In this episode of "Advice from a Call Center Geek," we jump into expert tips for setting up a successful contact center, drawing from our experiences at Expivia.
Learn about optimal team structures, effective management ratios, and strategies that foster efficiency and customer satisfaction.
This episode is a treasure trove for anyone looking to enhance their contact center operations, offering practical advice and insights that can transform your approach to customer service.
If you are looking for USA outsourced customer service or sales support, we here at Expivia would really like to help you support your customers.
Please check us out at expiviausa.com, or email us at info@expivia.net!
Follow Tom: @tlaird_expivia
Join our Facebook Call Center Community: www.facebook.com/callcentergeek
Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tlairdexpivia/
Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@callcenter_geek
Linkedin Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/9041993/
Watch us: Advice from a Call Center Geek Youtube Channel
In this episode of "Advice from a Call Center Geek," we jump into expert tips for setting up a successful contact center, drawing from our experiences at Expivia.
Learn about optimal team structures, effective management ratios, and strategies that foster efficiency and customer satisfaction.
This episode is a treasure trove for anyone looking to enhance their contact center operations, offering practical advice and insights that can transform your approach to customer service.
If you are looking for USA outsourced customer service or sales support, we here at Expivia would really like to help you support your customers.
Please check us out at expiviausa.com, or email us at info@expivia.net!
Follow Tom: @tlaird_expivia
Join our Facebook Call Center Community: www.facebook.com/callcentergeek
Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tlairdexpivia/
Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@callcenter_geek
Linkedin Group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/9041993/
Watch us: Advice from a Call Center Geek Youtube Channel
This is advice from a call center geek a weekly podcast with a focus on all things call center. We'll cover it all, from call center operations, hiring, culture, technology and education. We're here to give you actionable items to improve the quality of yours and your customer's experience. This is an evolving industry with creative minds and ambitious people like this guy. Not only is his passion call center operations, but he's our host. He's the CEO of Expedia Interaction Marketing Group and the call center geek himself, tom Laird.
Speaker 2:Welcome back everybody to another episode of advice from a call center geek the call center, contact center podcast. We try to give you some actionable items to take back in your contact center improve the overall quality, improve the agent experience, hopefully improve your customer experience as well. My name is Tom Laird. I'm the CEO here at Expedia Interaction Marketing. Expedia is a 600 grown on 700 seat BPO located here in the States. It's good to be back. Another week, another episode.
Speaker 2:Guys, I'm tired of AI. Can I just say that I think we are going through some type of AI withdrawal. Everybody wants to talk about it. I've been posting and talking about it for I don't know the last months and months and months. I was looking at the episodes, the last even 10 to 15 episodes, 10 to 15 weeks that we've done this and everything's been kind of AI driven. It's almost like we're kind of forgetting why we did the podcast in the first place. I want to get back to some of the roots Again. There's so much out there on technology and we can continue and I'm sure we're going to, as we're going into 2024, continue to talk about contact center technology, how the AI is impacting and influencing all the levels from that first touch point down to the agent experience, to improving the customer experience as well.
Speaker 2:I have a lot of questions from you guys, especially on TikTok, that people DM me and we get into these conversations because they finally read the book and they have questions on the actual operations of their contact center. That goes beyond technology. I want to kind of get back to that today. One of the big things that I've been asked a lot about too is just even the setup and the management structure of your contact center. How do supervisors, what are ratios? And we've kind of talked about this in episodes, but it's been almost over a year since we've kind of delved into this. So again, I want to kind of stay away for one episode here. Get back to our roots, talk about contact center management, talk about the structure of your teams, at least how we do it here at Expedia and how we have found that this really works well for us. And I think you can take that blueprint if you're a manager of a contact center and utilize that for yourself. So technology is going to be here. We're going to be talking about it forever. So I think this will be nice to kind of sit back and kind of go back to kind of the roots of the podcast, of trying to help some of you guys that maybe are newer in the space or are a call center manager that just took over, and kind of, how does the structure of your teams and that work? So we're live on LinkedIn, we're live here on TikTok. If you guys have any questions, we'll do this as an AMA. Please ask away as we go.
