Rushed, Routine, and Robotic
Call Center Directors: Be Careful What You Ask For

Johanna Lubahn, Cohen Brown’s Managing Director for Call Center Services. Johanna_Lubahn@cbmg.com

My family has an annual rite – a day-long harvest and freezing of beans from my parents’ vegetable garden.

One year, while my mother was sealing the beans into little freezer bags, she noticed that some bags were marked “sandwich bags” and others were marked “freezer bags.” My father was taking no chances with his precious harvest. He found an 800 number on the baggie box and started to call.

I was then a bank call center director and begged him not to. “It’s a call center, Dad, not the factory. It’s Saturday, they won’t know, they don’t care.”

He ignored me, called, and reached someone to whom he worriedly explained the whole bean situation. I was cringing, imagining the person at the other end rolling her eyes, smothering her laughter, waving others to listen in. But Dad was listening carefully, nodding, agreeing. Apparently satisfied, he offered his thanks, hung up, and proudly explained how the call center lady had helped him decide that all the bags were suitable for his beans.

This was little bags and beans – just a small customer with an odd question about a single box of bags. But that rep treated my Dad with respect and gave him thoughtful advice. She didn’t let her expectations or scripting keep her from being authentic, personal, and helpful.

So, full disclosure: I am a call center idealist. But when my line of work comes up in a social setting, I steel myself against a bitter chorus: All they do is read from a script. You can tell they just want to get you off the phone fast. They don’t care – I’m just a transaction to them.

Rushed, routine, and robotic. The unfortunate three Rs of too many call center interactions. “Press one to be patronized, marque dos to be ignored.”

Most people tend to blame the reps. But I would ask their managers: are you creating obstacles for your reps? Are you asking for one thing (service) but really wanting another (cost savings)?

• Do you emphasize the personal? Do you talk about “calls” or callers? Do you talk about call “traffic” and “volumes” or customers with needs and problems to be solved? How many systems do your reps have to manage when they are trying to sound personal? Have you role-played “personal” with them?

• Do you talk about service but emphasize numbers that measure anything but? Callers call with an emotion and a need. Do you measure how well your reps handled the emotion and served the need? Those measures are harder to quantify, but they are the essence.

• Do you overscript? Callers complain about reps who do not use “real” language. Do you hand reps a script and basically tell them to learn it? Do they contribute to their scripts? Do you have them practice on one another before going live? That is where they gain confidence and energy.

• Do you measure satisfaction by how fast calls get answered? What other measures do you use for customer satisfaction? Are they the same measures your customers and reps would use?

If your call center poses these obstacles for your call center reps, only sustained culture change will help you exchange “rushed, routine, and robotic” for “personal, authentic, and helpful.”

Learned Helplessness in the Call Center Industry

Dennis Adsit, dennis_adsit@comcast.net

In almost every Psychology 101 textbook ever written, you will always find several pictures associated with famous psychological experiments. There is the poor, perplexed looking student subject of the Solomon Asch experiment who is changing his answer about which line is longer because of the responses of peers (who are all in on the experiment). Another well-known picture shows a rhesus monkey hugging a wire “monkey” wrapped in terry cloth in the Harry Harlow experiments that demonstrated the importance of care-giving and companionship in the early stages of primate development.

Finally, there is the picture of the dog lying on the floor of a cage being shocked even though there is a simple way to escape because it had been “conditioned” earlier that nothing it did to escape mattered. The experimenter, Martin Seligman, called this behavior “learned helplessness.”

Learned helplessness is pervasive in the call center industry as well. What does this mean? It means that there are many problem situations in the call center industry for which there is an easy, proven way out, but leaders seem to be content with the same old, tired solutions that are not working.

Though there are many examples, here are a few off the top.

Labor Shortages. Call centers around the world, especially in Asia, are facing severe labor shortages…they can’t attract people into the industry. With billions of people around the world, clearly, the problem is not a shortage of labor, but a shortage of labor with the right skills…technical, problem solving, language.

At the turn of the 20th century, Henry Ford faced a similar problem. There was a lot of labor available, but the labor often did not speak English, was illiterate and lacked the technical skills to manufacture cars end-to-end. He solved it with a process change which broke down theretofore highly skilled work into smaller, well-defined, easy to teach and repeat pieces and moved everything along on an assembly line.

The call center industry is no different. By using technology to simplify the process and voice applications, the agent's job can be simplified so that the entry level skill requirements are reduced, thereby expanding the available labor pool.

Inadequate Training. Call center agents are often put on the phones like the Christians were put in the Coliseum…inadequately prepared for what they are about to face. This leads to mistakes, long handle times, call backs, escalations, frustration and terrible word-of-mouth (from the agents and the customers). Companies attempt to shore this up with the long dead horse of recording-(sample) monitoring-(occasional) coaching, but the efforts and results are laughable. Moreover, the damage has already been done.

There are well-known training criteria that you can train to…trainee satisfaction, knowledge, behavior, and results. Most of the time, we are training agents for the first two, with smattering of the third in the form of a few in-class behavior assessments and a brief on-phone nesting period. Why are we putting agents on the phone that have not been trained to a results standard? Would you like airline pilots trained this way?

Speaking of pilots, that is the well-tested way out of this particular cage…simulation. Technology exists to simulate calls. This allows you to make sure the agents are not released to the phones until they perform to a certain level of quality and at a certain pace. It also allows you to throw curve balls at the agent to make sure they can handle situations off the beaten path.

Stratospheric Levels of Turnover. Turnover is perhaps one of the biggest problems in the industry. It averages in the mid-30% range in the US and is much higher outside the US. It is not uncommon to find centers around the world with greater than 100% annual turnover.

The effect of this turnover in the form of costs for recruiting, staffing, training, coaching and in the form of operational performance (adequately performing agents are replaced by lower performing agents) does not show up on the P&L, but it is scourging the industry and the parent companies.

Let’s face it. Call center jobs are some of the toughest white collar jobs there are. They are repetitive, tiring and stressful. You can spend lots of money fixing everything else about your environment, but until the repetitive, tiring and stressful aspects of the job are reduced, you will still have high turnover.

Maddingly, solutions to these problems exist…solutions to make the process simpler so the agents can relax, solutions to reduce the stress of escalations, solutions to reduce how often the agents have to repeat the same information over and over again, day after day.

It would be unconscionable to paint such a dismal view of the industry and leave it there. So I will end with this. Not all of the dogs in Seligman's experiments became helpless. Approximately 30% of the dogs did not become helpless, but instead somehow managed to find a way out of the unpleasant situation in spite of their past experience with it. Seligman said that in humans, those that avoid learned helplessness are found to have a high degree of optimism. Not rose-colored glasses optimism, but a world view that frames the situation as “other than personal, pervasive, or permanent.”

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Copyright 2007 National Association of Call Centers