How design thinking helped solve our call-center conundrum.
It was during a client level synergy meeting with one of our huge e-commerce partners that we recognised the need to work closely with their customer care centre. Call centres have traditionally received a lot of bad press, being labelled a place where emotion is completely absent with the employees often called “robots at work”. They are also at times even referred to as ‘sweatshops’ in corporate gossip. Sweatshops, because those are the places where employees are poorly treated and over-burdened with deadlines and targets while receiving substantially low compensation for their work. Even the public perception of call centres is not good, probably owing to the declining trust between the customer and the agents, affecting the intentions of them both. We were asked to come in and solve two main issues to revitalise the whole call centre environment — one was to increase the trust between the caller and the agent, which was falling at a rapid pace, and the second was to bring in a system that could increase the overall call centre productivity.
We quickly discovered that the matter that lay at the heart of both these issues was the same — both were tied into the “emotion” of the agents.
Working with the call centre guys for just about two weeks really changed our perspective about them. They worked twice as hard as the rest of us and the work that they did was emotionally and psychologically draining. Call centre agents were on the phone for 8 hours a day every day, irrespective of holidays, and had access to a few of the comforts and benefits that most of us enjoy in our offices. Break times were minimal, with practically no time for leisurely chit chat or personal conversations, and you would need to be on the phone non-stop for more than 8 hours every day. And if that did not drain you, imagine getting shouted at every day — on one end by angry customers, and then by your manager on the other end for not hitting your daily targets.The agents handling cold calling cases were even worse off. They plodded forward on a meagre hope — the minuscule chance that the call they were dialling out might get answered. This may sound trivial at first but imagine having to go through about 500–600 numbers one after the other in the hope that one might get answered and then discovering that most of the calls do not, and then doing this day after day.
A study shows that less than 20% of all calls in a cold calling list get picked up and less than 5% of these get converted. But how could you know if a call would get answered or not at the outset? So they must make the attempt almost devoid of hope. Combine this with the fact that up to a minute of a sales agent’s time is wasted on every unconnected call, you might be able to sense the dying hopes echoing across those empty emotionless call centre halls.
Hope can be a powerful force. Maybe there’s no actual magic in it, but when you know what you hope for most and hold it like a light to guide you, you can make things happen, almost like magic.
To us, it became more than a use-case or a project. It became a mission to “deliver hope”. To improve the lives of the agents, we felt we needed to connect them to real customers faster, while somehow managing to bring in some breathing space for them to transition between tasks and with better insights. That’s a tall order, but surely you can’t increase the productivity of a group of people with just a bunch of confusing metrics or by putting them under insanely high pressure? You need something that could reignite the fire in them. The agents we had were the best in terms of skills and work ethics, the only thing we needed to do was to give them a system that could support them.
Enter, Ryng!
We later looked deeper and realised that supporting the users was not just about increasing the efficiency of the system and making their tasks run quicker and smoother — it was about elevating their perspective on their tasks to a place where they were able to invest in them without being disappointed. Here is where design thinking in UI/UX made all the difference in the world. It’s the simple things in life — a button here to synchronise what you’re seeing on-screen with what’s actually happening on the server, a timer there to show you exactly how much time you have before the next action takes place, and when the system faces real-world delays, we take the opportunity to deliver useful information that keeps them occupied in a productive way. We try to make sure they’re never stuck, never confused, and never feeling unproductive. Simple UX changes have great power to deliver a hope-filled experience to the user (for example, ever heard of Optimistic UI? ).
The server could even be stuck for a few minutes or more, unable to connect
to anyone, but the user is not worried. He leans back in his chair, twirling a pen between his fingers, reading up on the customer information and planning a strategy for the upcoming conversation. And now, building on top of this newfound hope, we can begin to optimise the backend and help to create real power-users who breeze through the workflow and generate the great results that the managers want to see.
A good teacher can inspire hope, ignite the imagination, and instil a love of learning.Inspires Hope, Ignites imagination and instils a love for learning.
Ryng the bells of change!
