• Recruitment costs; for example the cost of adverts
• Induction training – the time and effort invested in training can be large. In the contact centre industry, for example, there is often high turnover of staff with new starters staying only a few weeks before deciding the role is not for them
• The costs of having to subsequently re-advertise the role and go through the whole process again.

What is often overlooked is the impact on staff who have been in the company for a longer period and who see a succession of new colleagues join and then leave. The rapid turnover of new staff can clearly have a negative impact on morale within the work environment.

The steps involved in recruiting and selecting new staff are often standard across organisations, but there are a number of factors to consider along the way.

• The recruiting manager should draw up a job description and person specification for the vacant role if the documents are not already available. These are generally standard company-wide documents that specify the duties that the role holder will carry out and the skills and competencies they should have. For example, in a sales role, it will be beneficial for applicants to have developed some negotiation and customer presentation skills. The Human Resource Manager will be able to check these documents or help draw them up.

• If a job grading system is in place, the role should go through the relevant process. The job grading process will identify the salary band that the role falls into and the benefits package that comes with it.

• The recruiting manager should decide whether the role will be permanent or temporary. In the UK, a number of new starters are recruited on temporary contracts. This brings with it the advantage that, if the successful applicant does not fit into the role, the company can let them go. However, the disadvantage is that new starters on temporary contracts will often continue to look for a permanent role elsewhere and could leave early in their employment.

• The organisation may have standard processes for managers to follow to attract candidates. If the company does not have a standard policy, a cost analysis should be undertaken to decide if it will be more effective to advertise the role and through which channels, or to use an agency or specialist recruitment firm. Using employment agencies or recruitment companies can have the benefit that they will undertake part of the selection process; such as, application and CV screening, initial candidate interviews and testing. The downside is that the agency needs to be very clear on the kind of person that the company is looking for and the kind of workplace environment that they will be joining. Often too little time is invested to make sure the agency or recruitment company is clear on these points. There are a number of ways around this including, for companies who recruit regularly, having a dedicated relationship manager at the agency.

• Once applications have been received for the role, the selection process should be clear and a timetable drawn up. There are a number of methods a company can use at the selection stage. These include identifying whether the candidate has the required skills and experience from their application or CV, face-to-face interviews, assessment centres and completion of case studies or presentations. Many companies like to conduct initial telephone interviews to draw up a short list of candidates.

• Whatever selection process is used, managers involved should be fully accredited and act in a consistent manner. For example, if the selection process consists of criteria-based interviews (where candidates give examples of how they meet the various requirements of the role), all managers concerned should be trained to ask questions in a consistent manner and on how to rate the answers that candidates give. Senior managers or a Human Resource Manager may wish to audit the process to ensure there is consistency of application.

• When the successful applicant has been identified, appropriate references should be sought. In addition, feedback should be given to those candidates who attended interviews or other selection events and were unsuccessful.

Some best practice tips include ensuring that the immediate team leader or supervisor of the new member of staff is included in the selection process. Another is completing a cost analysis on how much it actually cost to recruit the successful candidate and retaining this for future reference and comparison.

Additionally, with really large-scale recruitment campaigns, having a member of the agency or recruitment company work on site is often beneficial so that they develop a better understanding of what exactly is required for the roles they are recruiting for.

Geoff Hardy

Picture by Tobias Wolter

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I was thinking about how different a manager or team leader role is today compared to when I started my career.

My first manager was a 50-year banker who, while being very good at lending money (and getting it back), would have had difficulty with the demands of the role today. Managers and team leaders are no longer expected to only complete more advanced technical or administrative tasks; there are a range of people management issues to be dealt with also.

It’s the ‘softer people skills’ that most managers and team leaders struggle with in the places I work now. Coaching, communication, listening skills and the ability to generate enthusiasm, energy and commitment in others are not abilities that everyone has – yet these are the things we ask our managers and team leaders to do.

Take coaching for example. There can’t be too many things with the potential to demotivate employees more than a botched discussion about performance. Yet the assumption is that managers and team leader have the attributes to be effective coaches.

Thinking back, I can only remember one training session that I attended on coaching. The advice was that it is best to listen twice as much as one spoke. The coaches I see presenting at managerial conferences suggest there is more to it than that.

Organisations recognise the problem and some bring in coaches from other departments or external companies. I’m not sure about this approach as I prefer to see one leader responsible for all aspects of their team’s performance.

Surely the better way is to equip managers and team leaders with the skills they need.

Organisations could do a lot worse than have ‘softer human type skills’ at the top of the list.

