution from agents.
And tracking how well these calls go lets you know how well your call center
does overall. Here are the most crucial inbound call center KPIs, so you know
what to track.
1. Total Calls Handled
You need to know the historical data of how many calls you handle and the
times. With this data, you can see the historical spikes in calls. This call center
KPI will also help you prepare and schedule your agents.
The best way to track total calls handled is to create a spreadsheet. The
columns should show one-hour intervals, and the rows represent the days.
After you create this, tally how many calls are received in each cell. It will be
easy to see how your call center metrics fluctuate.
2. Average Handle Time
The average handle time is the best call center KPI to gauge how efficient
your process is. This is the whole time your rep spends on the interaction.
From the time they pick up the call until they finish their after-call work. As
a result, the average handle time includes talk time, hold time, and after-call
work as well.
If your talk time is low, but your average handle time is high, the after-
call work is probably too inefficient. Knowing how well your call center is
performing with this KPI isn’t just good for efficiency, it can also improve
your rep’s work life.
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3. Talk Time
Talk time is the time an agent spends talking to a customer. Many managers
(and many of our clients) believe that the lower the talk time, the more
efficient you are, the better it is overall. While we want to control calls and
never have excessive talk times, we also should shy away from super quick
talk times as well.
Why? Because if the agent needs to rush a call to meet a certain KPI, they
won’t perform quality work.
This is a prime example of how customer satisfaction should always come

before call center KPIs.
4. After Call Work
This is part of the average handle time as well. Otherwise known as wrap
time, this is the time your reps spend on finishing the customer service work
after the call is done. They may need to update an account, send a memo, or
request a change.
You have to understand your after-call work and use it to your advantage.
Don’t tell agents they only have 5 seconds for after-call work. Instead, give
them time to finish, breathe, and recalibrate for the next call.
While this call center KPI is easy to adjust, it may affect the happiness of your
agents if you put too much pressure on them.
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5. Average Speed of Answer/ SLA
As part of your service level, you need to know how long customers are in the
queue. The average speed of answer (ASA) is the average time from when the
call is started with your telephone switch until your agent picks up.
The industry standard for service (SLA) level is 80/30, where 80% of the calls
are answered in 30 seconds or less.
6. Longest Delay
While the average speed of answer is a crucial call center KPI to keep track
of, we can’t forget the longest delay either. This is the number of the longest
waiting period a customer experienced before an agent picked up the call.
If you keep the 80/30 industry standard, this shouldn’t be much more either.
But if you see that there’s one call that took 6 mins 32 seconds to answer,
something’s definitely wrong. You need to adjust your staffing and have more
agents on the floor if you see numbers like that.
7. Occupancy
If you are overworking your agents, you run the risk of burning them out.
And then you’ll have serious problems in your contact center.
Your occupancy tells you how efficient your agents are. To calculate this
rate, divide your handle time by the total time an agent is logged in. For
benchmarking purposes, we want our occupancy rate around 75-80%,
meaning our agents are actively working around 45 minutes of every hour.
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8. Call Back Percentage
Most of our clients like to offer virtual callbacks to their customers. If a

customer gets caught in the queue during a spike, instead of waiting, they’re
offered a callback. They don’t lose their spot in line, and they don’t have to
sit on hold wasting their day.
We track how many customers opt into that offer. We also track how many
callbacks get abandoned because no one answers when we return the call.
Callbacks are a great way to boost your customer satisfaction KPIs.
9. Self-Service Usage
Interactive voice response (IVR) systems can be a lifesaver at a call center

when used appropriately. They can hand out information and record details
without an agent. And you can track how well these IVRs do by counting how
many calls need to be transferred to real people to solve.
10. Shrinkage
Your shrinkage will dictate how many extra staffers you need for each interval.
At Expivia, we generally schedule with 10% shrinkage.
We know through tracking intervals that we need 20 people on staff at 9:00

AM. As a result, we schedule two extra people. This gives us a buffer to help
keep us covered when any time a staff member leaves the floor.
Outbound Call Center KPIs
Unlike inbound calls, outbound calls are initiated by the agents. They call
customers with offers and promotions. So, the KPIs you need to track if
you have an outbound call center are completely different than inbound call
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centers.
11. Sales
When looking at outbound calls, these KPIs are less about customer care and
more about sales metrics. Most importantly, you need to track how many
successful sales go through in your call center.
The best way to track this is to see how many sales you complete in hour-long
intervals. This way, you can compare your reps and programs effectively. At
Expivia, we look at sales per hour. Alternatively, if we are trying to collect a
payment, we watch the method of payment per hour.
12. Dials Per Dialing Method
Whether you are using a predictive dialer or a power dial, you need to track
the number of dials per hour. Make sure you have that benchmarked for your
organization. That must be an attainable goal, and your reps need to adhere
to it.
13. Abandonment Rate
When you’re using a predictive dialer that dials more than one line at a time,
you need to look out for the abandonment rate. As phones are answered, your
dialer will give those calls to your agents. Those leftovers get abandoned.
Please be aware of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) regulations

state that your abandonment rate must be under 3%.
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13. Number Contact and Connects
Make sure you know the difference between contacts and connections and
track them both. Contacts happen when you successfully get through to a
prospect. In short, someone picked up the phone and said hello. (Except, it
may not be the right person.)
Connects are even more important to track. If you are trying to reach Jane
Smith, and you actually speak to her, that is a connection.
14. Conversion
Connects can roll into a conversion. They can be qualified or unqualified.

Unqualified is the sales that we get from connects out of all the calls that
we are dialing. You can qualify them off of the total. However, this will really
only tell you if the file you are working with is any good.
Connect and conversion numbers will tell you if an agent can sell or not. If
an agent got one “yes” and nine people said “no”, that agent has a 10%
conversion rate that day.
All agents can get lucky for a couple of hours. But, their long-term conversion
rate will show their real talents.
Call Center KPIs to Measure Customer Service
A lot of call centers measure the wrong KPIs. They want to know the numbers
of calls, sales, and times. But, they don’t pay enough attention to customer
service itself. Measuring the customer and the associate’s performance is a
lot more important for the overall good of the call center.
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15. Net Promoter Score
How likely is it that your customer would recommend your company or

product to a friend or colleague? Net promoter score (NPS) is the percentage
of customers rating their likelihood to recommend your call center’s services.
Although the NPS isn’t a common call center KPI, it really should be.
It’s the best way to track how well your customer service performs. And
there’s no way to successfully raise your net promoter score without actually
improving customer satisfaction.
This can range from the quality of your IVR to the wellbeing (and therefore
mood) of your agents. The NPS of your call center lets you know how well it’s
performing overall.
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9
CX METRICS THAT MATTER
In 2011 one of my favorite movies was released.
The movie was called “Moneyball” and it was based on the story of the 2002
Oakland Athletics MLB team and how General Manager Billy Beane thought
there had to be a different way of building a team. Until that time every team
based the players they wanted on subjective opinions of scouts that got it
wrong a lot! Billy Beane looked hard at the math of the game. He looked at
what statistics were actually important and made some real breakthroughs
in how the game is played to this day.
The call center is a lot like this. Old time thinking that gives us results that
continue to provide a low customer experience. There has to be a better way,
right?
Let’s take some time and talk about customer service metrics with a real
impact on our customers, novel idea huh?
So many companies confuse KPIs and call center metrics in a constant

struggle to quantify a world-class customer experience. They seem to be
changing what is important……this month is AHT, next month it’s SLA =
VOC… all trying to justify a great customer experience.
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Why are we measuring the wrong things when it comes to CX. These are still
important metrics (We just dedicated the chapter before to them) but they
measure efficiency and not CX
The companies that measure this way are ignoring the two main groups that
decide a great experience, the customer and the associate (includes processes,
CRM), and put all the time and money into the measurements in between
them. This makes little sense to me.
Getting away from metric scoring and looking at the process of Net Promoter
Scoring is what I believe, the real first step in enhancing what you view as
great service. Net Promoter programs are not traditional customer satis-
faction programs, and simply measuring your NPS does not lead to success.
Companies must follow an associated discipline to drive improvements in
customer loyalty and enable profitable growth.
WOW! A program that does not just depend on First Call Resolution, SLA,
Average Talk Time or hold times to tell a company they are offering great
service. As we have been saying for many years, these metrics should diagnose
and put service issues and techniques under the microscope, not be the goal.
Net Promoter Scoring programs basically ask one simple question and work
from there— How likely is it that your customer would recommend your
company or product to a friend or colleague? I know you ask this question at
the end of every interaction, right? You think you have an NPS program in
place then right? … nope, not at all.
What I am here to stress today is that:
“WORKING TO GET YOUR NPS SCORE IS NOT AS IMPORTANT AS

EMBRACING THE PROCESS!”
Embrace the Net Promoter Scoring Process… How? Remember, the goal
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is to get your customers to recommend you. Let’s look at some basic

recommendations that would include:
• Look at the whole call process. Are there wait times, annoying IVR
prompts, bad self-service processes?
• Are you utilizing multi-channel/Omni-Channel (voice, email, chat, self-
service APPS/IVRs, Chatbots, social CRM and now VIDEO) interactions
with your customers?
• Are your associates trained not just on how to navigate screens but on
treating your customers like family? Delight, empathy, not fake “I’m so
sorry” but true engagement with a customer? Too many service centers
just assume associates will do this even though they are trained poorly.
• Is your call center the “fun” place to work in your company or is it the
“corrective action” place? Show me a quiet call center, and I will show
you one with poor quality and high turnover.
• Do you have an organized monitoring platform that provides instant
feedback? Do you educate poor calls and CELEBRATE great calls or do
you punish the poor calls and ignore the good ones?
• Are you using metrics such as FCR and SLA’s as the measure of great
service? If you are, it’s time to realize they are a tool and a tool only.
• Stop the annoying wait “infomercial” and belittling self-service “tips”
that we think will lessen calls to the Center and costs through your IVR.
Embrace the chance to talk to a customer. Don’t waste the opportunity
by being petty.
• Are your middle management supervisors properly trained or are you
just pulling well deserving associates and giving them the keys with no
training?
• Most importantly, BE DIFFERENT. Since when did the standard for service
become bad self-service, infomercial wait messages, and reps that are
not into it…but hey service level is 82%. How does that make any sense?
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Outside of NPS and CSAT I also LOVE looking at Sentiment Scores that get
measured with Speech Analytics. To be able to measure and score tone
and word choice from agents and to see how your customers react is a very
powerful tool, check out the next chapter for some other uses of why we love
speech analytics!
Again, I am not anti-metric. I just believe they should diagnose and drill
down on issues in your call center. They should not be how to determine what
call centers rock.
The Net Promoter culture make your company develop a culture of service
that is more important than any metric and it is measurable. In the era
of social media, your customers can be your greatest ally or your biggest
headache. So, don’t just look at numbers and metrics; develop a culture
where your customers become your evangelists and their loyalty grants you
more customers.
Let’s celebrate the proper things. Utilize the Customer Service metrics that
enhance the customer experience of today.
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10
10 UNIQUE BENEFITS OF SPEECH

ANALYTICS
1. Proactive Customer Service
For so many years, customer service was reactive. You would react to certain
complaints or compliments, bring it to marketing, or finance, or product,
and still, they might shoo you away.
Now we can quantify product issues, see what percentage of callers are
complaining, fix the issue, and inform customers proactively of any issues
they might have.
While it doesn’t seem like a major improvement, it definitely restores trust

in your customers.
Analyzing speech analytics to predict trends can also be beneficial. Listen to

NICE CEO Paul Jarman explain how the models from speech analytics data
can improve your call center.
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10 UNIQUE BENEFITS OF SPEECH ANALYTICS
2. Rewarding Associates for Great Sentiment
You should always appreciate the hard work of your agents. But with a
sentiment score attached to their performance, it’s even easier.
Speech analytics can track proper word usage, sentiment scoring, silence,
and hold time to analyze to make sure a rep is treating customers properly
(and vice versa!).
Use this data to give credit where credit is due. And incentivize with raises or
cash to keep morale and motivation up.
3. Generating Marketing Data
With speech analytics, collecting product and price information becomes

even easier. And that translates into actionable marketing data.
With the data to back you up, you can tell marketing how the customers are
reacting to the product you’re selling. And making marketing decisions based
on customer’s first-hand experience in their voice is the best strategy there
is.
Make surveys a thing of the past. Instead, rely on speech analytics to generate
your marketing data.
4. Noting Frustration
It’s best to tackle the most common problems customers have head-on. But
first, you have to know what their frustrations are.
For example, you could have a caller who’s very happy with the service that
they are getting, but they’re very annoyed with a certain fee.
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While they might really like the company they purchase a product or service
from, they may have small frustration points that are difficult to separate
out.
Speech analytics can help you build an entire roadmap of the customer’s
journey, to continue to pinpoint trending problems with your product or
service.
5. Learning What the Real SLA Variance Should Be
Every industry has its own service-level agreement (SLA) time frame when it
comes to call centers. Usually, the benchmark for call centers is 80/30 (80%
of calls should be answered in 30 seconds or less). However, some call centers
work just as well with 80/60.
And speech analytics can show you what your ideal SLA time can be.
If the sentiment score overall is 77% (77% of callers leave with a positive
sentiment) in both 80/30 and 80/60, that means that your customers don’t
mind the longer wait times. Reducing staff on the floor is a good way to save
money without affecting your customer service levels.
6. Tracking Silence
Using speech analytics we can determine how much silence a call contains.
Maybe there is a soft skill that your associate does not have. Or, maybe they
are putting people on hold or mute more often than necessary to ask questions
or research a problem.
With speech analytics, we can tell if there is an issue with a specific agent.
And we can use that data to find better ways to support and educate them.
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10 UNIQUE BENEFITS OF SPEECH ANALYTICS
7. Fraud Protection
Call center technologies doesn’t just help your call center. It can also help
your customers. You can track any phrases or words you want with speech
analytics. Plus, you can include fraud-related sentences to help prevent or
warn agents against scams.
For example, if a customer asks for a new debit or credit card and they want
to change their address at the same time, this interaction could get flagged
for potential fraud.
You can also input keywords or phrases to flag conversations for potential
fraud without the agent having to look out for these indicators manually.
8. Tracking Key Words & Competitors
Speech analytics can also be used to track specific keywords and the names
of competitors to drive competition.
Using this method of analysis, you can further understand what customers
want from your product or service. You can also see how your product or
service might be better or worse than your competitors.
9. Better Reactions From the Agents
Certain real-time AI speech analytics software can directly help the agent
do their job. It can detect the caller’s intent and sentiment, and generate
responses for the agent immediately.
This can translate into better sales, higher customer retention, and improved
customer experience.
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10. Data Security
Last but not least, speech analytics software is secure. It’s a software platform
that breaks the call down to data and presents you with those findings.
It doesn’t directly listen to the personal information customers share over

the call. This can help your business remain more compliant.
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11
10 CUSTOMER SERVICE SKILLS EVERY

AGENT NEEDS TO HAVE
Incredible customer service is the backbone of any call center. Agents deal
with customers every day. So, they need to have the most crucial skills to
handle their issues well. What exactly makes a call center agent good at
customer service? And is there anything managers and supervisors can do to
help? Let’s find out.
Top 10 Customer Service Skills of the Best Call Center Agents
Every call center is different when it comes to the rules. There are countless
ways agents can handle cases and please the customer. However, these 10
crucial skills are universal when it comes to call center agents. If your agents
have these traits, or if you can help develop them, you’re on the right track.
1. Friendly Tone
This call center agent skill is very underrated. Yet, it’s also one of the most
crucial ones. The quality of the call depends on the tone of the representative.
You could say that the tone is the message. And if the tone is right, the message
means good customer service.
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The best practice for an agent to achieve the best tone is to think of the
customer as a family member. This way, even if they say “no” to a customer,
they’ll still provide first-class service.
No one’s born with this skill.
Managers and supervisors need to teach reps how to handle calls with the
right tone.
2. Patience
Patience is a virtue, especially when it comes to call center customer service.

Customers are often frustrated when they call. Handling these emotions is
the agent’s job. But if they’re patient with the customer, they can do more
than just solve the issue at hand. They can also provide incredible customer
service.
3. Timeliness
The timeliness of an agent doesn’t just benefit the customer. It also helps the
call center run efficiently. Taking calls on time, switching between channels,
and solving issues rapidly reflects well on an agent.
4. Efficiency
Although timeliness is crucial, it goes hand-in-hand with efficiency. Quick

responses without the result don’t get the customer far. A call center agent
needs to complete tasks quickly and efficiently. That’s the best way to please
the customer in most instances.
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10 CUSTOMER SERVICE SKILLS EVERY AGENT NEEDS TO HAVE
5. Knowledge About Services
Understanding the product or the service the call center covers is crucial for
every agent. Without this knowledge, they can’t help the customer in time.
Not to mention that the average handle time increases with every second an
agent needs to look up instructions.
The only way to gain this skill is to have the managers and supervisors teach
it. It’s not the agent’s responsibility to acquire this knowledge. But, it’s their
job to use it.
6. Positivity
Having a positive attitude can help every call center agent in various ways.
Being positive on a call makes the tone and the customer service incredible.
And being positive about the call can help with the mental health of the
representative.
A positive work environment goes a long way in giving the agents this attitude.
Managers and supervisors are equally responsible for the mood of their
employees.
7. Empathy
Everybody has their personal issues. The customer that calls in angry and
frustrated isn’t upset at the agent. They’re upset at the product, service, or
something else in their lives.
A little bit of empathy and understanding from the agent can go a long way in
helping the customer find a solution.
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8. Creativity
Not every call is the same. Every call center employee encounters strange or
unique problems. And cookie-cutter instructions don’t always help. If they
can solve the problem with a little bit of creativity, there’s no need to run for
the supervisor.
The supervisor’s grateful, the customer’s happy (hopefully), and the agent’s
proud of the success.
9. Organization
Being kind on call isn’t the only job requirement in a call center. There’s
post-call administration too. If an agent is well-organized, this shouldn’t be
a problem.
10. Willingness to Go The Extra Mile
Ultimately, the customer’s happiness depends on how well the rep solved the
problem. Sometimes, the agent needs to do something outside their scope to
make that happen.
Whether it’s googling a unique issue, or asking a favor from the supervisor,
going that extra mile matters. And the customer will be grateful for it.
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12
SETTING UP A MANAGEMENT TRAINEE

PROGRAM
One of the most important aspects of a successful call center is the leadership
team. Good managers and supervisors are the best at guiding and motivating
agents. And call center management training is how you can ensure that your
leadership team is up for the task.
Good Managers Aren’t Born. They’re Made.
Many call center managers assume that because an associate did a great job
on the phone they’ll be a good supervisor. Big mistake.
Just because you were a great football or basketball player does not guarantee
you’d be a great coach. It’s the same thing with your customer service center
employees.
However, the opposite can also be true. An ambitious and driven associate
who expresses interest in a leadership position and does the work required to
get there will be a great asset.
It seems like a gamble. But, it’s not if you have good call center management
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training protocols in place. It’s the only way to ensure the quality of
management.
8 Steps of Call Center Management Training
The goal of call center management training is to prepare supervisors and

managers for the everyday challenges of a call center. They should know how
the floor runs, how to improve processes, and how to motivate agents.
Usually, a call center management training course will run for 3-6 months.
Short enough to keep it interesting, but long enough to cover everything.
The following steps can help instill practical knowledge and leadership skills
in call center management training.
1. Build a Call Center Management Hierarchy
Knowing how the managers, supervisors, and trainees work and interact
won’t just help run your call center. It can also help you when it comes to
training managers.
Leveraging the hierarchy, supervisors can educate trainees regularly. This

way, the trainee learns everything they need, and the supervisor has someone
to cover for them at lunch or when they’re out sick.
And the same goes for the relationships between supervisors and managers.
2. Have Weekly Meetings
Assign an hour-long weekly meeting for call center management training.