Speaker 2:But I just wanted to kind of talk structure again and talk maybe how we see a little bit of an evolution and how we've changed a little bit with this new technology and how the structure of our contact centers are set up from a management standpoint. But you know we still have from a hiring standpoint. We have a full HR, internal HR, like I'm sure most of you guys do too. How we get our agents is mostly social media and word of mouth and referrals, all right. So again, we're not huge, so it's not like we have I gotta find 2,000 agents in a three month period or a three week period, right, maybe we did during COVID a little bit. But so we'll put a bunch of stuff on Facebook. We put a bunch of stuff out on Indeed.
Speaker 2:We do a lot of referral programs internally with our agents, right? So you know, if again I always go back to if you like the culture of your contact center, if you like the people in the actual center, then those are the times to do referral programs. If you think you've got some knuckleheads in there, right, maybe you don't do it right Because I don't know what do they say, like you're the sum of the five closest people that you hang out with, right? So if you like that culture, referral programs can really help you. You know, bring in really high quality contact center agents, management and just team members in general. And so when we come in for an initial interview, we still do it live. We're all work from home, but we still have a you know, about 30,000 square feet here in Pennsylvania and Erie and we still bring everybody in to do internal interviews.
Speaker 2:We're not doing anything over, you're over the internet with that. So you have to come in, you talk to HR. If HR likes you, they will bring you in for a second interview, talk with the another HR person or a lot of times, the production management lead. We call our OICs officer in charge, which we'll talk about here in a minute, and then you know, we'll hopefully start you in a training class. From a training class standpoint we don't really like classes that are over 25 agents. Most of our classes are in that 10 to 15 range. You know, 25 agents is totally fine. If we have to go to 40, we'll do 40. But you know, really I like the more hands on really smaller class sizes. I think that that helps.
Speaker 2:We are still doing all of our training in-house. So you do come in, we do give you your computer here. Whatever training I mean again, as you guys know, for a lot of you financial services and very higher level contact centers you could have a six week train, right, and six week trains for us are pretty normal, but I would say on average is probably two to three weeks. So they'll come in, they'll do a week of Expedia training. We'll do two to three weeks then of client training. We'll nest and we'll stay here on site while we're doing all that.
Speaker 2:Make sure every agent feels comfortable before they get sent home on their own. You know, the last like three or four days we have the supervisor in another room. They just use Slack so that you know a new agent can get used to it, cause a lot of times you'll have a supervisor, you know kind of a team lead, right with you or even a training one of our trainers with you. So from a ratio standpoint in training we try to keep it five to one, six to one and that includes, you know, our quality assurance, team leads, supervisors, trainers, right. We can kind of keep that to a really, really low ratio, which I think is really important. Make sure that they really understand everything that they're doing. So once that happens, then we give them all their equipment. They get their computer, they get their mouse, they get, you know, everything they need. We pack it up for them, they bring that home with them and then we start kind of going, you know, with the work from home. So once they get home, you know we have found and again I think, kind of industry average 15 to 16 to one. We started a little bit smaller when we first went from home from a ratio standpoint, but that's about where we are now 15, 16 to 1 for actual supervisors to agent ratios.
Speaker 2:If there's any issues again that come up, it's not too overwhelming. We do have team leads. They're not on every single team but our team leads for us are pretty much our management trainees. We do that a little bit differently. We say, hey, listen, not only can you beat, we do have a couple leads that don't really want to be management. They just say, hey, we've been here for a long time, pay me more, I'll help a little bit. But I don't really want to do that. We do have a team lead status but for most of our team leads they have applied, they've become management trainees so they can help and take the team over if the supervisor's out or things like that. I think that's been really helpful as well.
Speaker 2:Just a couple of questions here on TikTok are we available in any state? Yes, if you want to apply xpvusacom, you can apply. Again, we do have some of our agents again that have a lot of experience that are outside of Pennsylvania, but for the most part everybody's about 45 minutes and it's like Erie PA's here, buffalo, cleveland, pittsburgh. So we're again in that corridor right on Lake Erie. Again, I think we just found that it really works well. When you come in here, you see us, you meet us, I don't know we can high five you, we can talk. You get to know that supervisor a little bit instead of just doing everything digitally or through video. I think that makes a big difference. So that's what we look at 15 to one.
Speaker 2:Again, we've done a full podcast on how we have our supervisor, how their day goes, and I think if you're interested in that, check out some of our previous. I don't want to even want to get too deep into that, but everything from team meetings to how many touch points a day does the supervisor actually have with each of their agents, individual goal setting, those kind of things, going over any QA or anything that comes up, we kind of talk through all that. There's a bunch of episodes that are on that, if you are interested in that. Again, we kind of talk about that supervisor ratio. We have our management, we have our team leads. Now, if you want to become a here like for a supervisor or team lead, we will open that up.
