Top 5 Call Center Realities Explained

In this post, I address five realities employees face in the call center/ contact center/ business process outsourcing (BPO), or global services industry, locally in Jamaica and the broader global space. These have been selected from topics I have had to address the most throughout my career.

This post acknowledges that these are realities faced by many and not necessarily all. I will explain why these tend to occur or persist, then provide practical advice to managers and line staff on improving these situations.

These are my views and are not necessarily those of third parties I am or may become associated with. I welcome any feedback or suggestion as I work towards growing and bettering this work.

Lack of growth

Growth in a company or program is often polarizing: all at once, then almost non-existent, abundant in one area, and absent everywhere else. The reason is that individual growth opportunities also require a corresponding business growth opportunity, which is managed according to a system of ratios. For example, in a program consisting of 100 agents, up to every 20 agents will require 1 supervisor and possibly 1 assistant supervisor or senior agent to form a team. Five to six teams would then make up this 100 agent program. The program is usually supported by 1 program manager and possibly an assistant program manager or senior supervisor. The program may be supported by 2 to 3 quality assurance representatives, 1 for every two teams, and 2 to 3 workforce management representatives to coordinate customer processing and provide reports and analyses. There may also be a trainer to onboard new hires and up-train existing staff when new content becomes available.

Per the above scenario, 100 agents may require about 20 support resources, most of which are often promoted from within the program or the broader company. The growth polarizations occur, for example, if the company or program suddenly lands 200 agents worth of business, which needs to start yesterday. Finding the 40 support staff is often more challenging than finding the 200 agents. In these cases, the top performers from each of the roles mentioned are almost guaranteed some form of promotion. However, if the growth is sector-specific, such as banking or healthcare, which may require domain experience, the growth may be abundant but closed off to the other sectors in the company. Moreover, after all the support requirements have been satisfied, if the company or program does not experience any further growth spurts, and as long as these ratios remain, there may not be any further individual growth opportunities unless to replace staff attrition. Employees joining after a growth wave falls in a lull and have the actual experience of a lack of growth.

Staff interested in growing should work on building a track record of high performance in their existing roles and with any responsibilities they are entrusted with. This ensures they are maxing out on earning potentials now and demonstrating to decision-makers that they are candidates for next-level opportunities. This also means suffering through lull periods, as switching companies without it being a promotion can mean restarting high-performance track records, which may not align with the next growth spurt, resulting in promotion opportunities being missed.

Leaders looking to stay ahead of unexpected growth should be earmarking candidates for next-level opportunities and ensuring that these candidates are aware that they are under consideration so that they are encouraged to stick around.  Lull periods offer great stability to launch internship and mentorship programs to build and develop talent pools and demonstrate to the staff the company’s commitment to advancing their careers. It can be unfortunate when lull periods are not capitalized on, resulting in growth opportunities that could benefit scores of staff being missed or short-lived due to lack of preparation and poor execution.

Bad Managers

Unfortunately, the cry about bad managers tends to be directed at line managers or supervisors. These resources are directly responsible for driving the level of agent productivity that clients demand, and the programs need to remain viable. Many of these charges are accurate and will continue to be an area of opportunity for the following reasons.

In most cases, supervisors are the second-highest staff population after agents due to the 1:20 ratio. For a population of 1000 agents, 50 supervisors are needed. These are often chosen from agents who were great at assisting customers and meeting targets. This means little experience managing and developing people outside of internship and exposure programs if their leaders were proactive enough to enroll them. Also, as discussed, growth is often not favorably timed and needs to be accepted first, with a view that strategies to mitigate gaps will follow. One of those gaps is 3-6 months of growing pains a team of 20 agents will experience while a new supervisor is brought up to speed. This may hurt new hires with new supervisors the most. They are often unaware that their supervisor is also on a learning curve and will be rough around the edges. In these cases, both the supervisors and agents may feel like they need more support from their respective leaders and better cooperation from each other.