Always be prepared for these meetings. Lesson plans, exercises, and printouts
can help guide the training and structure the course.
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SETTING UP A MANAGEMENT TRAINEE PROGRAM
It’s important to make these meetings enjoyable. Make it something that

trainees look forward to each week. Having some snacks and drinks prepared,
cracking jokes, and fun exercises go a long way.
3. Teach Management and Leadership Theory
Call center management training is more than just learning how to schedule
agents and complete quality monitoring. It’s about learning how to become
leaders.
Make sure you give trainees the tools for the psychological part of manage-
ment. Teach them how to manage tough reps, how to deal with confrontation,
and how to motivate agents.
4. Give Them Practical Skills to Run a Call Center
Agents also need to learn practical skills to make everyday operations smooth.
Call center management training needs to include lessons on starting and
ending a workday, controlling the first 30 minutes, weekly agent analysis,
and career progressions.
5. Include the Legal Side of Call Center Management
One of the most important classes is the legal class. This covers topics from
dealing with sexual harassment to company policies. Management trainees
need to learn what they can and can’t say to their teams.
With proper legal training, call center middle management can act profes-
sionally and prevent any litigation.
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6. Let Trainees Get Experience on the Job
It’s useful to tailor the training to the needs of your organization. And one of
the best ways to do that is to give trainees a chance to try their newly learned
skills in practice.
It’s great to have each trainee spend a week or two in all the companies’
different departments to see how everything works together. They can see
when errors happen and how it affects the company when errors happen.
It’s also useful for trainees to sit in on call center coaching sessions. They can
see how management talks to reps and learn valuable lessons on motivation
and quality assurance.
7. Complete Final Exams
Once you have them trained on all aspects of what it means to be a supervisor
in your organization, it’s now time for the final test.
Give reps their own team of 8-10 associates for a week. Monitor, review, and
evaluate their performance as a supervisor. You can create your own set of
KPIs for this test where you determine what a passing grade means for your
organization.
If they fail, it’s useful to re-train them on specific skills they lacked.
8. Celebrate the Training with a Graduation
When they finally succeed, it’s definitely a cause for celebration. It’s
graduation time!
At Expivia, we have a small swearing-in ceremony before a shift (normally on

a Friday) to mark the occasion. Newly appointed supervisors take an “oath”,
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SETTING UP A MANAGEMENT TRAINEE PROGRAM
get a diploma, and then have balloons and cake. We also present them with a
new name badge.
Make it fun.
They put a lot of time in their call center management training, and they
deserve a little recognition.
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13
PSYCHIC INCOME- 7 WAYS TO SHOW

RESPECT TO YOUR CALL CENTER
ASSOCIATES
Do you and your supervisors care about your associates on a personal level?
I’m not saying you are best friends and go out on the town, but do the reps
know that you, as a manager, care about them?
Respect is something that today’s generation really takes to heart, and we

need to be able to provide respect to make sure our culture is working at its
peak.
In this chapter, we talk about “Psychic Income”, what that is, and seven ways
to show respect for your call center associates.
• Showing Interest In Our Call Center Associates As People
Do you go out of your way to make your associates know you respect them?
Do you show interest in your associates as people? Asking your associates
about their home life, their kids, and their family is really powerful in terms
of mutual trust. Start the day with casual morning meetings, one-on-ones,
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PSYCHIC INCOME- 7 WAYS TO SHOW RESPECT TO YOUR CALL CENTER...
and show that you really care about them. As a boss, it is important to connect
with your mid-level management as well. It cannot all be about work.
• Coaching & Reprimanding in Private
Coaching or reprimanding someone for a mistake is best done privately. If

you coach or reprimand someone publicly, or in front of their friends and
coworkers, the immediate response will be defensiveness. They will lose
respect for you as a person because you just embarrassed them in front of
everyone. Always give critique in private, whether that be an IM or Video call
or in person. If an entire group needs to be corrected, that’s fine, just never
pick on individuals during that talk.
• Celebrating in Public
On the flip, always congratulate publicly! This builds trust. Celebrate every
single accomplishment, and pick out individuals if they are doing a great
job. This way the whole group, or even the whole company, can feed off that
positive vibe. No matter who it is, a job well done feels good for everyone.
• Talking About Advancement
We like to do weekly analysis where we talk about goals with each rep
individually. This is an appropriate place to talk about advancement with
your associates. For example, Susie has been doing very well, and you tell her
there are management trainee positions open. You tell her if she can get her
hours up by just two hours a week, she can move up in the company. This
both incentivizes her to get her attendance up in order to be promoted but
also is a way to avoid berating her for having slightly low attendance. No one
wants to be stuck on the phones forever.
If you have college kids working at your center, know what their majors are,
their passions, and route them with skills that will be beneficial to both your
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organization and their future career plans.
• Why & How to Keep Team Meetings Positive
One of the biggest mistakes supervisors make is having negative meetings.

Not to say every meeting should be rainbows and butterflies, but there is a
time and place for coaching and critique. This connects back to the idea of
coaching in private. Do not individualize negativity, because it affects the
group. Morning meetings and shift kick-offs should always be high-energy
to boost morale.
• Having Reps Talk Positively About Other Reps
We like to host incentives to get our reps to speak positively and publicly
about Expivia. I will offer pizza parties and lunches if we can get 200 reps to
post something positive about Expivia on Facebook or Glassdoor. You can
do this individually as well. During group meetings have everyone mention
something positive they noticed from another teammate. This is an awesome
way to boost morale and the positive energy within specific groups. Our
Slack channels and IM’ing have made it easier as well, some people are a bit
uncomfortable giving compliments or talking about a coworker face-to-face.
Being able to reread your compliments makes them stick a little better.
• Keeping Management Office Hours
If you are a contact center manager with supervisors beneath you, or even if
you are a supervisor, set aside 15-30 minutes a week and host office hours.
Let your associates come to you freely during that time to talk. Sometimes
it can turn into a complaint session, but it is important that you hear these
complaints and struggles, help them, and let them know that you care that
they succeed.
My dad always called it “psychic income”, which means additionally paying
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PSYCHIC INCOME- 7 WAYS TO SHOW RESPECT TO YOUR CALL CENTER...
your employees the respect and attention they deserve.
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14
SOCIAL MEDIA/BRANDING TO RECRUIT
Many call centers struggle with bringing in the right agents, managers and
supervisors to work for them. It can be difficult to hire the right people who
truly understand and value your services, and mesh with the company culture
you are trying to create.
Many companies choose to write a simple job description and post it on

their company website or Indeed. They pick a few applications and conduct
interviews, choosing whomever has the most experience. Unfortunately, this
method will often result in failure, as it sets up your company for low-quality
service and eventual disaster.
FIND YOUR CULTURE

Going all the way back to earlier blog posts, we discussed call center culture.
It’s important to define the culture of your call center. It can be distinct from
the culture of your company as a whole. Sit down with your team and really
define the kind of person you’re looking to hire. You’re not simply looking
for a worker, you’re looking for a person. What kind of person do you want
them to be? How will they fit into your company’s culture?
Here at Expivia, we have a culture of attitude and effort, “A sunshine attitude
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with an entrepreneurial mindset”. We place less emphasis on experience,

instead focusing on a potential employee’s attitude, and that they are willing
to put forth the effort to be an incredible call center agent.
Instead of conducting a traditional interview with the normal questions, really

talk to the actual person. Ask them to describe themselves. Dive into their
personality. Learn their values. Doing this, you can learn what kind of worker
they will be.
MANAGE YOUR BRAND

To attract the right candidates, you also need to manage your call center’s
brand. If you are an internal contact center within a larger business, create
your own Facebook page. This way, you can create a distinct brand and
community for your call center, separating it from the company as a whole.
In this way, a potential employee can learn about your call center culture and
values from your Facebook page, as well as learn about any fun activities or
initiatives your call center provides.
It’s not all just about Facebook, though. It’s important to maximize all your
social channels. This includes Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. You can
create inclusiveness and excitement within your company by engaging with
your employees and potential employees. Do fun things like raffles, contests,
and activities, to create engagement and personalize your call center culture.
Remember, it’s not enough to simply have these social media channels. You
have to use them. Being active is the only way to create engagement. Respond
to messages quickly, preferably by assigning an agent to keep it open on their
monitor or go to an agent’s phone. This shows that you care about potential
employees and customers.
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RECRUITING
The first method of recruiting employees is going to be your call center’s
website. Your website is your landing page for your entire call center. It’s
likely the first place prospective employees will go. Be sure to have a section
of your website advertising any open jobs. Try not to just call it something
generic like “Hiring” or “Employment”. These terms are dry and clinical.
Call it something like “Talent” to differentiate from other companies and
create a sense of worth for employees.
Apart from your company website, social media is also going to be a great
channel for recruiting new employees. Be sure to create engagement on your
call center’s Facebook page, as well as running ads. A Facebook ad campaign
can be incredibly effective, as well as cost-effective. A great thing about
recruiting with Facebook is that you can specify in an ad campaign which
area of a city or state you want to focus on the most, all to bring in potential
hires from a specific area.
LINKEDIN
LinkedIn is also a great social media channel for bringing in new blood. You
can use it to recruit for middle management and programmer positions,
somewhat higher up positions. LinkedIn is a great recruitment tool.
JOB BOARDS
Job boards are another great tool for recruitment. Indeed is the largest in the
US, but Glassdoor and Monster are two more great options. Indeed actually
is free up to a certain amount of resumes but it can bring in lower qualified
applicants, but a higher amount of people to choose from. You may find your
diamond in the rough on Indeed.
Glassdoor is unique in that current employees can post anonymously and
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review your organization as an employee. Your company’s Glassdoor site

needs to be managed. It’s important to keep your current employees engaged
on Glassdoor and posting about how positive their experience working for
your company has been. You can also create an enhanced profile for your
company, allowing you to tailor your company’s image and profile.
Consider allying with organizations in your city, such as veteran groups or

New Americans. Take a look at trade schools or ethnic organizations who
can bring new languages to your call center. Create ties with these groups to
source agents who have special skills. Form a genuine bond with them and
create a mutually beneficial partnership, so if they have someone who they
think may be a good fit for you, they’ll reach out to you.
USING REFERRALS THE RIGHT WAY

Another source of recruits will be referrals. Create a referral campaign in your
call center and create incentives for employees to refer new agents to you.
If you have awesome employees who understand and match your company
culture, this may be a great way to bring in new blood who have an equal
passion and understanding of your company culture. If you are having a
culture issue and there are some bad apples you are weeding out, don’t run a
referral campaign quite yet.
One thing we have found as we’ve explored recruiting methods, is that

newspaper ads simply don’t work. The return on investment from taking
out newspaper ads or digital ads on the paper website just is not worth the
investment. That’s why we’ve developed this more streamlined approach
of knowing our culture and focusing on social media. Always be evaluating
your recruiting methods to see what works and what you may need to tweak
or phase out. When you bring in new recruits, consider giving them a short
survey asking them where they heard about the job opening or where they
first learned about your company. Doing this, you can learn where to invest
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your time and energy.
IN CLOSING
Using these tried and true methods that have worked for us, you can recruit
quality employees. By defining your culture and creating engaging social
media, it’s an incredibly effective and easy to recruit new blood who match
your company’s culture and will drive your company forward.
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15
SETTING UP A NEW CALL CENTER

STRUCTURE
The Stations
We have 503 cubicles; that includes the supervisor stations that are at the end
of our rows. The stations that we use are a combination of 3’ D X 4’ W call
center booths. We also use s-shaped stations that are a little bit wider. We
use those for programs that require two monitors. About 80% of the stations
are the 3’ X 4’s and 20% are the s-shaped call center stations.
NAMING THE CALL CENTER COMPUTERS

A couple of tips on the naming convention: Don’t get cute.
Call the station something that is easy to recognize. We have three call center
rooms. The Main, West and East call centers.
We’ve tried to get cute and name them after famous streets like Bourbon Street
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and Penny Lane for our different aisles and we also named the computers
that way but it just got too confusing so I don’t suggest that method.
Be a little more technical when it comes to the name of your call center
stations. We name the computer that is to be put on our network and then we
also put the inContact, or if you’re using a cloud provider you have what’s
called the station ID or some type of identifier for your Cloud telephony
platform. We put that number on there too and when each agent logs in
they know what station they are in and the station ID when they have to
put that into their inContact. We use a label maker and stick it onto the top
right-hand corner of the computer.
BUYING COMPUTERS FOR YOUR CALL CENTER

If you’re buying brand new computers, you’re making a vastly horrible
financial decision.
We purchase all of our computers online through a couple of different sites.

Email me if you want the name of some of the companies.
We will not pay more than $400 for a computer. Most of the computers
are between the $300- $350 range and they are refurbished Windows 10
professional computers. They have one terabyte of memory and are super-
fast work machines. We normally use all-in-ones, so 90% of our computers
are 23-inch all-in-one Lenovo’s. They are what we have found to be the
hardest-working machines.
You don’t need a lot of memory. We’re not housing things on the actual
computers. We’re really just connecting to the internet and making sure that
we have a good and fast computer for our reps to work on.
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SETTING UP A NEW CALL CENTER STRUCTURE
CALL CENTER OPERATIONS

We have a supervisor ratio of about 16:1. That’s the average for some of our
programs, but it can be as low as 10:1.
Each of the Reps will have the same supervisor every single day and they
will also sit in the same station every day. It doesn’t mean that they own the
station because we have multiple shifts. So somebody that’s working a 9 to 3
shift will use a single station every day and then someone working 3 to 11 will
use the same station every day. They might share that station, and we want
them to at least be sitting in their same home every single day or as close to
that as possible with the same supervisor who knows them.
The previous podcast on how we set goals and how we talk to each of the
reps every morning, is really important because it discusses how to build the
relationship between the supervisor and the Associates on their team.
STATION PROTOCOL
When it comes to hanging things in the booth, we have a little bit of an issue
with that. We provide our reps picture plates where they can place pictures
of their family. We try to be as paperless as possible and with some of our
clients, we’re totally paperless so there can be absolutely nothing including
those pictures in the station.
It’s a security concern that we think is important. If anything needs to be

hung, we laminate it and give it a policy number to make sure it can never
be taken out. This may seem to be a little bit of paranoia but we’re dealing
with clients and we can’t make mistakes. We do everything we possibly can
to curb any type of issues that may arise.
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WHITE NOISE IN YOUR CALL CENTER

We also use white noise in one of our centers. I go back and forth on this and
depending on how you have it set up, it can be helpful. Sometimes to me it
can be annoying but the reps seem to like it especially in some of the louder
areas.
HEADSETS FOR YOUR CALL CENTER

You don’t need to spend a ton on headsets to get really good ones. We’ve tried
out probably five or six different types of headsets. The ones that we use you
can find on Amazon for $23. They’re noise canceling headsets and they last
for about a year before they need to be replaced, which I think is pretty good.
CALL CENTER STAFF STRUCTURE

So we’ve discussed our supervisor ratio being 16:1. The training area which
we call our Incubation Room is where our reps are trained before they come
out onto the floor. That can be as low as 5:1 in that training aspect, then the
reps go to the floor where they are introduced to their team.
From a QA standpoint, we double the ratio between the supervisor to QA. So

if we’re at a 15:1 ratio for the supervisor we normally do a 30:1 ratio with
our QA staff. Again, that’s client dependent on what we’re contractually
obligated to from a monitoring standpoint. We’ve found that we can be at
that number because of speech analytics. We try to rotate the QA staff onto
different programs that they are trained on so they aren’t listening to the
same people and getting bored.
We also like to rotate our management trainees throughout the QA area as

well. They need to understand the scoring aspect of QA and what to listen for.
In our 16:1, we have at least one team lead who’s been there for a while or a
management trainee.
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On the floor, the supervisor has a 16:1 ratio. They will have about 15 reps and
then one management trainee or one team lead to help them or give each
other a break. It also helps them get into the groove of being a management
person. We’ve done a whole management trainee podcast as well.
MISCELLANEOUS
Let’s talk about some of the physical things in the room like TV’s. We have
50” flat screens that are dispersed throughout the room. We initially tried to
disperse them by one TV per team but that can be a little bit difficult with the
number of clients that have come on board.
On the TV’s we place the stats of the people and programs that are around
that TV, post company news, and any games that we are playing. Another
little tip I would suggest is if you’re not sure how to utilize the TV’s, look
into Intel Compute Sticks. We use them on all of our TVs. They are a 4-inch
computer that basically has an HDMI plug. They’re Windows 10 and if you
get a wireless mouse and a wireless keyboard, you can actually control the TV
from another location. There are absolutely no wires and it’s super slick and
super cool.
I actually bring them when we have a client visit or when I’m giving any
type of pitch to a new client. When I fly out to LA, I just bring my compute
stick and plug it into the back of their TV. It provides me with a really cool
wireless setup that I think makes a good first impression from a technology
standpoint. So that’s something to check out as well.
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THE IMPORTANCE OF NO CELL PHONES AND

SECURITY
We have a no cell phone policy implemented on our call center floor. A lot of
the centers that I’ve been to do not have that policy, especially the internal
call center guys, but it can be done. Make sure that you set up some areas off
the call center floor where they can use their cell phone. But we have a policy
that if a cell phone is seen or heard on the floor, it’s an automatic suspension.
It goes back to the security aspects of who we’re dealing with. If we have
financial services clients, and we must be PCI compliant. We’ve been able to
train our staff on this policy and it’s become a cultural thing to where they
understand not to bring it on the floor.
In regards to the cell phone policy, I’m sure you have concerns that you’ll get
too much push back and that people will quit. You won’t and they won’t. We
feel it’s really important especially because of the type of calls that they may
be taking. In the early days, we made this policy decision, and it has served
the center well.
PAYROLL AND BILLING

The other question I get asked a lot is, “How do we pay our reps?” or “What
mechanism do we use to pay them?”
We utilize TSheets, which I think is a pretty cool Quicken product. With

TSheets, we have iPads set up in a kiosk which gives us a little bit more control.
The kiosks are set up all throughout the call center and reps can punch-in
and punch-out on them. It’s pretty cool because it has facial recognition and
if the system does not recognize the person punching in or out, then HR will
receive an email asking for verification. This makes it so we don’t have other
people punching in for others, which obviously could be a problem.
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We also do all of our billing off of it too, so let’s say you’re an internal call
center and you want to track customer service calls or sales calls to tier 1, tier
2, or tier 3 types of calls and the amount of time that each rep is on the call.
Obviously, you can do that from your telephony platform but many times it
gets confusing when you’re paying people from different tiers. For example,
someone logged in at tier-1 who gets paid a certain rate logs off and then logs
into tier 3 that has a different pay rate. This system allows us to change the
different projects for different rates of pay and for different clients we bill.
CONCLUSION
So that’s a snapshot of how we have our room set up and how we operate
on day to day from a physical structure. Also, make sure your rows are wide
enough. Make sure that people aren’t bumping into each other. Make sure
that the chairs that you give your reps are comfortable.
One of the biggest follies that we’ve seen is that you may be getting chairs
for a good deal, but they’re super uncomfortable and the reps revolt. Have a
committee for office furniture and accessories whether it’s headsets, chairs
or a new mouse. Make sure that the reps have the buy-in because that’ll save
you from a lot of pain if you order them and they hate it. It’s something that I
have definitely gone through and it is not fun.
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16
MONITOR LIVE OR RECORDED CALLS?
There is a minor debate in the call center and quality management circles
on whether it is best to use live calls or recorded calls when evaluating call
center associates. We have many clients that have differing views on this as
well. We have been using both models for many years and layer them on top
of one another to create an overarching QA plan that takes into account the
associate and program health.
Being a high school basketball coach, my work team sometimes gets annoyed
at me for using sports references time and time again, but I think in this
case it will really help make sense of what we do when evaluating live calls
compared to recorded calls.
Live Calls help you Win the Game Today

