L.A. Confidential: Contact Center Roundtable

In February, Multichannel Merchant escaped the winter storms of the Northeast and jetted to sunny West Hollywood, CA, to discuss contact center management with a group of multichannel executives. Although the participants represented diverse merchandise categories, the challenges they face running a contact center and improving customer service are universal.

Multichannel Merchant: What is your biggest challenge right now in the call center, and what has it been over the past few years?

David Robinson, customer service/call center manager, See's Candies: I think our biggest challenge is that we're very seasonal. During the summer months we have 15 agents, and that balloons into 300 for the holiday season. Then we slowly lay off and bring some people back for Valentine's Day and Easter. But being so seasonal does pose a lot of challenges, from finding the staff to training the staff to having the resources for the staff.

Lorena Abood, director of customer care, Modern Postcard: Ours is recruiting. We year-round have about 15 reps. We're able to handle the seasonality because we put them through training. But we have queues all over the building. We have a sales center that handles all the sales calls. I handle the customer care portion of it, but then we have 17 production teams [who oversee the production of the postcards for customers], which also have individual queues.

The average tenure [of the reps is] about two years. Any time we have someone leave us — leave the company or, most of the time, get promoted to other positions up in the company — it's finding their replacements [that's the challenge]. Right now we're just trying to raise the bar and find quality people to be able to handle all the e-mail communication and phone communication and special programs.

Robinson: Can I ask what you pay your starting reps?

Abood: For customer care it's $13.25. We've typically been hiring at the $13.25 starting rate, but now I'm open to hiring somebody at a little bit higher than the starting rate because of what I'm going to be tasking the new people with. It's really hard to find qualified reps. We've started some assessments — they need to know all the pricing, they need to be able to handle digital files and learn about the different type of mediums.

Robinson: It sounds like your rep has a far stronger skill set than ours. We start ours at $10 per hour, which also limits the talent that we get.

Abood: But see, the product knowledge would be much more limited. Here we're requesting that they know about direct mail and all the different postal situations and, in addition to that, about production and printing and product.

Christopher Foster, marketing director for Modern Postcard: We offer a mailing component and advice and consultation to help customers with their projects, so we're very service oriented. Our strategy and intention is to drive as many people to call us as possible. When they go to the Website, it's great, but I actually want them to call because then our value really rises, because everybody's got a Website, but not everybody has the people that we have. So not only do our reps need to know all about the jobs, but they also need to ask callers about their business, ask them how we can help their business.

Abood: But another challenge for us is that we don't have all the calls come into a centralized call center or centralized service center. We have production people handling client interaction, and it's really hard to keep that level of service equal.

Morlee Griswold, director of direct marketing for Patagonia: How many calls does it take for you to complete an order?

Abood: I don't know exactly, because we handle all the reporting in customer care, and then production manages all of their reporting, so it's difficult to tell… We actually make some outbound phone calls because we need to send [customers] a layout for approval, so if you're counting the outbound calls as well that's the second call. The third call would be if they call in with questions about billing or layout changes and things like that. And they receive an e-mail that tells them their package has shipped, and it has the tracking number. Typically it's more than one phone call; it could be two, three, max four if there's a lot of extra changes and details in the project.

Griswold: That's a really complex call center. The call center is really like the center of your business.

Foster: We're asking Lorena to centralize the customer experience and be the champion of a consistent vision of service and level of service throughout. But there are areas of customer care that don't report to Lorena. We're trying to work with our vice president of production, saying, Corral it in so that Lorena can manage the entire call group so that we can have a real bookend experience.

Griswold: You're in that terrible position of having the responsibility without the authority.

Abood: We're looking at doing some testing and putting different programs together to boost the level of client experience. One of them is to embed a customer care rep in the team. We have different work groups, and each work group consists of six production teams, so instead of routing them to six individual queues we're going to pool them into one queue and have the customer care rep and another team rep handling the phone calls. If I got my wish, it would be to centralize to customer care all the phone calls that aren't sales related and have that be the first point of contact, but I think what we do to diffuse the point is once a job comes into production we send them an e-mail telling them that we have all the data out there, and the name on there is the team rep name and extension.

Griswold: I'd say our biggest challenge is something somewhat similar, or at least related, and that is integration — going from a call center to a contact center. And changing the mindset of “we have 10% more calls, we have 10% more business coming in, so we need 10% more reps to handle that,” because some things are becoming extremely efficient — you know, having the FAQs and e-mails going out. But it goes back to that whole “we thought computers were going to make our lives easier, and we were going to have a paperless office” and all of that. We went from a 100% call center where it was one call for every order, and now we're in this blended contact center where we still have an equal number of contacts [but in different media] to an equal number of orders. But we don't have so much the problem with recruiting, because we're a premium company to work for, so people come in. But it's more [of a challenge] once they're in. The work of the call center is tedious and concise and precise, and it's just really a tough job. We start out at about $11 an hour and bump up from there pretty quickly at three months, six months, nine months, and a year. They max out at a year, but we keep our reps when there's not really any chance of advancement for two, three, four years because it's just so stable. But what do you do with a rep for three or four years to keep them engaged and busy?