Mr. Shaw is a graduate of the University of Maryland, Robert H Smith School of Business. He is also very active in the Baltimore/Washington DC area technology community and several Baltimore-area volunteer organizations.

The contact forecast, the resulting staff plan and budget, and the assumed efficiency of the operation sets in (only somewhat pliable) stone the level of chaos of the real time operation.  The “day-of” real time team operates within the constraints of the long term strategy and plan.

We are seeing many organizations reflect this new reality.  For example, organizations are now combining their long term team with their real-time team into one planning team, reflecting the truth that a long term plan sets the operating conditions for the short term team.  They should work closely together.

The determining factor of efficiency is most often the assumptions of the contact center strategic plan.  Through non-automated methods, planners determine the use of their agent resources: their training plan, their hiring plan, their overtime/undertime plan, their cross utilization, and more.  But most planners produce these plans by hand.

It is not easy to do this.

In this session, we will discuss common ways that plans become inefficient and the operational repercussions of these inefficiencies.

Thursday, June 21st at 1pm EST
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Have you ever noticed that the efficiencies associated with management improvement projects have not come through?  Have you ever noticed our operation didn’t bend enough for our finance-driven stretch goals to become a reality? Have you noticed that our call center metrics may not work so well for casework centers?  Have you ever noticed that improvements in service level don’t translate into improvements in customer satisfaction?

In this session, we will focus on metrics used to measure the service and efficiency of our workforce management process, our agents, and our operation.  Once again, with a focus on contact center planning, we will discuss other common contact center metrics and legacy practices that may be a tradition, but also may not be optimal.

Thursday, May 17th at 1pm EST
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It is not easy, and if we knew how to forecast any of these events early enough to be able to plan specifically for them, we would certainly be in another line of work.

But even if we don’t know exactly when these events will happen, we certainly know that they will happen.  It doesn’t mean we cannot prepare for these events.

In this session, we will discuss mathematical methods for planning in the face of change and how to prepare your contact center for the unexpected.

Thursday, April 12th at 1pm EST
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One of the more memorable stories I’ve heard about call centers was told to me by a workforce management VP of a very large company. Referring to his own company, he told me how corporate politics and misguided corporate strategy led to a significant business problem. In a nutshell, because the economy seemed soft, the decision makers decided to stop hiring across the company, including personnel for its large sales call centers, to free up marketing dollars. They implemented this cost-saving plan without doing any real risk analysis.

At first, two pleasantly unexpected things occurred following this decision. The economy, it turned out, was not soft at all, so an expected deep recession did not materialize. Second, the marketing department was surprisingly effective at marketing the company’s product. Within a few months it appeared that business was doing quite well.

Unfortunately, that didn’t last and the workforce management vice president suddenly found his operation in the infamous “call center death spiral,” where, due to agent attrition, as is typical in the contact center industry, the operation became severely understaffed. A scramble for staff ensued. The company immediately turned to outsourcers to provide emergency resources (which helped somewhat) and started hiring like crazy internally.

The new resource needs necessitated a cut back on new-hire training (to shorten the lead time for getting agents on the floor) and management became less selective than normal with their choice of new employees. Of course, these actions brought down their customer satisfaction scores. Agent occupancy zoomed to the mid-90s, which led to higher handle times as agents gave themselves mini-breaks while on call. Attrition began to increase as burnout set in.

As most call center veterans know, it takes a long time to get out of the “death spiral.” During the death-spiral period for this company, service quality was very poor, management was in finger-pointing mode and senior management wanted to know why their call center executives were performing so inadequately.

The real kicker was these were sales call centers and, therefore, company revenues were highly impacted. Sales volumes dropped significantly below their potential as prospective customers defected to competitors. The hiring-freeze decision cost the company a ton of money. A ton.

How Can This Happen? They’ve Optimized Their Workforce!

So what could the contact center vice president have done differently? This company was very technically sound. It had an effective workforce management organization and had purchased a workforce management system with all the bells and whistles. It had a performance-management tool and a historical-performance data warehouse. Also in place were sophisticated call routing, a budgeting system and a good supervisory and management team. This organization had spent millions of dollars on the purchase, implementation and management of the right tools, so in theory, it would appear it had “optimized” its workforce.

But we all know it hadn’t really optimized its workforce. Its center network performance demonstrated was not anywhere near optimal.

So what was missing?

Clearly, this organization was missing a solid strategic planning process. It did not have the ability to perform the complex what-if analysis that would have predicted the “death spiral” before it made the decision to roll out the hiring freeze. The great truth that follows from this and other similar contact center disaster stories is:

It is impossible to optimize your workforce without first optimizing your strategic center network plan.

Stories of “call center death spirals,” likely the worst service mistake possible, are quite common. Because “death spirals” cannot be fixed easily, quickly or inexpensively, they impact customers far more than normal short-term, service-outage types of mistakes. And they are always a result of strategic planning failures.

Similarly, strategic planning mistakes in the other direction – overstaffing — are also quite common and costly, but less painfully obvious. Recently, one well-known technology company spent many millions of dollars building additional call center infrastructure to improve customer satisfaction, only to find afterward that higher service levels barely moved the customer satisfaction needle. The extra cost was wasted because customers did not notice the improvement. Significant overstaffing is also a strategic planning failure; a mega-dollar mistake.

A Focus on Strategic Planning

An area of workforce management and operational analysis that has traditionally been left unexamined, the area of strategic planning, has recently sparked widespread interest.

There are several reasons for this. First, contact centers have become more and more a strategic asset, viewed as a primary channel not just for answering customer questions, but also as a valued sales or relationship channel. There have been many notable strategic successes (and failures) associated with leveraging the contact center channel as a true customer relationship device.

Second, the decisions associated with managing a contact center network are more complicated, as each center is more entwined with the next. Specialization of the workforce has made management decision making more complex and more important.

Third, the idea of the contact center network is being pushed to the extreme: your network may include centers far from your home shores. Global decisions on when and where to hire employees are difficult ones and your effectiveness in answering these questions will have significant impact on your company’s financial and operational success.

Finally, strategic planning is becoming noted as the next big problem to be solved. In analysts’ circles, people are wondering if we have the horse before the cart. Focusing on improving schedules may be less important today than ensuring that the correct number of employees are on the payroll to answer the calls in the first place.

Increases in computing power and development of new mathematical modeling (simulation) technologies have enabled improvements in strategic planning that 10 years ago would be considered magic. We can now answer critical business questions accurately in near real-time.

What is Strategic Planning?