Recorded Calls help you Have a Great Season
Bottom line…You need both
CALL CENTER MONITORING USING LIVE CALLS

Live monitoring from your supervisors and/or your QA areas is like in-game
coaching. You are looking to make the adjustments to win the game at the
moment. If an associate is not using a proper greeting, disclosure, upsell or
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MONITOR LIVE OR RECORDED CALLS?
close we need to fix that right away. Many times, we all will look at certain
stats or metrics like real-time SLA, AHT, Conversion or Sales data; we look to
see who is out of the norm, listen to them and make “game time” corrections
to help get back to the winning score. (AKA getting the KPI’s where they need
to be!).
Live monitoring, in my opinion, must be done to correct issues on the fly and
make sure the day stays on track. Now if we are seeing trends or issues with
the tone in certain reps, we are certainly going to look to address this but for
the most part, we use live monitoring to make sure we are doing what we
should, hitting the proper KPI’s and surpassing quality metrics.
One of the AWESOME tools that has come along to help us has been advanced
speech analytics. We now can “listen” to every call that comes into our center
and judge the agent sentiment (positive, neutral or negative) and then hop
on the line if we see any negative or neutral trends from our agents. It has
allowed us to really drill down more “in-game” to make any quick technique
corrections. In my opinion, it is the best QA tool to come out in years.
While being an in-game coach is important, we also must review past “game
film” to correct trends. This is where listening to recorded calls comes into
play…
CALL CENTER MONITORING USING RECORDED

CALLS
When you are evaluating and scoring recorded calls a different mindset should
be taking place with your monitoring team. This is where everyone should
be getting evaluated not just the associates outside of specific KPI’s like the
real-time monitoring seems to be focused on.
While live monitoring should be focused on winning the day, recorded calls
should be listened to, with the thought of raising the overall quality of the
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program. Adding them to your training and making sure any customer trends
are being noticed (if you are not using analytics).
It’s like when I watch film after a game, I don’t care about the score nor do I
look at what adjustments need to be made during the game. I am looking at
the bigger picture of what we can do to be better for the long term, our next
10-15 games’.
Every client we have, we give one hour of non-billed weekly education. We

use the recorded calls as great tools in these training sessions. We find trends,
scripting issues, bad or good rebuttals to use, all things that help with the
overall health of the program. These help all the associates succeed.
I think you get a feel for your team when you take a step back with recorded
calls. Do you need to work on the tone of the team, are there things we need
to retrain? Score the call, score the individual but after that think about the
program as a whole from what you are hearing.
We are still pulling associates here with any issues we find or just as
importantly any GREAT calls we find as well. But as a rule, we use the recorded
calls more for big-picture issues that an associate or a program may be having.
Using both live and recorded calls in your call center monitoring gives you
the optimum opportunity to create the best call center team possible!
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17
9 WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR TEAMS

COACHING
It can be difficult to turn the information you glean from monitoring into
actionable goals to help improve your call center reps. Today, we’ll be going
over different ways to improve the coaching in your call center and turn these
statistics into actionable improvements. There is no one way to do things
and you’ll of course add your own spin on these items based on the culture of
your call center.
1. UNDERSTAND WHEN TO COACH OFF THE FLOOR
If someone achieves a perfect score on a quality assurance test, make sure

everyone knows. Celebrate that achievement. Give your other reps reason to
strive. It’s always best to keep things positive.
If you must do some sort of coaching that is not positive, do it off the floor.
Don’t give your reps negative feedback on the floor. Pull them aside to a
private conference area to give them feedback.
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2. BE SPECIFIC
Always be sure to be specific when giving feedback to your reps. Your reps
may get agitated and start leading you down a verbal rabbit hole, causing you
to be unable to fully explain what you mean. Be ultra-specific when you’re
giving negative feedback especially. Give thorough details. If you give them
room to argue, you may not have an answer for them, and it will make you
look weak and undermine your authority.
3. THE TONE IS THE MESSAGE
Do not be negative. Don’t start your coaching session on a negative tone. Your
reps will immediately get defensive. They will automatically try to defend
themselves, and whatever you say next, they will not take as an improvement
goal. Start off the conversation positively. Try the sandwiching method.
Deliver negative feedback between positive feedback. Reinforce the good
things.
4. TIE GOALS
Tie your reps’ performance to goals. Each of your reps should have an
individualized goal. In your coaching sessions, make sure to tie the feedback
to goals. Give them something to aspire toward. Give them feedback that
relates to those goals, small steps they can take to help achieve them.
5. LET YOUR REPS GIVE FEEDBACK
Have your reps assess their own performance. Have as sit-down with them
and let them review themselves. Instead of suggesting issues, prompt them
and listen to their responses. Try to verbally steer them toward understanding
their own improvement points, then you can reinforce them. Try to lead them
to their own decisions that you can then reinforce.
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9 WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR TEAMS COACHING
6. ROLEPLAY
Try roleplaying the issue. It’s one thing to say, but it’s another to do. Try
replaying the portion of the call your rep is struggling with and help them
roleplay it. You be the customer. Go through what your rep should be saying
and how to fix the problem. Help them practice what they should be working
on and give feedback.
7. REDEFINE GOALS
Sometimes you may give a broad goal. You may need to narrow it down
or redefine it. Try breaking it down into smaller, more attainable goals.
Understand that not everyone will be a star from day one. Make sure the
goals that you give match the expectations and skill level of the associate
while still putting them on a track to meet standards.
8. UNDERSTAND EXPECTATIONS
Make sure your reps know what you expect, but also that they understand the
consequences if they don’t meet those expectations. If a serious mistake
is made, it may be necessary to send someone home for the day. Your
reps should know that is a possibility. There should be no subjectivity in
responses to negative feedback. Make sure everyone knows ahead of time
your progressive discipline policies.
9. RE-MONITOR
Every time you coach someone, within the next 30 minutes – 1 hour, score
them again on the areas which needed improvement. Someone other than
the first person who coached the rep the first time should listen the second
time. Listen to live calls so you can correct any issues as soon as they pop
up. Recorded calls are important, but live calls are important to keep the
customer experience from falling.
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CONCLUSION
Using these techniques, you can coax the best performance out of your reps.
By coaching your reps in a positive way, you will increase the customer
experience and create a better atmosphere in your call center.
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18
WEEKLY AGENT ANALYSIS
Call Center Quality management and education must be a cornerstone of any

contact center. Do all your contact center/customer service agents have a
current, up to date improvement plan? Do they understand their goals for
quality, sales, conversion or net promotion? A lot of centers just do a quick
morning meeting and then get on with their day. If that is the basis for your
rep’s improvement/goal setting, then let’s look at something easy to do that
I think can benefit all centers.
You would never go on a long road trip with no kind of map or GPS, right?
How can your associates and supervisor know where you want them to go
unless they too look at their map for success? We call this our Agent Analysis
program… your map to success for your agents.
Having a basic Agent Analysis program should be one of the cornerstones

of developing high-quality representatives. It not only shows that you care
about the standards set, but it also shows reps you care about them; it shows
you care about their personal development. They can see there is a path to
career progression.
Each of our associates is pulled from the floor for at least 15 – 20 minutes
a week… Tom did you say 15-20 minutes a week!!!! Off the phones!!! With a
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Supervisor too!! No Way could we do that in our center…
My response is, how can you afford not to! This is the most powerful culture
and training tool we have. It is a total investment into our people. So in short…
figure it out… lol
In these meetings the manager/supervisor talks a little deeper about how

they are doing, what they must do and how they can help them. The tone
of this meeting must be primarily positive in tone. You cannot have your
reps dreading their 15-minute Agent Analysis meeting every week; it makes
things counterproductive.
1) Review
Talk about the past week, what were the quality/sales/conversion goals given
last week to that rep. Did they meet the goal? If not, then talk about how they
can better achieve these goals in the next week. Your supervisors must be
prepared for this. They must give specific examples to help the reps. (“Janie
we talked last week about recognizing closing signals in your calls, I think you
have done a little better especially yesterday when you… “) Go over recorded
calls here if you have any specific to the goals you set the past week. Talk
about their specific monitoring scores. What’s that… you say, your reps don’t
have monitoring scores… well, more on that later.
2) Address
Any attendance/dress code/team behaviors should be brought up at this point.

This is the only part that may get a little negative, so I like to sandwich it
between the recap of the week and the next week’s plan. Everyone has some
things they need to work on from an HR/Policy standpoint. Whether it is
coming a little late to work, not being in the best mood (attitude/effort issues)
or fooling around too much. This is the time to address any issues in a positive
manner off the floor. This takes education for your supervisor to handle. Make
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WEEKLY AGENT ANALYSIS
sure they do this right.
3) Goal Planning
Give each associate SPECIFIC individual plans/goals for the week. Make sure
the given goal is attainable. Your stars will have higher goals and expectations
than your newer reps, although you should be ramping up a little quicker
with your new reps…
Understand as well the KPIs for the program they are running. Make sure
the individual goals correspond to the program goals. I know that sounds
rudimentary but so many times call centers just have overall center goals.
They must be broken down to project goals.
Be specific, for example: “Janie we need 3.0/5.0 quality score average for all
your monitored calls for next week. You were really close to that this week,
so I know you will be able to do this. I would like to see your conversion go to
6% from 5.2% next week on your cross-sell opportunities as well. Recognize
those closing signals we talked about and listened to in your monitored calls,
and you will be above 6%! We also had a couple days missed last week so let’s
shoot for a full week; I know you can do it!!!”
4) Progression
End the meeting talking about their career plan, if possible. Do they want to
be a management trainee, supervisor, team lead? Do they want to learn more
programs? And yes, do they want to progress to work at a different company
in a higher role. This time is not about you or your company, it’s about the
employee, investing in them. This will go a long way in how much trust they
place in your management team when there is a culture of real caring. Talk
about how you can help get them to the next level. This is very important in
keeping turnover down. Associates should feel as if your team is taking the
time to help them grow and move up. Deep down in places we don’t always
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talk about… everyone wants to be thought of in a positive light…help bring

this out of your people.
5) Document
This meeting should be documented in a database or simply in email or excel.

You must have this for both the supervisor and the rep but also for you and
the contact center manager to look at to understand how a supervisor’s team
is doing on a personal level.
Take the time to invest in your contact center agents. Remember they are the
voice of your brand. Invest in them so they can invest in your customers.
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19
ENHANCING YOUR COMMUNICATION

CULTURE
While I really don’t like to talk too much specific technology in the
book as it’s constantly changing, I feel confident that this
communications tool will be around for a while. Hopefully!! lol
HOW TO USE SLACK IN YOUR CALL CENTER

We have used Slack for a couple year now at our USA call center outsourcing
BPO Expivia. We did this because we wanted to evolve past email which was
getting stale in our center. We also had issues with tracking and sorting
information in email. Reports would get lost, others would forget to send.
We wanted a better way to look at the information being passed around the
call center and we wanted employees to communicate more…enter SLACK.
While we still use email for external communications, when it comes to

internal communication with the call center staff such as the managers, the
supervisors, and our Expivia Quality Assurance, we are fully on Slack.
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We have been using it for a while now but only started with the pay subscrip-
tion to Slack about the last two months. So, for the first six or seven months,
we used the free version which I think for 99% of you out there, free version
is going to work fine.
You don’t get full functionality, but for the majority of people who use it, they
give you enough in a free version. You get 10,000 messages that will hold
until it writes over them. However, in my opinion, a 10,000 message quota is
a ton.
In fact, it took us over half a year to get to that point. Really the only reason,
we moved to the pay version is that we have clients that are using it and they
wanted to join our accounts together (which is an awesome feature!) and you
have to pay to do that.
How We Use Slack for a Call Center
Now, lets dig deeper how we set up our slack channels. In the following
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ENHANCING YOUR COMMUNICATION CULTURE
paragraphs, you will learn about:
• What we’re using it for, and

• How we’re using it
First of all, you need to know that we are a USA customer service outsourcing
call center. Our role is to help companies who are looking to outsource their
call center. Therefore, customers are contacting us and are paying us to
handle customer service on their behalf for their customers. This will be a
little different the most of you.
We have our production channels set up for each different project or client we
have. So basically, every single client has their own channel. For an internal
call center, like most of you have, you might have a sales channel, a service
channel, a Tier 1, 2, 3 and so on. But for us, every client has their own channel.
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Internally, we provide access to only those that work that program or channel.
This would be the supervisor, QA staff, Client Services Manager, IT manager
and Sr management. We keep it tight to make sure we stay focused on what
is important, and to a lesser amount for security.
Team members know that if something goes into their channel it’s going to
be important for them to know.
Expivia Quality Assurance Channel
Also, we have our EQA channel which is our Expivia Quality Assurance.
So, anytime that we have a monitoring issue or a rep needs pulled, we use
SLACK to get that info out to the floor. We also celebrate GREAT calls in Slack
as well.
Slack has really enhanced the two-way communication between QA and the
floor. Supervisors may say “hey you know Janie’s been working on her tone,
can you please listen to her”, or “we’re working on some closing signals for Billy,
what do you guys think.”
HR Channel
Specifically, we have staffing and HR issue channels. We do updated staffing

every single day in WFM and we’re making sure the supervisors know if there
are any call-offs/lates for their team. Slack gets the word out to them quickly.
We are also able to send WFM reports to the Slack channel to provide a quick
heads up to make sure if we need to wait 15 minutes before reps are taking
their lunch today or if we need to delay a break because of staffing. Slack gets
it out to the floor really fast.
If we have any rep issues (anything that is a progressive discipline issue)
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we’re going to use the HR Issues SLACK channel. This is to make sure that HR
understands what is going on in real time and they can be prepared. It also
helps with our HR documentation from the supervisors.
Informal (but Useful) Use of Slack Channel
We have a YAY Channel for any type of announcement. So, if it’s anyone’s
birthday or work anniversary, or someone had an awesome call, all that info
goes in our YAY Channel. YAY is just a fun channel for cool culture things you
would like to get out call center wide.
Games Channel
We keep all of our call center games in one channel under separate threads so
any time that a supervisor wants to go play something, there’s a repository
for all that. The thread keeps all games separate so we can be adding to them
all the time.
Slack Bot
The other cool thing that we’ve done is something we’ve just really started
doing for the last couple of months. There’s a bot that comes with Slack.
This bot can basically be a kind of knowledge management repository bot
(or anything you want to use it for). So, for a lot of our programs, we’ll have
very basic information that can be “asked” of the bot that our reps may need
when on a call. Just another layer of information that can get to the floor.
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If you take just a little bit of time to set it up based on what you need, you can
have information that can be pulled. Super cool feature.
Call Escalation Function
Sometimes, when the call center associates are answering calls and there is
an issue that needs to be escalated to tier 2 agent or back to our client, we will
use an escalation slack channel to send the information to where it needs to
go. This will either go directly to our client, or to our client services manager
that will pick up the phone and call the client or add it to an escalation process
we have set up.
Integration with External Client
Nowadays, we’ve seen a lot of our clients that use Slack. Therefore, with Slack,
we can actually integrate both of our accounts so that we can both access a
specific private Slack channel for client communications.
So, anytime that the client wants to talk to us, or wants to send information,
they can do it directly through Slack. We found that this is a really great way
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to do it. It allows better access to information, we can comment on it and it

keeps it organized much better than in an email form.
(BTW you can integrate your email as well to populate in Slack.)
As I stated earlier, we’re seeing more and more clients getting away from
Skype. They are getting into Slack because it offers more functionality.
Customer Reporting
We’ve been actually sending reports that we normally would do via email over
Slack. Again, it keeps information way more organized. Also when a client
looks at them, they can comment as well in an organized thread. We will set
up a thread for each report.
(FYI setting up a thread on a topic in a specific channel allows for a really

clean way to deal with information. For example, let’s say you have three
issues in your HR channel. You can create a thread for each to keep all the
data separate and apart so you don’t just have a running diary of the day. It
allows for specific places to put information dealing with that issue in the
same channel.)
Working with Email vs Slack
You have to change the culture of how you communicate when you get into
Slack.
You just have to cut the cord from e-mail because we saw that it was hard
to use both at the same time. Employees stayed with what they were used
to. So that’s what we did. We use email only for external communication,
anything internal we Slack. We have actually deleted most email accounts in
the company.
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I will say though if I had to do it over again, I would have made it a bigger deal
in the organization to get people excited about it. We should have had more
training (don’t need much) and a countdown to SLACK! Something that was
more fun at the time of implementation. Everyone does love it now that they
are using it every day but do not underestimate the power that email had on
us…lol
Finally..
All of this is really just the tip of the iceberg for what you can do with Slack. I’m
not even getting into the really cool fun things about Slack. For example, how
they set up emojis and GIF’s for communication. It allows you to really almost
express yourself when you’re communicating with employees internally. You
can use API’s to integrate and populate Slack with your internal software and
processes.
It really helped the whole culture of our organization from our attitude and
effort standpoint to not only talk more to each other but to have more fun
actually doing it.
I would definitely take a peek at the free version. You might not even need
the paid version. Slack will evolve your communication culture beyond email.
It’s fun, easy to use and naturally makes your teams talk to each other more.
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20
IMPROVING CALL CENTER

