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Calabrio Shorts is a fun-sized podcast that covers all sorts of topics around the contact center industry. No topic is off-limits as we cover frequently asked questions, industry trends and definitions, and yes, we will have fun doing it.
Dave Hoekstra: Welcome
to Collabrio Shorts.
We're going to get right to it today.
Agent Empowerment.
And why would you ask
about Agent Empowerment?
Well, it's funny because we here at
Collabrio spend a lot of time working
very closely with our customers.
And one of the things that we notice is
that there seems to be a pretty wide gap.
In the organizations that use the really
cool agent empowerment tools that are
out there and the ones that don't.
So I asked my buddy Mark Beards WFM
consultant extraordinaire from the Great
White North to come up and join me here.
Let's talk a little bit about these tools
and what keeps people from using them.
And I think that's where a lot of this
stems from, Mark, is the, I would, for
lack of a better word, frustration.
Of organizations that have these amazing
tools at their disposal, but maybe
haven't started really utilizing them.
What's keeping that from
becoming more mainstream.
First off,
Mark Beards: thanks for having me back.
It's always an honor to be
on this podcast with you.
For me, agent empowerment comes
in two very wide ranges, right?
You have the people who use it
and then the people who don't.
So my question is why is half of
workforce using it and the other half not?
So my first question is
why is agent empowerment.
So I'm going to throw
it back to you, Dave.
Why do you think Asian
empowerment should be important?
Dave Hoekstra: Well, if you've
heard me ever talk I started taking
calls in a call center in the late
nineties and until I want to say
about 2014 or so, that's a long time.
The, it was sit down,
shut up and take calls.
It was, here's your schedule deal with it.
And when the economy is going
well and everything is really
clicking agents finally realized,
well, I can, I have choice.
I have flexibility.
And what we found out is that
so many of these organizations.
The reason they hang on to or lose agents
is because of schedule flexibility.
It's basically the number one reason.
We can talk about pay, but
that's a completely different
podcast episode altogether.
It's pretty much the number one
reason people leave or stay at
jobs consistently over time.
And when you have the ability for
these organizations to give some...
Modicum of, well, let's call
it flexibility and decision
making in their schedule.
Why wouldn't you?
And in, in my case, the reason I think
most of the organizations haven't done is
because they're just not aware that these
tools exist because they are next level.
They are next gen.
They go against the old school
thinking of the way context centers
have been managed for quite some time.
So if you were to ask me, it's
not because they don't want to.
It's just because they don't
really know they exist.
Okay.
Mark Beards: So thanks for that.
And based off what you're saying,
I'm very much in the same mindset.
So for me, it really comes down to
knowing what's available to you, how
to use it properly, and then what
benefits you're going to get from it.
Because if you understand all those
components, you can be super successful.
So let's talk about the agent experience.
You brought that up.
That is the first piece that I
find to be the most important.
The more control an agent has.
As an example, moving your breaks,
moving your lunches, having a static
break in a static lunch in today's
environment can be super stressful
for somebody, especially if they're
working from home, whether it comes to
bathroom breaks, whether it comes to
taking five minutes to catch a breather.
If the agent has their
break at a specific time.
Those bathroom breaks and those breather
breaks are going to happen irregardless.
So why not empower them to move
their break so they can take
it when they feel is necessary.
Now, when we talk about moving
their breaks, we're not just
saying willy nilly, right?
We're not saying you can move it
wherever you want, whenever you want.
Within Collabrio, you can actually
set it up so it's within the
parameters that are acceptable.
So it's not going to
impact your service level.
It's not going to impact when
you're Customers call in.
It's really just going to make it so
that they feel a little bit empowered.
Okay.
So for me, that's the first part,
which is the Asian experience.
The second part, and we'll come
back to the Asian experience, right?
There's a few more pieces in there,
but I just want to segment them first.
The second piece is the actual workload.
So do you want your WFM team doing a
hundred percent of the work all the time?
And the answer should be no.
If you can automate process of
adding overtime or adding time
off, that should be automated.
And we have the ability within
Collabrio to automate your PTO
balances, your VTO, or your overtime
using what we call as GrantBot.
And GrantBot in AI is really the
future of where WFM should be moving.
From an aspect of, is it successful?
The answer depends on
the company themselves.
You can't just set up a grant bot
and say, okay, go do your own thing.
Grant bot is going to be
dependent on two major aspects.
How successful you are at forecasting,
and how successful you are at scheduling.
If you're doing those two pieces
accurately, then your grant
bot is going to be successful.
And then when your grant bot is
successful, that work no longer lands.
On your WFM team,
Dave Hoekstra: okay?
But Mark, I'm scared.
Mark Beards: Having the
I'm gonna say it this way.
Having the guts to make the change.
You have to be able to break
through the barrier and the mindset
of what was and what can be.
And I'm telling you, the
organizations that we work with
that make this change are moving in
a completely different direction.
The more they start
depending on Collaborio to 1.
build their schedules, 2.
build their forecasts, and 3.
handle these other components is where
they really start to become successful.
