What is the solution? Unfortunately it has been to expand the working day. According to the Center for Work Life Policy, the average professional workweek has expanded steadily over the last decade, with many people logging 60-70 hours per week. Some people even read their email messages while going to the bathroom.

A variation of Parkinson’s Law applied to meetings goes something like this: “Meeting activities expand to fill the time available.” Ergo, more time, more activities. If you set an hour for the meeting, people will use the hour, regardless of how much is on the agenda.

As renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said, “meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.”

In a survey reported in Industry Week, 2000 managers claimed that at least 30 percent of their time spent in meetings were a waste of time. According to a 3M Meeting Network survey of executives, 25-50 percent of the time people spend in meetings is wasted. And according to a survey by Office Team, a division of Robert Half International, 45 percent of senior executives surveyed said that their employees would be more productive if their firms banned meetings for a least one-day a week.

Lisa Belkin, writing in the New York Times, describes a collaborative study by Microsoft, America Online and Salary.com regarding the actual amount of time workers worked in an average day and week. The study concluded that the average worker actually worked only three days per week or about 1.5 hours per day. The study identified that the rest of the working time was “wasted,” with unproductive meetings heading the list.

According to a new Clarizen/Harris Interactive surey, only 40 percent of employees think status update meetings waste valuable time, and 70 percent say these meetings don’t help them get any work done. And 67 percent of those surveyed say they are spending up to four hours per week getting ready for their next status update meeting.

And brain research may provide us with another reason to not have meetings. Research by University of Minnesota psychologist Kathleen Vohs and her colleagues as well as other neuroscientists, indicates that we have a limited amount of cognitive or what they call “executive” resources. One they get depleted, we make bad decisions or choices. Business meetings require people to commit, focus and make decisions, with little or no attention paid to the depletion of the finite cognitive resources of the participants–particularly if the meetings are long. So if that is true, the three or four hour project meetings may be counterproductive.

Former Ernst & Young executive, Al Pittampalli, author of Read This Before Our Next Meeting, argues most meetings are mediocre and not necessary, “not about coordination but about a bureaucratic excuse-making and the kabuki dance of company politics. We’re now addicted to meetings that insulate us from the work we ought to be doing.” He contends that traditional meetings create an unnecessary culture of compromise and kill our sense of urgency. He outlines three types of meetings: convenience, formality and social in which a false sense of urgency is created. Pittampalli argues that informal conversations, group work sessions and brainstorming sessions are not really meetings, and shouldn’t be treated as such. He presents 7 principles for good meetings if they need to be held. Of these principles, the most striking are:

1. Meet only to support a decision that has already been made; do not use the meetings to make decisions;
2. The meeting should always produce a committed action plan;
3. A meeting should never be held for informational purposes.

If you absolutely must have meetings, here’s some suggestions on making them more productive, other than the standard criteria of having an agenda, and distributing it in advance with relevant information:

• Always start the meeting on time, regardless of people who are late;
• Do not review the contents of the meeting with the people who are late for the part they missed;
• Reduce the length of meetings to one hour maximum, and preferably less—try 30 minutes, even try 15 or 10 minutes;
• End the meeting on the agreed-upon time, even if the agenda is not finished;
• Invite fewer people to the meeting—productivity goes down with increasing numbers of participants;
• Allow the right for employees to decline their attendance, without having to justify themselves and without penalties;
• Reward those people who show up on time and even early with some kind of small gift or reward;
• Don’t let people who are late to the meeting by more than 15 minutes join;
• Don’t allow individuals to hijack or dominate meetings by frequent and endless conversation. It’s the responsibility of the meeting leader to control this;
• End meetings early. People will be more positive about participating as a result;
• No laptops or phones are allowed to be active in meetings. Allowing people to be interrupted or diverting their attention lowers the value of the meeting;
• Don’t tolerate meeting participants working on other things during the meeting. Ask them to leave;
• The meeting leader should enforce only one person speaking at a time, and to the point;
• Ask each meeting participant to prepare for the meeting in advance in response to a meeting question that will be dealt with in the future, not a rehash of the past (not just an agenda item);
• At the beginning of the meeting, ensure that the desired outcome(s) are stated clearly;
• Limit the action items of your meeting to no more than three;
• Interrupt people who either repeat what they have said, or repeat what someone else has already covered. These are time wasters.
• Whoever calls the meeting should “own” the meeting; don’t allow someone in the group to try to take it over;
• Table any discussion that is not relevant to the agenda.