ATTENDANCE
Good attendance is something that must be ingrained into the culture of your
center. A strong attendance record is necessary for everything that we do
here at Expivia. There are two main pillars of our center: Attitude and Effort.
Attendance is a HUGE part of the “effort” pillar. We hire, incentivize, and
pay based on the associate’s performance within the two pillars, making
attendance even more important.
There are four tools we use to help our attendance, and only one of them is
“negative”, we believe in much more of a less stick and more carrot.
These four tools combined have helped us maximize our associates’ desire to
work their maximum number of hours.
CALL CENTER ATTENDANCE POLICY
All of our associates are scheduled as full-time, working 37.5 hours per week.
Our goal is for every one of them to work every scheduled hour every week.
Our HR policy includes 40 unpaid, personal hours per year. Unpaid personal
hours carryover year after year. One associate that has been with us for 3
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years, used 15 personal hours, so she has 105 hours banked. Again these are
not paid, but they can be used at will for any time off needed an employee
may need.
If a person goes under 37.5 hours, we will start to look at trends that might be
occurring by checking their 4, 8, and 12-week averages. If they are missing
more and more time, HR will meet with them and they will be placed on an
improvement plan. Not all plans are the same. It could be for three weeks or
three months–it depends on what the associate and HR agree to during their
meeting. Also, it’s important to note, if an employee knows she has to catch
the 4:45 bus to get home, or he cannot get into the office before 9:20, they
need to speak to HR–it is possible we can accommodate that. Not everything
is one-size-fits-all.
ATTENDANCE FROM THE SUPERVISORY LEVEL
Supervisors are given notification of any improvement plans that are put
in place. It is up to them to check in with associates during their weekly
Agent Analysis chat. These chats allow supervisors to chat with the associate
about their attitude, attendance, dress code, KPIs, goals, etc. Which lets the
supervisor get a good feel for each individual representative.
When discussing motivation with high-attendance individuals, we may gift

them with a small motivational gift to let them know we appreciate them.
However, if the representative is on an improvement plan, this time is often
used to really stress the need for good attendance and remind them of our
incentivization practices. These associates are also meeting with HR once a
week to be sure everyone is on track for success.
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IMPROVING CALL CENTER ATTENDANCE
CALL CENTER ATTENDANCE PAY MULTIPLIERS
Attendance is important, but do you have it tied to your pay scale? We do!
We use what we call “Effort Multipliers”. Every associate has a “Control Base
Rate,” which is their standard hourly pay rate. When an associate hits 100%
attendance, they get a bonus of $1 per hour added to their rate. When they
have done this for four weeks in a row, the bonus changes to $1.50 per hour. If
they continue to have full attendance eight weeks in a row, this bumps up to a
$2 per hour bonus–which is where we have the bonus capped. The multiplier
amount will vary from center to center, especially depending on location.
This has proven to be a great way for us to reward our employees with high
attendance. Higher attendance levels are mutually beneficial! We are able to bill
more hours as a company, while the associates are taking more money home
in their checks.
CALL CENTER ATTENDANCE PROFICIENCY PAY
We offer proficiency pay based on our speech analytics technology for our
inbound call associates. This may be a little trickier to assess if you are not
using speech analytics. For us, the associates who receive a specific sentiment
score will get proficiency pay. Proficiency pay is simply another multiplier
that can be added to an associate’s hourly pay rate. But, to be one of our
proficient associates, they must work 100% of their scheduled hours.
For the outbound side, this is based on hitting a certain number of sales or
conversions. Our outbound center is very customer-based for our client’s
customers. Our associates are expected to meet certain sales targets. When
these targets are exceeded, proficiency pay becomes a possibility IF the
associate is also working 100% of the scheduled hours.
The bottom line is that if you offer incentivized proficiency pay (or commis-
sion), you have to be sure to tie it to your most important KPIs, which for
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us is occupancy and attendance. We need as many associates here daily to

provide our world-class support as possible.
CALL CENTER ATTENDANCE MOTIVATIONS
Notice attendance motivations are NOT in this list. These types/motivations

for great attendance can be fun but are not as important as the culture we
build with the four tools above. Broader motivation is often much better for
everyone than a one-off motivation. Attendance motivations have a short-
term, minimal effect when you incorporate them into your culture.
Attendance is something that all call centers sometimes struggle with. When
consulting, I see too many organizations that are looking to fix motivations
quickly and not looking to incorporate it into their culture.
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21
WHEN GOOD TIMES GO BAD
Managing Confrontation on the Call Center Floor
Confrontation in the workplace will happen. How we manage it is a trained

skill that all managers must have. These are some tactics that we cover in our
management trainee program here at Expivia when talking about call center
confrontation strategies. These can be easily transferred to any manager who
leads a team.
Every contact center deals with people. Some come to work in good moods,
and unfortunately, some do not. To make sure that your customers are being
serviced in the right way, we should make sure our middle management is
armed with the tools to handle an associate having a difficult day and seems
confrontational. Sometimes these situations may turn into the worst-case
scenario of having some sort of argument on the call center floor. These little
spats will happen. Arming your management with the tools to deal with them
as they happen is very important in developing a great working and customer
care culture.
There are many ways to handle confrontation between supervisors and

associates in a call center environment. We want to give you five basic ways
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that supervisors can limit difficult situations on their teams.
1) SUPERVISOR RESPECT
The supervisor must be respected. This is not something that is just given; it
must be earned. If you are not arming your supervisors with the tools they
need to succeed, then whose fault is it when there are issues in the center? If
there is a lack of supervisor respect, then you will have unneeded situations
arise. They must be the first one to show up on the team, dress the right
way, have the most amount of program knowledge, and most importantly,
have a want to help each team member succeed… In short, they must be great
leaders. You need to put the most amount of your day constantly working
with your middle management team. If they are world-class, the sky is the
limit. If they are average, how can we expect our reps to be more than that?
Ask yourself, have I done all I can to make stars out of my middle manage-
ment?
2) UNDERSTANDING OF EXPECTATIONS AND

CONSEQUENCES
Make sure everyone knows what is tolerated, and what is not tolerated in
writing. You can give a quick quiz on dress code, attendance issues, how to
address management and things of this nature in their initial training. Having
a company handbook online for each associate to look at and know what is
expected, and if those expectations are not met, what the consequences will
be…is a must-have.
There is nothing worse than having HR, your supervisors, or yourself act
as judge and jury when it comes to inappropriate behavior. When you leave
consequences to be dealt with in a subjective way, more issues arise. If these
things are in writing, the consequences are known and are not up in the air
depending on who is handing them out.
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WHEN GOOD TIMES GO BAD
3) DON’T LET THE SITUATION LINGER
If there is an issue on a team, the supervisor must take care of it immediately,

and they must do this off the floor. If an associate has a blowup on a supervisor,
then we take both off the floor and deal with the situation. If you are not sure
who was at “fault” then what I suggest is you send your associate home for
the day after getting a statement from them and tell them that the incident is
under investigation.
If it was a little blow-up, then we document the incident and hopefully move
on after both are talked to. We are talking though about bigger issues that
happen on a team. SOOOOO many bad mistakes get made on spur of the
moment judgments. Take a deep breath, get an associate statement, and send
the associate home. Then get a supervisor statement. Because with how well
we believe my supervisors are trained, we normally have their back unless
they admit they were wrong (which is OK!!!) and we deal with it from there.
We try to call the associate and have them come in for their shift the next day
for a quick meeting if we think the situation has calmed down. If it’s a big
deal and the associate was wrong, we will tell them of their consequences
over the phone (1-3 day suspension… or whatever your penalties are).
4) KNOW YOUR ASSOCIATES
If every supervisor takes the time to know their associates on a professional

level, then a lot of this can be avoided. Supervisors must know what motivates
certain individuals. Humor for Suzie, Rah Rahs for Janie and tough love for
Jeff are all tools that your supervisors must be trained on and know how
to deploy. Also, know the strengths and weaknesses of each team member
individually.
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5) MANAGE PEERS
Meaning do they understand how to handle relationships with those they do

not have authority over. This gets overlooked so much but we must watch
and train the proper way for supervisors to handle those that they do not have
” authority” over. How do they handle business relationships with peers,
those above them and with those in other departments? Do they handle these
with respect and understand the positive example they are setting for their
associates or are they handling these improperly which will make it much
harder for them to manage their team?
This is not talked about very much and is such an important part of managing
in the contact center world where your associates are with you all the time.
Trust me, they see everything their supervisor does good and bad. They can’t
fake these relationships.
Moral of the story:

Properly trained middle management will cut down on a ton of confronta-
tional issues.
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22
OH THE GAMES WE PLAY
Motivational Call Center Games!

Call center/customer service work is hard. Representatives on the phone
can take a ton of abuse no matter what channel they are working. The
environment must be one of comfort. And yes, it’s okay to say… FUN!
Our job is to make the customers that interact with our center have a world-
class experience. We cannot do this if our associates are lethargic, have bad
attitudes and do not want to be at work. One way we can help them is by
making the contact center THE fun place to work.
The contact center can be a place where you can do things you cannot do in
any other department. You can yell out loud, high five, cheer each other on!
You can’t do that in accounting! Show me a quiet contact center floor, and I
will show you one with high turnover, low quality and more importantly,
one that reflects the associates are not enjoying themselves.
If we can get our associates to have fun at their job, it takes their mind off all
the negative things that hamper great contact center work. All contact centers
have associates that seem to always come in with their daily troubles on their
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sleeve. All contact centers have reps that leave “sick” every day because they
are just plain bored. If we can take their attention off these things and channel
it into something positive, then we have taken a huge step in improving our
center.
It does not matter if you are running a center with an insurance, banking,
pure customer care or sales vertical. You can, and in my opinion, must make
the environment enjoyable.
DECOR
Look at your center. Most of you are probably at work looking at this book so
take a second to look at your center… I’ll wait… lol.
Does it have energy, or is it just plain and boring? If you were an associate,
would you like coming to work in this room every day? For that matter, do
you like coming into the room every day!
I’m not saying you need to overhaul your center if it’s not where it should be.
There are a couple of basic things you can do. Also, I would love to get some
of your ideas on this as well.
Balloons can add a ton to a room. Just some “company” balloons or “great
job” balloons go a long way. As basic as that sounds, if you give a balloon to
each team’s top producer daily based on your specific KPI, it goes a long way
for morale and adds to the fun look of the center.
Team Crests/logos/mascot pictures can brighten up the room and add to a

great team spirit. Just having each team decide a team logo can be a lot of
fun for the team members. You can even make a game out of it where each
sale/great call/cross-sell gets to add a name for consideration, and the top
producer gets to pick the name. Use your imagination.
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Posters. I really like to put up great sayings my reps used on a call. It’s a
reward for them to have a poster “named” after them and the phrase will get
more use because an actual rep used it. Having generic posters in a room is
okay but just gets ignored.
GAMES
I have a TON of games that can be played in a call center, enough for a whole
book (hint hint!) This hopefully will give you some ideas. These are games
that can be played daily on each team. Every day, each supervisor MUST have
some game going on with their associates. You can do team vs. team or rep
vs. rep. Please understand these are daily games to help keep our associates
focused on their daily job and to have fun. These are not monthly or quarterly
sales or service motivations for your overall top producer. That’s a separate
topic.
Bingo
Set up a board that includes some KPIs that can be measured during the day.
Each time an associate hits one goal they mark it off the sheet. Once they get
enough, BINGO gets yelled out, and you have a winner.
Poker
Each time a rep hits a KPI they get a card. Best poker hand wins at the end of
the shift or the end of the week.
Pass The…
Like the chair, we will pass an object for each Sale or KPI hit. If it’s summer,
I will go get beach balls, and we will pass or hit around a beach ball, winter,
maybe a stuffed Santa. You can award the owner of the ball each hour or just
once at the end of the shift.
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Off the Clock Sports
Reps love to be off the phones, it’s human nature. Set up some games like
having a putting green on the floor, little nerf basketball hoop or some darts up
in your center. Again, however you have it set up, great sale, great monitoring
score, KPI hit, the rep gets to get out of the booth and go play the game for a
small prize. The real prize though is the 5 minutes off the phone.
Hangman
Pretty self-explanatory. Supervisor sets up a board, and the word/phrase,

and the reps get rewarded with chances at guessing a letter and the word or
phrase.
Human Board Game
We set up a “board” that goes around the center. We put down “lose a turn,”
“Go back to start”, “move ahead 5 spaces” …on the floor of the center. We
then will move around playing pieces of the associate’s choosing like a board
game. Use your imagination. The associates are great at setting these boards
up.
Battleship
Set up a board full of prizes (5-minute break, candy bar, 10 dollars) and ships
that represent each team. Every time an associate hits a metric, they get to
choose a space. They try to sink the other ships and get prizes.
Rollerball
Use your imagination here. We set up a garbage can on one end of the room
and set up some cool ramps where the reps will roll a ball and try to get it in…
Make a different setup every time!
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Pyramid
Every rep that hits the KPI gets a chance to build a pyramid with red solo cups
and then take it down to earn a prize… again this is off the phone time for
them. Here is a link to this in our center!
Eye Spy
Supervisor sees something and every KPI a rep gets, they get a guess… good
for days when you need to engage reps.
Sorry
We have set up giant games of Sorry we play. We create the games on a big dry
erase board, same with Monopoly. Just rename some properties for people
and places in your center.
Those are all just a small sample of games a supervisor should be playing
on his/her team. Remember this is besides a center-wide motivation that
maybe runs for a week or a month. Email me for more if you are interested,
my contact info will be at the end of the book.
PRIZES
What should the prizes be? Well, I can tell you they need not be big to have
the reps fighting over them. Candy, lottery tickets, a new pencil or pen, cup,
homemade cookies, a free soda are all things that work. It’s funny, it really
depends on how your supervisor sells it. I had a supervisor give away a 5-cent
pencil eraser. Sounds boring right? But the way she sold it to her reps made
it sound like the greatest thing ever. They died to try to win it.
It’s very important that your middle management buys into this. I cannot
express the need to have energetic supervision that leads the team. Look at
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some of my other posts on middle management training if you are interested.
I hope you enjoyed this look at some of the call center games we play; it
brought back some great memories of some of the fun I have had on the call
center floor. I hope it gets you to realize how important your role is in the
overall “fun” culture of your center.
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23
MORE CALL CENTER GAMES!
For the updated version of the Geek!, we wanted to give you 13 MORE games.
Prizes vary for each game. They can range from cash, a cup, candy, a lottery
ticket, extra break time, or even going home early with pay!
Punch out
Pin 20-25 Solo cups to a corkboard, and then fill some of the cups with small
prizes: lottery tickets, cash, or wrapped candy. Leave a few cups empty, but
also fill some with shaving cream for laughs. Then, cover the cup with a
tissue, using a rubber band to hold it in place. When a rep hits their goal, they
come up to the table and pick a cup to literally punch out and keep whatever
they find.
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Find the Joker
Tape an entire deck of cards (with the Joker included) face down on a
whiteboard. As reps hit their goals, they get to sign their name on a card.
Once all cards are signed, they are pulled down one-by-one. Whoever got the
Joker is that day’s prize winner!
Target Practice
Reps are broken into teams. When a team member gets to play, they roll a
die to see how many beanbags they get to throw. Each target gets a different
point value based upon the location and difficulty level—we use a cornhole
board, a Nerf basketball hoop, and a wastebasket. The first team to hit a
certain number of points wins a prize such as extra break time or going home
early with pay.
Horse Racing
We use the 12-inch square carpet tiles on the floor in our center as “spaces” for
several games. Teams get to decorate their “horse” game piece. Supervisors
create a racetrack around the call center and then each time a team member is
eligible, they get to roll a die and move their horse that many squares forward.
The team that gets to the finish line first wins.
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Human Board Game
Before the beginning of a shift, a supervisor labels carpet tiles with different
board game spaces: lose a turn, go back three spaces, swap places, roll again,
etc. Each rep then creates their own game piece. They roll the die each time
they hit their goal or make a sale. This game is really interactive because the
reps can see where everyone else is and what they need to do to win.
Water Pong
Beer Pong at work would be frowned upon lol, so we play Water Pong instead.
We draw names and pair people into a team of two; then, using a March
Madness type of bracket with every team listed, matches are played at a set
time. Reps love this time away from their phones to play! A tournament goes
on all week. The championship round is held at end of day on Friday, when
the final match is played. We play it outside when we can so everyone can
gather around and cheer for their friends, without disrupting the people still
working. The tournament winners get a nice prize.
Bubble Race
You may have to steal your kid’s bubble mix for this one. When a rep earns
the right to participate, they blow a bubble and must help it float down the
carpet “track” as far as they can by blowing on it. When the bubble hits the
floor, they put their team’s marker down. The next person on their team
starts from where they ended. All members of the team that cross the finish
line first get a small prize.
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Guess the Temperature
When a rep earns their turn, they guess the current outdoor temperature from
the supervisor, who has just looked it up. They learn if they are too high or
too low and get to guess again during their next eligible turn. That day’s prize
goes to the winner. Stupid yet affective…lol
Jeopardy
We set up a dry erase board as a Jeopardy board and break the reps into three
teams. Supervisors have questions written out for the dollar amounts in each
category. Categories relate to the program that they are running, company-
related issues, company history, supervisors, or other things within their job.
When one member from each team is eligible, they all go up for the question.
Correct answers earn points, but wrong answers lose points for the team.
This is great for reinforcing the culture you want to have in your center by
gently reminding them what is expected.
Box It Up
Sometimes called Dots (or Dots and Boxes), a supervisor will put 200 or so
dots on the whiteboard. As team members are eligible, they come up and
draw a single straight line from one dot to a neighboring dot, with the goal
being to create a box. When a team makes a box, they mark it as theirs. The
winning team is the one with the most boxes.
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State Bingo
If you get calls from all over the country, this is a great game. Create a table
with state names in the cells. This game is played within teams (not against
other teams). As each rep is on with a caller, they have to see where the
caller is from and mark it on their board—increasing awareness of where all
the calls come from. The first team member to get a horizontal, vertical, or
diagonal Bingo wins!
Pyramid
Our reps actually practice this game because it is more talent-based than luck-
based. When eligible, a rep comes to the table and gets a stack of Solo cups to
create a pyramid. They must do it and then take it back down, in a given time.
This is kind of like those minute-to-win-it games. When someone does it,
they get a small prize—and a couple of minutes away from their phone.
Create the Mascot
Teams get a small whiteboard. As team members are eligible, they go to the
board and add one feature to the mascot: the head, an eye, a hat, etc. This
game really lets the creative and artistic people shine and brings about some
interesting creations. At the end of the day, a manager, or someone outside
of the call center, looks at each team’s board and chooses the coolest daily
mascot. This could also be set up as a fun Facebook poll.
We hope this inspires you to have more fun in your center! As hard as it may
be, let’s switch gears (That’s right, time to get serious again)and start to
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think about how you are measuring sales in your call center…
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24
TOP 5 CALL CENTER REPORTING

METHODS TO FOLLOW
Top 5 Call Center Reports You Need to Have
You can have a lot of different reports in a call center. For every metric and KPI
you track, you can have a report. However, there are only a few key metrics
you should focus on.
When you’re running your own in-house or outsourced call center, the
following types of reports are the ones that truly highlight your contact
center’s performance.
1. Daily Summary Report
Daily summary reports help you make adjustments constantly and keep your
contact center on the same page.
Include the following KPIs and metrics in the columns of your daily
summary report:
• Incoming calls: How many calls came in that day?
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• Handled calls: How many of the incoming calls were answered?

• Abandons: How many calls were abandoned without an agent answering?
• Skills: What skills were needed that day?
• Average handle time: What was the average handle time for the center
(from call start to post-call memos)?
• Service level: How many calls were handled at a given time?
• Average speed of answer: How long did the callers wait before an agent
answered?
• Longest delay: What was the longest wait time?
• Occupancy report: How many agents were working that day, and what
were they doing?
2. Snapshot Reports – Monthly Volume Trend
Keeping records of your call volumes is crucial for call center workforce
management.
Daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonal snapshot reports on call volumes can
give you invaluable insight into what to expect for the future.
When there’s a common trend of more incoming calls in a period of time, you
can schedule more agents on the floor to receive them.
Similarly, if there’s a slower day in the week, you know that you don’t need
that many people on hand.
Bonus tip: If you’re a visual person, having monthly volume trend reports as
charts and graphs is a great idea.
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TOP 5 CALL CENTER REPORTING METHODS TO FOLLOW
3. Interval Trend Report
Looking at seasonal and monthly trends gives you great insight. However,
looking at interval trends is what you really need to schedule your agents.
If you don’t have robust workforce management, these reports are important
so that you know how to staff accordingly during high call volume times. This
is especially true for internal call centers.
Call center interval trend reports look at call volume for a defined interval.
Usually, these intervals are one hour. However, some clients like to see 15-
minute intervals. If there is a definite pattern to these intervals, then we can
staff accordingly.
Just be careful about how you schedule lunchtimes!
Bonus tip: Adding service level reports to those intervals can add an extra
level of information.
4. Agent Occupancy Reports
This type of call center reporting is important for managers and agents alike.
Agent occupancy is the time that an agent is in a working state, taking physical
calls.
The question is, which type of agent occupancy should you include in your
report? And should you be looking at occupancy by program, skill, or
occupancy by agent?
The answer is all of the above!
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Each of these factors are going to correlate with each other, especially
regarding billing.
If you’re new to the industry, occupancy reports should be included with your
daily summary.
Additionally, have the conversation about whether after-call work should be

included in your occupancy reporting. This can vary by program.
5. Agent & Customer Sentiment Reports
While customer sentiment reports are crucial for how your call center’s
performing and what the reputation of your business is, don’t forget about
your agents.
Agent sentiment reports let you know about efficiency issues, training needs,
and employee satisfaction. You’ll know who needs help, and which employees
need more support.
Taking the time to seriously consider your agents’ needs is employee engage-
ment best practice. And following best practice will help get you closer to
the results you want while keeping your agents and the customers they serve
happy.
Usually, you should check agent sentiment reports once a day, and customer
sentiment reports once every three days in a call center.
Tips to Become Successful at Call Center Reporting
Keeping track of data and organizing it into reports is a great start to call
center reporting. However, certain best practices can truly make your
reporting successful:
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TOP 5 CALL CENTER REPORTING METHODS TO FOLLOW
• Agents above numbers: It’s important to realize that numbers are only
numbers. The happiness of your employees should matter more than
what’s in the report in most cases.
• Benchmark key statistics: You can look at information. However, it
won’t mean much without context. Instead make sure to also keep
benchmarks for your reports. Whether you take these benchmarks from
past performance reports or you come up with a new (but reasonable)
KPI is up to you.
• Use a dashboard: Using a unified dashboard to track and display your
data can make your reporting easier for you.
• Simplify complicated call center reports: Everyone can easily get lost
in reports with lots of numbers and data. If you’re trying to display too
much, try toning it down. Summarize or cut unnecessary things from
your reports to make them readable and effective.
• Use graphs: Reading visually pleasing reports is always easier.
• Don’t be biased: Using reporting to confirm your suspicions can seriously
harm your call center.
• Compare the reports: If you have two or more call centers, make sure
you compare your reports. See if there’s anything you can learn from the
differences and similarities, and adjust your methods accordingly.
• Review the data: Making the reports is only the first step. Once you have
the reports, you need to review and analyze them. Afterward, you can
adjust the workflows and processes your contact center uses.
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25
ERQ: THINKING OF SALES IN A NEW

WAY
We have focused mainly on a call center running mostly customer service.