Speaker 2:We try to really hire only our supervisors. Very rarely will we hire it from outside. We want to just develop that talent here internally. And again, if you want to go into HR, if you want to go into client services, wherever you want to go, and you start on the floor, that's kind of the first movement for that. Talk about quality assurance.
Speaker 2:So this is where we've seen the biggest upheaval with AI. Normally we have six to 700 agents. We try to keep it about a 40 to one ratio, so I don't know 10 to 12, 13, something like that QA staff to where they're scoring calls. We don't have them coach. We have the supervisor actually coach, but they will score the call. If there's an issue, talk to the supervisor, supervisor will listen to it and then the supervisor just because they have that relationship. I know a lot of organizations do it the other way. Where their QA does the coaching, we've just found that they don't have the full relationship with that person, don't really know them, and so a supervisor, I think, can have a little bit better rapport with those guys. So we have the supervisor actually doing the coaching.
Speaker 2:With all of this AI though and if you have been following this at all, you know that we are starting a whole separate side company called AutoQA, ottoqa, where we're using CatGPT to fully score calls, and we have been doing that internally for our clients. So that team has totally pared down, which has been good. We really haven't laid anybody off. Those guys have either gone back onto the floor, they've become supervisors. We've had some. They've been able to beef up our training, so there's been some spots for those guys. That is different and unique because AI, I think, is having the biggest impact. At least for us, the lowest hanging fruit has been quality assurance scoring, because it can do it so well, especially once we have developed the proper prompting, done a lot of R&D with that as we're trying to develop our product. It's really cool to be able to have our kind of a testing ground with our clients with all the QA. So, again, no longer is we still have a couple of clients that don't want us to utilize CatGPT for it, so there are still some that are manually scoring, but for the most part we've been able to use AI to fully score all of our calls, which is kind of again has been a really, really big change If you are in the cloud.
Speaker 2:I think one of the main benefits of being in the cloud is the lack or the non-use of IT. You don't need that many IT folk, right? I mean, we have about two and a half, two guys that are fully full-time and then we have a part-time network person, right? So those full-time IT guys are basically telephony experts. They can do things from a full integration. Now we have another business that does professional services and does kind of if that's all you want. But for our internal team I'm only utilizing two IT guys, right, because we again we use nice CX-1. We're fully in the cloud. We can integrate with everything. Things are really easy when you kind of really learn your platform and so we become experts on that. So that's been a really a really cool way to not have to have a huge IT team.
Speaker 2:I think if you're on-prem it's different, man, like I mean, you need more network guys. There's a ton of servers that can go down, like again, we don't even have a server here anymore, right, everything we do is in the cloud. Now there's a backup server if things do go wrong, but from a day-to-day standpoint it's just kind of our backup and it's writing to it. But everything we're doing has been written to the cloud. So that's been kind of something. I think that really helps us as well. We do have a and I've done a couple episodes on this have a full management trainee program, right. So if you are a team lead, we try to help you as much as we possibly can from not only helping that supervisor that you're with, but also everything from the legal aspects, like what is sexual harassment?
Speaker 2:What can you say, what can't you say? How do you use the platform? How do you use analytics? And, again, I think that's the other thing too is our QA team has moved now to become less about scoring calls and one of the other things, we've really got them deep into the analytics piece, right, so they're the ones that are creating reports for again, for our clients, that are showing sentiment scores, that are showing trending keywords, phrases. What are some of the again, what are some of the things that clients want to hear? Right, they want to know how many times a specific thing is said. Again, you guys always hear me use the example of you know we have a retail toy company that we can tell them 35% of your customers use the phrase too expensive about talking about this product. So analytics has totally changed. You know just, we're not just, you know, taking calls and answering them, but being able to give that marketing data as well. And nothing earth shattering or breaking here, but wanting to just kind of talk.