Managers should be working closely with supervisors and their teams to ensure consistent performance and work experiences. Both of which be in alignment with company standards and culture. Sadly, many agents leave jobs due to challenges with their supervisors, without any interactions with their supervisor’s manager. Interactions that could have retained the agent and gathered important feedback to develop the supervisor further. Management hosting regular focus group sessions with agents, including and excluding the supervisor, can help to emphasize a more comprehensive leadership structure and reinforce that one inexperienced supervisor does not represent the entire company. Ongoing supervisor development remains vital as these are often the ‘bosses’ employees are leaving monthly, and not the senior levels.

Staff can play a role in managing their supervisors by adopting concepts such as ‘comply then complain’ for all requests that are not illegal or immoral. This practice can help deescalate developing situations and allow time for concerns to be addressed appropriately through correct escalation channels. 1:1 coaching sessions are great for giving tactful feedback to supervisors, highlighting things they are doing well and things you would appreciate if they did differently. It may be helpful to mention that you are giving this feedback personally first before it is raised on feedback surveys or in skip-level sessions with their managers. Combining these practices can go a far way in improving the effectiveness of leaders and the quality of work environments they foster.

Low wages

Not all companies are created equally, and also, not all programs inside these companies are as well. There will continue to be gaps between what companies and programs pay for each type of work and what they can or should be. This is where feedback from the staff in the form of their behaviors and words is needed to guide managers on well they are doing regarding compensation and benefits for critical areas and functions.

The reality is the industry tends to have wage ranges for each type of work: voice versus non-voice, sales versus tech support versus customer service, and back-office transactions versus real-time interactions. These are often guided by what clients are willing to pay in the competitive global market. Client payments form center revenue, which is generally at fixed rates, and the profit margins the program can realize are subject to how well they can keep wage costs and other costs and overheads aligned. The global market keeps tension in this area. There are always new companies looking to discount services to acquire clients and tenured companies needing to justify higher costs with better performance and quality. This naturally creates a propensity for clients to want to pay less for better quality work. This lowers revenue, and expenses are increased as more value is being offered. This can adversely impact company profitability and their ability to pay wages that would put them out of business.

Managers continuously have to make contextualized decisions on wage dissatisfaction feedback, which may be in the form of high attrition and lower performance outputs. Depending on the actual business impact, the company may choose not to take any actions to increase wages if they are seeing where client contractual requirements, as well as internal profitability targets, are attainable despite having to bear higher costs to replace staff more frequently and the need to offer overtime to offset performance gaps. However, in other cases, management may find it more beneficial to increase wages to the point where it is no longer a reason for staff dissatisfaction, and performance targets can be met consistently. In these cases, paying the higher wages and providing more benefits can be offset by the cost reductions from replacing less staff and not needing overtime. Finding the right salaries for each work type remains critical to balancing client, staff, and shareholder performance expectations.

Employees have the personal responsibility of ensuring they are in companies offering the best compensation for their skills and services. This requires a consideration of overall benefits packages, not just salaries, as perks, allowances, work environments, logistics and accessibility, opportunities to grow, and general culture all can have some financial components. While wages can always be higher for any given role, three questions offer perspective: 1) am I losing money due to performance misses and penalties? 2) am I maxing out on all earning opportunities, including taking advantage of promotions, bonuses, and extra hours where applicable? 3) am I in or working towards the highest role and compensation I am qualified for? A ‘no’ to any of the three questions would mean net wages are not as high as they should be. However, a lot of that is on the employee to fix and not necessarily the fault of the industry, client, or company.

Horrible shifts

Unfortunately, shifts and schedules are an output of the clients operating hours and performance requirements. The program has little influence over these, and clients are often forced to support operating hours and set performance targets to maintain competitiveness in their respective markets. For example, in some cases, financial services clients are bound by laws and customs to conduct business and get all their results during specific days and hours. In contrast, clients providing utility services will need to support customers 24/7 as outages can occur at any time. As such, representatives can have drastically different shift options and work requirements depending on the sector of the clients they support.

However, it is not beneficial for companies or Jamaica to cherry-pick clients based on operating hours that are favorable to ‘island time’. Global competitors are finding creative ways of saying ‘yes’ to as much work as possible, including working overnight in their time zones to provide local daytime support to clients if needed. Jamaica’s success requires similar creativity and flexibility on the parts of the companies and staff.