What if you have a sales call center? Well, I have some thoughts on this. I
have always had outbound programs going on in our center. I started in
this business in the mid-90s during the outbound credit card heyday on the
phones.
Sales is a key component to most centers. We have thought this through as

well and kind of flipped it on its head.
Call Center Sales
No matter what type of Contact Center you are operating, there is always some
aspect of sales. Customer service centers are looking to upsell and cross-sell,
outbound centers are looking to sell. How do you get your associates to do
this the right way without having your quality drop?
Almost all internal call centers fight with the concept of interdepartmental
mingling. The finance guys need the sales numbers to be X while the customer
service executives need the quality to be Y. This is a constant struggle in a
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ERQ: THINKING OF SALES IN A NEW WAY
lot of centers. How do we meet the demand of a sales quota with keeping our
service and quality metrics above board as well?
Most call centers with a sales aspect do some sort of commission, proficiency
or incentive to reward sales in the center. Sometimes associates do anything
they can for that sale to make a quota or sales goal leading to low-quality
sales and sales that have a high cancel and low stick rate.
We at Expivia have done away with using the word “Sale” in our call center
for both our inbound and outbound programs. When used, it has a negative
connotation. This is a cultural aspect in our center.
We use a different term. ERQ.
ERQ stands for End Result of Quality. On sales programs, ERQ is the end
goal. It means our associate did what the real purpose of the call was in any
high-quality contact center; they secured a sale the right way. What is the
“right way”?
COMPLIANCE
They fully complied with all regulations. This is program specific but includes
things such as not even approaching the line with verbiage. They gave all the
proper language in its full context and read disclosures verbatim. Our rule is
that if you are approaching the line on a compliance issue, you are over the
line.
TONE
The tone of our associate is appropriate. While sales calls and customer
service calls may have different goals, the tone of the associate should be the
sale. If a sales associate is pushy or talks down to customers, then they are
not trained well enough to be on the program.
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NO LOW COMMITMENT
They must be able to sell on the merits of the product; if they can’t, then
they should not be on the floor. You should never sell on low commitment
either. If you are selling in the fact that the customer can cancel for a refund,
then what is the point? You will have low stick rates driving up costs, and
frustrating all involved, most importantly the customer.
TECHNIQUE
Their technique must be perfect. Most insurance and financial service

products scripts need to be strictly adhered to as they have gone through
many eyes at legal. Are they following the script? For our scripts, we teach
our guys to follow the script. If a customer asks a question, you answer it
leaving nothing out, they do not leave dead air for the customer to take control
of the call. They must transition the end of the question back to the script.
GET THE SALE
Fifth and last on the list is did they secure an ERQ. The ERQ is a RESULT of
the quality steps being done right.
Anyone can get a sale; they are easy. Anyone can fudge information. Anyone
can push sales through. That takes no talent and no skill. Getting a “sale” in
our organization is looked down on. Change the culture of your sales center.
All centers with a sales aspect should not be looking for sales; they should be
trying to achieve the End Result of Quality or ERQ.
Think about how you are selling right now. Do you have quality conversion or
“stick” rate issues? If so, then you need higher quality sales. This is a great
way to do that.
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26
INCENT YOUR ASSOCIATES
One of the big questions I always get asked is, how do we incent our associates?
We as an organization have thought long and hard about how we can incent
not just based on a couple of key metrics but to incent based on our culture.
How do we do that? How do we motivate based on the pillars of Attitude and
Effort?
Well, we came up with something called Proficiency Pay. We calculate who

are the most proficient associates for each week. The reward is a boost to
their hourly rate based on a scale.
What is Proficiency Pay?
While I don’t want to get into the calculation we use as it will be different for
every organization based on what you think is important to your culture, I
will tell you the ingredients.
We based it on the two cornerstones of our culture so:
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ATTITUDE:
1) Supervisors Grade
Supervisors grade this on the weekly agent analysis. We talk to reps about
being in a great mood on the floor, and we score them on it.
2) Sentiment Reporting
Something we utilize is speech analytics which has helped us quantify
attitude. We get real agent sentiment report from our analytics, and we rank
the associates based on this. This is a real way we can project delight and
engagement with customers into a number. It’s awesome!
3) Adherence to policies
All policies must be adhered to for the week. Little things like break time
overage, wearing your name badge at all times, no cell phones on the floor…
all these are considered.
EFFORT:
1) Specific KPIs for the rep (not the program) are met. These are given in
the weekly agent analysis meeting.
2) Attendance
Associates must work 100% of their schedule for the week to be eligible. If
you are not here, you cannot be among the most proficient for that week.
3) No Holdbacks
Things like putting a head down in the booth, or not being in a good mood.
This is talked about all the time and is part of our culture, so it makes sense
we pay off it.
We believe in a more holistic way of incentivizing. We expect more from our
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INCENT YOUR ASSOCIATES
associates than just hitting one or two specific numbers.
When you expect more from your team, you know what happens? When you
have hired to your culture…they give more.
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27
CHATBOTS / DIGITAL CUSTOMER

SERVICE
The topic of chatbots has rapidly become one of the most popular in the call
center industry. There has recently been an explosion of chatbots. Some
people believe these chatbots will be the end of the call center industry.
While that is unlikely to happen, they can be used to enhance the customer
experience and customer service.
Where we are now with chatbots is similar to where we were with IVR about
10-15 years ago. Many people thought IVR would revolutionize the customer
experience and render call center reps obsolete.
RULE-BASED BOT
We have found that rule-based bots can handle about 80% of customer
questions. They are also used for lead generation. Rule-based bots are
basically virtual IVRs. They give you a menu and you hit the right buttons to
go down the path you want. They have keyword recognition to help guide
customers to the right destination. Using a rule-based chatbot can help
take volume away from the call center by answering the majority of simple
questions your customers may have.
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CHATBOTS / DIGITAL CUSTOMER SERVICE
That being said, chatbots can never replace a customer service rep. Some
customers can find them annoying or frustrating and would prefer to speak
to a real person. There should be an easy integration for your customer to
turn the session into a live chat with a real person.
AI
The term AI is often misused. AI is a data-centric bot that can collect

information and learn from your profile. If you’ve called before, it can retain
that information from your previous customer service interactions. It then
can present this data back to you to make your customer service interactions
easier.
KEYWORD-CENTRIC BOT
With this bot, you simply type your query into the platform. The bot will pick
up keywords from your message to know what it is you’re asking.
CONTEXTUAL BOT
The contextual bot “learns” and assimilates your data, taking into considera-
tion your previous interactions with customer service. It can prompt you and
ask if you would like to do the same things you’ve done previously. This bot
is more “conversational” than the previous two types.
SHOULD YOU USE A BOT?
You may not want or need a bot for your customer service. First, understand
your customers. Understand the types of questions they typically ask your
customer service representatives. If they tend to ask very in-depth, high-end
questions, a chatbot won’t cut it. They’ll need to speak to a rep.
Nonetheless, you do need some sort of texting/chatting self-service, in your
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customer service. Almost everyone has a cell phone capable of using apps, and
those customers want a fast and easy platform for answering quick customer
service questions.
Look into what these different bots can do. They can answer simple questions,
book appointments, buy products, and help you pay a bill or check a balance.
These are all simple tasks a customer may not want to talk to a rep for. For
customers with more difficult questions, they’ll need to speak to a rep. Bots
are also not quite as good at upsell/cross-sell as a person might be.
You could even use more than one type of bot. You could have a bot to answer
customer questions and another for lead generation. Before developing a bot,
you’ll want to analyze your data for a few weeks and narrow down your top
customer questions, and if those could be integrated into the chatbot, and
how.
Developing a bot can range from $10,000-$25,000 and up, depending on the
sophistication of the bot. Often you may pay a flat rate of about 50 cents per
use of the bot.
Chatbots provide for a very interesting technology, and new functions are
being added every day. Don’t panic if you haven’t implemented a chatbot
or if you’re not sure about it. Adding a chatbot to your customer service
repertoire is something you can outsource so you don’t even have to deal with
the logistics, but may greatly enhance customer experience.
DIGITAL CUSTOMER SERVICE TIPS

Everything seems to be more digital/social nowadays. Customers aren’t as
comfortable with picking up the phone as they are with sending an email.
That’s a social change call centers need to be aware of. But, it’s not a change
to fear. Contact centers should embrace digital customer service, and use
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CHATBOTS / DIGITAL CUSTOMER SERVICE
best practices to take care of customers over the internet.
Over-the-phone customer service isn’t dead. People will always need a

reassuring voice, and they’ll always feel the need to be heard but social media
is a preferred channel for millions of customers. Here are a couple of quick
tips to help you in supporting Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Linkedin, IG….
1. Balance Public Commenting vs. Private Messaging
Some customers will message you privately, others will make their complaints
public. Make sure you respond to both types of customer service requests.
While public posts hurt your reputation, it doesn’t mean that private messages
should be avoided.
Make sure you respond to negative public posts. But, don’t solve their issues
publicly. Guide the customer to message you privately or call you.
If their friends and other customers see that you handle their concerns
with tact and elegance, they’ll be reassured again about your company’s
professionalism.
2. Use a Service Handle
Create a username, or handle, that you use to communicate digitally with

customers. Don’t respond to customer service requests with your personal
account.
You want to funnel people towards messaging the service handle if there is a
problem, instead of making everything public. This will allow you to really
watch this specific handle and respond quickly, even as you still listen to other
channels.
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3. Be Proactive
Don’t let negativity fester on your page. Respond to a negative post, and tag
them by saying, “Hey, @SallySmith, I’m sorry to hear this. Please DM us so
we handle this for you!”
Most of the time the customer will do this because they just want to be heard.
They’ve already tried multiple other avenues and not gotten the resolution
they wanted. As a result, they turned to social media to vent.
4. Always Be Positive
Even if a customer berates your service, make sure you respond professionally
and positively. How you message them back tells other potential customers
more about you than some complaint. Remember, how you talk on the phone
is how you should talk to a customer digitally.
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28
WHAT DOES AI REALLY MEAN FOR

YOUR CONTACT CENTER
Sci-fi films and dystopian novels always say that AI will overtake humans in
the future. While we’re not there yet, AI is definitely a growing trend in the
customer service industry. Is AI overtaking your contact center right now? Is
your call center ready to integrate artificial intelligence?
We’re not going to speculate on the fate of humanity vs. AI. But, we’ll try to
show you how you can use AI to your advantage at your contact center. Find
out what types of AI software is commercially available, and how you can use
it effectively.
What Is AI and How Can You Use It in Contact Centers?
AI or artificial intelligence is the concept of intelligent machines. Unlike

living beings, computers can’t feel emotions. However, they can think and
calculate much faster than humans. That’s why artificial intelligence has the
potential to greatly improve people’s lives, and customer service too.
Various AI programs exist to interact with humans as if they were humans
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themselves. AI software can range from a simple code that responds with
set commands to a sophisticated program that can analyze and interpret
linguistics to adjust its responses.
As you can see, not all artificial intelligence software is the same. And even in
a contact center, there are different types of AI you can use.
Find out which contact center AI suits your business best.
The Self Service Bot
Although these programs aren’t complicated, they’re definitely a smart and

innovative way to handle simple customer service requests.
The self-service bot can handle interactions that don’t necessarily need an
agent. Setting up appointments, answering basic questions, and distributing
information are the self-service bot’s greatest uses.
Getting simple tasks done without the need for a human agent can save
companies time and money.
You can find self-service bots in online chats, and even some low-level
interactive voice response (IVR) programs over the phone.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
IVR has been a great asset to call centers. A robotic greeting voice that can
take customer information and direct them to the right place makes every
agent’s job easier.
However, not all call centers use IVR technology right. Some set it up to be
too long, others don’t rely on it as much as they should.
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WHAT DOES AI REALLY MEAN FOR YOUR CONTACT CENTER
When you implement an IVR system, make sure you map out the customer’s
journey. Don’t let them relay information pre-call that they just have to
repeat to the agent. This can lead to increased call time, frustrated customers,
and low satisfaction scores.
AI in Contact Center Analytics
Arguably, AI’s greatest strength lies in contact center analytics.
An artificial intelligence program can listen to a conversation and understand

what the agent and the customer talk about. What’s more, it can also
understand linguistic cues and compile analytics on how the call went overall.
AI can transcribe and analyze conversations, give sentiment scoring, and aid
the agent to help solve their problems faster.
Google’s Contact Center AI
Google made some headlines back in 2018 with its brand new contact center
AI. An artificial intelligence program made an appointment at a hair salon,
and the hairdresser had no idea she was talking to a robot.
This is the kind of technology executives think of when they hear artificial
intelligence in call centers. Sophisticated technology that is on par with
human communication.
But, just because it’s generally available doesn’t mean that it’s generally
acceptable yet. Some customers may really dislike talking to AI instead of a
human.
Since 2018, Google’s artificial intelligence contact center has only improved.
Now offering extensive services to companies, AI is just another avenue where
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Google’s resources excel.
AI Real-Life Call Transcription
Currently, analytics happens after the call. The call gets recorded, then it
goes to a server for transcription. Then, it’s sent to another server to analyze
the speech patterns and performance. Finally, we receive it with the overall
readout of keywords, tone, sentiment, and other key metrics.
Real-life transcription could make this into a streamlined and efficient

process.
A supervisor can monitor all calls in real-time. They can help agents in need
and ensure that customer service standards are met.
AI Call Center Agent Assist
Another great feature of real-time transcription is the AI’s assist function.

Agent Assist will give the agent real-time advice on how to service, how to
sell, what to say, and when to say it.
For example, when the AI hears the customer say “thank you” it will suggest
a way to cross-sell or up-sell a product.
This doesn’t just make the customer service better. It also makes the contact
center more profitable. It will help our agents sell and convert more happy
customers.
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WHAT DOES AI REALLY MEAN FOR YOUR CONTACT CENTER
AI in Contact Center Tools

As you can see from above, the main influence that AI currently is having is in
the tool of the contact center. We are also seeing this when it comes to tools
such as Advanced Speech Analytics, Workforce Management Software, and
the software used in real-time routing and skilling agents.
Will Artificial Intelligence Replace Call Center Agents?
AI seems to be capable of anything. It can think like a human, talk like a

human, and in some cases, it even sounds like a human.
This begs the question: will AI replace real-life call center agents?
With IVR and self-service bots being increasingly popular and significantly
cheaper, a lot of people would say yes. But, the truth is much different.
Artificial intelligence will never replace real people, yet.

Everyone craves human connection. And we’re not just talking about our
distrust of machines. Your customers will be frustrated if they can’t contact
a human to resolve their problems.
Any executive that hopes that AI software will just have to appreciate their
employees, their customer service skills, and their empathy.
Contact Center Best Practice: AI with Agents
So, you’re saying AI is amazing for contact centers, then you tell us they won’t
replace humans? Which one is it?
Well, it’s both.
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For the ultimate contact center efficiency and customer satisfaction, you
should use real-life agents and AI combined, you probably already are! The
software can take some of the weight off your reps’ shoulders, letting them
focus on the inquiries that truly require the human touch.
Remember, customer satisfaction should be every contact center’s main

focus. And cutting corners won’t guarantee the best results.
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29
TIPS FOR YOUR VIRTUAL WFH CONTACT

CENTER
Covid19 really was a wake-up call for all of us in the customer support and
contact center industry. Contact center agents working from home went from
a novelty to an absolute must-have. We saw huge investment in the cloud
to support this but also many contact center executives (including myself)
had to rethink how to operate in this new environment. Here are some tips
that I learned in moving 600 agents from 100% brick and mortar to a virtual
workforce environment.
8 Useful Tips to Set Up a Virtual Work From Home Call Center
Setting up a virtual work-from-home call center doesn’t happen with the

switch of a button. You need to plan and organize the procedure. Most
importantly, you need to train your reps to follow them as well. Use these 8
useful tips to make the process a lot smoother for you.
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Protect Your Equipment
Operating a call center requires equipment. Computers, headsets, and

keyboards. While most people have a laptop at home, you can always allow
your reps to take their work computer and headphones home. If you’re
operating a virtual call center, this could be very useful for them. Not to
mention how nice the gesture will be on your part.
However, make sure you protect your equipment as much as you can. Draft
up a take-home policy document that your reps agree to and sign.
In this document, you can state that you’re giving reps the equipment only
for work purposes. They can only use them during work hours.
Once they’re done, they need to lock them away. And, of course, they need to
return the equipment if they’re not working from home.
Manage Your Agents Differently
How you manage your reps will change if they’re working virtually from home.
Again as we said above, multiple short check-ins are much more effective
than less frequent and longer ones.
You or other call center supervisors should check in with each team member
regularly throughout the workday. A collective Zoom call before the shift
begins can motivate and orientate everyone. Afterward, you can also Zoom
individual reps to talk about personal goals and KPIs.
We also recommend that you touch base with agents and motivate them often.
Sending an encouraging message once every 15-20 minutes does a lot of
wonders.
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TIPS FOR YOUR VIRTUAL WFH CONTACT CENTER
Over-communicate…
3. Create a Checklist
It’s difficult to stay on task while working from home in a virtual call center.
Checklists are incredibly helpful with that. And not just for you. For your
supervisors and agents as well.
Create a checklist of tasks, goals, and KPIs for both you and your team. Ideally,
you want to give them a new one every day.
For supervisors, include tasks like reaching out to every single associate and
sending out motivational messages. It’s not as fun as winging it, but it’s
crucial, and it works.
4. Think About Security Measures
Security at a call center is incredibly important. You’re handling sensitive

information on clients and accounts, and keeping that data safe is crucial. As
you can imagine, virtual work at home call centers can’t monitor their agents
about compliance.
Before you lend associates computers, make sure you take measures to
encrypt the data. Most importantly, they shouldn’t be able to download
anything on a flash drive.
Even if you take all the preventive security measures, you’re still not always
compliant with regulations.
Arguably the most sensitive information out there is credit card details. Are
virtual work from home call centers PCI compliant? No, they’re not. And if
you set up a work-at-home call center, you need to understand this.
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PCI compliance goes way beyond your hardware and firewalls. It also goes
into your policies and procedures as well.
At Expivia we utilize our IVR and APIs for collecting credit card information,
so the agent never sees it. They only see the last four digits. This allows them
to verify and move on. It’s the safest way to keep information secure at virtual
call centers.
5. Use Dashboards More
Since you can’t control how your agents are working, dashboards become
your lifeline at a virtual call center. You can’t check how diligently they’re
working. But, you can check their performance and results.
Set up a dashboard that transmits performance data in real-time. You can

check quality scores, service levels, handle time, and occupancy easily.
6. Engage Your Employees
Working at a call center isn’t an easy job. Agents take on a lot when they’re
in charge of customer service and satisfaction. So, it’s crucial that they feel
engaged, fulfilled, and happy.
There are a multitude of call center games you can play, even if you’re working
from home.
7. Guide Your Agents
It’s easy for agents to feel unsure and uncomfortable when they’re working
from home. They don’t have their supervisor or manager to turn to if they
have questions. But, it’s your job to make them feel self-confident in their
work.
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TIPS FOR YOUR VIRTUAL WFH CONTACT CENTER
A monitoring tool that can bridge this gap is what our reps call jokingly the
“Voice of God”. This method lets you listen in on the calls that your agents
are making. And you can give them suggestions and advice as your agents go
through the call without the customer hearing you.
This goes a long way to helping your agents perform better. Plus, it’ll probably
make them feel like they’re secret agents on a mission.
8. Monitor Everything
It’s easy to check up on your employees and see how they’re performing in an
office. But, when you’re working separately from them, it’s easy to forget or
overlook regular check-ins. In fact, you should be even more vigilant about
monitoring performance. For your sake and for the success of your call center.
We use speech analytics to analyze how the calls go. And we can measure
customer satisfaction to see if our agents are hitting their KPIs easily.
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COST ANALYSIS FOR NON-FINANCE