First, let’s discuss what strategic planning is not. Strategic planning is not tactical, “day-of” planning. A great amount of resources are currently spent to plan in a reactive manner. We take care to help our businesses develop work schedules, manage daily shrinkage, track adherence, plan team meetings and react quickly to unforeseen events. None of this is strategic planning. Even though strategic planning may involve many of the same workforce analysts, strategic planning is not a traditional workforce management function.

To most folks, contact center strategic planning means developing a budget. And while strategic planning does involve the budget planning process, it also includes much more than that.

Strategic planning is big picture. Strategic planning involves regularly setting resource levels over time and allocating your business dollars according to your strategic priorities. It involves asking and answering tough questions about resources, expected performance and company goals. It involves testing and implementation of new management ideas and, by extension, experimental design, control and tracking. It involves regularly developing and evaluating the performance of plans, understanding variance and, most of all, using this process to make the most important decisions.

The heart of strategic planning is just that —- making decisions and answering questions. Some important strategic planning questions include:

• How many contact centers should we have?
• What types of contacts will we support?
• What contact channels should we support?
• What service goals should we achieve?
• What cost are we willing to bear to achieve these goals?
• When and in which centers should we hire our employees?
• What is our hiring versus overtime/leave policy?
• Should we outsource these functions?

Strategic planning is the exercise of answering these and other critical questions.

On my first day in a call center, over 16 years ago, I was floored by one particularly interesting observation: our company’s call center director needed to hit his service level goal — and he wasn’t!

When I spoke with the workforce management director, it was clear he was worried about this. He patiently explained how they defined the service level metric, and that their company goal was 80 percent in 20 seconds. But he couldn’t explain how they determined that goal in the first place. They simply chose a number they thought sounded right.

Think about that for a second. If there ever was an important number to understand and study for call centers, it would be the service goal. It drives all of your variable costs, your technologies, your overtime policies, your boss’ bonus, your quarterly evaluation, and those nasty 8:30 a.m. conversations with the boss.

For my former employer, the service goal was truly a semi-random number. And like other disaster stories, this was probably a strategic failure. However, at this company, nobody ever knew whether we were truly overstaffed or understaffed…scary.

The Typical Planning Process

1. There is a standard approach to putting together a strategic plan with five major analytic elements. These elements are: Forecast the Future: Almost every plan starts with a forecast of contact volumes and handle times. Some planning teams spend time forecasting vacation, sick time, employee attrition, wage rates and other seasonal and site-specific values that influence the budget (but most don’t). Note that all of these types of forecasts are important and forecasting the differences among centers and staff groups is critical to developing a good plan.
2. Develop a Capacity/Hiring Plan: These forecasts are used to develop hiring, termination, overtime and undertime plans given all of the real-world constraints (like training times and learning curves by center and staff groups, classroom and center capacity, service goals, etc.). Optimization technologies, like integer programming, can determine the “just-in-time” plan that meets the goals for the least cost. Most companies eyeball the hiring plan using an analyst’s intuition.
3. Develop a Budget: The capacity plan includes the most important cost variable in your organization: your agents. In most organizations, the capacity plan is “thrown over the fence” to the finance team to cost out the call center plan. The finance team spends time forecasting financial metrics, such as wage rates, percent of vacation that is typically paid, and, say, telecom costs. These forecasted cost items are applied to the capacity plan to create a financial plan.
4. Answer “What-If” Questions: At any or all steps in the planning process, the planning analysts can be asked to perform what-if analysis. The iteration on determining the costs and benefits of various ideas and initiatives is key to developing great final plans.
5. Use Variance Analysis to See What’s Changed: It always makes sense to have a good feedback mechanism to let you know whether or not you are hitting your plan goals and doing what you wanted to do with your operation. Simply knowing the difference between what you had planned to do and what is actually happening is critical to the process.

But We Do All of These Things. So Why Are We Not Optimal?

There are two critical differentiators between organizations that make good strategic decisions and those that fly blind. Strategically successful organizations have invested heavily in both their organizational planning process and in their planning technologies.

The five strategic planning process elements are fairly standard across most contact center organizations. Many organizations have a strategic planning spreadsheet tool to help them walk through the budget process and many have purchased call center strategic planning systems. However, there are significant differences in how these tools are used. As my Dad told me about golf (and golf clubs), “it is not the tool, it’s the craftsman.” And to be honest, even my Dad, who spent a lot of money on cool golf clubs, knew that having better tools certainly improved the likelihood of success.

But before we discuss the tools and processes that make strategic planning successful, let’s discuss common technology and process pitfalls.

• Budgeting is a “One-and-Done” Process. Many organizations spend tremendous amounts of energy putting together a budget and spend little time tracking and re-evaluating the initial budget assumptions. Further, many of the business assumptions include items like stretch goals and pet projects, the benefits of which may or may not materialize (and where accountability is nearly nil). For many organizations, strategic planning ceases on January 1 each year, only to be started again in September. Your business and business environment can change tremendously between January and September. Failure to track important trends could lead to being blindsided by a service breakdown that would have been obvious with a little bit of attention.
• Budget Reviews are About Dollars Only. Too often, companies that do have monthly reviews use this time to simply check that everyone is still operating within budget. Items that are out of budget get scrutinized and line items that are within budget are ignored. This process is often the precursor to a “death spiral”. Important business drivers may change (like call center handle time) that do not necessarily show up as a big dollar item in the budget. The strategic planning process should be about making decisions around costs, performance and also business risk.
• Forecast Error is Measured for Error. When forecasts (e.g., forecasts of handle times, contact volumes, employee attrition, sick time) are scrutinized, the first point of discussion should not be about the forecasting methodology and its flaws. The focus of the discussion should be around whether or not something significant has changed in the business or in call center management. By using the forecasting process as a benchmark to track your business assumptions, you can efficiently react to strategic changes in your environment quickly and almost casually.
• Planning Technologies are Inaccurate or Based on Best Guesses. Historically, strategic planning has involved hiring plans developed from an analyst’s interpretation of the company’s Erlang-based spreadsheet data. This method and technology is flawed in so many ways. First, the Erlang calculation is inherently inaccurate for strategic planning. It tends to overstaff, and is horrible at providing what-if analysis. Second, developing manual hiring plans is a slow process and is only as good as the analyst’s ability to solve extremely complex math problems. Couple these problems together and the old standard technology cripples the ability to perform quick, accurate, consistent and optimal strategic plans.

A Strategic Planning Victory!

On the flip side, an organization I’ve spent a fair amount of time with drastically improved its strategic planning process in one fell swoop. This company, a well-known financial services provider, found itself in the “death spiral” one too many times, so its management decided to overhaul the company’s strategic planning process. They did some very smart things.