Geoff Hardy

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As a business grows and takes on more staff, the management of people becomes a bigger issue. There will reach a point where it is right to introduce a staff performance management system.

In addition, a number of organisations in the public sector have recently introduced performance management systems; as reaching demanding government targets has meant developing performance management cultures across departments. For example, organisations in the emergency services have designed performance management systems that tie in control room and field staff to meeting targets.

A performance management system consists of agreeing objectives or goals with each employee that reflect what they will achieve in the coming period (say the next twelve months). The precise objectives will depend on the employee’s role; for example, a sales manager may have objectives relating to the amount of sales to new or existing customers as well as correct completion of order forms and related administration.  

Objectives are recorded and, if achieved, should make sure that the employee makes a strong contribution to overall company performance.

Generally, staff will receive an annual review and progress towards achieving the objectives will form part of this discussion. Sometimes the outcomes of the annual review will decide pay awards and bonus payments.

Performance management systems are in operation in most medium and large companies. They are often seen as a way of maximising individual employee performance and can mean that everyone is pulling together to achieve the goals of the organisation. Most managers I speak to see them as a way of improving employee morale with all the associated benefits that come with this.

In practice, however, there are few things that managers and supervisors struggle more with in their day-to-day duties. The worst thing is that, in spite of this, most companies let their performance management systems run and run, not aware of the damage that they can create.

Here are some of the things that happen:

• Objectives for the forthcoming year are generally imposed and may often be unrealistic or out of the control of the staff member
• Managers, supervisors and staff are often poorly briefed in how the performance management system is supposed to work
• While meeting structures are put in place to review objectives, these are often the first thing to be cancelled when pressures of work dictate
• The yearly performance appraisal is based on events over the last few weeks and not the year
• If a rating is given as part of this process, the results are often influenced by how the parties get on
• The final appraisal often involves completing complicated documentation that serves little purpose. All parties, except the Human Resource department, see this as an end in itself and a major achievement when the documentation is complete and signed.

For a staff member, there aren’t many things as personal as appraisals about their own performance at work. The chances of de-motivating staff members, if the performance management processes aren’t effective, are high.

It gets worse if there is a pay rise or bonus that is determined by the process, particularly if the achievement of an objective has been hit by a reason outside the staff member’s control. For example, an unexpected loss of a large customer due to financial reasons may impact greatly on the sales managers performance.

So, if a senior manager is thinking about designing, implementing or improving a performance management system, here are some points to consider:

• Staff should have input into the design of the system and accept its fairness
• Where possible there should be a combination of individual and team goals for staff members to work to
• The system should be as simple as possible and fully communicated to staff
• There should be an element of 360 degree feedback (i.e the employee has an opportunity to review the way she is being led)
• Any personal development objectives agreed should have a realistic chance of being fulfilled and a clear action plan on how they are going to happen. All too often such objectives are agreed and nothing then happens
• There should be consistency in the way the system is applied across the company and checks and balances to make sure this happens; for example managers should meet regularly to compare results
• The system should be regularly reviewed to make sure weak areas are corrected. Staff members should play a part in this review process.

Geoff Hardy

Picture by Moses

Image by yisris via Flickr

I visited a medium size telco recently. The company is doing well and seeing strong growth. They had a decent Christmas as there were some new products on the market that came at the right time. Their telephone sales team is also up to full strength and there are high expectations.

The company has progressed like others. They took on a few staff in the early days to answer phones and do some processing. Before they knew it they had a sizeable customer services team; together with customer retentions and collections.

I met the CEO, bright and early. He explained they’d lost a couple of senior staff recently; the heads of the customer service and collections teams. He was concerned about collections, so he’d moved the deputy in customer services across to run that team. This left a big gap in the senior management of the customer services team (who also had retentions reporting to them).

The CEO admitted he’d been ‘slow off the mark’ in recruiting their replacements. He has a finance background and wasn’t ‘totally clear what he was looking for.’ He would leave things for a while and saw no urgency to find suitable candidates. The head of marketing was a ‘people person’ and he’d thought he’d give her responsibility for customer services while they were recruiting.

I spent the rest of the morning listening to calls and doing a short review. It was clear that call answering performance had slipped. There were calls in queue all morning and there seemed a lack of discipline as I observed how people worked. The most worrying observation, however, related to the retentions team. Their performance in recent weeks was very poor. Upon investigation it was clear that spirits had dropped; two team leaders were jostling for position and competing to lead the team.

