This is a cardinal truth, rarely stated, often overlooked, but if you ask anyone who has run a call center it will almost certainly be acknowledged.

Every aspect of call center management comes down to the care and feeding of agents:

making sure you have the right number of them,
that they have the right skills for the job,
that they have the proper tools to do their work,
that what you spend on them does not balloon out of control,
that they perform at a consistent level, and
that you properly measure that performance and relate it to other goals of the company.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. It's not an exaggeration to say that the agent is the pivot point around which every other call center issue revolves.

Virtually every topic comes back to the agent. Offshoring and site selection is another way of talking about labor cost arbitrage, which is about agents. Quality assurance is about ensuring that every agent handles every similar interaction according to set guidelines designed to enhance a company's image. Even highly technological discussions, like call routing and IP in the call center, are about what applications you put on the agent desktop and what that enables your agents to do during the moment of interaction with a customer.

These things are all plainly obvious to any call center manager when you put them in these terms. But managers, because of their proximity to the action, sometimes don't see all these issues as part of a whole, or see the common thread ¡ª the agent ¡ª that runs through everything. It's the forest/tree dilemma ¡ª they are so busy putting out fires and meeting daily (or hourly) targets that the big picture takes a back seat.

But once you remove the call center from its splendid isolation and start talking about how it interacts with the rest of a company, folks both inside and outside the call center management hierarchy are forced to start talking about the role of the agent.

Some easy back-of-the-envelope calculating will show that in just three years, an agent will interact with 30,000 separate customers. Astonishing, no?

Depending on what you sell, that's either a lot of money saved, or a lot of opportunity squandered. Can the rep on the phone make the most of that opportunity by soothing someone who might bolt to a competitor? Or sell them something that they might not have thought of? Do you even know what they are capable of? If not, then you're looking at the question of value through the wrong end of the telescope.

When we properly identify the agent as the pivot point, as the nexus of the call center universe, we can more effectively run those centers for the benefit of the company as a whole.

What is Agent Development?

For a long time, call centers have been buying and using a broad spectrum of tools that all focus on improving agent productivity. Some of it has been hardware: call monitoring and recording systems, for example. Some is software, like workforce management, training tools, pre-hire assessment.

What we've noticed is that call centers don't care about the tools themselves; instead they are starting to ask the end-result questions that tackle difficult issues like turnover, retention, training costs, morale, and focusing those questions into a strategy for reducing labor costs. Not reducing headcount, necessarily, but reducing the real burdens of hiring, training, and then losing agents who aren't happy or productive, then going through that expensive hiring-training-retaining process all over again. Centers are addressing the structural insanity of losing the entire workforce each year.

And when they tackle these questions, they look at that spectrum of seemingly unrelated tools from unconnected vendors, and they ask: Aren't these all part of the answer to a single complex problem?

We call this problem "agent development," and we see that some of the cleverer and more dedicated vendors in different sectors reaching towards each other, grappling to create coordinated solutions to this bigger question. It's not just monitoring, or training, or scheduling that solves the problem. It's all of the above, and more. The tools are not new, but they are newly used in concert.

Applied intelligently, using coordinated business practices, agent development tools can shave costs off each step of the labor process. Starting at hiring, you can make sure you hire someone who's likely to last through training, rather than someone who will take a month of training and then decide it's not the right job. Training can be more targeted, thanks to computer-based e-learning tools and evaluation systems that tell you what specific skills need bolstering. Farther along the chain, applying workforce management and performance management keeps people in their jobs longer, and it keeps the most qualified people on the job, so you can keep their skills and use them to elevate the performance of everyone else as well.

We believe that when approached from a tactical point of view within a call center, the benefits that arise from a coordinated approach are greater than that gained by using them piecemeal. The whole of agent development is greater than the sum of the separate tools that make up the category.

A Jigsaw Puzzle of Tools

"Agent development" isn't a category of product all by itself. Few, if any, vendors would identify themselves as being in the agent development marketplace.

Instead, it's more helpful to think of agent development as a super-category into which we place many related vendor offerings. This includes both products and services, and cuts across different technologies ¡ª what binds them together is the fact that they work toward a common set of goals: better agent performance, more effective agent management, leading to measurably better customer interactions and a healthier business.