MANAGERS
Let’s take a second to think about the actual costs that go into your call center.
You don’t have to be an accountant to do this, but it’s helpful to understand all
the factors that go into the cost of running your center. There are a lot of more
technical ways to do this, but one way we like to compare apples to apples
is to cost out our center and divide that cost by the number of reps you have.
This way you can see how much an associate is costing your organization
when you add in all the support they are given.
We have a calculator you can play with on our Expivia website at

www.expiviausa.com/savings-calculator. This will allow you to put in the
actual numbers and see what one associate is costing your organization. It’s
fun to do and sometimes really eye-opening.
Here are most costs that go into an associate in the majority of call centers
that you may not be thinking of in totality:
1) Salary
2) Payroll Taxes
3) Supervisor Costs/number of agents
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COST ANALYSIS FOR NON-FINANCE MANAGERS
4) Telephone charges
5) Equipment (Desks, computers)
6) Quality Assurance/number of agents
7) Work-Force Management/number of agents
8) CRM License
9) Training Costs
10) Rent/ Lease
11) Motivations/commissions/proficiency pay
12) IT Costs
So how we do this is to add up all the costs and divide it by the total amount
of associates you have.
When you add all that in we have found on average, an associate costs roughly
$59,000 a year.
Find out the exact cost of an associate at your center by going to https://expi
viausa.com/savings-calculator/ and play with our call center calculator.
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31
ADVANCED CALL CENTER

TECHNOLOGIES: CURRENT TRENDS
AND BEST PRACTICES
You’re always surrounded by technology in a call center. From the way you
get the call to the aftercall memo you need to send, everything’s connected
to technology. Without knowing what the current and upcoming trends in
advanced call center technologies are, you may be left behind.
Seeing what options are available is just as available as looking ahead.
Get familiar with the latest contact center technologies, and become a world-
class contact center when you implement them by taking in this chapter. I
love technology when used properly!
10 Advanced Call Center Technologies World-Class Centers Use
The following call center technologies may seem very advanced for legacy
contact centers. But, all the world-class centers use these technologies daily.
They don’t just make your life easier at the call center. They also raise the
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ADVANCED CALL CENTER TECHNOLOGIES: CURRENT TRENDS AND BEST...
quality of your calls and the workload of your employees. Implement these
advanced call center technologies for the smooth operation of your contact
center.
1. Omnichannel Support
A lot of call centers already use multichannel ways to communicate with

customers. But, providing omnichannel support is what separates world-
class call centers.
What’s the difference between multichannel and omnichannel support in a

contact center?
Multichannel support means that you’re connecting with customers through

phone calls, emails, text messages, or online chat. Omnichannel means you
can handle all of those different inquiries within the same session.
You could take an inbound call as you are doing a chat session, and when
all that data enters your CRM, the platform encapsulates it. This call center
technology gives agents more freedom and customers more effective problem
resolution.
While omnichannel is a popular current trend, it’s not the end of the line
in contact center interaction innovation. Discover what the not-so-distant
future holds for omnichannel contact centers from NICE CEO Paul Jarman.
2. Advanced Analytics Software
Every world-class call center should invest in analytics technology. This tool
truly raises the quality of your contact center.
You can’t rely on customer surveys to see how well you’re performing.
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By monitoring every single call, picking up keywords, and building customer

profiles, call center analytics software gives you the advantage of monitoring
the customer’s entire journey.
Call analytics software changes the game in how you view each call.
It gives you everything you need to optimize and enhance the customer
experience. And that’s the greatest goal every world-class call centers need
to have.
3. Workforce Management Software
Some advanced call center technologies have more to do with the inner
workings of your contact center than communicating with your customers.
Nonetheless, they’re crucial.
Advanced workforce management software can analyze the stats of your reps,
forecast call trends, handle times, and predict the workforce goal you need to
handle requests. Real-time staffing suggestions also help managers assign
shifts much faster.
Workforce management software ensures you have the right amount of people
on the floor at the right time. This results in associate efficiency, and the
smooth operation of your call center.
4. Self-Service Technologies
Speaking of call center efficiency, advanced self-service technologies are

incredibly helpful.
A lot of incoming calls don’t need the time and energy of your reps. If an
interactive voice response (IVR) system, or enhanced AI chatbots, can take
care of them, it saves your call center time and money.
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However, self-service CANNOT be your service model.
It should be a helpful addition.
But, people don’t trust robots, and they love talking to other people. A
combination of IVR and agent interaction is a call center best practice when
it comes to technology.
5. Robotic Automation
Everything’s about automation nowadays. And call centers can take advan-
tage of this just as much as other businesses.
Robotic automation software can make the after-call work process easier
on your reps. It can auto-fill forms, save information, and create relevant
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memos effectively.
If you have the budget, investing in robotic automation in your call center
can make it even more efficient.
6. Gamification
Not every advanced call center technology needs to be about KPIs and call
center metrics. Some can also be for fun. Yet, the end result does enhance
the performance of your call center.
The work of your agents can be draining and repetitive. It’s your job to create
a fun, engaging, and motivating environment for them. And gamification is
a great way to do that.
Playing games, betting with (or against) each other, and winning prizes can
always lighten the mood. And there are plenty of call center games that you
can tie together with technology.
7. Advanced Call Center Reporting Technologies
Real-time reporting is an advanced call center technology that everyone

needs to have. That’s how you can stay on top of everything that’s happening
in your call center.
You need a dashboard that shows your service levels, calls in queue, a skill
summary for the reps, agent status, and how many calls came in for the day.
You also can opt for advanced reporting tools that include third-party and
non-telephony data as well.
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8. Voice Authentication
Security in a call center is very important. Especially if you handle clients’

financial information. And that’s where voice authentication becomes an
incredible call center technology to use.
Voice authentication isn’t widely used yet, but it will be in the future. It allows
customers to verify their identity without going through the long and tedious
verification process.
9. QA Tools and Technologies
Quality assurance (QA) and quality management (QM) are very important
for your call center and your agents. If you have an advanced platform that
monitors and rates the performance of your agents, you can give personalized
advice on improvement.
This raises the quality of your calls, the performance of your agents, and the
work culture of your center.
10. Advanced Contact Center Platform
While all these advanced call center technologies are amazing, wouldn’t it
be amazing to have one, fully integrated platform for a call center? One that
leverages omnichannel communication, analyzes conversations, and rates
them for quality assurance at the same time?
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The Call Center of the Future: What Technologies Can We

Expect?
Once you know what call center technologies are out there, you know what
you can buy and implement. But, if you’re really thinking ahead of the curve
here, you can also expect the newest innovations in call center technologies
before they’re available.
That mindset can keep your call center truly ahead of the game.
Discover what the future holds for call center technology and innovation.
1. The Rise of Call Center AI
Before artificial intelligence (AI) takes over the world, it will take over call
centers first. There’s already a significant use in AI agent assist and Google’s
developing their own AI call center technologies.
You can already find AI chatbots and IVR systems along with AI in speech
analytics and WFM software.
But, AI’s significance and reach will definitely develop in the next few years.
While AI will never replace customer service in call centers, it will definitely
improve the customer experience.
2. Predictive Behaviour Routing
How we connect callers to agents isn’t an art form. With the proper call center
technologies, it can be a science.
In the past, routing calls evolved from longest wait time to skills-based
routine. However, in the future, it will also be based on predicted behavior.
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Imagine using analytics and AI to predict the customer’s tone, and connect
them to a like-minded agent. The information exchange, the mood, and the
success of the call will be exponential.
3. Cloud-Based Call Centers
Server rooms and physical databases will be a thing of the past. Cloud-based
call centers can lower overhead expenses, increase the speed of updates, and
provide greater flexibility.
Clients prefer cloud-based contact centers because they can blind monitor
their agents. And agents can also enjoy its benefits as they have the option to
work from home.
4. VR/AR in Service
While it’s still pretty rare, many companies are moving towards the use of
virtual and augmented reality when it comes to the customer experience.
NFTS, the Metaverse, smart contracts, and blockchain technology will all be
up-and-coming tech to watch out for in the coming years.
This helps agents and clients solve more complex issues for customers, such
as troubleshooting.
5. Advanced Call Center Technologies to Enhance Security
While there are plenty of different security measures out there, the technology
behind them is constantly evolving. Today, voice recognition is the newest
trend in call center information security, who knows what the future holds.
What’s certain is that we’ll keep an eye out for the newest security innovations
to keep our clients’ and customers’ information safe.
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6. The Metaverse, NFTs, Smart Contracts, Blockchain
Facebook (at the time of this publishing) just announced they are changing
their name to Meta. The name change thought is a small piece of what they
are doing. One of the largest companies in the world is changing its entire
business model to focus on the Metaverse!
Are you ready to start servicing customers in a digital world in Virtual Reality?
This should open all of our eyes as tho what is coming especially how it
correlates to CX, it definitely opened mine.
NFTs and Smart contracts will be revolutionizing the interaction with

customers and the CX. The next book that will be coming out will deal strictly
with this topic, until then, make sure you educate yourself!
Get to Know the Call Center That’s Not Afraid to Use Technology
If you cling to legacy systems and processes, you’re setting your call center
up for failure. Your agents will be constantly frustrated, your overhead costs
will never go down, and worst of all, your customer satisfaction will plummet.
With the right call center technologies, you can modernize your contact center
to connect with the right customers at the right time.
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32
THE DIRTY WORD...OUTSOURCING
Call Center Outsourcing
Now that we have looked at the cost of your center in the previous, although
very short chapter, please indulge me in a cheap plug for looking at outsourc-
ing your center. In this chapter, we will look at some of the benefits of call
center outsourcing.
In the next chapter, I will give you the basic pricing structure of USA,
Nearshore and offshore pricing options. This is great info to have if you
ever decide you need to talk to an outsourcing company. I want you to be a
step ahead of the game if you never outsourced before.
If your organization cannot put in the time or the money to do a lot of the
things we have talked about in the previous chapters, outsourcing to a high-
end call center to do these things may be the best move for you and your
customers.
There is a perception in the market you should never give up control of your
customer experience to a 3rd party. The thinking is in-house facilities are
ALWAYS better, right!
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The fact is usually this is not the truth. From my experiences, most internal
centers cannot compete with the training, technology, expertise, and cost-
effectiveness of a high-end USA Contact Center BPO. Many of you sell a
product or a service and “do” call center stuff on the side. This is all we
do, and we are pretty good at it just like many other call centers like us out
there.
When the question comes up whether to outsource or not, you must under-
stand the difference between what your customers desire and what you can
provide.
Does your current in-house center provide:

• Multi-Channel/ Omni Channel Operations (Voice, Chat, Email, Video,
Social)
• Fully Integrated CRM Platform
• Advanced Speech Analytics 100%
• Advanced Routing Techniques
• Forecasting and Workforce Optimization Software
• Expert Call Center Personnel
• Chatbot/Texting AI Capabilities Cost-Effective Operations
If your in-house operation cannot stand with the technology of today by being
at least a multi-channel facility; if you do not have the time or resources to train,
monitor and track your personnel and KPIs, then you are doing your customers a
disservice by NOT outsourcing.
Many customer service executives too often think outsourcing means off-
shoring. The issues of foreign accents handling US calls and perceived lack of
quality are some of the first things, unfortunately, that come to mind. The
other negative thought we hear all the time is “my program is not big enough
to outsource” and “isn’t it expensive to outsource to US call centers?”
These notions of outsourcing usually are just not true. There are now many
158
cost-effective USA BPO call centers, like Expivia that offer customers more
than most in-house customer service centers in quality options while still
lowering costs and giving a better experience to customers than can be done
in-house.
The Cost Myth
Cost can be a huge benefit when looking to outsource. The cost of telephony,
servers, equipment, supervision, training, monitoring, tracking, and report-
ing add up. If you are not experienced at running a contact center and are
just purchasing the equipment without the real knowledge, you are risking a
huge expense to your bottom line and a threat to your brand and reputation.
Many think USA call center outsourcing is not a cost-effective way of

outsourcing.
A wide variety of companies may want to look at outsourcing their customer

service to give great service to their customers while still concentrating on
their core business. This is something we at Expivia think is especially helpful
for newer businesses that want to make sure they are on equal footing with the
technology offerings of larger competitors.
What you must look at if you are thinking of outsourcing
1. Proper Size
This is the first thing a company must consider before talking to contact
centers. What size BPO is right for you. If you are looking to outsource a
major program 1000+ seats, then you must talk to the multi-national call
centers with sites that can be as large as thousands of seats or more important
have multiple sites they can place your business for more redundancy.
Most of the time though, this is not the case as many customer service
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programs fall into the under 100 seat range. I personally would not want
my 20-100 seat program at a site with 1000 seats. In my observations, your
program will fall through the cracks, and you will become frustrated. You
probably want to look at a company with 500 seats or less to give your program
the time it deserves.
2. Track Record of Management
What has the management team done? Are they experts in your business type?
There are many niche call centers out there “specializing” in everything from
financial service to IT to retail. Make sure you have a comfort level with the
management of the call center, and they understand your business type.
3. Client Support Method
Client support is one of the most important points you must feel comfortable
on. Some call centers, like ours, make sure you have a one-point client
services manager to help you with all your needs be it production, IT,
reporting, etc. Many larger call centers have clients call into the call center
manager on the floor for issues. Some have you call in and put in trouble
tickets! I am in the group that believes all programs deserve a center where
issues can be dealt with 24/7 by a voice that understands your program.
4. Associate Match
The Call Center you choose needs to be an extension of your brand. The center
you choose should match the demographics of your choice in your center.
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5. Proper Technology
Have a baseline thought on what your program may need from a technical
standpoint and then make sure the call center has at least that in their
arsenal. Will you need call recording, virtual queues (queue callbacks), private
client monitoring, speech analytics capability, chatbots? Are they a multi-
channel facility (voice, chat, email, self-service options)? Do they have onsite
programmers or do they outsource programming? Can they handle any
screen, CTI, and connectivity issues? The call center of today is a high-tech
business. Make sure the call center you choose is up to date with current
technologies.
There is no excuse not to be.
6. Onshore/Offshore/Hybrid
This is a big decision and one you must not take lightly. There are some
programs that do well offshore. There are many though that need a US-based
center. There are pluses and minuses here that would take a whole new post.
All I will say here is you must understand your customers and the programs
you need to have done. Costs obviously are much cheaper offshore, but the
price you may pay in customer loyalty can make it expensive.
7. Company Culture
What is the culture of the call center? This is where site visits become
important. Is the center paperless, is there energy, do the associates look
like they want to be there? You cannot ask agents to go over and above for
your customers if the center is not doing that for their agents. How are the
agents paid, what incentives are there, what is the agent turnover, how are
supervisors and management chosen? These are all important questions to
get a feel for the company. Ask yourself, do they value what we do. That
question must be answered as a yes, or you need to move on.
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8. Training
How are their new associates on board, what training do they receive before
they start on the floor? What is the ongoing training like? How do they
communicate with agents about program changes? How do they handle
internal monitoring?
Training of agents is huge and a topic not to be forgotten.
9. Scalability/Flexibility
Some people talk about the scalability of a call center. Can they help you as
you grow yet still scale back if needed? I talk more about the flexibility of a
center. Do they take the time to understand your specific business cycle and
needs? Some centers do a great job with this while some will set minimums.
Make sure you have a comfort level here.
10. Security
Is the Center you are using PCI compliant? They better be. It is no longer just
a perk to be PCI. It should be mandatory for any call center you work with .
We would suggest only working with paperless companies (no paper in call
center booths) with strict no cell phone policies.
I don’t want this to be a sales pitch, but this is an option if you are struggling
to service your customers the right way.
If your call center doesn’t rock, mine does. Look at all your options.
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33
ULTIMATE GUIDE TO CONTACT CENTER

OUTSOURCING
Call Center Outsourcing
Now that we have looked at the cost of your center in the previous, please
indulge me in a plug for looking at outsourcing your center. In this chapter,
we will look at some of the benefits of call center outsourcing.
In the next chapter, I will give you the basic pricing structure of USA,
Nearshore and offshore pricing options. This is great info to have if you
ever decide you need to talk to an outsourcing company. I want you to be a
step ahead of the game if you never outsourced before.
If your organization cannot put in the time or the money to do a lot of the
things we have talked about in the previous chapters, outsourcing to a high-
end call center to do these things may be the best move for you and your
customers.
There is a perception in the market you should never give up control of your
customer experience to a 3rd party. The thinking is in-house facilities are
163
ALWAYS better, right!
The fact is usually this is not the truth. From my experiences, most internal
centers cannot compete with the training, technology, expertise, and cost-
effectiveness of a high-end USA Contact Center BPO. Many of you sell a
product or a service and “do” call center stuff on the side. This is all we
do, and we are pretty good at it just like many other call centers like us out
there.
When the question comes up whether to outsource or not, you must under-
stand the difference between what your customers desire and what you can
provide.
Does your current in-house center provide:
• Multi-Channel/ Omni Channel Operations (Voice, Chat, Email, Video,

Social)
• Fully Integrated CRM Platform
• Advanced Speech Analytics 100%
• Advanced Routing Techniques
• Forecasting and Workforce Optimization Software
• Expert Call Center Personnel
• Chatbot/Texting AI Capabilities Cost-Effective Operations
If your in-house operation cannot stand with the technology of today by being
at least a multi-channel facility; if you do not have the time or resources to train,
monitor and track your personnel and KPIs, then you are doing your customers a
disservice by NOT outsourcing.
Many customer service executives too often think outsourcing means off-
shoring. The issues of foreign accents handling US calls and perceived lack of
quality are some of the first things, unfortunately, that come to mind. The
164
ULTIMATE GUIDE TO CONTACT CENTER OUTSOURCING
other negative thought we hear all the time is “my program is not big enough
to outsource” and “isn’t it expensive to outsource to US call centers?”
These notions of outsourcing usually are just not true. There are now many
cost-effective USA BPO call centers, like Expivia that offer customers more
than most in-house customer service centers in quality options while still
lowering costs and giving a better experience to customers than can be done
in-house.
The Cost Myth
Cost can be a huge benefit when looking to outsource. The cost of telephony,
servers, equipment, supervision, training, monitoring, tracking, and report-
ing add up. If you are not experienced at running a contact center and are
just purchasing the equipment without the real knowledge, you are risking a
huge expense to your bottom line and a threat to your brand and reputation.
Many think USA call center outsourcing is not a cost-effective way of

outsourcing.
A wide variety of companies may want to look at outsourcing their customer

service to give great service to their customers while still concentrating on
their core business. This is something we at Expivia think is especially helpful
for newer businesses that want to make sure they are on equal footing with the
technology offerings of larger competitors.
If you decide to outsource your contact center needs, you need to do it right.
This ultimate guide that we have created, can help you figure out what contact
center outsourcing is, what its benefits are, and how you can find the customer
service right partner.
In this chapter, we’ll give you tips and advice on how to manage the
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relationship with your outsourcing partner. Plus, we’ll point out what red
flags you need to look out for before and after you outsource your customer
engagement.
Keep reading to find out how to navigate the pitfalls of contact center
outsourcing and find the right partner for your organization.
How Does Contact Center Outsourcing Work
Trusting an outside provider to handle your customer service is a big step.

