A Conversation with Melissa Kovacevic - Contact Center Consultant
by: Brooks Webb
Melissa Kovacevic
has been a contact center consultant since 1983, and has been in the industry
since the late 70s. She got her start
with Dial America Marketing as an agent, and quickly moved into a supervisor
role due to her past experience with customer service and real estate sales. She eventually managed that center and later
was recruited by another company to open and run their first center. She’s seen a lot of changes over the
years and has developed a true passion for what she does. She’s worked with
inside sales, customer service, tech support, as well as all channels,
including email, chat, phone, and social media.
She has worked in both operational consulting as well as coaching, which
she absolutely loves. We at Call Center
Weekly were lucky enough to sit down with Melissa Kovacevic last week in order
to pick her brain about her many years in the Contact Center industry.
CCW: What caused you
to move into the Consulting side of the industry?
Melissa: After a
couple of years with Dial America, a headhunter told me about an opportunity as
a new manager to help start up a call center in Charlotte. I jumped at the chance to do that. I started a brand new call center, in charge
of recruiting, training, coaching, etc.
I have to give all of the credit to Dial America who trained and mentored
me all those years ago. I met a consultant while in Charlotte, and
decided that I would really like to do that in the future. So after a short while, I opened my own
consulting practice.
CCW: Did you see
yourself going into Call Center Consulting early in life?
Melissa: Great
question. My father owned a small corner
grocery store, attached to our home. It
was on Main St in a small town in Pennsylvania.
At 3 or 4 yrs old, I would go with my mother for the delivery runs to
houses outside of town and got my first look at customer service. At age 10 or 11, I learned how to operate the
cash register, make change, and handle money.
I dealt with customers early in life, both nice and not so nice. I then went to college for Psychology and
Art. I was going to do art therapy, but I immediately realized that it was
pretty scary when people start throwing paint around the room. So that took me into real estate but when the
market dropped, I found a Dial America ad in the paper and moved into it just
to make a living. I have never felt
bored with what I do with Call Centers. I
think my enthusiasm comes through in blog articles that I write. I love what I do and I have to give thanks to
Dial America for the initial opportunity in the industry.
CCW: To someone brand new to the call center environment,
what would be your one piece of advice?
Melissa: Remind yourself who is paying your wage; The
Customer! We think it’s the company, but
the company doesn’t exist without the customers. Remember how we want to be
treated when we’re the customer. What’s
important to you when you’re the customer?
If you are upset, how do you want to be treated? How does it make you feel if someone is just
saying “Sorry”
You’ve got to have good energy, enthusiasm, be empathetic,
and see how that comes back around to you.
When a supervisor has given up on an agent, I try to get the agent to
agree to try some new things and answer some of these questions. They’ll come
back after a couple of weeks with responses from their customers like “Thank
you, you’re a great agent” and “It’s really great working with you” because
they’ve learned to make the customer feel important.
CCW: What are some
important qualities/traits that you look for when hiring?
Melissa: I love
the idea that you can do phone screens.
It tells you a lot about how that person reacts to questions, comments,
etc. Hearing them in actual scenarios,
giving them that role play over the phone is great. When you can go outside their comfort level,
that’s a good thing. We tend to hire
people who are more process oriented.
Most processes and procedures can be trained, but you can’t train
someone to have a great personality over the phone. Look for soft skills, and then train the
process/procedure/technical skills. Always make sure they can talk to the customer
on their level without talking down to them.
CCW: What’s been your
biggest challenge over the years?
Melissa: Remaining flexible and keeping up with all the
changes in technology and customer expectations. I’m bombarded on a daily basis with hundreds
of ideas through Twitter, blogs, and emails.
I look where the trends are and look for changes in technology. Customer expectations are now a big part of
social media and mobile interactions.
I had to be more flexible. When I first started, it was all
about outbound telemarketing. My first clients were banks and insurance
companies. One bank’s call center was in
the basement of a branch. It’s since
become SunTrust. At the time,
telemarketing and outbound telemarketing was something that everyone wanted to
do. Now there are more blended calls and
relationship selling. There’s more tech
support as well.
Learning different technologies, learning more about the
latest contact center systems that are out there are things I have to keep up
with. A lot of my knowledge I credit to
people I’ve met on Linkedin and Twitter.
CCW: What do you see
as the next big trend in Customer Service/Support?
Melissa: I love working with smaller call
centers. Large call centers have all the
bells and whistles but small centers are realizing that they need to start
tracking social media support. Some
companies’ marketing teams handle social but that’s not necessarily the right
direction. We need to be tracking social
tickets in our centers. There’s also
Mobile support. Mobile apps, mobile
wallets for banking, and apps that put you in queue via your mobile phone and
ring when an agent is available are growing in popularity. The question for our centers is what methods
are customers going to be using to interact with us?
