How to Find the Ideal Candidate For Your Call Center

The call center industry is known to have one of the highest employee turnover rates. This staggering figure is as high as 40% annually. On average an agent will stay on the job for six months. It is also estimated the cost to replace an employee ranges between ,000 and ,000, according to a study by The Robert Francis Group. These costs include advertising, screening, hiring process, training, and can take anywhere from two to three months to get the agent proficient. This figure does not take into account lost revenue or customer service due to these vacant positions and on-the job training for the inexperienced agent.   

That is a lot of money spent year after year. I have been in some call centers where they are just trying to fill the seats and little prescreening is done ahead of time. The thing to keep in mind is that not everyone is cut out to be on the phones all day. It takes a special person with the right skills. These employees are measured on every aspect of their day; from how many calls they handle, talk time, off the phone work, breaks, lunches and so on. The call center agent in most cases is the link between the company and the customer. This job requires people with excellent communications skills, as not all customers calling in are happy customers.
 
So what can be done to alleviate the revolving door syndrome? Using assessment tools prior to hiring. ExpressScripts a provider of pharmacy benefit management services has several call centers who work with patients and providers with prescriptions drugs. They employed the services of PeopleAnswers to help them figure out how to retain employees.  Per a documented case history at PeopleAnswers web site, over a 12 month period the company was able to reduce their call center agent turnover by 39%.  
 
PeopleAnswers DNA Profile analysis is quite unique. What their program does is first develop profiles of existing employees to determine the type of person that not only matches the requirements of the job position, but one that is in alignment with the culture of the organization. Prior to any interview, a candidate through an on-line portal will take the assessment. The analysis indicates if the candidate is a match for the position, strengths, weaknesses, areas for coaching, what type of career path can be expected and how well they will fit in. This is also a great development and coaching tool for existing employees.
 
Can the cost of a program like this be justified? Well, if you had a call center with 100 agents using conservative numbers of 20% turnover, ,000 to hire and train; the annual cost to the company is 0,000. Reducing turnover 39% or 8 people would result in a savings of 0,000, which would probably pay for this type of service. And it doesn't have to be limited to the call center. This tool can be used for every position in the organization. Imagine the impact that would have on the bottom line.

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You can read other case histories and learn more about the program at PeopleAnswers' website.

How to Find the Ideal Candidate For Your Call Center

Linda Hogan, managing partner of PTel Inc. has been in the call center industry since 1993. PTel Inc. provides a variety of products for managing call centers. PTel's call center knowledge and Centrex expertise is a valuable resource for many organizations. Linda spends a great deal of time training call center supervisor and managers understanding call center metrics and management. For more information about the company and products, visit http://www.callcenterstore.com or http://www.ptelinc.com or email linda@ptelinc.com

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Business Availability Center Products Overview

Business Availability Center products are an extensive package of advanced, state-of-the-art tools for measuring and managing critical business processes to ensure business efficiency, stability and longevity in the market. Designed by Mercury Interactive, Business Availability Center products offer users an innovative approach to integrating business, end-user and system perspectives, while also providing a detailed analysis of the infrastructure that incorporates critical applications.

With the help of Mercury Interactive Business Availability Center products, organizations can: manage IT from a business perspective to improve service levels; translate business objectives into IT operational level agreements; ensure alignment between LOBs and IT by measuring and reporting on service levels from an end-user perspective; obtain a detailed map applications and infrastructure environments; rapidly identify, classify and diagnose problems to prevent application downtime; assess impact before deployment in order to minimize business risk.

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Mercury Interactive Business Availability Center products encompass a wide variety of innovative tools, including End User Management, Diagnostics, System Availability Management, Service Level Management, Universal CMDB, Application Mapping and SiteScope.

End User Management is used for monitoring website and application availability in real time, from the end-user perspective, allowing organizations to timely identify and fix issues. This very popular Mercury Interactive solution proactively emulates end-user business processes against applications on a 24x7 time basis for over 60 protocols, including web and non-web environments, as well as packaged applications such as Oracle, Siebel, SAP, Citrix and many more. With the help of End User Management, organizations can optimize business outcomes by improving end-users' quality of experience; lower costs by reducing the number of help desk calls from end users due to application performance degradation; minimize revenue risk associated with customer abandonment as a consequence of unacceptable reliability or performance problems; mitigate business risks and costs by reducing the number and duration of application outages.

