empowering call center agents

[yukihiro]

i have been assigned to do a study on the empowerment of call center agents and honestly, i do not know where to start. how is empowerment exactly defined in the call center industry? what are the things needed to be included in the study? how do we empower the agents? what are the measures in empowerment? where does empowerment of agents stop? any reference site where i can get info for this study? any personal experiences and recommendations on this matter?

hope you can help me, guys.
thanx.

[cjw17]

All I can give you is my own experience. At our call center in the financial services industry, our reps are "empowered" to waive up to $25 in fees; this covers a couple of bounced checks, a couple of past year statements...that's about it. Our systems allow them, based on their ID, an override up to that amount. We haven't empowered them to waive any transaction requirements, because they haven't had sufficient training to be able to weigh all the liability issues.

[WiredLess]

Certainly cannot begin to answer all of the questions you have asked regarding this subject, but I do believe that there is a basic pysochological approach to it. There is a need to ensure the associate has a comfort that you will support the decisions you have hired them to make.

Agent empowerment does not necessarily begin with bestowing a credit adjustment allowance on them. It begins with establishing and documenting appropriate policies, procedures, and guidelines to effectively train associates on how to meet the company's goals and objectives. Once these are established, it is necessary to encourage the associate to utilize these resources to make decisions based on the needs of the customer AND the needs of the business, even if that means going outside of those P&P's and guidelines. Consistent monitoring and auditing will enable you to effectively coach and guide the associate to improve the decisions being made.

Good luck on your analysis.

[csteven]

I like Wiredless' ideas. When I worked in the US we had a Reagonite "trust yet verify" policy. We empowered the consultants to waive just about any charge but we also audited the charges to ensure they were just. For sizeable adjustments, another party would do the inputting. The size must be set by you. Overall it worked & we were empowered to solve problems. Once in a while we would catch fraud & we'd fire the guy.

Now I work in Asia (Malaysia) & there is virtually no empowerment. Over here it would be the equivalent in US purchasing power to be $25 bucks. I find the agents are frustrated as they can't solve the problem at one stop. We also drop the ball when we pass thru the hierarchy of approvals. It also takes time. But, although the customers would scream like hell if we treated like this in the US, they don't scream so much here.

Good luck,

Steve

[yukihiro]

steve, who does the auditing? is it the quality assurance group? i've chosen a specific call center and has observed that there are too many groups who do the auditing of transactions of the agents. the supervisors audit the agents. the quality assurance group of the call center audits the transactions and again, the quality assurance of the call center's client audits the transaction again. i ain't sure if this is good or something.

[csteven]

At my old employer, our QA team would do it. Our M&P guys. thx.

[Karsten Fuhrmann]

Hi all,

empowering the agents is quite important for me - if done the right way. It means to give agents freedom to handle calls individually. Each caller is different but many call centers are working with tightly defined processes - asking the agents to do call-by-call exactly following this process. There's no room for individualty and I think the customer realizes this. That's maybe one reason why we spent millions of $ for CRM-stuff.

Empowerment means to give agents only the very basic processes (based on technical requirements), define the desired outcome (in terms of first-contact-resolution, customer satisfaction or cross-selling) and let the agent handle the rest individual.

Karsten Fuhrmann