Setting up a High End Contact Center (On the Cheap)!

00:00Tom Laird here. You've heard me break down contact center technology on the podcast time and time again. Now it's time for me to help you with your challenges. As your contact center technology advisor through our new company Expivia Digital, I can help you with things like CC D, any type of AI implementation and nice studio and integration services.

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00:30We're here to give you actionable Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of advice from a call center geek, the call center, contact center podcast actionable items to take back in your contact center, improve the overall, improve your hopefully improve the customer experience as well. My name is Tom Laird on the CEO here at Expivia interaction marketing. How's everybody doing? It is cold here in Northwestern. Give my weather update. I wanted. I wanted to get into some things of getting a lot of leads, which is awesome, for people that are looking to move their contact center either to the cloud, move to a platform, and are asking for some help from a consulting side. and the cool thing is I've even talked to a couple that are setting up their contact center for the first time or maybe they had just like, like, channel they were start up, they did they did email or just the So, really cool stuff that I like to kind of think about and then kind of go back to even when we started and some of the things and again, as most of you guys know, we started as a startup.

02:21So there was a lot a pitfalls and things, you know, moving from a premise-based device, the which was robust and we had thousands of agents on it to now, moving to the cloud when we didn't really know what we were doing, whatever, 12, 14 years ago, and learning and kind of seeing the growth of the cloud, and then what are some of the things that I think are really good and really not. So what I wanted to do today is talk about how kind of on the cheap, but still high end. Like I, I know that that's kind of an oxymoron, What are the, I guess, we're just looking at the absolute things that you should spend your money on, and then, some other things that you don't need to spend your money on. That might be a little bit more of a pain in the rear, but you can definitely utilize some other tools, tools that maybe are free, right, to get through to get, to get, you know where you need to be.

03:14So, when you're first, first, starting out, what should you spend your money What are some of the things that are absolute you have to have if you want to be high means? But still don't need all the bells and whistles to totally blow your budget out of the water. So there's a, a couple of things here, let's kind of get into this list, I think it's, it's kind of, for me, you know, there are so many good cloud to. the providers out there right that you know, we could go down the list right from the real high-end kind of enterprise guys to a lot of these newer companies that we say newer it's probably five years old that are doing a really really good work and they have easy to use platforms. So, you don a programmer, you don't a giant staff. You can get some basic and take these platforms to really cool levels. [pricing remark omitted] You're not having a huge expense. You're moving forward, if you're looking to scale and where you are now, So Pay as you go So I would the number one thing too. Maybe you can't, you don't want speech-analytics. You don't need workforce management. We're to talk about all that stuff. But maybe if you if you grow your from now or the company grows and your internal center goes from 20 to 150 seats, you want to make sure that you know, those tools are available to you maybe the platform or at least understand in your head how you're going to integrate them. So I would say the first things that you a kind of make sure? You're spending your money on as a full a channel tight platform. Understand the expertise that you have in house. Do, you need somebody you know from a professional services or from a third party to help you and understand that when you're kind of doing that, right? And you're choosing your platform. So that can all be rolled in. The other thing that goes with this is what CRM are you using? Are you brand new and you don't have a CRM? Then, you know, maybe there's some some easy off the shelf things. And when I say easy, they just done a good job building out doesn't mean the platforms aren't robust, but you know, the Zoho's the Zen desks, and then you know, getting to that enterprise kind Salesforce, you're living in that world as well. So, you know, those are some things that, again, if you're spending your money on, you're blocking and tackling is your CRM. Anything off the shelf, you can easily integrate into your platform, make sure that you have that ability. And then for for army channel. The other thing you need to think about, that a lot of us don't think about is again, and I know I kind of just said this a little earlier is, is what expertise do you have in-house because there's a lot of things that you need to think about. I wrote some things down from porting numbers, routing calls, using the IVR, using the IVR not just as an auto attendant, but maybe from a self-service model, integrating your CRMs or integrating any third-party data into your platform, setting up virtual callbacks, which today is pretty darn easy.

06:34Even recording messages, recording the IVR, you got to think that stuff through. and if there's any kind of PCI or HIPAA compliance things that you need to kind of handle. I think that those are some things to make sure you think about when you're choosing the platform. And again, that's where you need to spend your money. That needs to be the number one kind of deal. The second thing I see a lot of newer companies or even from the contact center side, and mostly if you are an internal call center, the company has their own HR. But if you're a BPO or, you know, you are just starting up something, you know, from an HR standpoint, I think that there's some things that you need to kind of look at. You know, we use, you know, we use Bamboo HR, right, for ours. So there's a lot of cloud providers from an HR standpoint that, you know, you can do very cheap and just kind of pay on the go, right?

