Remote Agents

Why Collections Employees Leave Every 90 Days

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Snowfly Call Center Agents Culture

I was listening to a Dave Ramsey call (on Youtube) this week and heard him say the average tenure of a collections agent at a collections agency is 90 days. If you are in the debt collections industry I’m guessing you don’t really like Dave Ramsey. Much of his advice with regard to collectors is … Read more

How To Manage Remote Workers Effectively

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Snowfly Happy Workers Employee Satisfaction

[vc_row type=”in_container” full_screen_row_position=”middle” scene_position=”center” text_color=”dark” text_align=”left” overlay_strength=”0.3″ shape_divider_position=”bottom” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column column_padding=”no-extra-padding” column_padding_position=”all” background_color_opacity=”1″ background_hover_color_opacity=”1″ column_link_target=”_self” column_shadow=”none” column_border_radius=”none” width=”1/1″ tablet_width_inherit=”default” tablet_text_alignment=”default” phone_text_alignment=”default” column_border_width=”none” column_border_style=”solid” bg_image_animation=”none”][vc_column_text]Remote workers. People who work from home. People you may never meet in person, or rarely see in the office. How in the world does this work? Can it even be done? Can … Read more

The Important Relationships Between Employee Engagement Programs (1), Employee Satisfaction (2), Employee Performance (3), and Retention (4)

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Snowfly Employee Engagement Programs

Snowfly specializing in delivering employee engagement programs that work! When I worked in thought leadership at an HRIS software company last year I had the unique privilege of working with Rusty Lindquist, one of my favorite HR thought leaders and one of the two best bosses I’ve ever had. Rusty had put more critical thinking … Read more

Reinventing Customer Experience Surveys

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Positive Customer Experiences Drive Loyalty

In the current marketplace, a customer not only expects to have their issue resolved by the Customer Service Representative they are interaction with, which often is interpreted as that customer being “satisfied” with the interaction with your business, there is now an additional expectation that the interaction to be pleasant and respectful, even if the customer isn’t acting in a pleasant or respectful manner. Yet when calls are “scored” for CSAT, many times the most important factor in determining a final score is if the customer is “satisfied” because the issue was resolved, which leaves much room for improvement in the survey process itself. 

I have been on phone calls many times with Customer Service professionals who have been polite, respectful, and done everything in their power to help resolve my issue, but for one reason or another, were unable to do so. Does that mean my experience with that CS Rep was a positive one or a negative one? In most cases, if I were to respond to a post-call survey using the pre-determined responses for my “satisfaction” I would likely rate that super helpful CS Rep very high on all accounts, but would still provide an overall score of “dis-satisfied” because my issue was not resolved, which reflects on that Rep’s overall CSAT score ratings.

So what can be done about scoring those interactions where the CS Rep did everything right and yet the customer is unsatisfied? Or what about those situations where the customer is “satisfied” because they were able to get their issue resolved, but the interaction was very negative or even downright nasty on the part of the CS Rep? What is the best way to capture the true spirit of the call and get an accurate CSAT score that not only represents how well the issue was resolved for the customer, but also whether or not the CS Rep was polite, pleasant, responsive, addressed my concerns, and ultimately represented your business, your brand, and themselves well during the interaction?

Using Voice Analytics to Conduct Surveys

One very effective way to address this issue is to employ Voice Analytics and allow a customer to leave a survey response that is completely open ended instead of being forced to answer pre-set questions based on a 1-5 scale that may or may not even address the real sentiment of that call. Using Voice Analytics and open-ended survey responses, you can accomplish so much more in regards to CSAT by using less of your customers’ time while better capturing the overall “satisfaction” of that customer. This can often be accomplished after the call by simply asking the customer: “Please provide any comments or feedback about your experience today.” Once the customer provides their input, which could be a few short words, or a lengthy discourse about how wonderful (or terrible) the CS Rep was or how thankful they were that the issue was resolved, but felt that the CS Rep was unsympathetic or hard to understand, you are able to collect MUCH more valuable data because the customer is not restricted to only providing input on the four areas the pre-determined survey questions were asking about.   

