Rogers turning a blind eye …fact or fiction? And what should you do in your own contact centre

It’s was all over the news about Rogers turning a blind eye so call centre workers can lie and cheat customers.  In fact, there were thousands of comments, by customers that felt they were victims of this behaviour, as of the writing of this article and is quite heated.  The feedback made it obvious that people were not happy with these tactics and are supporting the employees that feel pressured.

Rogers refused to give an interview, but their spokesperson Paula Lash wrote, “While we do not believe the concerns raised represent our values or sales practices, we take them very seriously and we will work with our team to respond to these concerns.”  In addition, Lash also wrote that targets are achievable and that employees may be placed on performance improvement plans for other reasons like low attendance, concerns about behaviour, customer feedback, low sales, etc.

My question to the call centre management team would be why did they let it get to this point?  Did they not have a pulse on the centre or their employee morale?  Why were they not listening to feedback from their employees? Do they have balanced scorecards?  Were they not listening to the Voice of the Customer to know this was going on?

As you can see there are a lot of questions that I would be posing to the call centre management team and then working on an action plan to address these issues.  It has happened, so the perception is there and as we know, perception is reality .  So let’s take accountability and move forward with a strong action plan.  If we leave things business as usual and just sweep them under the rug, then we will not have addressed the root cause.  Rogers should use this as an opportunity to move their call centres to the next level by focusing on the right things and creating a culture where the employees are heard, customers are listened to and management has the tools to successfully implement a customer centric strategy.

Some of the things I would look at would be:

1. Determine why the message from the frontlines is not getting to upper management. Are we too focused on the KPIs that we are ignoring how we are getting those results?
2. How is it that we are defining customer experience internally? Ultimately it should be meeting your customer needs, and this definitely could include upselling. Sometimes customers don’t know all the cool things out there and that’s the job of the frontlines to make them aware and then provide recommendations to either make their customers livers easier or more entertaining.  Customers are more than willing to part with their money as long as you show them what’s in it for them.
3. Are my managers adequately trained on coaching methodologies and in this case on what needs based selling is? I have seen a lot of call centres where they are just giving targets/scorecards and then it’s up to their supervisors to figure out how to roll out it out and coach it to their agents.  They might be provided a quick 2-hour training session and then that’s it.  Just like your agents need regular refresher training at least once a month and coaching at least every two weeks, so do your managers.  Make sure that you are not using the scorecard as a carrot but instead make it simple with 3-5 KPIs and then focus on behaviours based on your strategic direction of your organization.
4. Inspect what you expect and don’t get results at your customer’s expense. You could get the same results by meeting your customers needs.  Focus on teaching people how to upsell based on needs so that you could capitalize on those customers that you may be currently missing out on which would more than make up for losing on the ones that you won’t be force selling to anymore. Also make sure that you are always keeping the pulse on your centre at every level so that everyone is aligned up the ladder on what’s going on in the floor.
5. Learn from the wealth of knowledge that you already have. Divide your frontlines into quadrants, the ones that sell a lot and have high customer experience results…learn from them.  The ones that have high customer experience scores but low sales…find out what sales training they are lacking and customize modules for them.  Low customer experience scores but high sales…Are they just too eager to sell or are they in fact not cut out for a customer service job.  You would really have to evaluate if they are worth keeping on your team.  Low customer experience scores and low sales…you might have to look at cutting your loses with these folks as the job might just be a wrong fit for their strengths.
6. Look at the outliers both in the top performers and bottom performers and look at what’s driving their performance. Easy way to weed out issues right away if the performance is due to some negative behavioural issues.

There is a lot to do in running an effective call centre, but it must start with taking accountability for our centres and then deriving a strong action plan to turn it around.  I know for a fact that you could get the same financial results by taking the time to train, develop a balanced scorecard, and really teach your agents to provide an optimal customer experience.  This way your customers don’t feel pressured, your agents have the tools to do their sales job effectively and your brand benefits through a positive word of mouth.