How to keep that personal touch

Managing business growth is tricky in almost any industry. The bigger a company gets, the more difficult it is to provide personal services for customers.

AT&T Wireless Services attacked the challenges of increased customer demand by focusing on efficiency and empowerment. The company created a process for a quality program to improve customers' perceptions of the company's service and gave customer service representatives (CSRs) the ability to manage their development.

In 1994, the regional call center in Austin, Texas, was increasing its customer base at an annual rate between 40% and 50%. The call center, which operates from 7 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. seven days a week, is one of eight call centers serving AT&T Wireless Services customers across the United States. It provides general inquiry and billing inquiry service for more than 300,000 customers in central and eastern Texas and Louisiana, including Austin and San Antonio, Texas; and Shreveport, La.

Although the growing business was great news, it meant that the center's 75 full-time CSRs were fielding an average of 1800 calls per month. The increased volume meant that CSRs were challenged to continue providing the high level of customer service that differentiates one cellular provider from another. The supervisors were also having difficulty focusing on CSR development and training because their responsibilities also had increased.

AT&T Wireless Services has relied on CSR performance monitoring for years to maintain productivity and quality standards. But even as early as 1993, the results of an employee survey and changes in AT&T Wireless Services' business indicated the need to update the process by which the company conducted and evaluated monitoring sessions.

At that time, supervisors were responsible for monitoring CSRs as well as many other operations tasks. They often took live calls and did not have enough time to conduct monitoring effectively. At peak call hours, supervisors were frequently unable to complete monitoring sessions and sometimes missed them altogether.

Another problem with the monitoring system involved equipment. Supervisors were using cumbersome manual tape recorders that were unreliable and inconvenient. Between six and 10 recording machines had to be purchased to ensure that one to three machines were operational and available at any given time. To make playback more convenient, all recorders had cigarette lighter adapters so that supervisors could listen to tapes of calls while driving home each night. Despite these creative attempts to handle growth and added responsibilities, this quick fix was still inefficient and cumbersome.

As a result of the inconsistent monitoring system, employee morale was low-turnover had risen to as high as 25%. The evaluation process, they felt, was unreliable. They did not clearly understand how performance related to compensation and did not have effective incentive to improve their skills. The CSRs also were unclear on what was expected of them and felt they were not able to meet the quality/productivity goals the company was setting.

Recognizing that this situation was a management problem that could not be remedied through technology or training alone, the company decided to start from ground zero and create a call center environment that encouraged CSRs to succeed and grow. With this goal in mind, the company set out to accomplish four goals: to improve the evaluation/compensation system, increase CSRs' skills, improve morale and reduce employee turnover.

The 'Q' Word AT&T Wireless Services emphasizes total quality management (TQM). All employees receive mandatory TQM awareness training in the first six months of employment. Within this framework, the company used state-of-the-art technology and TQM techniques to change the call center.

To automate the monitoring process and provide the foundation for the quality program, the company chose AutoQuality! from Teknekron Infoswitch Corp., Fort Worth, Texas. The system offered reliable, high-quality, digital voice files and accessibility. The system, which is PC-based, automatically records CSR calls during specified time periods.

Playback works a lot like voice mail and can be accessed from any touch-tone phone. Evaluators can simply start and stop the recording when interrupted. Because calls can be fast-forwarded, rewound and repeated, no sessions are missed. "Dead air" is automatically eliminated so that evaluators don't waste time listening to silence. Finally, the system eases the logistical burden for evaluators because it can be programmed to schedule CSRs for monitoring.

Because the automated system is much more efficient, the company was able to centralize monitoring responsibilities and hire two call quality monitors to handle all monitoring responsibilities. As a result, call center supervisors could concentrate on group development, scheduling, recruiting, interviewing and other projects. The quality monitors keep an ambitious schedule, recording two sessions per CSR each month. Each session includes five calls, which means that they observe 750 calls a month.

This new automated monitoring system has given AT&T Wireless Services consistent, accessible data that is invaluable for evaluating CSRs and providing insight as to how the company can better serve customers. Now CSRs can easily complete the number of sessions needed for comprehensive CSR evaluations without taking supervisors away from important calls during business hours. In addition, supervisors can better manage their groups because the new system allows them to track CSR progress and determine which CSRs have the ability to handle complicated calls.

Automating service observation also enabled the quality team to implement a new scoring method for evaluating CSRs. They developed a checklist of 17 call quality questions such as "Did the CSR use the correct customer name?", "Did the CSR resolve the problem?" and "Did the CSR offer additional services?" Using Teknekron's P&Q Review!, the team assigns each CSR a grade known as the Service Quality Indicator (SQI), which indicates how well the CSR met the checklist quality criteria and productivity goals. Under the new system, individual SQIs link to both monthly pay and career advancement.