I spoke to the head of marketing. She admitted being ‘run off her feet,’ particularly given the expectations on her. She has no experience of running a customer services team and had difficulty finding reliable senior staff in that function who she could rely on.

Later in the day I met the other members of the senior team. The Director of Strategy and Acquisitions had a finance background, having previously been the finance director of a rival company.

I also met the senior finance team. They have a vast amount of experience; having mostly been in post since the early days of the company. It was clear that their biggest concern were the results being produced by the retentions team. Recent figures were adversely impacting projected year-end performance.

Sadly, the situation at this company is not uncommon. The customer services functions can often be ‘the odd ones out’ or the ones that are difficult to fit into the organisational structure. Customer services teams are found reporting to marketing, finance, operations or sales.

The reality is, as with finance, specialist skills are needed to run customer services successfully and the function warrants a seat on the top table. I doubt there are many finance directors reporting into customer services.

Geoff Hardy

The Accord Partnership has just finished hosting their 2^nd annual Housing Sector workshop, this time in the Institute of Directors in London.

Due to the large numbers wishing to attend the event, we spread it out over 2 days, which not only provided the opportunity for everyone who wished to attend, to attend, but also we could vary the subjects covered in the 2 days and so more topics could be covered.

Firstly, we would like to say a big thank you to everyone who attended. Everyone enthusiastically joined in the group discussions on both days, and each session was very interactive, with the audience providing real life examples form their own experiences, ensuring the presentations were particularly relevant to everyone.

The main subjects that were covered over the 2 days were:

Delivering high quality contact services

• Optimal contact centre operating model
• Contact centre management processes
• High levels of quality for resident contact
• Avoidable contact
• First call resolution

 Shared services

• Introduction to shared services
• Drivers and characteristics
• Evaluation, implementation and evolution

 The use of technology in delivering high quality contact services

• Rethinking service delivery in a time of budgetary constraint
• Delivering ever broader services to a more varying, mobile and ‘channel savvy’ customer base
• Real life examples of the innovative ways that increasing customer service demands are being met through advances in customer relationship technology

 Current challenges in contact management

• Current state of HR/management/leadership
• Recruitment
• Performance Management
• leadership and development issues  

 Benchmarking in social housing

• Output recommendations and benefits roadmap
• Defining benchmarking
• Traditional benchmarking vs. Best Practice Performance benchmarking

 Effective approaches to collections and recoveries

• Make-up of what is being received
• Are you collecting what you should be?
• How to make it easy for tenants to pay
• Dealing with tenants (or others) who don’t pay
• Why you should review processes frequently

We were also shown a fascinating case study about the 311 shared telephony service, which services all non emergency public service calls in New York, including social housing.

The group discussions followed up on many of these areas and, in addition, various groups talked about customer satisfaction, customer segmentation, social media and managing change from a tenant’s perspective.

We look forward to continuing discussions on these subjects on this blog site and in person with the attendees. Should anybody want to raise discussion points on any of the topics, then please feel free to post a guest blog on this site, or start a discussion on our Linkedin group http://linkd.in/9ffjxB.

If you would like to discuss any issues raised, or indeed any other subjected related to tenant management within social housing, then please contact mark.loly@theaccordpartnership.com .

Finally, we would like to thank our guest speakers – David Moody, Founding Director, Lagan Technologies who gave a presentation on  “The Cloud, the Web and the Crowd”, Michael Galvin from Olivo, who presented the 311 case study and Jeremy Wood from the C2 Partnership who presented “Should RSLs review their Collections’ Operations to improve service and efficiency?”.

The video of David Moody’s presentation is available at http://vimeo.com/20915219

Mark Loly

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I’ve written before about the importance of front-line leaders and how their roles have become more complex. I’ve also discussed John Adair’s approach to developing people in these roles.

Team leaders and supervisors play a huge part in any contact centre or customer facing department. However, the amount of effort allocated to develop and support them in their roles is insufficient. I can’t help thinking that the situation is getting worse.

My suspicions were raised by an article in the ‘Financial Times’ at the start of the year. The article discussed how the Chartered Management Institute are putting more resource into developing the leadership skills of younger people. The initiative was to help fill the 1 million new leadership positions coming up in the UK over the next 10-years. The article implied that effort is needed as organisations have mixed records in supporting leadership development in their own operations.

In some contact centres there is almost an air of desperation among first line supervisory teams. Functions such as human resources, recruitment and project management have been cut. In one company, the Organisational Development team, which worked closely with team leader groups, has been reduced from three to one. At a time when more support is required, the opposite is happening.

