Tim Whipple, VP of Virtual Contact Center, LiveOps
When I ran the Victoria’s Secret call centers for over a decade in Dayton and Columbus OH, I managed a staff of 100 people who supervised 1,500+ agents. Today, I oversee a virtual call center of over 20,000 independent agents that work from home, and I can manage them from anywhere in the world using just my laptop.
So if you currently manage a brick and mortar facility, and are thinking about building that next call center or wondering how to handle seasonal call volumes, consider augmenting your existing capacity with a virtual call center. What you need is the right call center technology and access to a pool of independent agents that you can certify to take your calls.
Here are some key “best practices” to consider when building a virtual call center:
-- Accessing a Nationwide Pool of Superior Talent
Brick and mortar call centers typically recruit within a 25-mile commute radius, thereby limiting their geographical access to talent. With notoriously high turnover, it’s not uncommon for traditional call centers to exhaust the local talent pool. And within the same general area, you can also have multiple call centers competing against each other for talent, driving up agent compensation – a costly proposition.
With virtual call centers, there’s nationwide access to an untapped pool of talent. Agents can be cherry picked to precisely match any specific program. Recruiting a substantially large agent population can be accomplished quickly and easily. And, compensation remains relatively constant since most agents thrive in a home-base environment, working as much or as little as they wish – valuing the ability to maintain work-life balance.
-- Improving Agent Quality
In a virtual call center you have a significantly wider pool of applicants to choose from, since you are not limited to a 25-mile call center radius. And, because virtual call centers offer a very desirable way to work, more people apply for these jobs. Out of the 2,500+ applications received by LiveOps each week, only 5 percent are accepted into the certification process (Harvard has a higher acceptance rate). Of those few selected to become home agents, over 80 percent have some college education and over 75 percent have prior sales experience. By attracting and retaining an unmatched quality of agents, virtual call centers experience far lower attrition levels, less than 10 percent annually, as compared to a traditional call center where turnover can be 10x as much… or 100 percent per year.
In a virtual call center, you have to create the incentives that drive performance. At LiveOps, our on demand call center platform includes performance-based routing. This ensures that the top performers get a higher volume of calls and therefore earn more money that lower performing agents. So agents are constantly driven to perform to excel to their fullest potential.
-- Delivering Flexibility
A virtual call center platform enables the flexibility to expand infrastructure on-demand, with the freedom to customize every aspect of your call center – from the design of a given program, to call volume capacity, monitoring and reporting. Flexibility also relates to the agents themselves who are able to maximize their time with an opt-in scheduling environment. An online “scheduling marketplace” allows agents to schedule themselves in 30-minute intervals, working around their availability, increasing the resources to handle volatile call volumes.
-- Increasing Scalability
With the ability to scale in “real time” to handle spikes and lulls in call volume, virtual call centers can ramp up from tens, to hundreds, to thousands of agents in hours – something that can take brick and mortar facilities days or weeks to achieve at enormous cost. In my virtual call center, I’ve been able to deploy the equivalent of a 300 seat brick and mortar call center within just a few hours. On-demand technology enables me to assign circuits, route calls, deploy agents, monitor calls and manage my workforce, without ever having to add another workstation or build out a new call center. And because agents are working from home, they can opt-in immediately to take unanticipated calls and provide service coverage during evenings, weekends and holidays – or even for just a half hour.
-- Supervising, Monitoring and Reporting in Real Time
With the visibility that enables supervisors to monitor agent performance, virtual call centers can provide customers with a transparent execution of every call. Supervisors can provide constructive, one-on-one feedback, host development sessions and answer questions all while simultaneously monitoring what agents are doing in great detail. Call recording, computer monitoring and continuous auditing ensure the highest quality of customer service with every call.
-- Establishing a Strong Sense of Community
Providing agents with multiple ways to ask questions, stay connected to the company, and establish a meaningful social network while they continue to build their skill base, is essential in maintaining a highly effective, well-trained staffed. Building a sense of community means having the tools in place to make open dialogue, information exchange, e-learning and certification resources available online for anytime, anywhere access. Within a virtual call center framework, businesses can take advantage of e-learning solutions that enable hundreds of agents to ramp up simultaneously on new programs – right from home and at times that are convenient for them. There are no logistics to manage, so companies can focus on developing the highest quality content with improved cost and time savings.
-- Managing the Call Center as a Meritocracy
Managing a 20,000 virtual contact center is extremely different than managing a facilities-based call center where agents can simply raise their hands if there is an issue or a question. In a virtual environment, agents are actually managed by rules, not by bosses; an automated, data-driven performance system objectively measures and rewards agent performance, creating a meritocracy whereby agents are compared to their peers and rewarded based on their relative performance.
Agents see their scores on individual metrics, so they always know exactly where they need to improve. They receive 24/7 access to agent facilitators, who act as coaches (not supervisors), and work with agents as needed to improve performance within any given area. Online agent communities are also available as a forum to share tips, advice and best practices. Agent scheduling is very much part of the reward system as well. Using innovative online applications, agents with the highest ratings get to opt-in and receive first dibs on the best shifts.
-- Increasing Cost Savings
Software as a Service (SaaS) has penetrated into the call center with on demand CRM and IVR. By providing an on-demand solution, contact centers no longer have to invest in technology that is often under utilized during low call volumes – so there is no idle infrastructure. Virtual call center technology enables its clients the flexibility of scaling the agent population to accommodate demand while only paying for the capacity used. By introducing the pay-per-minute concept, virtual call centers have transformed the technology for call routing and agent management.
Call centers play an increasingly important role in business operations and in driving financial outcomes. Today’s customers are increasingly fickle; they demand fast, responsive customer service, and when they don’t receive it, will readily defect to competitors. And as companies increasingly turn to services as a new revenue stream or source of differentiation, they need more sophisticated customer support organizations to sustain these business-critical operations. With the right on demand call center technology and highly motivated home agents, a virtual call center can provide higher quality, scalability, flexibility, visibility and be more cost efficient than a brick and mortar call center. Experience the difference for yourself.