First, they hired a senior-level planning vice president who possessed vision as well as contact center and mathematical expertise. This person was responsible for changing the planning process, choosing new planning technologies, implementing this process and then living with the result. The company wanted this completed quickly.

Second, these folks surveyed their current planning technologies, those they could build in-house and those available in the marketplace. They chose to scrap their current, slow and inaccurate Erlang spreadsheets for newer and more accurate simulation and optimization modeling technologies. By purchasing a third-party solution, they cut the implementation time to just a few months.

Third, once this new simulation-based technology was implemented, they published to their executive team the accuracy of the tool and the terrific speed by which they could provide analysis. By getting senior management comfortable with the technology, they gained immediate credibility. They quickly became partners in strategic planning and were asked to come to the boardroom to answer questions on the fly.

Fourth, and most important, they turned the strategic planning process from a budget maintenance process to a regular strategic decision-making process. Variance to plan is examined for real-world reasons (not simply forecast error), and used to force real-world solutions. When variance is detected, the business — as a matter of course — determines whether the variance is due to internal changes (e.g., a change in the operation or a marketing-driven change), external factors, a developing trend or whether it is a known or unknown “blip.”

At this point, the company makes decisions to fix its internal changes (or not, and staff accordingly), to ignore the blip or to watch and react to the trend. But always, this step involves making a committed decision to action. The speed at which important decisions are made and brought to market is the beauty in their process. It is impressive.

Since implementing new technologies for their strategic planning process, this company’s management has avoided many of the pitfalls to which they had previously fallen prey. They regularly provide sophisticated analysis of alternatives, they build more accurate budgets and plans in a fraction of the time it used to take and, most important, they make better strategic decisions faster. They’ve avoided “death spiral” types of mistakes and have operated at a significantly lower baseline cost.

This is becoming more and more the norm in our industry as companies begin to invest in improving their forecasting, capacity planning and budget planning infrastructure and processes. As the industry focuses more on real optimization, they will begin to notice that many of their most serious missteps occurred, not because they had an unanticipated disaster, but because they failed to pay attention to the runaway bus on which they were traveling. Sometimes making sure you have a roadmap and a clear view straight ahead is all it takes.

Call center disaster stories can have a fairy-tale ending after all!

By: Ric Kosiba Ph.D.

If there is one obvious contact center trend in the last few years, it is this: the management of the “new” contact center channels and multiple sites/regions is rapidly becoming consolidated. Email, chat, instant messaging, branch offices, back-office and casework processing across multiple centers and regions are being handed over to contact center planners in order to take advantage of the hard earned expertise we have each developed. It is thought that many of the economies we have brought to our call center plans, and some of the mathematical wizardry we possess, can be brought to bear to help our companies again do more with fewer resources. We workforce management types are about to get a lot more work and a lot more responsibility. This makes a whole lot of sense. Our companies have other operations that are large, people-intensive, and queue-based. Sounds like a job for the workforce management gurus! To complicate matters, these contact types – email, chat, instant messaging, back-office and casework processing – are expected to be handled by groups of multi-skilled and multi-tasked agents and we are expected to have in our bag of tricks the methods and computing power to staff and plan for these more complex operations. If you aren’t responsible for these lines of business yet, you soon will be. Congratulations, I think.

Let’s Discuss Complexity First

In the world of computer models (like our contact center strategic planning and workforce management systems) there is a concept called computational complexity. Basically, mathematicians can look at a math (or business) problem and determine how hard it is for a computer to solve. We are getting to the point where the problems we are trying to solve are very difficult, not just because of our lack of decision support systems, but because the math, by its very nature is intrinsically tough. The scheduling problems and the planning problems associated with these more complex multi-channel operations are very computationally difficult (Google NP-Hard Mathematical Complexity).So that’s difficulty number one.

But We’ve a Bigger Problem: Current WFM Concepts May Not Hold

We’ve been doing a fair amount of research into these newer problems, and we may have uncovered a truth that I hadn’t heard from others, and it is this: many of the concepts and constructs associated with our traditional workforce management processes probably do not have much meaning in this new, more complicated world. The ways we traditionally develop our plans (first we forecast, then we build requirements, and then we build schedules), the way we track schedule compliance, and the ways we manage our employees may not be ideal or even correct in a multi-channel environment. Here is an example. Quite a few years ago, while working at a very large collections center, I was responsible for scheduling our collections agents. These calls were a combination of inbound and outbound calls. When trying to develop work schedules, it was very clear that the standard models –build requirements, then schedules, then track adherence – did not make as much sense for the outbound component. What, after all, is an outbound requirement? The answer is, of course, there is no outbound requirement, because a calling attempt can be made at any time on any day. There is, however, outbound calling efficiency; outbound calling attempts to a home address are much more effective early in the weekday morning, in the evenings, and on the weekends. However, the concept of a requirement- where agents absolutely must be on the phones at a particular time- has no real meaning. So what did that mean to our scheduling process? It meant that the standard mathematical algorithms were not applicable. We had to develop our own methodologies and algorithms, which we did. We later even went so far as to allow agents to develop their own outbound work schedules – but that is a very cool story for another day. These are the next batch of difficulties.

We Need New Models

As in the previous example, the outbound math model is very different from our standard Erlang model. An outbound operation is different from an inbound operation which is different from an email operation which is different from a processing operation. And because of this, the models, in order to be even moderately accurate, must be different too. Standard Erlang does not apply to email, outbound, or processing centers. To determine the relationship between staffing, handle times (or servicing standards), contact volumes, and operational performance, you need to develop an accurate model of your operations, with the proper queuing structure, the correct operational metrics, and the appropriate service timeframes. For example, a staffing model with a 24-hourservice standard is not well served by a 15-minute interval requirement model. The only model that makes sense in such a situation is one of much longer duration than the service standard and the average processing times. Further, deferred work, by its nature involves deciding to warehouse contacts for some period of time. This warehoused work must be considered when developing staff plans; a critical part of your staffing decisions involves tracking and managing this backlog of work tasks (more on this in a bit).