And if you’re wondering how to hire an outsourced contact center, here are
five steps you should follow:
1. Know Your Needs: Before you can reach out to a partner, you need to
know what you need. Map out the needs of your business and how you
think a contact center can support those needs.
2. Find the Right Fit: Choose a call center that matches your organization’s
values and goals. And look for partners that get along with your team
while striving to exceed your customer expectations.
3. Establish and Track KPIs: You need a partner that has the right
technology for monitoring and tracking key performance indicators
(KPIs), so you can evaluate performance at any time.
4. Prioritize Transparency: You need to focus on running your business,
not double-checking your call center to ensure they’re delivering on
your expectations. (At Expivia, we use blind monitoring to increase
transparency while giving our partners freedom.)
5. Collaborate and Calibrate Regularly: Any long-term partnership re-
quires work and communication. Work with a call center that doesn’t
keep you in the dark, one that provides regular check-ins and recalibra-
tions. This way you know what you’re getting.
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Reasons Why You Should Outsource Your Call Center
For some, hiring a contact center to handle customers is an obvious choice.

For others, breaking away from in-house solutions is a bigger step.
These are some reasons why outsourced contact centers benefit your business.
Review this list to put your mind at ease and discover the benefits of choosing
a third-party contact center.
1. Save Time and Money
Offloading non-essential tasks to outsourced companies can lower your

overhead costs significantly. Think of all the revenue you’ll save on office
space, equipment, software, and payroll.
However, it’s important to note that price shouldn’t be the main driver for
outsourcing your contact center.
If you want quality customer service (and you should), it may not be the
cheapest option, Although you’ll save money on overhead costs and labor
costs, the contact center you choose should still be seen as an investment in
your business growth.
The team you choose will be working with your organization’s most valuable
asset: your customers. And you want to be certain that the team you choose
has the skills and technology to exceed their expectations.
Still, if your company’s based in a big city like New York or Chicago, the price
of office rent is likely very high. Rural outsourcing (outsourcing to a call
center located in a mid-sized city like Erie, PA) can effectively save you a lot
of money without sacrificing the quality of service.
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2. Improve Customer Experience
Leave it to the professionals! Hiring an outsourced call center doesn’t just

benefit you directly. Your customers will also thank you for the “white-
gloved” support they receive.
Every good call center lives and breathes world-class customer service. It’s
not just about being polite. It’s about finding the right answer and solution
in a timely manner to keep your customers happy.
Effective conflict resolution, emotion management, and universal kindness

are some of the core skills of every good associate.
3. Lower Turnover and Training
There’s no denying that working with customers is a stressful job. If not

properly engaged, call center employees often leave after short periods of
employment. And that means more training, fluctuating levels of service,
and higher costs for you.
Luckily, good-quality outsourced call centers have the managerial skills to

keep employees happy and engaged. Be sure to choose a call center that cares
about their agents as much as their clients’ happiness.
Look for contact centers that have low turnover and employees who are happy
to work there (you can check out review sites like GlassDoor.com for more
information.)
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4. Focus Improvements on Other Areas
When you start an in-house call center, you need the right tools to accept and
handle calls and emails. Computers, headsets, and contact center software
all cost money.
Not to mention the headache of mapping out the customer journey, agent
workflows, and analytics systems…
If you outsource your call center, you won’t need to worry about spending
the time and resources to build out your own customer service department.
(And it can get really expensive trying to do this in-house.)
Instead, you’ll save time and resources while reducing frustration and stress
from learning to manage and optimize a customer service center in-house.
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5. Scale Easier
If your company is successful and profitable, you’re going to feel “growing

pains”. As your customer base expands, your contact center needs will
expand, too. And you’ll need more staff to handle more calls.
That means more office space, headsets, and managers to oversee your
continued success.
In short, you’ll need to invest more time and resources. Otherwise, you risk
damaging your customer relationships, hurting your brand, and weakening
your bottom line.
By working with an outsourced call center, you can easily adjust the level of
service needed to fit your growing business. And it’s pretty easy to do.
A simple renegotiation with your partner takes care of upgrading or down-

grading the level of customer service in your organization.
6. Adjust to Seasonality Faster
Seasonality is especially important for many types of businesses. Certain

times of the year call for more or less customer service that a business may
normally need during off-peak times.
Having to ramp your call center up from 20 agents to 50 (or 100+) during the
holidays and other busy periods can be exceptionally difficult. It places a lot of
burden on your infrastructure, training, and hiring of the entire organization.
Not to mention how important it is to deliver on customer expectations during
these periods.
The best call centers are designed to handle fluctuating volumes of business
without any negative impact on your customers. This means, your business
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can keep up with the increased pace without damaging customer relationships
or losing out on revenue.
7. Get 24/7 Support
Providing 24/7 support for your customers is a great reason to outsource.

Whether you have international customers or you simply want to be more
accessible, always having staff ready to provide support pays off.
However, keeping agents on staff to make that happen can cost a significant
amount of money if you try to provide this in-house.
Luckily, most contact centers offer some type of 24/7 or extended hour
capabilities. When looking for a call center partner, look for vendors that
have teams of agents working manageable hours throughout the day. That
way, your customers are always getting the highest level of support no matter
what time it is.
You don’t want a call center with a team stretched thin during late hours.
That could potentially lead to poor customer service during off-peak hours.
8. Don’t Worry About Upgrades
There’s always a new piece of call center technology that makes interacting
with customers easier or more efficient.
Phones, headsets, skills-based routing, omnichannel connections, speech

analytics, AI (artificial intelligence), and self-service are some of the many
tools of the trade that constantly improve.
But which tools are the best? And which are nice to have versus necessary?
Trying to balance improving your call center against a backdrop of constant
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innovation while growing your business is extremely challenging.
The best call centers actively search for, test, train and deploy the latest in
customer engagement technology.
By outsourcing your customer service to a call center, you’ll stay ahead of

the competition with cutting-edge technology and tools without having to
juggle the difficulty of vetting them. (Plus, you won’t have to pay for all the
trial and error for these new tools.)
9. Experience Better Data Analytics
If you’re a data-driven organization, outsourcing can be a cost-effective way

to help you gain deeper insights into your customer base by leveraging the
latest in customer engagement technology.
With constant data collection and superior analytics software, you don’t just
learn what your customers think of your product or service. You also learn
how you can improve your business at every stage in the customer journey.
With contact center outsourcing, you can leverage data to find out where
and how you can make the best changes in your business. Changes that will
drive customer engagement, increase sales, and help you stay ahead of the
competition.
Call Center Outsourcing Red Flags
Some contact center outsources like to play games. Here are a couple things
to make sure you look out for when going through the outsourcing process.
(Remember I am always available to talk to if you have any outsourcing
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questions no matter what outsourcer you use.)
High Setup Fees
Setup fees are a fair way to recoup some of the starting costs. New software,
new integrations, and training new hires all cost money after all. However,
some contact centers use exorbitant setup fees to rip clients off. Some go as
far as claiming $87,000 is a fair price.
That’s absolutely not true.
For companies that are already in the cloud, your setup fees could be as low
as $7,000. (At Expivia, we have never charged more than $10,000 for setup
fees.)
Additional Client Support Costs
If you have an outsource call center telling you it will be $50 an hour (or a
monthly package of $2,000) for client support–run away!
Client support should be rolled into the costs.
This is most true with smaller, boutique programs of 500-1000 seats.

However, this is not necessarily true for a 30,000 seat, international program.
Unreasonable Per-minute Changes
Be sure you understand the breakdown of your per-minute charges. If a call

center is charging you $2 per minute and their reps work 45 minutes each
hour, that’s $90 per hour.
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Even if you are not a full-time client, be careful of going over $0.75 a minute.
There’s always a hidden agenda behind unreasonably high permanent

charges. Perhaps the center doesn’t want your business but is willing to
take it for a high fee. Or, the center isn’t running its operations effectively.
Either way, it’s best to stay away. You’re not paying for quality at that point.
Upcharges for Email and Chat
Everything used in your program (such as voice, email, and chat) should be
included in your cost.
There should not be an additional setup fee for any of these services. The one
exception is if you add on additional services after the initial setup. If you set
up your program and six months later you want to add chat services, there
could be a minimal setup fee for that.
If your call center wants to charge you $5,000 to set up voice, another $5,000
to set up email, and another $5,000 for chat along with a “base” setup fee
when they onboard you, that’s just not right. All of these services should be
bundled together at the start.
Licensing for Reporting
Many call centers want you to pay extra for a licensing and reporting
dashboard. Some even go as far as adding an additional $1,500 charge every
month so you can access your own reports.
That’s absurd.
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Any licensing and reporting costs should be included in your permanent

charges.
Charges to Monitor and Have Access to Recordings
Any recording made on-call belongs to your company. If you are being
charged per recording, push back against that.
The one exception to this is if you’re storing your recording on their servers.
Then, it’s reasonable to ask you to pay for this storage. However, that charge
should be very small as cloud storage is very cheap.
Paying by the Minute
While paying by the minute isn’t necessarily a bad thing, you should always
check to see what that covers.
Are you paying for handle time? Talk time? A combination? Is after-call work
included? If so, for how long?
If you’re being charged for everything, including all after-call work, you’ll
end up paying a lot more money than you should.
Even worse, that inadvertently incentivize your call center to be lazy on calls.
Most companies will hold everyone up to an efficiency standard and not
do this. Either way, be sure your partner provides reporting to justify their
billing.
Generally, clients pay for their outsourced contact center by the hour. This
excludes lunch breaks for reps.
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Attrition Training Costs
Even if there’s a high turnover rate, you shouldn’t be charged for it. Never
pay for attrition training.
If you started with 25 reps and several months later three reps have left the
company, the call center is responsible for covering the training needed to
replace those agents.
If your center knows that they will have to pay for training to maintain a
number of seats, they are going to think twice about the type of person they
bring on for your program.
They’ll look for higher-quality candidates, instead. Plus, they’ll treat their
employees better, so they stick around longer.
Equipment and Workflows Every Outsourced Call Center NEEDS
Of course, you’re looking for the highest quality call center. But, how do you
know you’re truly getting all your money’s worth? Here are some of the tools
that you should be getting when partnering with a call center outsourcing
organization
Your outsourced contact center is well-equipped if they have:
Omnichannel Support: Multichannel support is a must. You need a contact

center that can receive calls, emails, and chatbox messages for wide customer
accessibility. This empowers the customer to seek out support through the
platform that works best for them.
Fully Integrated CRM Platform: Equipping a call center isn’t just about hard-
ware. Your outsourced customer service needs to have customer relationship
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management (CRM) software to truly provide the best quality help.
Advanced Speech Analytics: Speaking of software, speech analytics is a must.

Sentiment scoring and AI-based analysis ensure that the customers are well-
cared for, happy, and the service you get is monitored for quality.
100% USA-based Associates: If your business and customers are in the USA,
provide them a point of contact in the same country as them to lower their
potential frustration.
Advanced Routing Techniques: Making sure a call reaches the right
associate as fast as possible is crucial in keeping customers happy.
Forecasting and Workforce Optimization Software: Your outsourced contact

should seek out ways to get you the most value for your money using
workforce optimization.
Expert Call Center Personnel: Trained, educated, and experienced agents in

quality customer service is an absolute must.
Chatbot, Texting, AI Support: Calls and emails are basic. Nowadays,

customers want the newest and easiest form of communication to get their
issues resolved.
Cost-Effective Operations: You don’t want the contact center with inefficient
systems that drive waste. Instead, you want a partner that has the bottom
line to invest in growing their own business while keeping your costs low.
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Choosing the Right Call Center Outsourcing Partner [10 Steps]
Even if you find a great call center, you can’t be sure that it’s the right fit for
your business. Consider these 10 points when shopping for call centers to
help you choose the best customer service outsourcing partner.
1. Size
This is the first thing that a company needs to consider before talking to
contact centers. What size BPO partner is right for you?
You want a contact center that’s big enough to manage your needs, but small
enough to still take your business seriously.
If you’re looking to outsource a major program with 1000+ seats, then you
should consider multinational call centers with multiple sites.
However, this isn’t the ideal solution in most cases.
Most customer service programs fall into the under 100 seat range. You don’t
want your 20-100 seat program at a site with 1000 seats. Your program will
fall through the cracks. Ultimately, you’ll grow frustrated with the lack of
support and care.
Instead, you want to look at a company that has around 500 seats or less to
give your program the time it deserves.
2. Track Record of Management
What has the management team done? Are they experts in your business
type?
There are many different niche call centers out there that “specialize” in
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everything from financial service to IT to retail.
Make sure you have a comfort level with the management of the call center
that they understand your business type.
3. Client Support Method
Client support should match your organization’s needs. Some call centers
dedicate a manager to work with you. Others have you call in and create
trouble tickets as if you were a customer. Either way, you deserve support
from a team member who understands your program and your needs.
4. Associate Match
The call center you choose needs to be an extension of your brand. Matching
the demographic and personality of your associates in a call center with your
brand is crucial. Remember, they will become the voice of your company.
Make sure you’re happy with how they represent you.
5. Proper Technology
Consider what you need from a call center from a technical standpoint.
Will you need call recording, virtual queues, private client monitoring, speech
analytics capability, or chatbots? Are they a multi-channel facility (voice,
chat, email, self-service options)?
Do they have onsite programmers or do they outsource programming? Can

they handle any screen, CTI, and connectivity issues?
Asking and answering these questions before you shop for an outsourced
contact center can save you a lot of time and help you find the best partner.
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6. Onshore, Offshore, or Hybrid?
This is a big decision and one that you must not take lightly.
There are some programs that do well offshore. There are many that need a
US-based center. The costs obviously are much cheaper offshore. However,
the price you may pay in customer loyalty can make it very expensive.
You must understand your customers and the type of program you need before
you can make this decision.
7. Company Culture
What is the culture of your prospective call center? This is where site visits
become very important.
Is the center paperless? Do they have the right chemistry? Do the associates
look like they want to be there? How much are the agents paid? What type of
incentives are there? What is the agent turnover? How are supervisors and
management chosen?
These are all important questions to get a feel for the company.
You cannot expect agents to go above and beyond the needs of your customers
if the center they work for isn’t doing the same for them. If the values of your
outsourced contact center line up with yours, then you have yourself a good
match.
8. Training
Agent training (and how your potential call center goes about it) is critical to
the success of your relationship.
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How are their new associates on-boarded? What training do they receive
before they start on the floor? What is the ongoing training like? How do
they communicate with agents about program changes? How do they handle
internal monitoring?
The answers to these questions can give you valuable insight into what your
future brand representatives go through. They also reveal the culture of the
contact center.
9. Scalability, Flexibility
Your call center should be ready to scale efficiently based on the needs of
your customers. Every contact center does this differently, though. Ask your
potential call center how they handle increased volume and whether or not
they can scale to meet demands.
10. Security
Choosing a PCI (payment card industry) compliant contact center isn’t a

benefit. It’s a necessity. Data security needs to be a top priority in the contact
center you choose.
Only work with paperless companies. They should also have a no cell phone
policy. This is important to protect you and your customer’s safety while
ensuring your business avoids any potential data security issues.
How to Manage Call Center Outsourcing Partner Relationships
The work doesn’t stop when you find your ideal outsourced call center. And
it doesn’t stop when you sign a contract and complete onboarding.
Keeping a positive relationship with your contact center is crucial for your
181
success.
A lot of companies forget that. And even more, companies commit mistakes
that damage their partnership with their contact center, potentially damaging
productivity.
Follow these tips to ensure the partnership between your organization and
your outsourced contact center remains mutually beneficial. They cover
boundaries to set, rules to establish, and the mindset you should adopt to get
the most out of your call center.
Don’t Treat Your Outsourcer Like a Vendor
Your relationship with your outsourced contact center is too important

to treat like a vendor. Your customer service outsourcer is not just some
company that you’re buying a piece of software from. They speak to your
customers and represent your business.
Your outsourced service center is like an extension of your company. Treat

them like that. You don’t want to come at them with a stick if they mess up
or make a mistake. That’s going to damage the relationship in the long run.
Instead, you need to provide a constant cycle of constructive feedback. And

you need to treat this relationship like a true partnership.
Visit them. Communicate regularly. You can even go out to dinner with them.
In short, it’s best to develop a lasting, close, professional relationship with
your outsourcing partner.
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Be an Active Part of Training
Whether you are onboarding five or 500 agents, you need to be a part of at
least the first three or four classes. Ideally, you should be on-site (or at least
on a video call) for the launch.
If you don’t have time later on and you want to be more hands-off, the
outsorcerer’s dedicated trainers should be able to continue what you started.
This is important because agents should always place a face on the client.
Make sure your outsourcing agents know who you are.
Work with your partner to develop a solid QA platform that you both agree
on. This will make sure that you get the most out of your calibration sessions.
Plus, you can trust the scores your call center partner should provide weekly.
One Point of Contact
Have a dedicated point of contact within the call center. Someone who can
help you with any questions or requests you have. Usually, this position is
the Client Services Manager Lead.
Make sure they can respond to you within 15-30 minutes for emails and
voicemails. That is the SLA time that we give our client services managers.
This is also what most centers offer.
Have Weekly Calibration Sessions
Sit down once a week and listen to either recorded or live calls. Your team
and your outsourced call center partner should be on the same page.
Understand your goals and understand when your partner may not be hitting
them. Make sure you and your partner’s scoring mentalities are the same.
183
And be consistent in your scoring week after week.
Have an Issue/Escalation Process
If a call gets out of hand, if a customer uses foul language, or if an agent

becomes visibly irritated, having a written procedure to report what happened
can be extremely helpful.
You need to know about these issues. And your outsourced contact center
shouldn’t feel the need to hide problems. With the right procedures in place,
solving issues becomes a lot easier.
Have Weekly Status Calls and Quarterly Reviews
Have a weekly catch-up and talk about service levels, handle time, call volume,
and/or whether you need to add more agents to your program. Talk about
any immediate adjustments you need to make in your weekly call.
In a quarterly review, you should talk about your program at a macro level.
Agent sentiment, customer sentiment, speech analytics, or if any big changes
that need to be made.
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Open Communication
Just like any relationship, communication between you and your contact
center outsourcing partner needs to be honest, quick, and easy.
Having some sort of quick messaging tool like Slack can be an easy and quick
way to update your outsourced contact center quickly on any changes.
Be Flexible
No matter how foolproof you think your plans are, how solid you think your
forecast is, things will inevitably change.
Understand that the partner you choose is going to bend over backward to
make sure they are working correctly for you. And they’ll do everything in
their power to provide the service you deserve.
185
That’s why it’s useful to have a flexible and patient mindset, especially when
you’re starting to work with your contact center.
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34
CALL CENTER OUTSOURCING PRICING
Call Center Pricing: How Much Does Outsourcing Cost?
Outsourcing your call center comes with a lot of benefits. But, does it come
with a lot of costs too? This call center pricing guide can help you figure out
what it might cost and how you should budget.
Gain an accurate glimpse into the world of customer service pricing, so you
know what to expect when you hire your own outsourced contact center.
Call Center Pricing Breakdown
It’s important to note that every call center charges for their services
individually. The location, seat-number, certification, and expertise of your
call center can significantly change the price.
Usually, call center pricing is customized to your business. So, the quote you
receive is a lot more accurate.
Before we give you actual numbers, it’s important to understand how a call
center prices their services.
187
One-Off Costs
When you first start working with a new call center, you’re probably going to
encounter on-off fees. While it’s much more common to have one-off fees
at the setup, depending on your requests, these may repeat occasionally.
Common on-off fees call centers charge can be:
• Setup Fee: When you start your relationship with a new call center, you’ll
usually encounter a setup fee. This covers the software and hardware the
call center needs to acquire before they begin working for you.
• Training Fee: How many agents you need can vary depending on season.
And just like any job, there’s always turnover at a call center. Training
fees cover the education of new hires. Although, it’s important to note
that good call centers won’t charge you a training fee for general turnover.
They’ll only charge you this fee is you request more agents than usual.
Ongoing Rates
Ongoing rates are the most important rates when you get your pricing
breakdown. This is what you’ll be charged regularly.
Generally, there are two types of ongoing rates:
• Hourly: You’ll be charged based on exact time.

