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By: Rosanne D'Ausilio,

Customer Service Skill Training and ROI
Ph.D.
Statistics consistently reinforce that the biggest challenge in today's contact center
Forgot Password? New environment is agent training. Turnover continues to be high; new hire costs are on
User? the rise-I've seen anywhere from $6500 to $10,000 quoted per agent! At the same
time, losing customers because of bad call experiences negatively impacts your
bottom line. What can you do? How do you justify the training expenditure?

Research has been making a case for how spending in human performance areas such
Home Based Business as training, translates into bottom line growth. Accenture's study on the impact of
Health & Fitness training on ROI has some interesting results. (Smith, David. Y. and Waddington,
Arts & Entertainment Ted. Running Training Like a Business: Determining the Return on Investment of
Loans Your Learning Programs, Outlook Point of View, March 2003.)
Small Business First, in the area of recruitment, training opportunities were among the top three
Alternative Medicine criteria people considered when deciding where they want to work (the others are the
Business opportunity for advancement and a good benefits package).
Vehicles In the area of productivity, as a result of training, employees were:
Religion 17% more productive
Internet Marketing 20% higher performance levels relative to their peer group
Weight Loss Stayed with the company 14% longer
Pets In the area of retention, employees who had access to the training were:
Beauty More than 2 times more likely to expect to be with the company in 2 years
Marketing More than 6 times more likely to think the company is a 'great place to work'
Relationships More likely to think they are fairly compensated
Dollar figures associated with their statistics for a fiscal year report the annual per
View all Categories person net benefit or $25,324. They multiplied this number by their 50,000
employees yielding a companywide benefit of training of $1.26 million. By dividing
the benefit by the cost of one year of training ($358 million), researchers concluded
that the ROI (at Accenture) is 353%.
Submit Negative Customer Service Experiences?
How many of you know (and track) what percentage of your calls are bad
experiences? Hopefully, you do know the number, and they're in the low single
digits.
In a recent study, in answer to (1) did the agent satisfy your needs in the call, and (2)
based on any negative experience, would you stop using this company and go to the
competition? the results were:

Ages Would Stop Using the Company in the Future

18 - 25 100%
26 - 35 97
36 - 45 53
46-55 50
56-65 33
Over 65 63
Source: 2003 Purdue University/BenchmarkPortal.com
As you can see, there is a strong correlation between participant's age and his/her
tendency to stop using the company after a bad experience. Notice that younger
participants were less tolerant, more likely to go to the competition, and those over
65 are more demanding that those in middle age.
Therefore, it's very important to take great care of your younger callers so as to
maintain their loyalty. Callers above 36 have more of an 'emotional bank account'
with the company they're dealing with-probably had some good experiences and are
more willing to 'forgive' a bad one.
If you know your percentage of bad experiences, put a dollar amount on that call and
then total it out for the year. I think you'll be very surprised at the amount of lost
revenue. Now if you have a 1% improvement, as a result of a training initiative for
example, the amount of recovered revenue (and customers) is very encouraging.
This is just another means to tie soft skills to ROI, and to include your front lines as
part and parcel of the revenue-producing operation of your companies.
Customer Satisfaction Driver #1

We all know first call resolution (one and done) is the #1 driver for customer
satisfaction with best practices reported at 86%. However, if your center is at 86%,
this means that 14% of your customers are contacting you more than once to resolve
their issues! This not only frustrates your CSRs and yourselves, but your customers
as well. Repeat calls are costly not only to operations and the bottom line, but they
negatively impact customer satisfaction, and ultimately, customer loyalty.

How do you define first call resolution? And how do you-if you do-calculate it?
Research shows that there is no common measuring method. However, what gets
measured gets managed, and what gets managed gets better.

In a recent study (Ascent Group) more than 90% of companies measuring first call
resolution reported improvement in their performance. Another study
(callcentres.com) reported a dramatic fall in call volume-identifying that a minimum
of 20% of all calls were repeat calls from customers needing an answer or help they
didn't get. Further, that the absence of first call resolution was found to account for a
minimum of 30% of a call center's operational costs!

The bottom line: Invest in your people-give them the training, the tools, and the
authority to get their job done right the first time. After all, CSRs are the interface
who handle customer issues. One of the foremost methods to boost customer
satisfaction-and improve first call resolution-is to consistently and ongoingly train,
train, train your CSRs in world class customer service skills.

About the Author: ROSANNE D'AUSILIO, Ph.D., an industrial psychologist, and

President of Human Technologies Global, Inc., which specializes in profitable call
center operations in human performance management. Over the last 20 years, she has
provided needs analyses, instructional design, and customized, live customer service
skills trainings. Also offered is agent and facilitator certification through Purdue
University's Center for Customer Driven Quality.

Known in the industry as 'the practical champion of the human,' she authors the best
selling books, "Wake Up Your Call Center: Humanize Your Interaction Hub," 4th
edition, Customer Service and the Human Experience, and her latest Lay Your Cards
on the Table: 52 Ways to Stack Your Personal Deck, all available at www.human-
technologies.com. Also offered is a free 'tips' newsletter on How To Kick Your
Customer Service Up A Notch at www.HumanTechTips.com.

Rosanne is also a Certified Call Center Benchmarking Auditor through Purdue

University's Center for Customer Driven Quality. This certification training focused
on the access and use of key performance data to help better understand
benchmarking results so as to advise on practical solutions for improvement.

She sits on the Advisory Board of Help Desk Professional Association, is a

columnist for TMC.net, and represents the human element on the Advisory Board for
an Italian software company, and is a much sought after dynamic, vibrant,
internationally prominent keynote speaker.
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