Tom Peters writes: ‘Are you, Big Boss a formal student of frontline supervisor behavioural excellence? Do you have the best training programme in the industry for first-line supervisors? Do you formally and rigorously mentor first-line supervisors?’ (‘The Little Big Things’).

Tom goes on: companies should ‘start down the path to Matchless Supervisory Excellence by creating the best imaginable first-line supervisory training programme ASAP.’

I can’t help thinking though that the issue has gone missing on the radars of many senior executives.

Geoff Hardy

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Shared services is the buzz word at the moment, particularly in the public sector. In some circumstances, it is almost assumed that the service you offer will be shared, and a convincing argument needs to be put forward to not share services. Clearly not all organisations have taken things this far…yet.

Whatever form of shared services you opt for, there is one key business driver – to save money. Sharing services with another organisation or even outsource partner, will allow for greater economies of scale. This will then allow for either a saving to be made or more work completed for the same level of manpower. That is what you expect from shared services.

But more can be done to either create greater savings or an increase in flexible capacity. Optimising processes and concentrating on transformation as part of the shared service planning and implementation, will increase savings and improve the customer experience. This is for the whole end to end processes, not simply those processes handled within the shared services.

So if you create a contact centre shared service, it will use the same processes as were used previously. But by optimising the end to end processes from a customer perspective, more informational and transactional work can be completed at the first point of contact. This will mean that more work is taken from the back offices, resulting in over capacity. This indeed might be good, and allow backlogs to be completed, but it will mean that there will be people in work with little work to do. That is why it is essential to look at the end to end process during a transformation programme, not simply the front end or shared service processes.

This isn’t simply a way to save money. By looking at the end to end process from a customer perspective and putting yourself in their shoes, you will increase first call resolution. This builds on the savings and efficiencies created with the shared service, by creating additional savings as less customers will need to make repeated calls about the same issue. By including the transformation work as part of the shared service implementation, the total benefits will be realised sooner, leading to a happier Chief Financial Officer!

Peter Tetlow

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Last week I watched the programme “Service” where Michel Roux was helping a group of unemployed people learn the skills required to work front of house in a restaurant, and how important service was and what skills it could develop and ultimately how rewarding it was.

For many years now, people have bemoaned the lack of service generally and it seemed that little was done to improve things. Contact centres, for example, held up as the new way of providing customer service, often provided poor service, concentrating more on efficiency and statistic rather than provide customer’s the service the expected. As a result, expectations dropped. Perhaps now, with this new programme, customer’s expectations may begin to rise.

Contact centres play such a key role in everyone’s lives, whether it be to pay a gas bill, change your phone, or book a holiday. Local authority contact centres arguably play a much more important role in many people’s lives that of a mobile phone provider or utility company. And the disadvantaged and vulnerable arguably need better service still.

In today’s climate, there is pressure to produce cost savings above all else. Councils can then make the best out of what is left in the pot. This approach, however, ignores the lessons learnt (and re-learnt) that service is equally as important. So how can the circle be squared?

So how can customer service be improved whilst saving money? The clue is in the question! Customer service provides service for the customers. If the service provided is not helping the customers, or making their lives harder, it cannot, by definition, be true customer service. So by making sure the structure and processes of a contact centre reflect customer needs, then that is a great start. However, because many interactions do not end at the contact centre, but require greater involvement of a back office, the back office must also be structured to reflect customer needs with processes that support the concept of customer service. For a great many Council’s, this will require a detailed change programme, that will take time. And the benefits? Well, this is where the part about cost savings comes in. If the contact centre and Council are set up to reflect customer needs, they will contact the Council less, more work will, by default, be placed in the contact centre as customers will want a ‘one and done’ approach and savings can be made in the back offices. Plus also, this approach will allow the back office professional experts to concentrate on being professional experts, rather than constantly answering customer’s simple questions and dealing with repeat contacts because the process dictates they must. It is a win/win situation for customers, Councils, and Council budget holders.

Realistically, with the budget challenges facing Councils today, the ‘improving the customer service’ approach will not balance the books. But, it will go a long way to help. Plus, imaging the headlines that despite Council cuts, service has improved. With some imagination, determined leadership and a detailed change programme, all this is possible.

Peter Tetlow

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As reported in my previous blog all UK NHS Trusts are facing severe austerity pressures, but are expected to continue to deliver top class services.

