12 Call Center Ideas in 10 Minutes

Three foundational building blocks must be optimized to consistently deliver engaging member experiences over the phone: people, processes and leadership.

Our journey of nine articles will cover each in detail. Part one discussed hiring top performers  and performance management. Part two covers processes. This is the seventh article overall and the final on processes. Specifically, we’ll share our experiences with such companies as Zappos, Disney, the Ritz-Carlton and other credit unions, and how they’ve created a culture of learning.

Best of all, these are practical ideas you can implement within your call center to help improve employee knowledge, increase engagement and ultimately advance the level of service your credit union is delivering to its members. 

Idea # 1: Talk to HR

You may want to make changes to your interview process. That’s because you want to hire people who are passionate about learning. When interviewing, find out about candidates’ education, their hobbies, books they’ve read and are currently reading, what they are doing to improve themselves, etc. After all, these are the employees who will help drive positive change. For more on making better hiring decisions, read our first article of this call center series.

Idea # 2: Pull a Donald Trump When Mistakes AREN’T Made

Episodes of “The Apprentice,” a popular reality show that judges contestants’ business skills, often ended with Donald Trump eliminating one of the contestants by using the words “You’re Fired.” You too should do the same to employees who NEVER make mistakes. This may seem extreme, but the idea actually came from Peter Drucker, a notable management consultant, who once suggested that businesses should find all the employees who never make mistakes and fire them. Why? Because employees who never make mistakes never do anything interesting.

You see, a big part of creating a learning environment is allowing employees to make mistakes. Admittedly, this is difficult for most managers and leaders. However, while it's true that mistakes can be costly to a company, mistakes also allow your employees to learn. Plus, if you aren’t making mistakes, you likely aren’t trying enough new things outside your comfort zone, thus limiting innovation.

One way leading organizations build strong learning cultures is by starting at the top and having executives show a little humility and admit mistakes. Sharing failures encourages employees to be more open. These organizations also don’t look to point fingers when things go wrong – they attempt to gain insights into what went wrong and learn from the situation. Again, this promotes a culture of openness.

Menlo Strategies, a software company in Ann Arbor, Mich., has a large sign in its office that reads, "Make Mistakes Faster," reminding employees to not fear making mistakes. The sign is just one tactic used to build and sustain an environment that allows for organizational learning.

Idea # 3: Learn from Disney & The Ritz-Carlton

Disney allows employees to fix issues without needing permission from their supervisors. The Ritz-Carlton allows employees to spend up to $2,000 per incident to make a guest happy – without any approval from their supervisors. In fact, a common characteristic among Fortune’s 100 best companies to work for is empowering customer-facing employees.

Think about your call center. Do members have to hear “I need to get permission from my supervisor” when they are trying to reverse a $10 fee? What happened the last time an agent mistakenly rebated a fee to a member? Was the employee reprimanded or was this incident viewed as a coaching opportunity? Take it one step further: Can you give your front-line staff a budget to make members happy?

Idea # 4: Who’s Your Daddy?

Face the facts. No matter how good you are, there is always going to be an organization that delivers customer experiences better than you. Admired service-oriented organizations like Zappos and AMEX are often mentioned as having amazing call centers and therefore get the boastful claim of dominance. What are some other customer-oriented organizations you admire? Find them and learn from them.

The point is to have your agents occasionally reach out to other call centers and inquire about more information or even make a purchase. Agents could then share their experiences (good and bad) with the team. Just remember, all you need are just a couple of really good ideas your credit union could implement to make the initiative worthwhile.

We recently called Zappos and found it pretty interesting that, when ordering, our payment information was captured on a separate system so when the internal team pulls up recorded calls, payment information isn’t heard. What a great way to protect customer information.

Idea #5: Build a Library That’s Super Local

When I worked at $500 million/30,000-member Proponent Federal Credit Union, the call center offered its employees access to customer experience and management related books in an in-house library. While not every employee at the Nutley, N.J., CU took advantage, many did. In fact, some even took it a step further and started small book clubs to share learning and come up with ideas to improve the department.