You’ll have to excuse me now, I have a meeting to go to.

Source: Psychology Today

So what if a superhero were to answer the phone in your call centre? What special tools and skills might they possess to enable them to swiftly tackle customer queries and appease the wave of angst from disgruntled callers? Equipping your call centre agents with the ability soar, cape flapping, above your competitors may seem like a difficult and expensive task, however this needn’t be that case.

Listed below are five basic remedies to the most common examples of “call-centre Kryptonite,” all which can easily be foiled using software and related services:

1. First off, enabling single sign-on will eliminate much of the time a superhero call centre agent takes at the start of a call, when customers are likely to become agitated at being asked to hold for excessive periods. Superhero agents are ready at the press of a button. “Contact centre agents are using different applications to access customer information. They often have multiple logins and must switch between different applications which results in long hold times for customers and inefficient business processes,” says Aphrodite Brinsmead, Associate Analyst of Customer Interaction Technologies at Datamonitor.

2. Many superheroes had difficulty harnessing their powers in their younger days. Some aren’t even aware they are in possession of such strength at all. By investing in a comprehensive training programme, teaching superhero agents to utilise the tools and applications at their disposal, a call centre manager can ensure that all investments, including staff, hardware and software, are being used to their full ability.

3. By eliminating the need to copy and paste data superhero agents will be faster, more accurate and suffer fewer repetitive strain injuries (which are decidedly un-superhero-like). In many organisations, a call centre agent is required to switch between a series of siloed, windows-based, and custom applications to update customer data that is needed to complete a call leading to high Average Call Times (ACTs), lower employee productivity and disgruntled customers on the other end of the phone.

4. Allowing agents’ rapid access to relevant customer information across disparate data sources will also decrease the amount of time spent hopping between screens, leaving agents free to tackle the actual issue a caller is having.

5. By providing agents with real-time up-sell offers to match a customer’s exact requirements, agents can give customers solutions to specific issues they are facing whilst simultaneously improving the bottom line. A Superhuman power indeed.

By tackling these five issues head on, you enable call centre agents to channel their inner superhero, save your company time and money and most importantly, rescue innocent customers from the stress and aggravation of unnecessary call centre chaos.

Source: Business Computing World

The originally proposed bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Depending on who requests the court orders, the actions could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators such as PayPal from doing business with the allegedly infringing website, barring search engines from linking to such sites, and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites. The bill would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a crime, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison for 10 pieces of music or movies within six months. The bill also gives immunity to Internet services that voluntarily take action against websites dedicated to infringement, while making liable for damages any copyright holder who knowingly misrepresents that a website is dedicated to infringement.

Call Centre Advice belives in Internet Freedom as does NameCheap a major Domain and Web Hosting company who said the following statement. When you register a domain name, you can do anything you wish with it within the confines of the law. That is the essence of the Internet; the ability for anyone anywhere to make a meaningful contribution to the commons, and to have that contribution recognized.

SOPA, as proposed, would give unprecedented remedies to owners of intellectual property.  While protection of intellectual property is important, to allow overbroad and ill-considered remedies and processes such as those contained within SOPA threatens the very freedom that serves as the foundation of the Internet.

If SOPA passes in its current form, the rights of users (who are the Internet) will be wholly and totally subjugated to the rights of intellectual property holders.  This simply cannot stand.

Credits: Name Cheap, Wikipedia

Leading the team to completing the task

The role of team leader is definitely not the easiest of roles, as you are still part of the team but yet you have the satisfaction of developing and motivating the team to success.