Our friends at Surgent Networks have been leading the technology push towards open-ended survey responses using Voice Analytics. They are revolutionizing the “Voice of the Customer” aspect of Customer Experience by literally allowing the customers to “Voice” their opinions regarding a specific interaction without the restrictions of a customer being required to respond to very specific questions in a traditional post-call survey. Customers can openly talk about what they appreciate about the brand, how their interaction made them feel special or really valued as a customer. A customer can share how they understand that the CS Rep was unable to get them the resolution they had hoped for, but they felt heard, were very grateful for the efforts of the CS Rep on their behalf, and, despite a ‘negative’ outcome of the call, leave very satisfied and likely to share their experience with others. 

Surgent Networks has written a fantastic overview of how to change your customer survey opportunities using Voice Analytics to find the real VOC and provide you insights into what your customers want to tell you vs. only collecting responses to what your survey offers the customer. To download and read the article, click here: Revolutionize the Customer Experience with Voice Analytics. 

#EXinCX   —   🙂 Employees = 🙂 Customers

In today’s ultra-competitive market, every company, every brand, must strive to have an emotional connection with their customers…especially in those instances where the customer has reached out to you specifically for help. In a nutshell, this is the essence of CX, or Customer Experience. And the only way to achieve this exceptional CX, is for your Employees to truly understand what is expected of them and then to deliver on those expectations consistently over time. This is why the focus of Snowfly in 2019 is all centered around the concept of #EXinCX – Employee Experience within Customer Experience.

Employees who are engaged and understand that their performance and behavior in their specific role with customers drives positive Customer Experiences are those employees whose value to the business is priceless and who are the ones who will drive your brand forward. So don’t rely on specific and generic questions after the call to determine if your customers are “satisfied” with you, instead, give them the chance to tell you how they REALLY feel, to tell you about anything and everything they want to say regarding your company and your brand. You will be pleasantly surprised at what your customers will tell you when given the chance to do so.

 

Snowfly Industry-Specific Article Series – Part 1: Collections Agencies

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When working with clients in the Collections Industry, Snowfly typically provides rewards and feedback to individual collections agents and/or teams that specifically reflect that person’s or team’s performance relating to key business goal metrics.

In collections environments, most companies are focused on the number of calls/contacts made, total value of funds collected on delinquent accounts, number of actively paying accounts, etc. and are comparing those metrics for each person or each team to a published goal or standard of performance within that department. Each of these metrics, along with other call center specific goals (AHT, CSAT, Adherence to Schedule, etc.) are the basis for most of our incentive and recognition programs that involve collections industries.

Moving into more of the advanced features that we offer, Snowfly can also help ensure your collections agency is adhering to regulatory standards that are strictly enforced within the collections industry. The costs associated with fines for not following the proper protocols when performing collections duties can be extremely punitive and avoiding outages in this area can lead to increased profitability for your collections agency. Using our Speech Analytics tools, you will have access to archived voice-recordings of every single call for each individual agent that provides proof to regulators that your agency is performing 100% QA checks on every call. Such QA checks ensure that agents are maintaining industry standards for things such as: properly reciting the “mini-Miranda”, refraining from the use of illegal phrases or tactics like intimidation or coercion, and/or documenting when an agent needs additional coaching based upon past call performance or feedback from customers.

Snowfly’s Speech Analytics services include individual performance scorecards that provide instant feedback to agents on how their performance stacks-up in relation to the company standards. The scorecards can also provide instant comparisons to a team average score and even provide rankings within their team or department. Using the data generated from the Speech Analytics platform, agents can determine what skill areas they need to improve upon automatically, in easy-to-interpret graphical form. This creates a pro-active approach to collections agent performance improvement, without supervisors having to tell agents where they need to improve, because results that are represented in a scorecard format, where the achievement of desired standards turns into performance-based incentives/bonuses/rewards means the agents themselves seek personal improvement because there is something tangible in it for them to do so.

Providing Collections Agents with clear, measurable, and easily tabulated goals that are directly tied to instant rewards for meeting and exceeding performance standards leads to more productive and efficient agents. Snowfly adheres to the axiom of: “what gets measured gets done.” But we also know that taking it further by stating: “what gets rewarded gets my FULL attention” is not always the easiest thing to track and implement, which is where we have already done the work for you. Let us know where you would like to see improvement in your collections agency and we likely have some ideas for solutions that you can implement, with very little effort on your part, that will provide significant ROI to your bottom-line and will further motivate your collections agents to improve their performance daily.