• Fixed: You’ll be charged a set amount, which usually ties to a KPI. Whether
that’s time, sales, or something else depends on your agreement with
the call center.
188
What the Call Center Pricing Covers
Once you know what kind of fees you should expect, you should also know
what this fee typically covers. Of course, every call center offers different
things. And your customized offer needs to reflect your preferences too.
That’s why your contract with the call center should be your first resource if
you want to know what your pricing covers.
However, these are generally what you should expect an outsourced call center
to provide.
• Advanced telephony platform

• All telephony minutes
• Realtime and daily recap Reporting
• QA Processes
• Client support
• Middle management
• Monitoring Capabilities
• Workstation (computer, headsets…)
• Workforce management
• Voice, chat, email support
• Dedicated agents
What You Shouldn’t Pay for at an Outsourced Call Center
If your outsourced call center charges you fairly, you should never pay for:
• Management: Unless you want your own dedicated managers for smaller
teams, you shouldn’t pay for supervisors or managers.
• Client support: A call center should always have a representative you can
reach that’s dedicated to your relationship.
• Turnover costs: While a training fee is standard when you start out and
189
when you specifically requests more agent support, but natural turnover
and training costs should never be your burden.
Average Call Center Prices
Now, for the part that you truly came here for. The call center pricing guide.
We should note once again that every call center prices their services
differently, so take these numbers as guidance only.
The type of call center and its location are the two most important factors
in this guide.
There are two types of call centers:
• Inbound: Where customers call in for support, and cross-sell or upsell

opportunities both arise.
• Outbound: Where call centers reach out to customers directly.
And for the location, we make a difference between:
• USA-based
• Nearshore: Mexico and Eastern Europe
• Offshore: Asia (india, Pakistan, Philippine)
Inbound Call Center Pricing
USA-based
Dedicated US-based call centers usually charge $27-$30/hour for their
basic services.
However, if you’re looking for specific skills, such as tier 2 tech, licensed
insurance agents, or registered nurses, you should expect to pay $30-50/hour
190
at least.
Some call centers charge by the minute based on occupancy. This will
generally come out to $0.59-0.75/minute with an average occupancy of 75%
(which means associates in a billable state 45 minutes out of every hour).
If you take $0.59 * 45 minutes = $26.55. That is how you get the per hour
charge.
Nearshore:
Nearshore inbound marketing services range anywhere from $14-$20/hour

depending on the country you are looking to outsource to.
Offshore:
Offshore contact centers a bit harder to gauge because all countries have
different averages.
You can pay as low as $6-9/hour for centers in India or Pakistan, but the
going rate is usually $10-12/hour.
While this may be a lot cheaper than US-based call center pricing, but
remember, you’re sacrificing quality, language, and cultural familiarity for
price. These are things that may alienate your customers, seeing as call
centers are a representation of your business.
Outbound Call Center Pricing
USA-based
Pricing for inbound and outbound call center services in the States is very
similar due to efficiency for multi-skilled agents.
191
USA rates are anywhere from $26-$28/hour for standard outbound programs.
This includes sales, follow up, appointment generation, and service calls.
Any advanced skill programs can run from $30-$50/hour.
Nearshore:
Call centers in Eastern Europe and Latin America are in the $9-$16/hour
range.
Offshore:
In general, you’ll find agencies in India and the Philippines normally charge
from $5-$12/hour/agent.
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35
FINAL EXAM- DEEP DIVE INTO YOUR

CALL CENTER: 21 QUESTIONS WE ASK
WHEN CONSULTING
I love this chapter and left it on purpose to the end of the book. I want you
to do to this exercise and take some time with your team and answer these
questions. If we came in for a consultation for you, we would talk to reps,
managers, HR, upper management; honestly, we’d talk to everyone. We
would ask each person what things are a struggle and what things are great.
Then, we’d create a plan to help you correct the weak stuff so you see more of
the good stuff. Use these questions to find a few areas your center needs to
work on. You will be surprised to see what a difference it can make to just put
a couple of these ideas into action.
Coming together as a team and answering these questions will go a LONG

way to improving your contact center!
193
What is tolerated or not tolerated on the call center floor?
This covers a broad spectrum of topics but is a huge piece of your organiza-
tion’s culture. This question can be a great starting point when consulting.
From here, we launch into several different areas that can be broken down to
discuss in depth.
Do your supervisors care more about their reps than themselves?
Consider the culture of your management team. Are the actions being taken
by your supervisors actually helping to push their teams forward, or are they
more interested in pushing their own agenda? Is that manager helping their
reps succeed or are they just trying to make themselves look good and possibly
get promoted?
Have you talked to HR about the type of rep that you want in
your center?
Define the job attributes for any position that comes open. It will really help
your human resources team to find the perfect people for a position if you
explain to them specifically what you need that new hire to do for you. You
don’t want them to just fill your seats. Are you looking for salespeople? Do
you want people who work better as a team or as individuals? Help HR help
you.
How do people speak to each other?
You normally sound quite different at work than when you are home tucking
your preschooler into bed or when you are out for a happy hour. It is up to
you to coach your middle management to know and use the appropriate tone
when working with their staff. How should a supervisor speak to reps? How
are reps expected to speak to supervisors? What is specifically allowed or not?
Define those points and then teach your team to use them.
194
FINAL EXAM- DEEP DIVE INTO YOUR CALL CENTER: 21 QUESTIONS WE...
How do Supervisors treat peers?
This is discussed a lot. If you have a middle management issue–you have a

call center issue. Along with how they treat their reps, we need to know how
our management team treats each other. Have they split into cliques? Have
the cliques started to bash each other or their teams? Do they talk down to the
newer or younger supervisors? Your management team needs to understand
that their reps see everything. If supervisors are being rude, the reps will
begin to think they can do the same.
Do you engage floor leaders?
Are you having a daily meeting with your supervisors, do they know the exact
KPI’s that they need to push their teams to hit? Are you doing Team vs Team
motivations?
Do you let things slide?
You’ve got that one person who comes back from break late at least once
a week. If you don’t stop the behavior, you are letting it slide. By letting
things slide, you are also allowing those things to become the norm. Be sure
everyone is on the same page with where you draw the lines for your norms.
How strict is your center?
This isn’t as much about the policies or rules themselves, but how we all
engage with those policies. When policies are enforced, your staff needs to
know you are not doing it to be a jerk. You are demonstrating that you have
expectations and will do what is necessary to have them met.
195
Do you tolerate poor attitudes or lack of effort?
At Expivia we are all about Attitude and Effort from our teams. What do you
do when someone comes to work with an attitude that is screaming “I just
don’t want to be here today…”? It is too easy to get sucked into that kind of
attitude, which then spread. Poor attitudes can lead to a lack of effort.
If someone is in a foul mood, their work often suffers. When effort is lacking
on a call, it can lead down a dangerous rabbit hole. You need to teach your
management how to handle these situations. Your supervisors need to know,
and the reps need to understand, what will and will not be tolerated. They
need to know what the repercussions are, too. Will they be sent to HR? Will
they be written up? They need to know what steps will be taken and if any
leniency will be given.
What do you do when a rep rocks a QA score?
This is something that we love to celebrate on the floor! Give high-fives and
announce to the room that Steve just hit his goal. You’ve got to celebrate
the victories and all the awesome things that happen. Create a list of specific
things that you are going to celebrate each time they happen on the floor.
Don’t leave it up to a supervisor to wonder if they should do it. Teach them to
do it every time. Really define those victories, so there is no confusion.
What really happens when a rep is late?
The beginning of a shift is really key to how the day will run. The first 30-
minutes of each shift is really important, so we want to be sure we are getting
off on the right foot. If someone is late are they written up the first time? Are
there any exceptions to this rule? If exceptions exist, they need to be written
down and specified.
196
Do you play games on your floor daily?
Contact centers can be boring, brutal places to spend a day; make yours a fun
environment that makes your reps want to come to work. If your personality
is more laid back and you like to watch things unfold, your floor will be a very
different scene than one where the manager is a cheerleader for the team.
Your team will take on the personality of their coach. As a manager, you might
need to step out of your comfort zone to do what is best for your team. You
need to play games daily. It may feel uncomfortable at first, but as the days
go on you will see the positive results. Positive reps lead to much happier
customers which leads to happy clients!
Is there an upbeat vibe on your call center floor?
Every single day there has to be something going on that is a little bit of
fun to distract from the negatives they may face later. Light music in the
background and games being played all day long help to make the call center
fun. It simply cannot be miserable for your reps to be there, or they will go
somewhere else.
Do you take pride in your equipment like chairs, headsets, etc.?
When you take the time to connect with your reps regarding their equipment,
it shows them that you care about them. They can see that you are trying to
make their jobs a little bit easier or more comfortable simply by asking for
their input. When it’s time to replace headsets and you’ve found a few pairs
that you like, let several people try them and use their feedback to pick the
new ones. If you can’t decide between three different chairs for your floor,
ask the people who sit in them all day which they prefer and why. They will
see that you care, not just about the job, but about the people who do the job.
197
Do you correct reps on the floor or off?
As we talked about, do not coach on the floor. Just like coaching a basketball
game, you praise the players on the court. But, you wait until you get to
the locker room to point out what they could have done differently to get a
better outcome. Your team will appreciate that you care enough to give that
corrective feedback off the floor away from the crowd. They will also have
the chance to really focus on what you are saying to them because they are
not being chastised in front of everyone they know.
Are you investing in new technology?
If you are a high-end customer support center, you are going to have to look
into upgrading to some of the things coming down the road. It will be really
important to the culture of your organization for several reasons. If you live
in an area with several contact centers, your reps talk to people who work
at the other places. They all compare notes. If one of the other centers has
better technology and better work culture, you are going to lose staff to that
center. The culture of your organization, the technology being used, and the
overall feel of your center is really important. It will help with turnover and
with the overall customer experience.
Do your supervisors all manage differently?
Every manager handles things just a bit differently due to their different
personalities. There should be policies that explain how it will be handled
when something good happens or when an issue arises for the team. There
must be continuity from the management training program that you have.
You need a training program no matter the size of your call center; it
doesn’t matter if you have two supervisors or fifty-two. Consistency in your
management teams comes from training.
198
Are you investing in rep education or is your center “too busy”?
Almost every call center has WFM that says your occupancy is too high and you
are too busy for rep education. You need to make time. It is really important
that you schedule at least half an hour for education weekly. Remember,
your reps don’t talk to each other a lot. As the workforce gets younger, fewer
employees use their phones for talking to people. You have to actually teach
people how to talk on the phone now. Your weekly education time should
focus on soft skills–people skills. Centers that put the time in will reap the
benefits in customer satisfaction scores.
Do you calibrate quality and KPIs with supervisor evaluations?
Hitting KPIs should be a goal for your reps. It only makes sense that
supervisors should be evaluated on that as well. In order for a supervisor to
be considered successful in working with their teams, their teams need to be
hitting KPI’s that are program goals consistently.
Are you taking the time to onboard new associates properly?
You are doing your organization zero favors by rushing people through a
shoddy and onboarding period. They need to be given the time and attention
necessary to learn the job, your culture, and engagement skills. You will
continue to have a high turnover rate if you are not onboarding properly. Do
it right the first time.
Do you love your job?
If you have (or are) a miserable manager, you are never going to have a high-
end call center. People who don’t love their job are not as successful as those
who do. Someone running a call center has the ability to change things. Tell
upper management what you need to help everyone succeed. As a manager,
you set the tone for your team. Your team ultimately wants you to succeed,
199
because that means they have succeeded. Everyone loves success. Make it
happen.
Every center will answer these questions differently. There is no one right
answer; there is only the right answer for your call center. Communicate with
all your stakeholders and start finding the answers to these questions for
your organization. When you find areas that are lacking, you can use these
ideas to strengthen your call center.
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36
THIS IS THE END
My last tip for you…
Technology is ever changing. There will be some awesome and wild tools that
come out over the next years that are really going to change the landscape
you and your team are going to instantly fall in love with.
Always remember these are just tools. They are the facilitators to service not
of service. The call center technology of today is amazing, tomorrow will be
even more fascinating, but it only works when your core culture is set and
not before.
Before adding any new technology, your priorities should first be on the
human interaction element. Hiring, engagement, culture, attitude, delight,
proper processes, program knowledge and an overall agent dynamic based
on true customer satisfaction. To sum that up…you better have well-trained
agents and thought out processes or no matter what technology you have it
will not save you!
If you give me the choice of a center that only offered 1800 number voice
service, was properly staffed, answered calls on time, employed agents that
were masters of the product and service needs, were empowered to provide
201
a high percentage of first call resolution and educated to truly engage with
customers on a positive level, you have a good chance to have world class
service!
I will take that over the call center with poorly trained associates but have
an omnichannel setup that allows customers to interact on their terms. This
allows MORE WAYS TO PROVIDE POOR SERVICE!
The industry must start talking more about how service is done, then on how
we facilitate it. Looking at LinkedIn the ratio of technology to actual call
center operations and agent management posts seem like 20:1. We wonder
why there are so many companies with poor service.
The true measure of world-class service is not just how you facilitate the
experience…that is not service. The true measure is how your customer feels
when the experience is over. Will they become evangelists for your brand or
are you offering them a hollow experience dressed up with technology?
CLOSING
I hope this was helpful to you and your staff. My hope is that you will come
back to this book and look at certain chapters more in-depth. I know not all
of this may apply in your organization but I bet a lot of it will.
If you just take one thing from this book, I would hope you look at your culture
and how you view what makes an awesome center, awesome. I hope you take
a second to just make some small changes every day to generate the culture
that is appropriate for your company and your customers.
Remember, it’s not just looking at SLA, and AHT and CSAT scores, but looking
at the entire operation. How you hire, how you educate and how you engage
your reps. That’s how you start down the path of a world-class call center.
202
THIS IS THE END
But hey, what do I know…I’m just a call center geek!
203
About the Author
Tom Laird is a contact center thought leader and the founder and CEO of the
award-winning Expivia Interaction Marketing Group with over 30 years of
experience in all facets of contact center operations. Expivia is a large USA
BPO omnichannel contact center located in Pennsylvania.
Expivia is a bridge between a high-quality contact center and a high-tech

software company. Expivia can integrate the latest technology (Speech Ana-
lytics, AI, WFO, Chatbots, API Integrations, Advanced Routing Techniques)
with time-tested education and employee engagement tactics to create what
we believe is the new standard in call center outsourcing.
Tom also is the President of “Call Center Geek Consulting” where he leads
a team that help CX executives and managers run their contact center to
become more agent-centric and efficient, while also assisting with major
contact center software purchases.
Tom has the honor of being a member of the NICE CXone Executive and
CXone Advisory Board. The board is a select group of NICE CXone customers
selected to join as trusted advisers to help NICE CXone validate ideas for new
products and features and plans for future innovations.
204
Prior to starting Expivia, Tom was the head of call center operations for
a large BPO that specialized in financial services. Having this past know-how
has given him the honor of running many services and sales programs for
most of the top 15 largest financial institutions in the USA.
Tom is also the host of the most popular contact center operations podcast,
Advice from a Call Center Geek and it can be found on iTunes, Spotify, Sticher,
Google Play or here:
https://expiviausa.com/podcasts/
You can connect with me on:

https://www.expiviausa.com
https://twitter.com/tlaird_expivia
https://www.facebook.com/Expivia
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tlairdexpivia
https://expiviausa.com/call-center-geek-podcast
Subscribe to my newsletter:
https://expiviausa.com/category/blog
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THOMAS LAIRD

Advice from a Call Center Geek 3.0!

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or

Thomas Laird has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often

Proofreading by Cathy Lombardozzi

This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy.

1 WHY A CALL CENTER BOOK 1

WHY A CALL CENTER BOOK

Think about this customer interaction:

Using our outdated KPIs, on paper, it looks like a great call:

Customer experience is next to the corporate battlefield

WHO IS THIS BOOK FOR?

My name is Tom Laird. I am the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing. We

up yet. Besides, we already agreed, technology does not make an excellent

Before we get into this, I want to tell you a little story….

This is where I came from…

In 2010 the company was sold

Greatest decision I ever made!

Expivia Interaction Marketing was born a couple of months later. We

Currently, we are a apart of the NICE CXone Executive Board.

Next, we will talk about the education of your associates, Management

I bet you I know why your call center is struggling!

In helping companies with call center outsourcing, we have seen many

1) WHO HAS THE SAY IN YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE CALL

FINANCIAL IMPORTANCE IS THE KEY DRIVER

This is true in so many companies. COMPANIES STILL DO NOT REALIZE SELLING

TO AN EXISTING CUSTOMER WHO IS HAPPY WITH THEIR SERVICE IS SO MUCH

MARKETING/SALES IS YOUR KEY DRIVER

Some mistakes we see here is when:

4) WRONG METRICS (Moneyball stuff!)

So many companies have in-house USA customer service centers stuck on

5) DEPENDENCE OF SELF-SERVICE CHANNELS ONLY

Many organizations believe by FORCING self-service they are saving money

6) POOR CALL CENTER CULTURE

7) POOR MANAGEMENT TRAINING

Customer service is as much an art as it is a science. Many impressive

MANAGEMENT TRUST EQUATION- TRUE

Call Center Management Trust Equation — A True Story

It was up to me to be sure my AM shift was hitting its qualitative and

She asked, “Do the people on your floor trust you?”

do the right thing.

Do your reps trust you?

CULTURE > EVERYTHING

No one likes to talk about culture because it is so hard to define, right?

It’s abstract when talked about but tangible in action.

Our Hiring Culture

REFINE YOUR HIRING PROCESS

We try to pull a personality out of potential hires, such as by asking them

INCENT OFF OF YOUR CULTURE

Next we score on engagement. We do a weekly agent analysis with all our

ENGAGING YOUR ASSOCIATES

Make your employees feel involved by considering their suggestions. We

What is the culture of your organization right now? Is it healthy? Do people

TRAIN ANIMALS, EDUCATE PEOPLE

“TONE IS THE MESSAGE!”

We fix any lingo or “street” language. Our standard is a world-class center.