As part of the new program, the company also hired a call center trainer. Customer representatives currently complete four weeks of classroom/nesting training when they are hired and continual training as they progress in their careers. Based on the recorded calls, the company also customizes training according to which quality elements are challenging for particular CSRs. In addition, CSRs can review their own calls to see where their strengths and weaknesses are.

A major plus about the program is that it has changed CSR attitudes toward performance evaluation-and even about their jobs in general. Quality has become a team effort. Agents feel service observation is fair and consistent because the same SQI criteria are applied to each CSR for the same number of calls. And CSRs know that they can discuss a particular call with their evaluator if there is any question about an evaluation.

Under the new quality program, AT&T Wireless Services has been able to achieve higher levels of professionalism and measured achievement (see sidebar).

The benefits the company experienced in Austin have encouraged other sites to adopt the same program, and the software that the Austin call center uses is being installed in the Oklahoma City call center, which serves customers in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri. In addition, the Dallas call center is revising its processes based on information gathered in Austin.

The AT&T Wireless Services' Dallas call center serves cellular telephone customers in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and provides around-the-clock support for the Oklahoma and Austin call centers. The Dallas call center has assigned one experienced CSR to perform all service observation and grading so that supervisors are free to perform one-on-one coaching and handle the most complicated customer inquiries. Establishing benchmarks for productivity and quality has given Dallas CSRs a clear understanding of their goals. And equipping CSRs with the ability to access their monitored calls has empowered them to manage their own improvement aided by additional coaching from supervisors.

It's a new mindset at the call centers. An efficient system is now in place that rewards quality performance and gives employees the tools to improve their skills. Agents now view service observation as a mechanism for their development-and customers are seeing the difference in terms of better service.

Mark Nelson is Director of Client Services for the Texas/Louisiana District of AT&T Wireless Services, Austin, Texas.

Starting this fall, AT&T will use a new object-based billing platform from Claremont Technology Group to increase the carrier's flexibility in charging for its MultiQuest 900 service.

The platform, called Premost, is a client-server based operations support system (OSS) designed to help carriers create billing models for individual customers and combine and simplify billing processes, helping to reduce support and billing staff costs.

Because it is object-based, the system also enables carriers to quickly create billing procedures, helping to cut time to market for new services.

The system will allow AT&T to implement a variety of new billing approaches without having to replace existing systems, said Robert Doyle, general manager of AT&T's MultiQuest Services Division. The carrier is expected to announce the agreement today.

"Any billing system we use has to interface with a lot of legacy systems," Doyle said. "We needed that flexibility. We also needed to deal with a tremendous amount of variety among our customers and to put new billing processes in place quickly. The object-oriented nature of Premost was ideal for that." The platform was created in response to the increasingly complicated relationships that carriers form with large customers-which is changing the nature of customer billing.

"All the carriers are entering into increasingly complex contracts with their bigger customers for services that aren't billed strictly on a flat usage rate, and that all ends up creating a new 'standard' rate," said Ed Fullman, senior vice president for Claremont, Basking Ridge, N.J.

"That standard is that there isn't a standard that applies to each customer anymore. You need a solution where you have total flexibility to align products with customers. With Premost, a carrier could create different billing models for every customer, if need be," he said.

Premost comprises four fully integrated software engines Claremont calls "value servers" that focus on product management, pricing, customer management and payments. These components compile billing records, analyze customer habits and provide end users with analyses of pricing and discounts.

"It's an ideal tool for situations that involve calls billed to multiple parties, payments to content providers and negotiated agreements with local exchange carriers," said Fullman. "It addresses some of the issues that modern carriers need to face. Carriers cannot only generate billing information, but they can use the data that the system uses to keep their customers happy."

The MultiQuest 900 service is a pay-per-call offering that allows customers to dial into businesses for purchases, customer support or entertainment services. Charges for the service are billed to the caller. The Premost system will allow AT&T to determine the rates charged for these calls in cooperation with businesses.

By integrating well with legacy systems, the OSS will also give AT&T room to grow.

"The carriers have a lot of different billing systems in place, but most of them are linear and are focused toward specific services," Doyle said. "Carriers are going to begin bundling more and more services to make themselves more attractive, and they'll need a flexible way of billing for them."

Said Fullman: "If you design a system that's too close to the existing model, you'll find that it'll be outdated before very long. Premost is flexible enough to accommodate new billing models."

Analysts say the 900 environment is a good proving ground for modern billing systems because of the variety of customer needs.

"If you can do [billing] in the 900 field, you can do billing in a lot of other service areas," said Rob Rich, an analyst for The Yankee Group, Boston. "The 900 service is all about billing, and you need flexibility and an ability to offer new services quickly. That makes AT&T an ideal customer for Claremont."

The fact that the first customer for the Premost system is AT&T also should help the system's acceptance.

"Any time you're doing business with AT&T, a company whose customers have some very stringent demands, it's a good indication," said Robert Rosenberg, president of Livingston, N.J.-based Insight Research. "It should certainly make it easier for them to get through the doors of their carriers."