The Call Center Handbook: The Complete Guide to Starting, Running and Improving Your Call Center / Edition 4

by Keith Dawson

Overview

Need to know how to buy a phone switch for your call center? How to measure the productivity of agents? How to choose from two cities that both want your center? No problem. The Call Center Handbook is a complete guide to starting, running, and im

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781578203055
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	11/20/2003
Series:	Call Center Handbook
Edition description:	Subsequent
Pages:	283
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Keith Dawson is one of the world's foremost authorities on call centers. He is currently senior editor for CommWeb and was founder of Call Center News Service, the industry's premier online source for information and independent analysis. He is also author of Call Center Savvy and co-author of Call Center Dictionary.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1: Destination - Call Center

Before you buy a switch, hire staff, install a single piece of software, train any agents before you take a single call you're going to have to find a place to put your center. Site selection is one of the biggest decisions you'll make. It affects every decision that comes after from the kinds of wiring you install to the services you offer your customers, for years to come. Where do you locate your call center to provide the maximum advantage to your organization and your customers?

Finding a site for your call center is more difficult than finding a site for many other types of business. And it is more difficult to find the ideal site for your call center now than it was just a few years ago.

The choice of locations has never been broader you can put an effective center just about anywhere these days. But having more choices means you have to do your homework better than ever to find the right site for your center. It used to be a simple matter. You'd put your center in an established call centerfriendly city, like Omaha, hoping to get the best telecom connections, and an educated, accent-free workforce.

But that's not the most cost-effective solution anymore. While there are a huge number of centers scattered throughout the American (and Canadian) Midwest, other factors let you enlarge the area of consideration. Many companies no longer see the Midwest as an attractive area for new centers (though existing ones continue to thrive) because of the tight labor market in the late 1990s.

In essence, the traditional barriers have been eliminated, which makes the decision of where to locate if anything, harder. You can get goodtelecommunications services just about anywhere in the continental US and Canada. Similar conditions exist in other regions of the developed world. And (at least in the US), the cost of telecom has dropped dramatically through this decade.

A call center is not physically demanding as to the kind of space you put it in, either. We've seen centers in office buildings, strip malls and industrial parks; squeezed into back rooms and former warehouses; converted supermarkets and trading floors there's no end to the ways to house a call center.

Given that, you can place a call center anywhere you like. It means that you can choose the physical surroundings based on your specific company's needs. If you need to be near an order processing center, for example, or the CEO's summer cottage, you'll not find that too much of a problem.

What is good news for call center managers is there are plenty of locations, both in the United States and abroad, that are eager to have your call center join their business community.

Call centers are so malleable, physically, that you can just as logically conclude that New York City is an appropriate venue for your center as Ponca City, Oklahoma. In real life cases, both of those cities had something critical for the company that ran a center. In New York's case, it was a company that already had an office presence in town; converting an extra room into a small, informal call center made sense, even at New York real estate prices. New York City has some of the highest costs for office space and labor in the country, plus a telecom environment that's not always what we could call a welcome mat for high-tech businesses. But that's where one company set up a center dedicated to outbound calling on small accounts. They already had the telecom in place, and the networking infrastructure. At $100,000 to revamp the existing space and furbish it for call center work, it made more sense to add-on than it did either to locate somewhere cheaper, or even to outsource.

In the case of Oklahoma, you have a very different environment. Space is cheaper, and there is room to spread out. Several years ago a major outsourcer built a jumbo center, investing more than $5 million to build a 42,000 square foot center in Ponca City, a small town of 29,000 people.

They were not just looking to add an informal center to an existing business function. Instead, when placing a major facility, they were thinking costs, and thinking long-term. So state incentives played a major role in their decision. Oklahoma has a highly developed government program designed to attract call centers, because they quite correctly see call centers as a killer job creation engine for their communities. And in the case of the big centers, you can transform a small community overnight, build a tax base, create a reason for local people to stay in the community instead of migrate to bigger cities, and so on. Call centers do for these communities what factories did a few generations ago.

Dig a little deeper, and you find that Ponca City has an excellent school system, including vocational schools, that can provide a steady stream of support reps with some technical skills. The University of Oklahoma is not too far away, either. Outsourcers like small towns they provide stability and permanence. But they choose carefully, because if you make the wrong decision, you're stuck with a multimillion dollar investment.

Selection Criteria

Labor. One surprising quality of this strong economy is low unemployment - recently at just 4.5% and hovering around that area for long enough now to create real competition for quality workers, particularly in the service sector at the low end of the pay scale.

While that's good for workers, it's affecting the call center industry. Anecdotal reports indicate that it's harder to find workers in large quantity at the traditional low pay and benefit rates that have fueled the dramatic expansion of the industry in the last few years. Staffing large centers is harder, and turnover has always been a problem. It appears that the national labor squeeze is exacerbating the problem that used to appear on a local or regional level, where too many call centers in one area would saturate the labor pool. Where in the past the industry would move on to another area, now instead salaries are creeping up.

"Call centers have traditionally drawn from the marginally employed," says call center expert Madeline Bodin. "People like housewives, students with flexible schedules, people who have to work part time, or recent graduates. With unemployment so low, people have other choices." She says that given the choice between a job in a call center and something else, there has to be a reason for potential employees at that level going to choose the center. Often, there isn't one.

Kevin Leonard of Strategic Outsourcing Corp. specializes in hiring in bulk hundreds of agents at a time for large, high-end call centers in the southwest. "What most call center people do is call temp agencies," he says. "The signal is sent to all the temp agencies and they find everyone they can't place anywhere else."When you staff by the hundred in a single concentrated area, especially under time pressure, the call center management ends up under the gun, with no real opportunity to check the skills of the pool as a whole.

What this means for call center site selection is that the old rules don't necessarily apply. Going to a location because of the cost of labor doesn't make sense. Economic conditions will change over time, changing the cost of...

Table of Contents

Introduction, Part I: The Physical Center, Part II: Routing Calls: Switches & Hardware Systems, Part III: The Front End, Part IV: Making Sense of the Call, Part V: Critical Peripherals, Part VI: Management & Operations, Part VII: Outside the Center