Old Concepts Don’t Apply: Requirements, Adherence, and Occupancy

Let’s talk requirements first. For outbound contact types it is clear that the concept of the traditional staffing requirement is nonsense. How about email? For work that can be deferred, work like email and back office processing, the concept of interval requirements has much less meaning. If your performance standard is expressed in several hours to a few days, what does it matter that you have employees show up to work at exactly 9:00AM? Further, a requirement that X people work in hour 1 and Y people work in hour 2 is probably as effective as a requirement that Y people work in hour 1 and X people work in hour 2. Or X+Y people work in hour 1 and no people work in hour 2. See where I am going with this? The whole concept that “you have to have so many people on the floor at this interval” makes little practical sense. What does this mean to our standard view of our daily staffing? Our standard approach is to look at an over/under graph or report to determine if we need folks to work later or go home earlier. Without a solid requirement calculation, this over/under picture is, well, not too terribly clear. Over what? Under what? How does this real issue affect our management of interval staffing? Let’s extend this to the concept of agent adherence. For outbound contacts, email, and back office processing, does the concept of non-adherence have much operational value? I think it probably does not, except as a means to oversee our agent’s productivity (in a Big Brother sort of way). Simply, does it matter if an email agent returns from their break 10 minutes early or late as long as we get the proper amount of work from them? In most cases, I think the answer is no- it does not matter to our efficiencies that an agent is a little sloppy with their schedule adherence. How about agent occupancy? As far as I can tell, the concept of occupancy for these other contact types has meaning only insofar as agent task completion times (e.g. AHT) and expected workload are matched with the overall daily or weekly staffing levels. It has less to do about the economies of the operation. While semi-random inter-arrival rates of contacts will be similar to that of call centers, the email or back office operation is expected to almost always require a queue and, hence, occupancy is by definition near100%.Also, for the chat contact type, the number of concurrent chat sessions is a variable that changes our overall definition of occupancy. For example, an agent who can handle 3chat sessions at a time may be fully busy on one chat session, but still only be 1/3occupied.These are also difficulties we must overcome.

The Concepts of Capture, Purity, and Queue Ebb and Flow

Any time that agents are expected to be multi-skilled (especially having skills across multiple channels), the concept of capture and purity becomes super important. These two metrics represent a way to prioritize staffing solutions in an environment that has a whole bunch of potential “right” answers. Here is an example, and then we’ll discuss each metric’s definition. Let’s say I have two call types and two agent groups, and let’s call them customer service and sales. Given my druthers, I would prefer my sales calls to go to my sales agents, and my customer service calls to go to my customer service agents, but for cost reasons, we cross utilize these groups. All things being equal (like handle times and wage rates), if my agents can handle either sales or customer service contacts, then the “optimal” staff plan would necessarily include solutions that are any combination of sales or customer service agents. For instance, I can staff with 100% sales agents, or 100% customer service agents, or any combination in between, and I would be “optimally” staffed. But we know that this is not optimal, because I would like each call to go to its right place – I’d like my sales folks to work on sales and my customer service folks to work on customer service calls. This is where the concepts of capture and purity come in (borrowed from a very smart customer of ours, by the way).Capture rate is simply the percentage of contacts that end up where you want them to end up. In our example, the sales capture rate is the percentage of sales calls that are answered by a sales agent. Purity rate is merely the percentage of time that an agent spends working the types of calls we want them to work. In our example, the customer service purity rate is the percentage of the time a customer service agent is on the phone with a customer service call. These concepts are critical to determining your truly realistic optimal staffing levels. You can add an additional constraint – your capture rate constraint – to your staffing optimization to get to an answer that is truly optimal. For instance, we can staff both of our customer service and our sales agent groups to hit both our service goals and our capture rate goals. This creates a staffing problem that has as its solution an answer that is both at least cost and hits your servicing strategy preference. Any multi-skill or multichannel plan that does not include a concept like capture rate is simply a guess. Finally, deferred work, like email, leads to queue behaviors that have a specific tipping point. That is, in your operation at any point in time, you are most likely to be either building a queue or working down a queue. This is a very good thing; it allows you to disconnect staffing requirements from the work arrival patterns. Unlike the call center environment, processing centers allow managers to spread the work across their peaks and valleys of arrivals, saving staffing costs. The trick is to make sure the queue lengths are never too long or nonexistent. The tipping point is the staffing level that turns a queue building operation into a queue reduction operation. Does your work backlog ebb and flow in your current email staff planning model? Can you account for work that remains at the end of a day or week in your staffing plan? Do your service metrics include queue counts at various servicing timeframes? If not, you don’t have a workforce model that mimics your real world operation, and it is time to build a better one.

Tactical and Strategic Plans Start to Blur

There has always been a bright line between strategic plans and tactical workforce management plans. But in contact types that involve work that can be deferred and long servicing times, the more pertinent question is not scheduling, but long term staffing. It is more important that you have the right number of agents trained and on the premises than it is that you have rigid and exact interval schedules. Interval plans aren’t as important. The strategic planning problem (determining when and where to hire our agents over longer time horizons) for these types of operations is more important than traditional tactical workforce management. Improving daily agent planning has much less value in these operations than in our regular inbound call center operation. You need to solve your strategic planning problem well to gain any efficiency associated with your planning process.

It is Time to Revise Our Systems and Our Thinking

These new operational constructs, these new approaches have our workforce planning vendors scrambling to develop new algorithms and approaches to help us solve these bigger problems. There will be (and absolutely should be) a slew of modeling approaches newly developed, and these need to be skeptically tested by all. The most basic responsibility of any workforce planning company, be it a tactical workforce management software provider or a long-term strategic capacity planning company, is to prove that their computer models of your operation accurately represent your actual operation. If you cannot prove that the models that drive your critical staff planning decisions are accurate, what is the point? Ask them to provide you this: a validation chart of any of their previous installation’s accuracy. If they cannot show you a plot of actual center service performance versus predicted results, then they and their customers have no idea if their modeling technology is better than a guess. Guessing in our expensive operations can cost your company millions of dollars, and your reputation dearly. With all these changes, the stability of our standard systems is in flux, and you need to know that your planning tools are representing your operation correctly. This is the real difficulty.

 

There is a powerful new concept called “Enterprise Analytics,” that has been introduced to contact center operations over the last few years. This concept leverages robust mathematical technologies, such as mathematical optimization, simulation modeling, and forecasting techniques against the big picture contact center decisions that we are so often asked to analyze (without the time to do it!).  Basically, Enterprise Analytics is the  application of engineering principles and technologies to contact center enterprise performance monitoring, forecasting, scenario development, plan development and evaluation, business risk analysis, and ultimately, strategic decision making.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about Enterprise Analytics and the way that contact center organizations make decisions. So, what is the “standard” decision making process?

I spoke with some call center planners and executives, along with our Vicki Herrell, and think that this next statement rings pretty true: the contact center operation is 90% reactive and 10% proactive, when it comes to making decisions.  We, as an industry, tend to first notice something is broken, and then we work to fix it.  Our decisions are born out of necessity most of the time.