Traditionally UK Public Sector organisations have not been known for being overly efficient. However, in the current climate this all has to change. No longer will it be acceptable to prepare and submit annual budgets that are based on purely standing still from both organisational and financial perspectives. Therefore opportunities to exploit technology for both internal and external benefit have to become the norm.

Notwithstanding the above, all Patient Transport operations are increasingly finding themselves in more and more competitive markets and as such, it is crucial that they operate as effectively as possible without threatening the qualities being demanded by their commissioning authorities. Automated and proactive contacts with patients, road crews on control room staff can provide real tangible benefits, but only if the service providers accept the opportunities before them.

Consider a world where the NHS is truly ‘joined up’ in terms of information provision and sharing. It would not take a huge leap of faith to envisage a vehicle starting out on a multiple patient pick up and transit to clinic / hospital; on the way delays are experienced and the vehicle could miss appointment times for one / many of its occupants. This essential information could be shared across the NHS to facilitate ‘flex’ within the system to move schedules around and avoid the financial implications associated with missed / broken appointments (estimated to cost the NHS some £600 million annually).

Many operators providing this type of managed transit (whether people or packages) use ‘mobile data’ as a way of keeping track of vehicles and assets. Information relating to the vehicle whereabouts and real-time status can easily be manipulated to inform interested parties of total or partial journey outcomes. This type of information could be invaluable across the NHS.

Taken to the next level it is not difficult to imagine a patient transport operation where the full life-cycle is tracked and managed. Currently, patients are transported to hospitals and clinics and they then disappear into a world which is invisible. Technology such as Wi-Fi and RFID could make it possible to link these worlds together and provide both patients and the wider NHS with better overall visibility of the full patient delivery, treatment and management life-cycle.

Steve Desay

Photograph by Oxyman

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Measures announced in the October Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) are now starting to filter down to those organisations directly impacted by them.  Changes to the Department for Communities & Local Government (CLG) budget – for local authorities and housing – are of particular interest to us here at Accord because of our work in this sector over the past 12-months.

Back in the summer we brought together leaders and key influencers in the Housing Association community to share their tenant management challenges in a one-day free of charge workshop held in central Manchester.  The event was extremely well attended and proved to be a helpful platform for attendees to network and share ideas about:

• The Coalition Government’s housing policy and its impact on ALMOs, TSA, etc.
• The responsibilities of Housing Associations post Tenant Service Authority (TSA) reports
• The role of the contact centre in the social housing context
  • How anti-social behaviour is managed through the contact centre
  • How to reduce contacts volumes and improve first contact resolution
  • ‘Need to reach’ engagement techniques deployed by the contact centre in conjunction with community partners

Since then we’ve been actively engaged on a number of assignments helping Housing Association clients to develop their contact centre operations and implement performance improvement initiatives which respond to post-CSR tenant management challenges.

As with all of the sectors in which we operate and the services that we deliver, knowledge transfer is key to our approach.  We are therefore committed to holding our second free of charge Housing Association Tenant Management Workshop as a means of once again gathering leaders and managers together to share their challenges, ideas and solutions in a facilitative and practical networking environment. 

Our next Housing Association Tenant Management Workshop will be held on Wednesday 9^th March 2011 at The Institute of Directors, 116 Pall Mall in central London and we have just issued invitations to individuals who we think have the most to gain by registering for the event.   

We have outlined the following agenda which builds on the discussions and themes highlighted in the first workshop:  

Performance Benchmarking

• Why benchmark – internal (operational) and external (customer, political) objectives
• Benchmarking approaches, methodologies and organisations
• What to measure and how to ensure it is comparable

Contact Centre management best practice

• A look at appropriate recruitment and selection practices for the Housing Association contact centre environment
• What does ‘good’ looks like in your contact centre team
• Maximising the talent available to you today through coaching and performance management

 2010 Housing Association Case Study

• Identifying the root causes of avoidable contact and low first contact resolution
• Measuring the baseline and quantifying the benefits of change
• Developing solutions
• Managing implementation

Our objective is to balance new concepts and insights with case studies that demonstrate how some of the earlier knowledge sharing has been applied by specific Housing Associations.

As with our previous events we are offering this free-of-charge one-day workshop to all individuals operating in this sector who have a genuine desire to: share knowledge and experience of the social housing environment with their peers; and gain insights into the best contact centre practice being deployed in other sectors and then applying it to tenant management post CSR. 

If you would like more details about the networking event or to register, please visit our website at http://www.theaccordpartnership.com/housingworkshop.cfm

We look forward to meeting you on the day.

Mark Loly