Future of Call Centers pt. 1

Work of Tomorrow

Joining Christian Terwiesch is Angela Garfinkel, Founder and President of Quality Contact Solutions (QCS), an outsourced call center service and leading telemarketing firm. QCS, founded 11 years ago, supports clients as they outsource their call center operations or business-to-business (B2B) telemarketing sales programs. Its business model is to work with organizations that have brick-and-mortar call centers with excess capacity. Ms. Garfinkel describes “owner operators” as “a managed business processing outsourcing solution”: Her firm develops clients’ programs and places them in qualified brick-and-mortar call centers. QCS works with 15 owner-operated brick-and-mortar call center locations, across which there are approximately 500 full-time seats, with hours shifted for customers across different time zones. One of the firm’s departments, “QCS At Home,” has 30 work-from-home seats to manage both inbound and outbound calls. “QCS At Home” came about when one client’s vendor went out of business, which almost left 30 of its representatives without work. But because the client did not want to lose the expertise of these representatives, as it recognized how these representatives had done professional B2B sales to medical accounts, QCS hired them. A number of QCS’s best practices would be worthwhile for other companies to learn from: To cut down on attrition/burnout, which can be especially high in the customer service setting, QCS identifies if the work done by clients is “something that employees would enjoy doing.” For example, QCS would not work with credit card companies to sell credit card insurance. Moreover, what makes a firm like QCS move beyond “good” to “great” is achieving optimal staff planning. QCS forecasts demands based on 15-minute intervals throughout the day, which are different every day of the week, day of the month, and time of the year. Additionally, according to Ms. Garfinkel, QCS minimizes customer wait times by blending inbound and outbound interactions together. The firm is intentionally overstaffed for inbound interactions, such that when representatives have free time, they initiate outbound calls, which come second in priority to inbound calls. Ms. Garfinkel notes that a typical customer service goal is answering 80% of phone calls within 20 seconds; customers also tend to be more satisfied if they receive an email reply within 10 to 15 minutes, or an initial reply over chat between 30 to 45 seconds. By reviewing a set percentage of these different interactions on a daily basis, QCS is able to provide its clients with summaries of customers’ feedback. The clients, in turn, can improve their pricing and quality of service according to this quality monitoring. Ms. Garfinkel shares that organizationally, there is one supervisor for every 8 to 15 representatives, and typically one quality monitoring person for every 50 representatives. Mondays, especially holidays, are typically the busiest. At any given point, roughly 65% of representatives are managing inbound calls, 20% are managing outbound calls, and the rest are waiting for the next call, either inbound or outbound, to queue. Representatives are cross-trained in up to 3 types of calls. With more experience, the time it takes for a representative to take notes post-call usually decreases. Ms. Garfinkel predicts that with emerging technologies, over the long-term, the number of face-to-face interactions will decrease, and the overall number of service requests will increase. How much will all of this change with the development of artificial intelligence? Ms. Garfinkel notes that tasks like resetting passwords or looking into balance inquiries have the potential to become automated. However, only human agents have the ability to manage more complicated calls—for example, in cases where the representatives’ emotional intelligence is essential for working with frustrated customers.