Mercury Diagnostics is a very popular solution that helps users to ensure availability and performance in order to provide better quality of service to the business. Mercury Diagnostics can be used to efficiently resolve a series of problems that can deteriorate business availability: end users experiencing slow performance when submitting orders; business-critical applications run out of memory; online portal for order status fails intermittently; frequent failure of cluster nodes. By using Diagnostics, organizations can substantially reduce the frequency and duration of incidences, thus lowering the costs associated with problem identification and resolution; lower costs by reducing fault management efforts, as well as hardware and software expenses; collaborate across team boundaries and streamline the learning curve of those people responsible for maintaining J2EE, NET and ERP/CRM applications.

System Availability Management, corroborated with Mercury SiteScope, enables users to efficiently deploy and maintain an enterprise infrastructure monitoring solution. System Availability Management connects to existing Enterprise Management System products or uses Mercury SiteScope to collect and monitor system availability and performance data from across the entire enterprise. With System Availability Management, organizations can maximize ROI and improve scalability by eliminating excess infrastructure capacity from the system; reduce hardware, software and support overhead associated with managing business-critical applications and infrastructure; reduce costs from topology based correlation by measuring and managing only the important aspects; increase administrator productivity via prioritized alerts based on service level or operational level breaches, instead of flood of alerts.

Mercury SiteScope is today's most efficient agentless system monitoring solution designed to ensure the availability and performance of distributed IT infrastructures, such as servers, operating systems, network devices, network services, applications and application components. With the help of Mercury SiteScope, organizations can lower total cost of ownership by consolidating support and maintenance tasks to a central agentless server; reduce the need to track and remotely administer thousands of agents including their overhead on production systems; save time and money by deploying Solution Templates - best practice-based groups of monitors for key applications; eliminate the need for multiple solutions via SiteScope's industry leading breadth of more than 65 supported monitoring targets.

Mercury Service Level Management enables users to proactively manage service levels from the business perspective and provide service level agreement-compliance reporting for complex business applications in distributed environments. With Mercury Service Level Management, organizations can reduce costs by eliminating the need for manual, ongoing report generation; maximize the availability of revenue producing applications; reduce the level of effort required to produce and distribute service level documentation.

Mercury Universal CMDB provides the background required to succeed in service management initiatives. The solution comprises a complete business-service-oriented data model with built-in auto-discovery of configurations and configuration item dependencies, visualization and mapping of business services, as well as tracking of configuration changes. With the help of Mercury Universal CMDB, organizations can federate and reconcile data from existing repositories and other CMDBs; visualize and map the used infrastructure in a multitude of ways; track changes using a continuous CI (configuration item) change history; perform sophisticated analyses based on complex relationships; rapidly perform tasks such as report creation, database administration, or event simulation.

Application Mapping provides visibility into the dynamic relationships between used applications and the underlying infrastructure. The solution continuously updates and maintains this topology map within a common relationship model, enabling users to quickly assess business impact of IT issues. It also substantially simplifies the complexity of understanding and controlling IT elements like networks, systems, and application interdependencies. With Mercury Application Mapping, organizations can lower deployment and maintenance costs while accelerating time-to-market; mitigate the business risk and cost of downtime; reduce data collection and assessment costs for data center consolidation initiatives; optimize Sarbanes-Oxley compliance efforts; build topology maps, evaluate business impacts, track and verify changes and prepare reports; reduce downtime and improve productivity with application diagnostics and root cause analysis for permanent resolution of issues.

These remarkable Mercury Interactive solutions are nowadays extensively used by organizations of many different types and sizes. Along with Mercury QuickTest Pro and Mercury LoadRunner (which provides high-quality load and stress testing services), Business Availability Center products can substantially increase business efficiency and performance.

Business Availability Center Products Overview

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