How to Address Language Issues

In this line of business, everything relies on communication. Language issues, are translated into stats, by poor QA scores, low CSAT, low FCR and high ATT. Being a QA for 4 years, I have experienced working with agents who went live, had difficulties communicating, and as a result, had low morale. This is because they are often at the end of customer abuse. They have issues completing resolution because the customer's can't understand the steps. They have long calls because it takes a lot of effort on their part just to discuss a simple point. It was a challenging task at first. I know that the conventional way of coaching won't work. By going through a series of trial and errors (with emphasis on errors), I was able to find a series of steps that worked with most of the agents I have handled. This is a tried and tested formula.

1. Motivate- Excite.Brainwash. Attitude Transplant. They're all the same.

The first issue I have experienced is coaching agents with bleak outlook on self improvement. After all, they spent 14 years, at least, of education trying to work on their ps and fs, th, vs and bs, to no avail. Some of them already accepted the fact that it is impossible to learn. There are different ways to motivate people, but the first step is to let the agent know that there is a NEED for improvement, and that it's not too late to learn a new skill. And that need is supposed to be addressed to as soon as possible.You have to build the confidence.This is because effective communication requires confidence. Without doing this, we can't go to the next steps.

2. Minimize Word Count- Most agents with this problem, fall into a trap. Wherein, to compensate for this perceived flaw, an agent talks more, sometimes out of control, drowning the customer with details, circling around different topics. Sometimes this can be due to enthusiasm of being in a new environment. Or simply because of a notion, that maybe by speaking more, they are practicing more. But this is a common sight. However, what this does is that it makes matters worse, because the language issues have now become more obvious. And sometimes by over talking they find themselves, hitting communication walls. The first thing that we should do is to HIDE the flaw. After all, when it comes to communication, less is more.

Coach agents on:

a. Being clear, concise, and direct to the point. Take note of common sentences that are wordy and come up with modifications.
b. Minimizing fillers.
c. Avoiding run on sentences.
d. Planning the call ahead of time, anticipating possible discussion points.
e. Organizing thoughts and focusing on one topic at a time.
f. Using transition phrases to direct call flow.
g. Being in control of their emotions during the call


This step alone can make a huge difference. In fact, for most agents, I only did this step, and they figured out the rest.

3. Create Audio Scripts- Scripting makes it easier for new agents to handle certain situations like referrals, closing, handling an irate customer, etc. By constantly rehearsing the lines, agents can say it with more confidence in time. The problem is , can they say it correctly?

As people grow old, they become accustomed to their native speech sound, and can find it hard to retain the correct way of pronouncing particular words/phrases. Communication is 100% mental, because when we speak, we retrieve a memory of words into our head before putting it in a sentence.Sometimes, if our mind is cluttered with an abyss of thoughts, our speech is, well, cluttered. If we hear our neighbors, talking in bad English for years, we unconciously retain it. When we retain it, it manifests itself when we speak.

To create audio recorded scripts, we must write down the scripts that the agent frequently uses during the course of a call. Record it using windows recorder, and have the agents listen to it before shift and even at home. By doing this, we are re programming their memory, and this time with the correct data.


4. Improve Speech Techniques-Intonation is the speech music. Each language a genre. Even if we pronounce all the words correctly, we would still sound awful if the intonation is incorrect. For example, in our native tongue, every syllable is pronounced, whereas in the American Language, sentences are treated like sound groups. This contrasting characteristic is one of the challenges when coaching these agents. Voice modulation exercises can be beneficial in terms of sounding clearer, more confident and more mature.

5. Think in English- When we think in Tagalog, we find it hard to construct sentences in the middle of a conversation. By thinking in English before shift, we are conditioning our mind for this activity.Thus, we are avoiding incorrect transliterations and will sound more spontaneous, less strenuous when we talk.

6. Speak English-

Exaggerate.

Most often, even if agents have the skill, they are often shy to display it. We must exaggerate , stressing on twangs, intonations, inflections, etc. Even if it sounds embarrassing at first, this is an essential part of this development. Through this way, we are conditioning our mindset that speaking English is something that comes naturally. And it will.

Agents should listen to their call recordings and must take notes of commonly mispronounced words. There are a lot of websites that can be used as a reference. (i.e., encarta.msn.com, then go to dictionary, etc.)

I'm not a big fan of English only Policies because it can be compared to forcing a basketball player to keep on shooting even if his mechanics are wrong. It lacks creativity and displays short understanding of the agent's psyche. The previous 5 steps must be achieved FIRST before enforcing such policy.

7. Improve on Grammar- Agents should notice patterns between correct grammar usages. Most often, the same rules apply. There is lot of grammar related sites. The best one for me is Englishpage.com.