07:26So if you have the agent, you're going to pay for them. If you don't, then you don't pay for it. I think that that's, you know, really, really important in something from a policy and procedure standpoint, even if you have your HR set up, the contact center policies and procedures are different, right, than financial control or your finance department or your sales or your marketing, right? There's certain things that apply directly just to contact centers that you need to make sure if you're just starting out that you have these policies, right? What are the attendance policies? What are some of your work from home policies? Maybe that does tie into your internal. talking about things like after call work. And we have gotten into a big, I don't know, I guess discussions of, because we kind of force after call work and force, I guess we should, I should say we force availability for our agents to go back available where a lot of people, I don't know, they think that that's undermining the rep or something, I don't know, where I'm just trying to give them, if we don't have a lot of wrap up or wrap time or after call work to give them some, a breath, but.

08:29So thinking all that stuff through and as I'm saying that, Do you think you'd be able to handle that with the talent that you have in-house? Or do you need a professional services because there's a lot of people that'll handle that, but again, that's a little bit more money. These next things, I don't think you need a platform for, right? When we talk about scheduling and workforce management, right? For me, it's in that 50 to 75 reps and higher that I think you need to start thinking about workforce management. If you're 50 reps or under, I think you can use an Erlang C calculator, right? We have one on ExpiviaUSA.com, callcenterhelper.com has a really good one. You can just Google Erlang C. You can find it in that Erlang C calculator where a lot of you will help you forecast calls or it should say forecast your staffing, right?

09:15With the calls that you know that you have coming in. If you don't know your calls, then it does become a little bit more difficult, but I think you can estimate based on some, what your email is and those types of things to kind of come up with a number least to start with. And as you start getting your calls in, using that calculator to staff your intervals appropriately. You know, when we were first starting out, so this was, again, 1015 years ago, we use that a lot. And that's kind of why I put it on the website, because I thought it helped me a ton when we were smaller. You know, now we have, you know, the the nice CXone WFM platform, and it's got all the forecasting, all the bells and whistles. But I don't think you need that, especially if you're smaller, you can handle an Excel spreadsheet and an Erlang C calculator, I think you're totally fine.

10:03From a QA standpoint, a lot of this is Google Sheets or Excel or Word are your best friends. We also utilize Monday.com for a lot of our checklists, for our supervisors, for anything from our QA. You can utilize it for QA, we have the nice CXone QA platform, but you can set up all the different things that will keep it as a database. So if you have a rep and you have a scoring form, S, you can score them on a money.com. You can just score them in Excel, right? But sometimes it can be a little bit weird when you start doing a ton of different tabs. But again, you don't need to have the robust QA platform. If any omni-channel platform that you get is gonna have call recording, you're gonna be able to record calls. If you have your own scoring mechanism, you can score calls using Excel.

10:56you can score calls using a third party platform. You don't have to go out and get that robust platform, especially again, if you're under 50 seats. I think you can save a lot of money and I would prefer you to beef up your platform than to go out and kind of get some of the QA stuff that I think you can handle there. And again, with the QA, it's the coaching tools too. So maybe even outside of QA, if you're doing your agent analysis, if you're pulling reps once a week and just having a talk, keeping them at that in Excel, you know, having an agent tab for each of those that kind of continues, you can definitely do it might be a little bit, you know, wonky. I keep using that word. I probably shouldn't but but there's also other tools like third party tools that you can utilize as well. You know, there's so many things out there internet wise that I think even now because I have a lot in so long because of, you know, the platforms that we have internally. But again, the bottom line is, you know, when it comes to Q and when it comes to workforce management, when it comes to coaching, you don't have to have a huge, don't make it the excuse that we don't have anything to do that, right? Because everybody has Word, everybody has Excel, everybody has Google Sheets or Google Doc. And you can definitely do that even with a Google Form. Make sure that you can help and handle your QA.

12:15I just want to go back to the HR thing as well, is making sure that you do have the the right policies for your organization. I think it's really, really important that you look at the culture of your organization. For us, now everybody's worked from home, so there's no dress code. But before, when we were internal, and I know everybody pushes back on this, we did have a dress code, right? We, in the organization, we worked for a lot of financial services companies. So we said that we probably give out more loans and credit cards than a banker does in a day, right?

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13:14basically means you have maybe a 1-800 number that you have internally and if you're giving it to another third party, an outsourcer, or. An outsourcer's giving you a number you want to own have that number on your actual platform. You got to make sure you dot the T's and cross the or dot the I's and cross the T's for sure. Because anything that is anything that you have wrong on there they will push back because those carriers do not want to lose their number. They don't want to lose the billing on that number. So just a the kind of little quick tip on that. Again, and routing calls. Think that through. Do we need an IVR? Do we need a self-service deal I think every platform now has it, everybody should be utilizing it. I think that that's just as important as an IVR. It just rolls out your tongue. It should be something that everybody has. Should we get that? It should be just, yeah, it's part of our, it's part of our deal now. It's part of how we live our call center lives. Think about your messaging. Who wants to be the voice of your brand, right? From an IVR standpoint. I. a I'm Tom Laird, Expivia Digital, Expivia Digital, Expivia Digital, CCaaS, NICE CXone, RFP, QA, WFM, QA, WFM, So, the bottom line is to boil your technology, the blocking and blocking and things that you do not, if you're a smaller contact centers, work force management, making sureo sure that you don't need any type of coaching, those are all, speech analytics you don't levels. You know what your average channel time you can benchmark all that stuff. You you can utilize other free tools to kind of do the record keeping. You can use calculators that are online from an early see to do your workforce management in your schedule. So again from an HR standpoint I make sure your policy procedures are are from an omni channel standpoint make sure that you can handle and that you can be on each end of the and that you can integrate with your CRM and then thinking in through professional Can we handle a lot of this stuff internally?