Now, that doesn't just mean
you can set it and forget it.
Workforce is almost like an art, right?
You need to be working with the
tool, with your agents, with your
leaders, almost symbiotically so
that everything functions properly.
But the being scared pieces, but I'm
sorry, I'm still laughing at that.
I find that so funny because the
last thing that you should be
afraid of in workforce is change.
Because it's the easiest to change as
long as you're doing it right, okay?
Dave Hoekstra: Yeah, and I think
what happens a lot of times is
organizations are scared not only
of the business implications of what
might happen, but also that the agents
are going to run wild with it, right?
They're just going to insane, go
crazy and I'll never have anyone
working and and those kinds of things.
And what I think is important is
that, this is not the wild west here.
There are rules, there is governance,
there are, there's an engine behind all
of these tools that, that, trust me,
the system is more concerned about your
service level than you probably are.
And the only way that we can start
to do this, I like the way you
phrase that, have the guts to do
this is to start to put some faith
Mark Beards: in the system.
To address your other point, you're
always going to have the people that
try to abuse the system, whether
you're automated, not automated.
It really doesn't matter whether
you empower your agents, you
don't empower your agents.
Those people exist.
They're always going to exist.
All you do is you set up your reporting
to make sure that you minimize it
and you catch them when you need to.
Alright, so let me ask you another way.
Do you think there's monetization
in empowering your agents?
Do you think there's a way to save money?
Dave Hoekstra: Oh my gosh, I talk
about this all the time with customers,
prospects, and things like that.
How the tools in Collaborative
WFM create essentially like
this self regulating process.
So as a WFM, a little bit of an old
schooler in WFM I was afraid to walk away
from my desk for more than about an hour
because there was always going to be some
new factor that needed to be looked at.
Oh my gosh, we're going to
get burned in this interval.
I've got to turn off.
I got to get two people on the
phone or, Oh, we're really slow.
How many people should we let
off those kinds of things?
Well, yeah.
That was my monetization
of my own position, right?
That was me justifying the spend that
we have well with these automatic tools.
Guess who gets the responsibility on them?
It's the agent.
And if you think for one second that
every agent in your organization
doesn't want to go home early.
Or sign off early nowadays.
You're crazy.
And that's the thing.
It's just if you don't need
them, there's a very good
chance that they won't be there.
But if you go with static old
school schedules that are never
fluctuating and changing, they'll
be there and you'll pay them.
And that's basically the
way it's going to go.
So again, this kind of goes to, why
wouldn't you turn on some of these tools?
Because it has a very strong
implication in overall payroll
dollars that are being spent.
Mark Beards: So you're talking about
V T O, voluntary time off v t o?
Yes.
What about the efficiency aspect of it?
Somebody is spending seven hours of
their day working on the phones, and then
the other hour on breaks and lunches.
There's the efficiency piece of people
taking above that hour with it, with the
off on time for their breaks and lunches.
And that goes really into the efficiency
aspect of it, where if you're not allowing
to move their breaks or lunches, you
could be losing an extra 10 minutes a day.
So let's just say that it's
10 minutes a day per agent.
So 10 minutes a day per agent is
100, 100 minutes a day, right?
For 10 agents.
Okay.
That then ends up being, I lost my
math here, 500 minutes a week, and
then times 500 minutes a week ends
up being 2, 500 minutes a year.
You end up losing hours in efficiency
just from having that flexibility.
My math may have been way off there.
I'm trying to do it in my head real
quick, but you're losing tons of hours
in efficiency just off 10 head count
for not giving them that flexibility.
So is there the potential
to get money back that way?
Dave Hoekstra: Yeah, absolutely.
It, that's the beauty of the cumulative
effect of these kind of, whether
you want to call it Six Sigma or,
even just like finding tiny little
improvements that roll up over time.
What I don't, I think people lose
sight of the fact of how many
minutes a context center actually
has to be productive in a day.
And then how many minutes,
conversely, that aren't, that
are hurting you know, we.
We talk all the time about
squeezing blood from a stone, right?
And really just dragging every ounce
of productivity out of the agents.
And that's what happens when
they're scheduled to work, right?
We tie them to a phone and we tell
them they can't get up and they
can't do this and they can't do that.
And if you take more than 10 seconds
of ACW time, somebody's going
to be hunting you down, right?
Those are all things.
And we create this kind of
stressful environment that an agent.
Fears and what we're talking about
is taking it the other direction and
saying like you said, I work from
home and my, my break doesn't sync up
with what my body needs or, when I'm
hungry or things like that and okay,
let's walk through this scenario.
I am hungrier than I
usually am early in the day.
Old school method is open up Slack
or teams or email and send a message
to someone that says, Hey, can I take
my lunch a little bit earlier today?
I even, we're pretty slow,
any chance I could, take that.
And then that, that sits
in someone's inbox for.
Five seconds or 30 minutes,
depending on how available they are.
That person then opens up workforce
management, looks at the intervals,
looks at the day, looks at the agent, and
then says, yeah, I think that'll work.