8.Develop Conversational Skills- Cultivate good phone savvy/personality by listening, turn taking, avoiding dead air, building rapport, spontaneity, and expressing one's point with clarity.

Overall, this completes the package.

Deming Quality Chain Reaction (applied to a contact center set up)

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1.Improve Quality

Quality is the focus. Everything starts and ends with quality. Without it, improvements will not be sustained in the long run. For example, if an account bills client on a per call basis, then focuses on getting calls without providing any quality help to customers, then it is bound to fail. Because, in today's market of intense competition, someone will always provide better service,by providing better ways of meeting the customer needs. Management should always be at the forefront whether by iniatitives on establishing quality metrics, or through process improvements.

2. Reduce Costs-

As quality is improved, costs are reduced because of less delays (long calls) and defects (customer dissatisfaction). One of purposes of quality is to have less rework, with this, agents know what is acceptable and what is not. Thus, operational definitions are clear. By chopping off redundant steps through process improvements, calls are more efficient because of less rework and delays. Agents can focus more on issue resolution and improving the customer experience. By focusing on quality, agents are less prone to mistakes, leading to customer satisfaction. Time, machine and materials are economized.

3.Improve Productivity-

As costs are reduced, the company have better use of the agent's time and energy. As much of it is no longer spent on defects.They are now more devoted to work that only adds value. As a result, billable utilization increases, getting more value per employee.

4. Reduce Prices

We now have MORE products (calls) that have a higher quality. These are created with lower costs. We now have savings. Savings are now passed to the market by reducing prices to our clients.

5. Capture the Market

We now have more calls, with a higher quality, and at a lower price. This provides us a great competitive advantage compared to competitors. We can now create markets that provides calls to the changing needs of its clients.

6. Stay in Business

Once the contact center has stayed ahead of competitors, and has captured the market. The long term prospects of the organization have been ensured.

7. Provide jobs and more jobs-

Companies that focuses on quality realizes the value of continous improvement. Thus, opportunities for new jobs are created.

8.Improve ROI-everything gains.

It is recommended that the internal customers ( steps 1-3) were satisfied first before the external customers. Or else the chain breaks.

The Futility of Call Center Coaching

One-agent-at-a-time coaching is the go-to method in call centers for trying to improve center-wide output measures. But it is less valuable than many believe. Through the use of mathematical modeling and simulation, it is possible to see that coaching, even in moderate turnover environments, does not offer a return on investment (ROI). More-effective improvement strategies aimed at lifting the performance of the whole system, such as task consolidation and prerecorded call flows, should be used instead.

Coaching in Error
Dr. W. Edwards Deming, a 20th century quality guru, warned managers about an inference error pertaining to the performance of a team, unit or organization. This is the error: Because coaching may help an individual improve and because the performance of the system is the sum of each worker's performance, coaching each worker will improve the performance of the system. Deming believed this was faulty logic

In Deming's view, most coaching efforts are a form of tampering because they try to make improvements to individual components of what is largely common cause variation. He argued that the overall performance of a unit was much more a function of the quality of materials, process design, specs and machine performance – in other words, the “system.” Deming went on to demonstrate that the result of an improvement strategy based on coaching each employee would be no system improvement; rather, it would simply be increased variation in performance. He encouraged management to find ways to lift the performance of the whole system.
There is another practical reason there can be no ROI from investments in coaching: turnover. When turnover is high, every month and year workers that may have improved from individual investments walk out the door. As these people quit, they are replaced with new, lower-performing employees.
But many managers still believe in the efficacy of coaching, especially in the call center industry. Centers pay to record phone calls and do sample monitoring for use in sporadically coaching agents – despite the high rate of employee turnover.
Background for the Model
A mathematical model can be used to show the inefficiency of coaching individual call center employees. To understand the model, it is important to be aware of the variables that were in place when the model was formed.
This model starts with 100 new agents in a call center. Performance is measured by the percentage of customers who give an agent a 5 on a 5-point scale (referred to as “percentage top box for customer satisfaction” in the model). Because no agent can be perfect and because agents must occasionally give an answer the customer will not be satisfied with, the top performance used in the model is 85 percent. The 100 agents start with a mean performance of 66 percent, with a standard deviation of 2 percent. No new agent starts at less than 60 percent; if they ranked lower than this on customer satisfaction, they would not have graduated from the initial training program.
The model is measured over 72 months, or iterations of the system. During each iteration, some agents improve because of coaching and some agents quit and are replaced with new agents. For the agents who stay, if their tenure is less than six months, they improve by 2 percent each month. If their tenure is greater than seven months but less than 12 months, they improve by 1 percent each month. The amount of improvement continues to halve every six months, following a declining exponential function. In my experience as a call center leader, long-tenured agents are not very responsive to coaching. Their approach and work habits are too ingrained and the amount of coaching available for these experienced agents is too limited.
The turnover rate in the base model is 36 percent annually, or 3 percent per month. This turnover is random, such that each month a new agent and an experienced agent are equally likely to quit; few make answering calls a career.
The variables used for top performance, mean performance and turnover rate can be adjusted by different centers using this model.
Constructing the Model
With the variables in place, it is time to look at the math used to construct the model. The distribution of tenure at month M, with a monthly turnover rate of T, was found using a Markov chain. The following matrix works on the assumption that turnover is constant and is not a function of tenure:

The “percentage top box customer satisfaction” (CS) of an employee with t months of coaching is the sum of the contributions from coaching (Ce), which can be expressed as follows:
where H is the half-life of the effectiveness of training, and CL is the limit of coaching.
The limit of coaching is the best possible customer satisfaction rating that the given employee can reach, which can be set anywhere. If turnover is set to 0, the system will approach CL as the limit.
CS can also be expressed in terms of the employee's initial performance, M0, as follows:

where H is the half-life of the effectiveness of training, and CL is the limit of coaching.
The limit of coaching is the best possible customer satisfaction rating that the given employee can reach, which can be set anywhere. If turnover is set to 0, the system will approach CL as the limit.
CS can also be expressed in terms of the employee's initial performance, M0, as follows

Plugging the fourth equation into the second equation gives the following:

Thus, this is the performance vector of the system:

This vector contains the performance of employees at any given month of tenure. The contribution of any group of employees to the overall customer satisfaction of the system is the number of employees in that group, multiplied by their performance. The vectors of tenure and performance have been constructed such that, when multiplied, they will result in the call center's employees’ average “percentage top box customer satisfaction.”

Examining the Results
The model ran through the 72 months, or iterations, under numerous different starting conditions. No matter how the starting conditions were manipulated, the shape of the curve describing the performance of the 100-agent system looked exactly like the graph below.

Clearly, the system improves rapidly at first. This is because the coaching effect is strongest for new agents. After about a year, however, the system stopped improving at a level well below the system maximum because the effectiveness of coaching diminishes for experienced agents and the turnover eats up the effect of improvement from coaching.
This result is also reflected in the distribution of the performance of individual agents in the system. A negatively skewed distribution took shape after about 12 iterations of the system and remained stable through all 72 iterations. There is constantly a big group of high-performing, experienced agents and a trailing group of new agents growing in experience and performance. Because experienced agents continue to quit and are replaced by brand new agents, the shape of this distribution never changes.
One could argue that the coaching investment is holding the system in place and keeping it from regressing, but it is, without question, not improving the system; after about 18 months, there was no discernible increase in system performance. Although coaching may be helpful for the new agents, the system's performance rate stays the same due to continued turnover.
Improving System Wide
The conclusion from this modeling effort is that coaching in systems with a broad mix of tenure and even a modest level of turnover will have little effect on the performance of the entire system. To improve the outputs of a system, managers must find an approach to process improvement which lifts the performance of all the agents at the same time, not one at a time. Task consolidation and prerecorded call flows are two options.
Task consolidation involves studying what agents do and looking for ways to make what they do on the phone more accurate and efficient. An example: Finding a way to turn a process that involves cutting and pasting, and opening 15 different systems into a one-click step that causes all the work to be executed behind the scenes.
Another systemic improvement strategy is to engineer what the agents actually say during the call. In this approach, call flows are built to respond to customers' needs and inquiries and executed by agents using both prerecorded audio files and their live voice when needed. This solution can help eliminate accent barriers, deliver greater process adherence and achieve significant reductions in talk time, without the need for monitors to listen to calls. (Note reference to a related article that provides additional details and data on this approach.)
Both solutions involve actually engineering and error-proofing sections of the call. These are the type of approaches that can transform a manufacturing environment, and they can do the same for a call center.
An Old Lesson
Although the lights went out in Vaudeville a long time a go, one of the standard gags was about the guy looking for his keys under a street lamp. Another guy stops by to help and asks, “Where do you think you lost them?” To which the man replies, “About a half of a block away over by my car, but the light is better here.”
To improve live call handling, start looking where the keys are likely to be (system-wide improvements), not where the light seems good (trying to improve agents one at a time).

Written by: Dennis Adsit

About the Author: Dennis Adsit was most recently the senior vice president of contact center operations and process excellence for Intuit. Prior to Intuit, Dr. Adsit was the Six Sigma practice leader for Rath & Strong Management Consultants. He is currently the vice president of business development for KomBea Corp. He can be reached at dennis.adsit@kombea.com