Managers being transparent about shifts and work requirements at the outset and the employees being realistic and honest about their ability to meet them will ensure the best outcomes. From my experience, only about 30% of the shifts fall in the horrible category. Companies can make these shifts more attractive by giving them preferred day off options, such as priority for weekends or back-to-back days off. In some cases, offering shift incentives, transportation allowances, or meal subsidies can make these shifts highly desirable. These incentives can become self-funded from lower shrinkage and attrition performances. The overall process can also benefit from consistent shift assignments that are known and easy to execute. These may include sequential rotations, where all staff will work all shifts over eventually. Tenure or performance-based shift assignments that can be worked towards by building tenure or improving performance. These systems should also include a process for exceptions that management can administer and provisions for staff to trade shifts easily among themselves.

Top performance is the most significant negotiation point for staff when bargaining for preferential shifts or placement on programs with more favorable schedules or shift perks. Learning how shift assignment processes work will ensure efforts are going towards desired outcomes. Forming relationships with peers by taking trades to less desirable shifts that are still workable can create currencies that can be cashed in for a more favorable change as needed. Typically, once staff becomes settled in the system, they will often find that getting their desired shifts is no longer a significant challenge. This is because new hires are continuously joining the company and are less likely to qualify for premium shifts based on their performance or tenure. The key is getting past the new hire stage.

Impossible Targets

Companies are selling clients that they can do their customer service work better than they ever could. Clients recognizing how competitive their markets are and that customer service is often time-consuming and distracting from their core businesses can find it advantageous to leverage these experts to benefit their customers and improve their overall competitiveness.

Providers who can meet demanding targets will quickly differentiate themselves. This allows them to strengthen and grow client relationships, resulting in them being awarded more challenging and higher-paying contracts. This dynamic naturally creates a healthy tension between the sales and operations departments within the company to ensure sales commitments to clients are grounded in reality and operational performances are continuously pushing ahead of the competitive market. This can position the company for even more growth, to the benefit of all parties mentioned above. However, in between this tension exists the staff responsible for executing the actual work of each client according to their contracts. This results in challenging targets by design, as these are set to give the clients a competitive edge and justify their investment in a third-party provider. Unfortunately, in some cases, targets are pushed beyond hard to impossible due to calibration gaps, requiring sales and operations to adjust expectations with clients. These changes can take a long time to accomplish and create bad experiences for the staff in the interim.

Managers know that the success of the center requires consistently meeting challenging targets. They also know that they will need to agree with the clients to make these targets even more difficult to strengthen the business relationship. Sustaining this requires that the center invests in continuous improvement programs to put processes in place for how staff can continue to meet increasingly difficult targets without feeling burnt out and wanting to resign. These may include journey mapping of entire customer service experiences to see what opportunities exist and categorizing them into what they can address on their own and what they can provide as business insights back to the clients. Sanity checks such as the percentage of individual representatives meeting each target can tell whether issues are systemic or individualized. Supervisors should ensure they can meet the targets they are managing their teams towards to ensure the coaching and development they provide are grounded in practice and experience.

Employees can adopt the practice of peer-to-peer comparisons to identify opportunities for improvements and best practices to borrow. They should challenge supervisors to provide development plans to get them where they need to be and accept that they will need to put the work in. Categorizing shortcomings into skill versus execution gaps will provide insights into what help is required. Also, on average, about 80% of work can be solved with 20% of the overall knowledge, so quickly mastering these major work types will make life much easier. Moreover, taking the initiative to innovate on coaching received and leveraging available resources can help with the mastering of more complex work types. Also, sharing these skills with the team can be a great way to stand out and secure promotion opportunities.  Staff may benefit from the mindset of learning all they can because they will need to teach it one day.

Conclusion

These five realities, and others not discussed, are endemic to the industry and are not expected to go away. These result from complex market forces driving tension between clients continuously desiring to pay less and companies having to find ways to add more value at discounted rates. Frontline staff tends to get caught in the crossfire, and the impact is seen in their work conditions continuously changing. However, there are upsides to mastering these challenging situations. These may include rewarding working experiences and lucrative careers. It is often said that knowing is half the battle, so I aim to continue providing these industry insights and knowledge bits, and encourage others to do the same so that we can collectively move the industry and Jamaica forward.