Lofty goals, yes. But definitely achievable, especially when you aim for the goal first, and select technology and products after setting that initial focus on results.

Broadly speaking, these tools and services fall into two groups. First, there is the segment that focuses on finding the right person for the job and putting him or her in the seat. Then, there is the set that aims to measure agent performance on the job. In each segment, we find much that is familiar.

It helps to think of agent development as taking place along a timeline of the agent's job. So in the first segment, getting him into the seat, we find these technological helpers:

Recruitment services. Outside consultants and experts who work with call centers, often in specific geographic regions, or that specialize in particular skills, to provide an ample labor pool of qualified potential call center reps.

Pre-hire assessment systems. Tools, usually software, that gather preliminary information about a potential call center worker and correlate the person's skills with the needed ones. There are many permutations of how these tools are used, either in-house or by third-party providers like the recruitment service providers. The goal of these tools is to narrow the pool of candidates to just those that are likely to perform well and stay in the job long enough to justify the cost of training them.

Training. Nowadays it comes in many flavors, from traditional classroom training to targeted e-learning and computer-based training. But there are three things to remember about training:
No agent gets onto the phones without it.
It's extremely expensive, so you need to make sure that the match between learner and material is made effectively the first time.
A significant portion of hiring errors do not become apparent until after a person is trained and starts the job. That makes the logic of using recruitment and pre-hire assessment more compelling.

Once we've successfully navigated these rocky shoals, we turn to the question of how we measure agent performance on the job.

Call recording, logging, monitoring and quality assurance. These tools are often neglected when people think about factors like agent tenure, retention and turnover. We tend to think of them as ensuring overall quality and verification ¡ª tools that support the center as whole, tools that are used to spot problems in workflow and process that affect customer satisfaction scores. They are also critical to making sure that training is working, and to identifying agents that fall at the extremes ¡ª outstanding performers that others can learn from, or those at the low end of the scale.

Performance management. The simple goal of performance management is to be able to glean the most valuable information from different sources within your call center and use it to increase agents' performance. PM tools automate the process of consolidating data, analyzing key metrics and relating the results to the people who need to know most, such as trainers, schedulers, team leaders and managers. This information can in turn be used to improve and focus agent training programs or to develop effective hiring profiles.

Workforce management and optimization. At heart, the most fundamental efficiency mechanism in call centers is the tool used to forecast demand for agents and schedule their shifts accordingly. This tool acts as a bridge between the specific ¡ª each agent's personal labor ¡ª and the general performance of the center as a whole.

Motivation and incentive programs. Traditional incentive programs rely on point-based reward programs, but the industry is gradually adopting more flexible rewards systems like gift checks. Whichever sort is used, the goal is to build a sense of loyalty among workers that are difficult to retain, and push people who are lower on the performance scale to perform at their highest levels.

The Sum of the Parts

The rationale behind each of these tools is easy to make separately. Each category can be justified through ROI in any given circumstance, and call centers are used to going through the process of cherry picking the tools that make sense for their immediate needs.

What is changing, and what makes Agent Development a new and interesting idea, is the way that the tools in these categories are beginning to leak into one another. It's common to see workforce management tools that have performance management built in. Training and monitoring and quality assurance are coming together. Training and assessment are offered as service packages.

The vendors in many of these areas are working to increase their reach into related areas, making the purchase of any agent-facing application a more complicated¡ª but ultimately more effective ¡ª venture.

Agent Development, as we would define it, is about starting with the goal instead of the tool. All call centers share certain goals: Reduce turnover. Lower agent costs. Retain more agents. Improve customer satisfaction. Make training more effective, less costly and more relevant.

All of these goals are different facets of the same problem, and that problem is managing the life-cycle of the agent's job. Keep good people longer, hire more of the good in the first place, give them a reason to stay and perform at their best. Satisfy these objectives and the rest of the call center's functions become much more manageable.

Throughout 2005, we'll be exploring all the components that make up Agent Development in more detail. We'll ask how these tools work together; what this integration means to the vendor offerings; and what effect this has on call center operations.