Taking Your Call Center to the Next Level

Call centers and their agents are the lifeblood of the collection industry, creating a person-to-person contact with a debtor, generating revenue for agencies, gathering payments for creditors, and providing jobs for communities. One of the toughest challenges for call center owners and operators is finding, training, and retaining the best agents.

Since October, insideARM has been running advisory pieces on call center operations, and readers have responded, making the stories some of our most popular of the last year. The series has included stories on what to look for in a prospective employee (“Agent Alert: A Good Work Ethic Often Surpasses Experience,” Nov. 7), how an agent should prepare for a collection call (“The Best Collectors Know: the Debtor is a Customer ” Oct. 29), and how one successful call center owner addresses agent turnover (“Equity Stake Could Convince Agents to Stick Around ” Nov. 20).

Today’s item targets call center managers, and offers some ideas on tracking and improving agent performance. If you have suggestions for further stories in this series, please contact Burney Simpson, editor of insideARM.com at 240.499.3826 or burney@insidearm.com.

IMPROVING CALL CENTER performance can help many collection firms. With that in mind, Jeffrey Feuer, president of Customer Solutions Groups, a Culver, City, Calif. telecom/call center consulting firm, offers the following ideas to enhance agent skills and center performance.

Monitor numerous calls. This can be a boring, repetitive task, Feuer admits, but it’s an essential practice for call center managers who want to correct ineffective, inappropriate or illegal behavior.

“Monitoring calls enables [a manager] to determine if an agent is sticking with the script,” Feuer says. “With collection, there are many privacy and credit laws that apply.” Monitoring helps make sure that agents provide the proper legal disclosures. Monitoring also tells the manager how persistent an agent is in reaching the right person and in making the collection, Feuer says.

Manage the calling list.  Some are high value calls, others are low-value calls, Feuer explains. Some debtors have a higher propensity to pay or have higher outstanding balances. Others are new on the calling list. All of these have to take precedence over low-balance, less likely to pay customers. Experiment with lists and keep good, accurate reports of what works and what doesn’t.

Use More and More Meaningful Reports. Too many call centers have too few performance reports and the ones they do have offer little value, Feuer explains. “Sometimes management is not privy to what’s working and what’s not.” He recommends using productivity reports as well as reports that show what percentage of calls “generate the action you’re seeking,” and workforce management reports that show the time an agent spends on calls, in training, in coaching, and so on.
     
Coach for improvement. Call center coaching sessions need to focus on improvement rather than simply finding fault, Feuer says. So there should be input from the agent and the coach in order to improve the agent’s performance. “Coaching sessions are often seen as something unpleasant; they shouldn’t be,” Feuer says.