Certainly, some decision making comes from an idea generated somewhere in the organization, however, for most organizations there is a standard way of making decisions.  If you apply a little more rigor to the process than is probably formalized in our individual operation, decision making probably follows something like this:

1. Monitor the operation.  Forecasters often “re-forecast” as the contact center environment changes.  Often, through this process, operational changes are first noticed.
2. If there is a change, determine the likely scenario (or better yet, scenarios).  The decision to “reforecast” is often a decision itself. Deciding that an operational change is worthy of a reforecast is often the equivalent to saying that the operational plan needs to be changed as well. The best organizations (not most) will look at the range of possible forecasts, and not one static forecast.
3. Develop new plans for all scenarios.  From a reforecast or a new forecasting scenario, new hiring plans, staffing levels, and budgets need to be determined.
4. Make a decision.  What is the new plan?
5. Repeat.

However, Can We Improve this Process?

Contact center analytic technologies have been available for some time to help with the various steps in this decision making process.  These technologies have been developed separate of each other, and it has only been recent that the computing horsepower exists to run these sophisticated modeling technologies together.  But our industry now has a fair amount of experience with this comprehensive approach.

It is in this comprehensive approach that normal statistical or optimization models become “super models” able to answer strategic business questions from forecast to budget optimally in minutes.

These technologies enable better decision making; but the business processes that surround them are as important as the technologies.  I’ll discuss each of the technologies and the business processes together.

The Four Enterprise Analytics Business Processes:

1.  Automated Forecasting and its Appropriate Role

Most of the time, call center organizations view forecasting as a process that simply develops new handle time and volume forecasts.  Any differences between forecast and actual are considered “error.”

Leading organizations view this very differently.

Forecast “error” doesn’t mean that the forecast analyst is wrong, instead they view error as variance to the baseline (the forecast is the baseline) and an item to be explored.  Is the business environment different? Has the operation changed something? Are the mix of calls different because of some mailing?

Similarly, the best organizations forecast- using sophisticated but common forecasting algorithms- more important metrics than just handle times and volumes.  They also know that it is as important to forecast shrinkage, attrition, wage rates, etc…

2. Automated Variance Analysis

Traditionally, forecast variance has been an exercise in budget compliance.  Variance has served to crack that whip and make sure nobody spends too much.

However, leading operations view variance as something to be investigated.  What happened to cause this variance?  A series of questions need to be answered:

• Is it a mistake? Was there a math error when developing the forecast?
• What is the root cause? What is the reason, internally (the operation) or externally (the market environment), for the variance?
• Is this variance expected to be part of a long-term trend or is it a single event?
• Can the operation control this variance?

By answering these questions, variance analysis gives operations managers the best chance to develop scenarios for analyses.

3. Developing Response Plans

The best planners have two weapons available to them.  They have a way to determine what will happen under any planning scenario and they have the ability to automatically and optimally develop new plans in response to any changes.

We have all heard a lot about the technologies that bring these two analytic weapons to reality.  Discrete-even simulation allows any contact center analyst to accurately answer what-if questions like:

• If volumes keep increasing above plan, what will be my service levels?
• If attrition climbs, will we be OK?
• Should I combine workgroups?

Integer Programming is the best mathematical method to determining the operation’s best plan given any change in the business environment. It answers the question: given my changes (volumes and/or handle times and/or shrinkage, etc.), what is my best hiring and overtime plan that minimizes the number of resources, but still hits my service goals?

It is only recently that these two technologies, discrete-event simulation and integer programming have worked well together and the power of these is easy to see.  Leading contact centers can quickly and accurately perform what-if analysis (simulation) as well as quickly and optimally determine their best business response (integer programming).

4.EnterprisePerformance-Risk Outcome Matrix (EProm)

Given that leading organizations can quickly and accurately plan for any possible scenario, they also have the ability to determine what would happen if they were to plan wrong!  These technologies allow a different take on the planning process – they allow us to monitor and optimally plan for business uncertainty.

EProm is a technique that enables good decision making in an uncertain business environment.  If you believe that your forecast could be one of several possible forecasts, it is best to cost each of the scenarios out using simulation and integer programming.  But it is also important to cost-out the real possibility of making the wrong business decision.

By doing this, you measure forecast error by business risk!  That is a powerful piece of contact center analysis!

Strategic Action

By automating this decision making cycle, strategic decisions are no longer any big deal.  Instead, they occur as a regular part of the way of doing business.

Business decisions are developed knowing both the uncertainty and the best response given the uncertainty.  Strategic risk analysis is the natural outcome of this process.

We are starting to see some of the same mistakes in contact center decision-making we saw beginning in 2000. Company management is known to repeat mistakes, and it appears that this is happening now. The purpose of this article is to highlight some of the themes and particular items we saw last time, and fear we will see again during this current business slow down.

Theme #1: During a recession, there is a higher potential for companies to make strategic mistakes.

During the 2000 recession, most major issues we noticed were strategic in nature. Tactics and tactical decision-making do not have a severe impact on the health of the company. Those decisions can be undone. Unless a tactical blunder undermines a strategic pillar, like the unwritten covenants between management and phone agents (e.g. getting rid of some small but traditional company perk), it is unlikely a tactical decision will cause real financial headaches.

However, strategic mistakes become much more common in times of high anxiety and high variability. In times of uncertainty, most new decisions are strategic in nature like:

• Should we relax service goals or should we cut headcount? How much? Which groups? Which centers?
• Are we expecting changes in our volumes or handle times? How much? Which direction?
• Should we outsource? Which business functions should we outsource?
• Should we stop cross sell functions, or should we realign our contact centers for economies of scale and not quality? Should we focus on “shareholder value” instead of “customer quality”– moving toward cost cutting and away from quality service?

Answering these strategic questions wrong will lead (and have led) to huge cost and service issues. In fact, our strategic mistakes will directly result in tactical headaches, as strategic mistakes almost always lead to day-of operational failures. In general, strategic mistakes begin to show themselves at 9:01 AM, Monday morning.

Item #1: Should we relax service standards or cut headcount?

During the 2000 recession, and during the current one, our first line of attack seems to be to reduce service and cut headcount. What is interesting is that, for many executives, these two items are not necessarily the same thing. Many non-operationally minded folks think that they can reduce staffing and service can remain as before, with some management ingenuity. Most often, this is wishful thinking.

The common blunder to avoid this time around is cutting too much staff. Certainly costs must be saved, but at the same time it is very easy to get into the fix where occupancy runs high enough to affect attrition and quality, or service drops enough to affect customer satisfaction or revenues. During the last recession, there were several horror stories of companies cutting staff past the point of the possibility of medium-term service recovery.