Speaker 2:I get a lot of questions on ratios, right, like what is your ratio for training? What is your ratio for for production, right, and again that five to six for training, 15 ish to one for for production. Now, if we have something that's a little bit more technical, a little bit more difficult, if we have newer agents, we may lower that to, you know, right around that 12 to one. But that's about where we are from a ratio statement. Oh, workforce management as well. So we were normally about I used to say 150, but with technology, now we're we have two workforce managers, right, so you know 300 to one and both of those guys kind of help each other for the for the entire company. Again, that's workforce management and it's a little bit heavier.
Speaker 2:And I think if you just an internal call center, you probably only need one person. But with how many clients we have? Right, you're doing forecasting, for you know extra seven different clients, right, for you know the end of the year, for next week, for next month, you're, you have somebody that's doing real time, right, schedule adherence and breaks and those kind of things. So again, supervisors are taking a lot of that. But the WFM guys are kind of the backup for that, making sure as they're watching that and everything is being managed, managed, the right way. So, yeah, guys, that's kind of. That's kind of what I have you know for today.
Speaker 2:Hopefully this answers a lot, especially on tick tock. Again, a lot of you guys and I love the engagement on tick tock and a lot of the DMs have been on this topic of setting up your contact center. What is the right way to do it, you know, and again, this is super high level. If you guys have any questions for me, you know, please feel free to to dig a little bit deeper. But that's kind of how we set up our contact center. And again, we're different where BPO. You guys, if you're an internal son, you're not gonna have client support. So you know we have, you know, full client support. So you're not putting tickets in if you have a problem, right, everything is a watch one, one, one touch point for for any issues or anything that you may have, from whether it's production, reporting, all of that stuff.
Speaker 2:And again, from a reporting standpoint, the cool thing about again being in the cloud is every client sees the real-time dashboards like we do. We just set up security profile so we could have, you know, 500 client when we don't. But if we had 500 clients, we get a 500 different dashboard set up for each client so they can see, they can see service levels, they can see handle times right, they see the exact same data that we do and then any reporting that they want we send out the next day if there's something specific that they want to see daily, and then normally there's like a month and then quarter and then year and that that kind of stuff gets out. So but again, being in the cloud has allowed us to not really have to have somebody that's like a data analyst, that is a reporting guru, Because everything is done. It's really really simple to do. You know when you're, when you're just looking at the cloud and looking at all these telephony metrics and even looking at kind of sales and conversion data as well, that we can kind of tile that stuff in there. So that's what I got.
Speaker 2:Guys, again, this is kind of a quick one 17 minutes. Hopefully this answers a lot of questions that you guys especially have had on tick talk that I've been getting in some DMs on on LinkedIn. Again, that's kind of how the back end of our, of our contact center, set up from a ratio standpoint, from a management standpoint. Oh, one more thing I probably should say this too is you know we have our, our supervisor teams. You know that our 15 to 16 one I can't believe I didn't talk about this earlier, but we have three.
Speaker 2:We call them OICs and you guys might just call them call center managers, right, but OICs officer in charge. So we kind of split now. Initially we had it split into different channels, like one was financial services, one with retail, one with kind of everything else, most salesy stuff. But we we've kind of merged so many different types of channels that now we just basically have them broken up into into three kind of equal segments where they're in charge of those supervisors, making sure that you know they're meeting and other goals and kind of talking through if they have any issues with supervisors. But having that kind of one level I guess kind of above us or below us, that can, that can help those guys out and really just drive the supervisor to try to help them and in any way they can. So that's kind of our structure, right is kind of I guess like this this kind of upper management level Our call center managers, our OICs officer in charge, right, we have our supervisors and then kind of our team leads, slash Management, trainees, and then kind of I guess there'd be kind of dotted lines to kind of EQA, to training, and then over here is it's kind of IT that we have have kind of set up. So, yeah, that's kind of the structure of expivity, how we're kind of set up. I think it works really well, especially from the ratio standpoint for for how a lot of you guys might might want to set your stuff up.
Speaker 2:But if you have any questions on that, please let me know. I can dig so much deeper into this. This is, again, extremely high level. I hope that this helps a couple of you guys out there. If you have any questions, you know, please let me know. A tick tock, I'll hang out for a couple more minutes If you guys have anything that I know. There was a couple couple funny questions, a couple mean questions and a couple serious questions that have already popped up, which is which is pretty close to what I expect now from from going live on tiktok. But anybody on LinkedIn, dm me, hit me up, let me know. If you guys have anything else, more than happy to answer any question. Oh, and also have a great, great, great Thanks, give it you.