15:55Those are some of the things I would definitely be thinking about

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16:22has a virtual callback. Even if we have a 90-10 SLA adherence and every day we're above 84%, you never know when that spike's going to come. You never know, we've seen a lot of weird stuff where they made a mistake and they send out this, you know, 200,000 or 4 million pieces of email that accidentally gets sent out and it has our number for our customer service center. And so we just get absolutely bombarded And having those kind of things, I think, can really help at least, at least from a half hour or longer. A lot of times why you will see people not use virtual callbacks is because they're

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17:35everybody would just hear would just kind of, you know, it wouldn't do any benefit, it would probably, you know, probably tick people off even more just because the volume is so massive, that the virtual a callback would work. And then the question was, you know, you know, what whole time do you call. a little bit, further use some analytics to see what how long really special days, like, you know, the day after Christmas, Black Friday Friday, Cyber, Cyber unfocused, you know, those kind of things were, you know, again, or if if something went wrong with the company from a marketing standpoint, and again, like I said, they send giant emails out,. So there's something, you know, going on, so yeah, I mean, I think that's that's about what we would, what we would do in the time, how long that would be. Well, you know, let me get back to you. Here's another Can I briefly explain shrinkage in the Erling Sea calculator and it's important? Yeah, so when you talk about shrink, shrinkage. You're basically coming into play with, you know, people who are P t.T.O. People that go talk to HR people that are on break people. People that are lunch, right? All the reps that are there, but they're not actually taking calls, right? So you know, you can't, it's not a black and white thing, right, just saying, okay, we, we need 10 reps scheduled from eight o'clock to five o'clock at night, and every interval is total Let's just play this game. Every's totally perfect we just need 10 agents.

19:57Well, that's great that you need 10, but you can't just get it because we're human beings, right? And some people are going to way to account for it is to have a shrinkage percentage hey, can you take can you I know you're scheduled for lunch? Can you can you give me like 15 more minutes, because 30 calls in queue. And I got four rounds coming back. And if you can, we can play those games. And WFM can kind of ask and do those kind of things too you know but overall for what we do is we take about a 15% shrinkage number all right so again if we if and I always kind of screw this math up but. But if we need 10 reps Right. We're going to go about 15% over that. Right. So maybe have your roughly one and a half, two reps, depending on the intervals over that. Right, so the schedule, you know, maybe 12, something like that, right, to make sure that we're at And this, right, right? If you if you if you if you don't really care about your SLAs, which everybody's which, but I know some companies are like, whatever if we have a couple of 7120 or whatever that is. So, we know for different programs, different projects, how long reps have been here, like all these numbers all these numbers are played into our WFM platform and then we know what our historical shrinkage is for each program and it automatically calculates that in.

22:02If you're just using the Erlang-C, you've got to start with something. 10%,-20%,-30%, you know, whatever that number is, put that into there so it schedules kind of over that and then you kind of tweak it-it from there based on kind of what you've seen from a historical standpoint. So, yeah, the bottom line is it's shrinkage should be like that. It, it's almost like taking into account the human element of all of us, right? not robots. We can't work. We can't come to work every possible single day. We can't work a single thing, single thing perfectly. We have to take breaks. We have to take HR. We have to get trained. We have to get educated. And it's basically taking those kind of off the phone, instances, and making sure you're still staffed appropriately. It's a really good question. It's a little confusing. And a lot of people get the shrinkage and And, um And how do we account for that? Make sure that we're staffed appropriately.

23:02occupancy is making sure that we're not keeping them there too long. Right. So we're making sure that, you know, if we're not having reps work and speak and talk like 55 minutes out of the hour and totally burning them out. 100 reps work and speak and talk like 55 minutes out of the hour and totally up, right. And this kind of goes back into my after call work deal that I that's been going on like then that we've been discussing putting that we've been putting people automatically, or letting them manually go back in available, understanding. We want to have our occupancy be about 75% or about 45 minutes out ofIthe to call work from to make sure again that we're not burning anybody out again. We're talking about human. We're talking about human. They have a job to do but they have to breathe and be able to kind of just take a second as well. So yeah, good, good questions. I appreciate that, guys. Alright, well, if there's nothing glared I hope that that was a value to you and kind of thinking through maybe even talking to purchase in 2023 from a telephony standpoint, you know, thinking of those things, things as budgets get tighter, as maybe if we are in an economic downturn, you know, some of the things that to look to purchase, but there's a lot of things I think you can do, I don't even say on the cheap, but of maybe takes a will bit more work, but it's definitely for sure. So again, thank you guys very much and I will talk to all of you next week.