Similarly, the pendulum will someday soon swing the other way and, in much the same way that we need to plan for cost cutting, we need to also plan for volume growth as the economy improves. The 2000-2001 economy improved faster than expected and several companies were caught behind the growth curve. This caused financial and operational troubles, even as we were coming out of the recession and when opportunity for real business growth was high. All of this can be avoided by carefully planning for risk (which we will discuss below).

Item #2: How do we plan for changes in volumes?

One thing is certain in a business environment like today’s: expect your volumes to change. A lot. Business uncertainty breeds operational variability. However, there are better ways to manage this uncertainty than how we handled it during the last recession. Last time, we did our best to determine the reduction in calls we could expect, and we planned accordingly. There were two big and common mistakes in this thought process that we made then that should be avoided now.

1) Picking a single volume number and going with it. Uncertainty means that we do not know what will really happen. By pretending that we do and developing a single plan based upon a single best-guess forecast, we can find ourselves with the same problems that we discussed above, like having too many or too few agents in our operation. The trick is to evaluate the various combinations of likely volume scenarios and resulting staff planning decisions. We must plan for both what we think will happen and what happens if we choose the wrong volume forecast. By doing this, we are adding the element of business risk to our decision analysis, which by extension will improve our decisions and operational performance.

2) Not zagging after the zig. The second mistake that companies made during the last recession was to put forward a plan and to live within that plan. Clearly, a changing environment means that there will be changes to our original assumptions! The industry best practice is to closely monitor (at least monthly) all important business drivers (like volumes, attrition, and shrinkage) and be ready to reforecast these drivers in order to make the appropriate staffing decisions. Similarly, variance to plan is very likely and can be viewed as an early warning signal that alerts of changes in the business environment. If you are not monitoring your performance drivers and acting upon this new information, how will you know the recession is over?

We have better technologies available to us for planning this time and we should use the power of automatic scenario evaluation available in a strategic planning system to avoid these serious pitfalls.

 Item #3: Should we reorganize or outsource more or migrate to cheaper channels?

 Outsourcing:

A direct result of variability is the need to outsource if we miss Item #1 and Item #2 above. Simply by understaffing there will be a need to find resources quickly. Similarly, variability will mean that there will be a short term need for “overflow” agents. This need can be expected during times of high variability- especially if your capacity planning function is less developed and your plans are not well worked through.

But the real question is whether now is the time to outsource purely on the basis of cost. Like the economy, outsourcing as a trend is somewhat cyclical. There were many stories in the media about the outsourcing of jobs during the last recession, but internally, we heard much about those same jobs coming back to the States as a method of improving quality once the recession had passed.

The lesson from 2000 is that it is very important that the business functions that are outsourced (to offshore centers) be well thought through and analyzed. Too often, companies outsource too many core processes and those companies took a perception hit that American jobs were being sent overseas. During rough times, there is a huge potential for reputation risk.

At the same time, as recent news out of India demonstrates, there is international political risk associated with moving operations overseas. These need to be weighed with the cost savings expected.

Reorganization:

General reorganization for economies of scale purposes is also worth analyzing. However, the value associated with the economies of scale of phone agents are hard to come by. Simply, the operational economies of scale we gain by adding phone agents are mostly exhausted at lower volume thresholds than we might expect. There are, however, economies associated with consolidating management and reducing the infrastructure costs of combined groups, but I expect that these are also not big cost savers for most companies. Again, these are strategic decisions that can be quickly analyzed in your long term planning process.

On the other hand, many companies used the last recession to take calls from disparate locations (like branch locations or retail stores) and place them into contact centers. This, of course, garnered economies of scale for the processing of those phone contacts. But did the companies actually save money? Only if they were able to reallocate the branch resources to more value added work or keep fewer employees in the branch. That is likely a function of the branch employees’ other tasks, and whether they could be handled with fewer employees given the reduction in phone calls.

Multi-channel:

Finally, a mistake that many organizations made during the last recession was the propagation of other channels in order to bring costs down. While it is certain that the long term trend has supported multichannel as a cheaper way of servicing customers, it is also certain that these were not short term fixes. It is likely that the start-up costs of new channels and the time that was required to implement such organizational and technical changes long out-ran the previous recession.

One last point about multi-channel servicing as a cost cutting move: there usually turns out to be less short term value than you would expect. Customers often use multiple channels as ways of contacting service centers several times over- for the same customer issue. Multi-channel servicing often means more contacts in aggregate. Couple this with the obvious phenomenon that multiple channels mean that simpler contacts are self serviced, but also that more complex contacts are serviced by phone agents, and call center costs may be higher than expected in this new environment. Multiple channels often mean that your phone agents’ average handle times increase as the more difficult service problems come their way and the “easy” calls disappear (which is a good thing).

Theme #2: Decentralized “planning” can skew performance

A cousin to the issue of strategic missteps is that management and others, from a variety of organizational disciplines, can make decisions that directly and adversely affect center performance. It isn’t only an individual executive’s fault if there are service disruptions. During times of economic downturn (and when running lean operations), unplanned activities have much more of a dire impact than during times of plenty. Other decision-makers, be they marketing, legal, your agents, or even your customers, can affect your service more dramatically during a recession.

During the last recession we heard stories about:

• Companies cutting a random percentage of their workforce. Top down decisions, made with no operational analysis, often are an operation’s bane. We heard of an industry that chose to cut staff by the uniform amount of 20% during the last downturn. Were they right? Probably not.
• Companies reallocating operations budgets (e.g. through a hiring freeze) toward marketing or other contact generating functions. We heard terrible stories of hiring freezes accompanied by increases in marketing activities- which for a contact center network means certain chaos and operational headaches. More calls without more agents usually will bring agent burnout, attrition, more burnout, more attrition, and…
• Attrition being radically altered. In the absence of the call center death spiral of burnout and attrition, there is often the opposite problem: in times of tough economies nobody quits, stagnation occurs, service suffers, and customer satisfaction takes a hit. It is never good for your agents to be stuck in a job they do not want and tough times often drive this unhappy situation.
• Customer rates and terms being altered to drive revenue (and contacts) or companies charging for previously free services (e.g. airline’s checked baggage policies). When there is more uncertainty with the products and services that you offer, you’ll get more (and more difficult) calls from your customers to sort out your policies. Similarly, even if you keep your product and service exactly the same you can still expect additional clarifying contacts if your competition’s product changes.
• Overall uncertainty can drive call volume for some verticals. When the economy itself is a driver to your product offering (e.g. brokerages), you can expect large volume swings All of this describes a few of the reasons for the many uncertainties we face when running an operation as complex as a contact center network. In times of financial stress these problems are amplified.