And so they go ahead and they move
that break and then we're done.
We're talking about doing the
exact same process in milliseconds,
as opposed to minutes and.
Over the, and not only that
agent gets an immediate feedback
and says, wow, that worked.
My gosh, I love working for
this company because they
actually help take care of me.
And that's what we're talking about.
That's the guts that I
think you're talking about.
A thousand
Mark Beards: percent.
And that instant gratification that you
mentioned, I don't think people realize
the benefit of what that actually does
from an expectation from an agent.
Knowing that if they send that email
or that text or that communication and
then having to wait half an hour, Or
20 minutes, whatever it ends up being
or getting instant gratification.
We all know that instant gratification,
whether it's winning at a lotto ticket
waiting at a green light, whatever
it is, instant gratification is key.
And what we're saying is we're
offering it in the exact same way we're
functions the way W F M is supposed to.
Dave Hoekstra: So I think the overall
point of this, and I think what spurred
this in a whole conversation is.
These people are adults.
We have to be able to trust them and
this is what I was going to say earlier
I get asked a lot of times from companies
that are like, hey, can you find out?
Automatically a report that shows
me whether somebody is pushing the
ACW button and kicking themselves
to the bottom of the queue And
I'm like, yeah, we could do that.
What works really well is Like putting
them on a plan when they do that.
And they're like, yeah, but
we want, and I'm like no.
All it takes is one.
And it's the same thing when we talk
about these processes that do breaks
and lunches and things like that is
we have people that are grownups.
There's always going to be the one person.
Who is not a grown up and tries to
find a way to flanagle the system,
but you have to deal with that person
individually if you're punishing your
whole entire organization because you
might have one person who takes advantage
of the situation, that's exactly the
kind of guts that we're talking about
is have the guts to make things better
for your agents And try to improve
on their processes from a day to day.
A
Mark Beards: thousand percent agree,
but you brought up another thing that
may even be a completely new topic.
What about empowering your leaders?
We talked about empowering your agents.
Maybe next time we talked about empowering
your leaders and how you make it so that
they leverage some of your workforce.
Dave Hoekstra: Yeah, and I will
be the first to admit I've been
guilty of that in the past, right?
There will be no decisions unless
they are run through workforce
management, and I will, How dare
you think you can move someone's
break ten minutes later in the day?
That is for me to decide.
But, in my defense, Back in the
day, when that was a, when that was
a thing, leaders did not have the
tools available to them to make those
decisions that they have today, right?
With cloud based software and smarter
displays and UI and things like that.
We have access to so many more decision
making tools, but you have to teach
them how to interpret the results.
And that's the thing.
They're smart people.
They can look at a chart in front
of them and say, you know what?
I think this makes a lot of sense.
And so I think the overall point is, yeah.
When you free everyone up to make
smarter decisions, it's actually a huge
productivity, morale boost and not The
negative thing that it used to be because
it used to be if you turned on Wild West
Everybody would just run all over you.
There are systems in place
to make sure this doesn't go
Mark Beards: off the tracks.
And I'll add one more thing
and maybe we end here.
When you mentioned the Wild West, what
we're suggesting, we're not saying turn
on the floodgates Let everything start
tomorrow, but maybe start one piece
at a time, one month at a time and
get there gradually and then see how
those gradual changes actually start to
realize benefits to your organization.
Dave Hoekstra: Baby steps.
Here's how to do it right.
Baby steps is exactly right.
Find three of your most.
Influential agents and turn this process
on for them and get feedback from them.
If it doesn't work, it doesn't work,
but if it does work, guess what they're
going to be doing in the break room
or on Slack, they're going to be
telling, Hey, they turned on this thing
that allowed me to move on breaks.
It's great.
And everybody said, well, I want that.
And you say, okay, well, then,
oh, it doesn't let you move unless
we're staffed appropriately.
You don't have to just.
Flick the switch for everybody.
You can turn it on for a small group,
beta test it, really understand
it, and then move on, right?
And there's been so much written and
recorded about how to properly implement
new processes and things like that,
but that's absolutely the way to go.
And you know what?
I'm sure, Marker, I would be glad to
talk to you more in depth about about
the appropriate way to roll out changes
in a, in an organization, because
we've both dealt with them many times.
So I think you're right, Mark.
I think this is a great time to
wrap it up, but as always, you
get the last word, my friend what
do you what do you want to tell
Mark Beards: your agents,
treat them like adults.
Dave Hoekstra: That sounds
like the title to a podcast.
I tell you what that's great stuff.
All right.
Well, thanks Mark for joining us.
Thank you everybody for listening.
We we always enjoy getting these
collaborative shorts episodes out.
Hopefully you found this useful.
If you have a suggestion for a topic
you'd like to hear us cover, let us know.
Just send an email to marketing.
We'll be glad to take that
under advisement and you never
know, you might even be joining
us for that podcast episode.
We look forward to hearing from you soon.
Hopefully you enjoyed this episode,
but as always have a great rest of
your day, a great week, and we'll
talk to you soon from Calabria.
Thanks everybody.