Selection Criateria for Chat and E-Mail Agents

[Donna Banks]

I manage a relatively small center (200 agents, three sites) handling fairly complicated advocacy issues for beneficiaries seeking information on healthcare benefits delivery (we serve a government-funded contract, we do not sell anything). We are planning to roll out additional contact options to our callers (web-chat and e-mail). We seek some recommendations of testing tools that will:

1. Help to select agents from our current staff to handle web-chat and e-mail;

2. Help us to select new candidates, when hiring, who are adept (good balance of writing speed, accuracy, grammar / spelling, word-use and communication).

We DO plan to supplement the program with pre-defined messages and text insertions, but issues we handle may be complex and may require the responding agents to ad lib. Thank you for your help!

[Rakesh Bhambani]

You seem to have got all the criteria correct. Just some pointsÂ…

Accuracy is determined by the quality of the knowledge base you will create for them. In our call center we strongly discourage adlibbing. Remember that you are sending out a written document and the recipient could preserve this, which could have legal ramifications. E-mail allows an agent the luxury of getting a correct answer from a subject expert or the knowledge management team before sending out the response. Your response accuracy goals should be 100% or close.

We have also observed that sometimes agents with good spoken language are not that hot with text. Their typing is slow. They make spelling mistakes in spite of spell-check tools, their formatting is sloppy and they canÂ’t differentiate between similar sounding words with different spelling e.g. their-there, based-biased, do-due etc.

The good news is that testing for these skills is fairly easy. Any good typing tutor software will not only test candidatesÂ’ speeds but also build up their skills. Our favorite is Typing Tutor 6 by Que Software. We have made typing practice mandatory for 15-20 minutes every day till over 60 wpm is achieved. ItÂ’s worth investing agent time on this.

We have also created a small test in-house. It is a short story that tests if the agent can differentiate between similar sounding words. ItÂ’s fun for the agents and an effective tool for you. I can send it to you if you send me your mail ID.

Have you also considered outsourcing, especially to India? You could get a fine job done by an e-services company using specialized best-of-breed processes and technology and still enjoy significant savings over your existing budget and costs.

[Rakesh Bhambani]

I just got a mail from the Call Center Ops webmaster telling me that they have disabled the e-mail function.

My mail ID is r_bhambani@indiatimes.NOSPAMcom.

Please remove the NOSPAM from the address (feeble attempts to foil spammers' bots).