With tech advances, we’re seeing more remote agents, and
technology that allow us to monitor people while working from home, including
supervisors and QA teams as well. For example
here in Charleston, being able to go mobile and move call center activities if
hurricanes come through is key. It gives us that opportunity to set up
somewhere else if we need to.
For social support, if a customer says I communicated with
someone on FB, the rep needs to know what the customer is talking about. We need to track that, and if Marketing is
handling social, we need to see if we can get it moved over to the support
teams.
CCW: What’s the one
thing that everyone seems to get wrong?
Melissa: I’ll give you two; metrics and coaching. The first one is either too many or the wrong
metrics. A lot of people just started
realizing what matters to their customers.
I do webinars and work with companies that do webinars, and after these
sessions, some people say “Zappos does
that, so we’re going to do it”. They try to duplicate it but it’s not always
successful. Sometimes you end up dealing
with metrics that YOUR customers don’t care about and miss the metrics that
they do care about.
Sometimes companies have
so many metrics that the poor manager doesn’t know where to start. One example was at a bank, where a top agent was
moved to a management position in the call center. He was told to be sure to
pull and print all of these reports but no one showed him what to do with
them. He ended up with 3 months of reports
under his desk that he had no idea what to do with. I told him we’re shredding these and pulling
the reports from the database where everything was saved and find out what is
really important.
The other side of this relates to coaching. We find
supervisors who are not given the opportunity or the time to do the job. So much emphasis is placed on meeting time, pulling
reports, doing all kinds of busy work and very little time is given for them to
be out there on the floor.
The great folks at Dial America gave only one chair to two
supervisors so one could monitor calls at the desk but the other one had to
“walk the floor”. Their idea was that at least one supervisor would visit,
coach and encourage the reps and not just sit behind a desk.
It’s important to spend a little time with each person, not
to necessarily distract them, but to have that interaction and that coaching time. It’s great just to sit side by side with them
to help them with something when you can.
Some supervisors spend most of their time in their offices and have yet
to take that first phone call in order to help the agents.
The coaching, the way the supervisor sees their job role in
terms of that, and then the metrics are probably the two biggest areas that I
see people failing in, and areas that I love to work with them in. It’s all about the customer experience and
all of their interactions. What your
agents and supervisors need to understand is that end result. How do we make the end result the best
possible, and how do we remain successful and stay in business in order to pay
everybody? Setting the right metrics and
coaching/motivating our agents are both a big part of this success.
CCW: What do you think are the essential metrics for a call center to
track?
Melissa: Any metrics related to customer experience blended
with your operational needs. Customer satisfaction, Individual agent
quality skills, metrics related to service levels, agent availability (time in
idle and on calls vs. not available) and wait times in queue. Things that
your customers are complaining about to agents or on your surveys and other
customer feedback tools.
CCW: What metrics do you think can hurt more than help?
Melissa: Focusing
too much on talk time can be a problem. If not balanced with
quality/results of the call, the agent may rush and have incomplete calls
(customer not completely helped resulting in call backs), soft skills are dropped
in favor of quick processes done and the agent has reduced upselling and
cross-selling efforts made. Too many short calls may mean the agent isn’t
taking the time to empathize and show interest and appreciation. Calls
that are too long may mean the agent is
unsure of the product information or processes or needs training on how to personalize
their call without talking too much about personal things.
CCW: Final question,
what’s more important to you, Agent Satisfaction or Customer Satisfaction? Regarding Agent Satisfaction, what do you
feel motivates them most?
Melissa: The
chicken or the egg! If you have good
happy agents, you’ll have good happy customers for the most part. You have to know what motivates agents.
Studies on motivation will tell you that money and gift
cards are popular, so I don’t take away from that, but I say there’s a lot more
to it. I do want my agents to be happy,
but I don’t want to just make it about the “pizza party.” For example, “every week we’re going to have
a pizza party and that’s going to motivate everybody.”
It’s not necessarily
just money or gift cards, but recognition by their supervisor, and time
spent with their supervisor. Great
feedback from customers too that shows that their efforts are being recognized
and that goes a long way as well. We
need to make our agents feel valued if we want them to do the same with our
customers.
When you keep agents happy and motivated, and reward them
for the great things they’re doing with customers, then your customers are
going to be happy. Your customers aren’t going to be happy if
they’re talking to agents who either need to go or need better coaching. It’s either one or the other.
And I’m happy with “happy turn over”, the kind that occurs when someone leaves
because they are a problem. Other agents
around that person will be happy that they’re gone and so will your customers.
How motivating can it be if I’m an agent and I’m doing what
I need to do, but I’m sitting next to someone who is treating the customer
poorly and hates their job? You’re going
to lose good agents that way.