Idea #6: Pull a Gloria Estefan

Gloria Estefan, a popular Cuban-born singer, had a hit single “Get on Your Feet” back in 1989. Take a cue from her and “get on your feet” and out of your call center! While call centers are very likely the greatest learning environment in most organizations, they can also quickly burn out employees. With that said, set a goal, perhaps at some point in the future, that you’ll allow employees to spend one or two hours per week working in other areas of your organization.

Maybe it’s shadowing a representative in the branch or loan department or even supporting a select employer group or community event. These experiences will give the employee a broader understanding of how the organization operates and help minimize burnout. However, don’t stop there: Make sure employees are providing feedback on their experiences with the team.

Idea #7: Use the Force

The Force, a metaphysical power known in the “Star Wars” series, can be strong in your organization too – provided you teach your employees the ways of The Force. In addition to daily coaching and development, agents should have access to training opportunities –internal and/or external. All employees, regardless of position, want to grow and develop their skillsets. Even if you don’t have an internal training department or the budget to spend on outside training, you can be resourceful by utilizing your current staff to hand pick experts in specific areas and have them offer training sessions for agents. 

Zappos offers employees a Certified Skillsets Program. Employees have a variety of skills they can learn such as online chat, email, etc. Not only do employees learn new skills, they also get a small increase in their base pay for becoming certified in these skills. Over time, employees learn so much that they master the skills they need to become a Jedi (those who ultimately master The Force).

Idea #8: Knowledge Sharing Newsletter

Often learning needs to be reinforced. Agents are learning new things every day – whether it’s a new issue, a new process or just have a new idea. Also, coaches almost always hear things (good and bad) when listening to recorded calls. So how is this knowledge best shared across the team? One idea is to start an internal email newsletter for your department (and share with senior people as necessary) to share new and reinforce previous learning. And when the content is personal and interesting, employees will absorb the material.

Idea #9: Huddle Up

Morning huddles are a great way to share knowledge across the department. Basically, huddles are a quick (under 10-12 minutes) meeting where everyone is standing. These meetings can be effective for a variety of things, including how to make everyone aware of an issue and role-play phone calls so members get a consistent response. They can be used to recognize employees, share department updates and much more!

Idea #10: Team Climate Meetings

At least once per quarter your team should meet and invite at least one member from the executive management team. During this meeting, the team should discus the following topics:

• what the organization does really well;
• what the organization can improve upon;
• what the team does really well; and
• what the team can improve upon.

After each meeting, create an action plan of to-do items and then start each subsequent meeting with an update from the previous meeting. This helps agents feel that you care and that progress is being made on big issues. The benefit of having an executive involved is to help ensure key organizational issues get fast-tracked.

And if you’re worried employees won’t speak up when a senior person is in the room, then select another senior person – one who has done a better job of building trust and relationships with staff.

Idea #11: Organize a Collection of Greatest Hits

Every time you hear that perfect call, you should immediately archive it, share it with the team and then build a library of great calls for future new hires. Doing so will provide a useful tool for all employees, as learning is always more effective when you see or hear great examples from others. Over time, you too will have a library of greatest hits!

Idea #12: Call Reviews

On a weekly basis, coaches should be meeting with agents to listen to two to three randomly pulled calls. Coaches should always begin the conversation, after listening to the call, with “so what did you think?” and let the agent speak. You’ll see, that over time, the really good agents will know exactly what they could have done better (they are typically self critical) and they’ll ask some really great questions.

We hope this article helped you come up with new ideas to build a learning organization. Be sure to stay tuned for next month’s article, #8 in this series, on how to get senior people more involved in the member experience.

Prior to starting his new company, Bill Stavros spent over 13 years of his professional career in the credit union industry, most recently as VP/marketing & member experience at $513 million Proponent Federal Credit Union, Nutley, N.J. At Proponent FCU, Stavros was responsible for conceptualizing and deploying a new vision for delivering customer service for the inbound call center, based on his learnings from highly regarded service oriented companies such as Zappos, Ritz-Carlton, Disney & REI. Now with Blueprint Interactions, his goal is to help other credit unions achieve similar results. He can be reached at bill@bpinteractions, by calling 888.757.8338 or at http://www.bpinteractions.com.