You will of course bring the skills and experience of your previous role and will most probably apply these skills to your new team to lead them to success.

When you become a team leader the first step is to understand your new role and responsibilities and what part you play in delivering the overall departmental plan.

It’s important for team leaders to show that they are capable of understanding and carrying out the required tasks through communication, monitoring and organisation - Communication and organisation is crucial for the team to perform and complete the task successfully.

So, if you are a team leader in a contact centre leading a frontline phone team your task will be to ensure that you answer calls within X seconds with a percentage of loss of X percentage.

Each day you will need to communicate yesterdays results and feedback on what you think you could do better as a team today. You will need to make sure that all the team members understand what is required of them for the day.

You will need to monitor performance throughout the day, as it’s your responsibility to complete the task. The team will become motivated in completing the task, as they will soon see that you are leading them to success and they will take pride in their role, which will boost self-motivation of the team member.

In my experience, the main cause of demotivation in team members is because the team didn’t understand what was expected of them and they had very little development time invested in them.

The hard part of the team leader role is maintaining this level of communication and organisation daily. When this becomes a routine for you, team leading will then become much easier.

Statistics can provide a view of what is happening in the call centre right now, for the interval or for the day. These statistics are helpful when the agents, team leaders and managers want to know the current status of the call centre.

Performance metrics allows you to: manage your staff workforce, control costs effectively, continuously enhance the customer experience and ensure the call centre is a contributor the overall profitability of an business.

Good statistics that show the status of the call centre are:

• Average Handle Time (AHT) or Average Call Handle Time (ACHT) Calculation: Total talk time + wrap time After call works/total calls.

• Service Level (SL%) Calculation: The percentage of calls answered with a certain amount of time. For example if 80 out of 100 calls were answered within 30 seconds then the service level is 80%. Some call centres have a shorter time frame such as 20 seconds or even 10 seconds.

• Abandon Rate (ABN%) Calculation: Total Abandoned calls / Total incoming calls Some customers are now adding abandon calls from the IVR and Chat sessions to this calculation.

• Average Speed Answer (ASA) Calculation: The average number of seconds (minutes) it takes to answer a call. If it takes an average of 30 seconds to answer a call then the ASA is 30 seconds. This statistics should be measured by interval and for the day. This statistics can change throughout the day depending on the type of call centre.

• Longest Wait Time (LWT) and Average Wait Time (AWT) Calculation: The Longest Wait Time is the longest a caller has to wait before the call is answered. Average Wait time is the average time a caller has to wait before the call is answered.

• Calls in Queue (CIQ) Calculation: The total number of calls in the queue waiting to be handled by the agents. Some call centres are now adding email and chat queues to the total Calls in Queue. Some call centres track these statistics separately.

• ACD Time (ACDT) Calculation: The total talk time by and agent or team (split/skill) spent talking to customers.

Performance metrics provide a different picture of the call centre. While statistics show us what is going on for our call centre from our point of view performance metrics will show you what your customers think of your agents and call centre. The team leader or call centre manager may be aware of the call centre status (statistics) but not aware of what the customers think of the call centre or how well we are doing compared to our goals (performance metrics).

Performance metrics are used to manage the call centre and drive sales, improve efficiencies, and increase overall customer satisfaction. When the call centre performance metrics improve the state of the business will improve. Some performance statistics that are useful to the call centre manager are:

• First Call Resolution (FCR%) Calculation: The percentage of customer issues or tickets that are resolved on the first call.

Sometimes this is a survey that the customer takes immediately after the call or given by the agent. This is a metric that can be difficult to measure however it is an important metric as it gives the call centre a clearer picture of the quality of the call centre. Customer Satisfaction (CSat%) Calculation: Satisfied customers / Total calls.

This calculation is typically taken from secondary survey results.  When an agent asks if the customer is satisfied they may not receive a valid answer. To assume that the customers transaction is complete and therefore the customer is satisfied is incorrect as well. Secondary surveys are the most accurate method of calculating CSat ratings.