 Theme #3: Planning is much more important in these difficult times

Both of the previous ‘themes’ lead to a specific truth: during tough times, while more difficult, strategic planning becomes much, much more important. Changes in the operating environment, whether internally or externally caused, make your ability to plan and react critical. Planning is a decision-making cycle (see the SWPP article, The Contact Center Decision-Making Cycle), comprising of monitoring performance drivers, re-forecasting if necessary, making decisions about the business response to any changes, and implementing the decision. Our ability to perform this process, as a normal matter of business course, will determine whether the organization can be consciously competent during these tough times. In the absence of being able to accurately and quickly analyze changes to our operation, decisions will be made without any analysis. In the end, a decision always has to be made, even if it is to do nothing, and even if it is the wrong decision. But, better decisions come from a better planning and analysis process.

Planning well requires an automation and optimization of your planning process. It requires you to have the ability to forecast, the mathematical technologies to determine optimal staffing levels and hiring plans, the ability to simulate your center network to determine expected service performance, the automation to quickly perform sensitivity and what-if analysis, and the ability to monitor your operation through variance analysis. Speed and accuracy of your planning process is the key.

We are in for tough times but history does not need to repeat itself; many of our big mistakes during the last recession can be avoided by doing some solid analysis and quick and accurate planning. And then doing it all over again.

However, if you delve into many of these Websites, you will find that what they are selling is not a lesson in artistic endeavors. You probably won’t find advice telling you to take your sales team outside, telling them to set their inhibitions aside, having them run barefoot through the grass or having them do tantric exercises to let their minds expand, all so they can be better artists and sell more stuff. Quite the opposite. What you will inevitably find is that these Websites will break down the sales process into a series of steps that look surprisingly like, well, a process. And while we all know particular salespeople who have a real knack for selling things, most sales seminars sound a lot like a recipe and a checklist of activities that will lead to better sales. They are selling a process.

But call center sales is even less artistic than face-to-face sales: overlaying the “process of selling” is the “process of managing a call center” and, excepting some very colorful contact center office cubes, there isn’t a lot of art in managing a contact center either. In this, we are layering an operational process on top of a sales process. That isn’t to say that there is not talent and creativity associated with managing a process, especially a process that deals primarily in people, it simply means that we do not believe it is art in the standard sense. So let’s discuss the non-art of selling in a contact center environment.

Planning to Sell

When we first began to think about this article, we both independently put together a list of attributes of a successful sales center. To be honest, we expected to disagree on many of the items on our lists. But surprisingly, our list of important activities and attributes was actually pretty similar. For example, both of us had high on our list the importance of planning and committing to the sales process.

Like any operation, it is necessary to be sure you have the appropriate tools, management processes and facilities to enable a successful sales environment. But all of this begins with a plan.

The Strategic Plan and Hiring

All plans begin with questions of purpose and size. What are we selling? How are we going to sell it? Who will sell it? Where and how many agents will sell it? How will we market our product?

While most companies’ marketing departments will answer the “what and how” questions, it is up to contact center management to determine the “who, where and how many” answers. The start of any serious center plan starts here; it is a question of how to size the sales operation. Further, these questions are not at all static month over month, there is a timing problem associated with ramping up an operation and, even once an operation is mature, there is a serious seasonality component that makes the analysis of determining when (which weeks) and where to hire your sales agents very complex.

When determining the size of a cross sale opportunity, the question is even more complex – you are determining both the staff required and the number of customers (and their attributes) you’d like to pitch. This is a huge math problem.

But it is critically important to get this question of the appropriate size of your operation answered correctly. We have seen sales operations that, improperly planned, have crippled the effectiveness of major marketing campaigns. Simply, the company’s expensive marketing campaigns have brought customers to the contact center, but improper hiring and planning has meant that those customers could not be serviced and they went to the competition instead. This can be a very expensive mistake.

There are commercial strategic planning systems available that will enable contact center planners to answer these and other important questions.

Given that you have invested in your strategic planning technologies, and you know how many sales agents to hire (and during which parts of the year), it is then important that you hire the right people.

Working in a contact center is not always an easy job, and selling is even harder. Hiring the right people is critical, as these sales agents will drive revenue to your organization. Here are some tips and tricks associated with hiring the right sales agents:

• There are great technologies that will help you screen agents, look into technologies like sales simulations.
• Do not hire emotionally; look at employee experience.
• Do not be afraid to use rigorous testing (even personality tests).
• Ask them to sell you something.
• Listening skills are critical. Test this.
• Don’t try to fill sales slots by convincing service agents to take a sales position; your best sales folks want to sell.
• Check their unique references; talk to their customers (if they owned accounts before).

Training

Great sales agents are not born; they need to be trained to be great sales agents. Training sales agents requires training two separate skills, great phone-handling skills and great sales skills. Great phone-handling skills are standard for our industry and cannot be ignored; customers expect that every agent will be able to answer every customer service question as well as complete a sales call.

The first skill any sales agent requires is expert product knowledge. We have seen some very creative methods to help sales agents acquire and maintain their product expertise. In one retail clothing sales center, the entire product catalog was available for agents to view and handle, even while on a sales call with the customer. Imagine how powerful the discussion is when the phone agent can, when questioned about a particular item of clothing, says with certainty that a feature is as described, because they are holding it in their hands! Similarly, an outsourcer for a major electronics firm had samples of each product available to sales agents for use during their breaks. The power of real familiarity with the product is priceless.

There is a very important question you should consider – are you truly interested in hiring sales agents? There is a huge difference in the skills required for a sales agent as opposed to an order-taking agent. Even though they may be called the same thing within an organization, there is a significant difference in the skill and aptitude required to perform the different jobs. An order taker is required to have skills much akin to your better customer service representatives. They must be polite and helpful, and must help a customer complete the sales process. But real sales skills are not as necessary with an order-taking phone agent. Even though they may have a sales quota, they are not necessarily sales focused.

A sales agent is required to sell – cross-sell a customer toward a product where there was originally only a customer service question, up-sell a customer who is purchasing other items, divert a semi-interested party toward the benefits of products or services resulting in a closed deal, etc. In other words, real sales representatives must make a real difference; they create something out of a fleeting opportunity. (Wow that sounds sort of like art!)

For this reason, it is important that newer sales agents spend time listening to and learning from the current sales stars. It is never enough to memorize a script and recite it well. The best sales folks will internalize the benefits of a product; they’ll understand the pros, the cons and the spin associated with turning a con into a pro. And they’ll pitch it with their own personal “voice.”