• Agent Utilization Rate (AUR%) also known as Occupancy (OCC) Calculation: Total talk time + After call work + Idle Time (in hours or minutes) / total paid hours worked (both in hours or minutes).

The total talk time, idle time, after call work, hours worked must all be for the same length of time (days, hours or minutes). If you capture the total talk time and after call work for the week, then the total hours worked must be for the week as well. Example: Talk time = 18 hours, After call work = 10 hours, Idle time = 2 hours, Number of hours worked = 38. 18 +10 + 2 =30, 30/38 = 79% agent utilization rate. Industry best practices suggest that an agent utilization rate should fall between 70 -85%. To low and the agent is bored, too high and the agent is stressed. Either condition will result in a high attrition rate among the agents.

• Cost per Contact (CoC) Calculation: ACD Calls per hour / Agents hourly rate.

If your contact centre has multiple agents with varying hourly rates then this calculation should be taken across the entire call centre or for each group, depending on how your call centre is set up. In this case total ACD calls for the group / total agents hourly rate. IVR cost per call is calculated by determining the amortization schedule of the IVR, breaking that cost down to a monthly amount and then dividing the number of calls handled by the IVR for the month / amortized IVR cost for the month. Only calls that are fully handled by the IVR can be used in this calculation.

• Average Speed Answer (ASA)Calculation: On average how long it takes an agent to answer a call.

Standards vary depending on the industry. For example: Financials such as mutual fund companies strive for a less than 10 second ASA.

• Abandonment Rate (ABN%) Calculation: Number of calls abandoned / total calls.

Call abandoned should be after the first 8-10 seconds.  Most calls abandoned during this time are false abandons, wrong numbers, caller was interrupted, caller was not ready, etc. Some call centres are including IVR abandons as well but only when they are certain their IVR is functioning properly.

The calculations for each metric are the industry standard, however, your call centre may want or need to measure these metrics in another manner. You will also notice that Abandonment Rate and ASA are shown as a useful statistic and a useful performance metric. These two KPI’s can and should be used for both call centre status and call centre performance.

These metrics will provide a true picture of performance in the call centre, identify strengths and weaknesses, and help establish goals for the call centre and agents. Used properly these same metrics can be used to provide an aggregate call centre performance number (A single weighted number that shows how well the call centre is performing, today).

To truly support the effort to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the agents in the call centre reporting must include call centre statistics and performance metrics. Statistics tell us how we are doing right now but do not tell us how we are performing against our goals.

Performance Metrics show us how well we are performing but do not tell us how we are doing right now. By utilizing both statistics and performance metrics a call centre manager can improve the call centre.

For our readers in the US check out Spectrum Corporation - http://www.specorp.com - Who kindly allowed us to use this article.

• Induction Programme – Often missed out by most contact centres. Induction programmes not only settle the agent in to his/hers new role it will also help the agent understand what part they have to play in the company strategic plan - Good induction programmes will also improve mutual respect and loyalty to the company.

• Training – To give agents the best start possible you will need to have a well-planned training schedule. I’m more in favor of training modules rather than the normal 4 weeks worth in one go of training.

• Understanding what is expected – Its important that the team leader/manager communicates the task to the team members, this way they know what is expected of them and what part they have to play in completing the task.

• Development – We all like to be involved in projects and learn things new. Agents like to feel valued and respected as much as anyone else. The more we invest in agents development, the better their performance will be and there need to succeed in to a better role.

• Involvement – Involve your agents in customer experience projects. They will let you know what customers like/dislikes. Involving agents makes them feel valued.

• Innovation – Include innovation time – Give them time to try out your company’s products and service. They will share their ideas to help improve your company’s products and customer experience.

• Agent guidelines -  Ask your agents what they believe in and ask them to commit to these guidelines. A useful tool to improve customer experience and team commitment!

• Feedback – We all need to know how we are doing whether we are doing well or perhaps we need a little help. It’s crucial that we feedback to team members - When we feedback we need to pay attention to the details of what we liked and why or what we would have like to have seen and why.