Sales agents must be trained in the language required to sell your products and services. If the product is complex, they must be immersed in the business of the customer, so that they understand the business jargon and, more important, the business need for your products. It is their job to help spot and convey this need to prospective customers. For some firms, it is also very important for sales agents to become expert on the competition’s offering, their strengths and weaknesses. It is a good practice to produce regular industry “briefings” so sales agents can converse with your customers about current issues concerning them.

While most companies do a fine job with new-hire training, many do not do the work necessary to provide seasoned agents with best sales data available. The best sales resource for all your sales agents is the wisdom and experience of your best sales agents. While it is impossible for every agent to sit with the superstar agent and learn by listening to their pitch (there is not enough time in the day), it is absolutely possible for management to spend an appropriate amount of effort to learn from these super sales agents and produce a series of best-practices reports and sales seminars. While this requires work for center managers (and management humility, noting that the sales superstars often know more than management), it is simply the best source of sales intelligence available. This intelligence needs to be part of recurring training (whether it is called that) for all of the sales agents.

Sales Technologies

There are several technologies that will improve your sales team’s productivity. Clearly, the standard contact center technologies are important for managing a sales call center team: call monitoring, workforce management and call routing software are all as important for a sales center as they are for a customer service center. Similarly, CRM tools are probably more important for sales centers than for customer service functions, as product information, sales history, etc… can aid an agent to make a sale.

Contact center analytic systems help bring disparate sources of data together and help agents track their performance relative to their peers. Peer pressure is a powerful motivator, and there isn’t a salesperson alive who doesn’t want to be number one.

Speech analytics systems have terrific application to the sales process. These systems monitor the natural spoken language for patterns, in order to raise awareness of issues or common customer comments. There is a tremendous amount of information that resides in the conversations of your phone agents and customers. Until speech analytics, this information could only be gathered anecdotally. With this technology, managers can quickly learn how customers are interacting with your phone agents in a systematic and structured way. In effect, these systems “listen” in on all of your contacts and glean business intelligence and marketing information from them. By understanding what your customers are asking for, you can do a better job of providing your solution.

A current trend in managing cross-sell opportunities is the application of mathematical models to contact center routing and sales staff planning. For instance, the contact center will be organized into customer agents and sales agents or “customer service agents who also cross-sell product.” The trick is to both determine the scope of the business opportunity, and to develop the process by which you direct sales eligible customers to your sales agents. Two technologies aid tremendously in this endeavor. The first is the application of statistical models to help determine who, among those calling your customer service function, are likely to purchase your product. Several companies are scoring their customer base for “likelihood to buy” so as to improve the efficiency of the cross-sell process. Regression modeling and other traditional statistical techniques can do a great job of determining the actual probability of getting a sale from each customer profile. By sending those customers who are likely to buy to a sales agent who will pitch a product at the end of the service call, you can greatly improve your cross-sale function.

The second technology helps determine the scope of your cross sell-function. Determining the size of your sales group is important, and it is absolutely critical to your success. When developing a cross-sale function your need to determine both the demand for your product and the staff plan associated with this demand. If you are using your customer service contacts as the “hunting ground” you must develop a strategy for mining this valuable resource. If you send too many contacts to the sales group, because you overstaff this group, the efficiency of the process will be reduced as more marginal contacts (those less likely to buy) will flow to your sales group (who typically have higher handle times). Similarly, if your sales group is too small and you send too few sales-eligible customers to this group, the efficiency of this operation will also be reduced, as you are leaving sales opportunities on the table and are not selling as much as you can. It is a balancing act, and contact center strategic planning tools can help by determining the optimal size of your sales functions throughout the planning horizon (the optimal size of your sales opportunity probably changes with the seasons). By optimally planning the size of your cross-sell function, you will appropriately balance your costs and revenue potential. You will make the most of your cross-sell opportunity.

Sales Management and Processes

Managing sales folks well requires talent. While this is a stereotype, we believe that successful sales agents tend to be independent, self-assured and driven. A contact center sales manager has to understand the trade-offs associated with managing an efficient contact center operation and managing to maximize sales results.

The tension, obviously, is magnified by whether the sales efforts are transactional or relationship oriented (agents “own” specific accounts or regions, and sales are multi-contact).

Transactional sales centers are centers where sales are likely to result through a single contact, and, therefore, the more “transactions” there are, the more sales are generated. In this environment, it is important to manage the trade-off between handle times and sales. Certainly, managers are expected to maintain operational efficiency, but also they are required to manage the interaction quality through call monitoring and through sales quotas. You can run an efficient center, but you better hit your sales numbers.

For relationship sales, where multiple contacts are required to get the purchase order, the game is very different. Managers must ensure the quality of the contacts, they must manage sales pipelines, and they must keep tabs on the relationships being developed. Center managers often make mistakes by measuring relationship centers by transactional metrics. For example, if your incentive program pays on sales results, it is not likely that you will be able to manage your agents to strict handle time goals. There is no logic that can defeat the statement “I am hitting my sales goal, why do you care about my handle time?” A wise center sales manager once said, “If we are on the phone with a customer, then our competition is not.” The tension between handle times and sales is an artificial one- sales rule all.

Another mistake companies make is to insist on sales scripts (transactional or otherwise). Often, sales scripts are developed by management; they are not developed by the successful sales agents. Management flexibility here is important; the best sales agents are those who truly understand your product, its benefits and can articulate these with his/her own voice.

The most effective sales management tool is the sales quota. Managing toward the sales expectation through this quota truly gets to the heart of the sales purpose. Most other items, operationally or otherwise, are unimportant in a sales-focused environment.

Finally, good management understands that for their sales agents, motivation is really not all about money. It is common to expect that commission on sales is a proxy for employee satisfaction, but if employment research is to be believed, this is but a canard. Salespeople, whether highly compensated or not, require the same care and feeding as your typical management employee. Take time to learn about their aspirations, their three-to-five year career plan, and then try to help them get there. Don’t think that, because their commission payments are high, that an ego-affirming raise is not necessary to keep your best employees from moving to the competition (especially for relationship sales agents).

Planning and Sales

Great salespeople are not born, they are hired correctly, trained correctly, managed enthusiastically and given the tools required to do their jobs. Similarly, great sales centers do not magically appear. They are planned for, they are staffed optimally, and they are provided the systems and infrastructure necessary to allow their sales team to prosper.

There is a saying about knowing art when you see it. While stepping through a sales process and running an operation well certainly doesn’t feel like you’ve been painting the Mona Lisa — there are times when you can look back on what has been accomplished and feel like, well, an artist.