Brett Arnold, General Manager of ACCENT Marketing Services, is among the presenters in the 'Best Contact Center' category during the 2009 Top Ranking Performers Conference in Toronto, June 2 - 4. Read this exclusive interview, and be sure to attend the conference to receive the best tips and ideas if you want to run a world class center!

Click here to learn more about this annual Best-of-the-Best Conference!

Please describe your contact center - no. of agents/reps, types of calls, emails etc you manage, volumes. Inbound or outbound etc
ACCENT’s New Albany center has 380 customer service representative work stations and is one of our most diverse centers, accommodating unique customer care programs that fully encompass and execute ACCENT’s integrated customer lifecycle management solutions. We receive 250,000 calls per month and make 185,000 outbound dials per month as well as handle 13,000 emails each month for clients across the manufacturing, healthcare, and insurance verticals.

What makes your center a little bit different than others out there?
The New Albany center serves eight different clients with 20 different programs that utilize inbound and outbound calling as well as an email channel. The enormous variety in clients and programs require the program managers to operate programs as separate business units, while sharing best practices with their counter parts. The senior leadership team must be able to juggle the competing requirements on resources while ensuring that performance metrics are attained for each client’s program. We believe that each customer interaction provides our clients with the opportunity to deepen and extend the relationship while also garnering valuable customer insight.

How do you go about recruiting and retaining talent?
Our recruitment philosophy employs a continuous, proactive approach in attracting applicants to our organization. Recruiting all begins with creating the proper hiring profile for each individual client program. The next step is identifying pockets in the community that provide applicants who meet this hiring profile. Once the applicants come into the center, it is critical for them to undergo testing that reinforces the profile requirements. After the applicant successfully passes their interview with our People Services department, he or she has an interview with their potential supervisor. This interview includes a realistic job preview in which the applicant spends 20 minutes sitting with a customer service representative on the particular program he or she would be working on if we were to hire them. The supervisor is able to ask questions about the interaction to gauge the applicant’s ability to absorb information. This also provides the applicant with the opportunity to decide whether he or she enjoyed the experience as well as whether they would be a good fit for ACCENT.

ACCENT believes that effective, initial and ongoing training is critical for program success and employee development. That’s why every ACCENT contact center has a dedicated training facility for hands-on product and skills training. We align our training curriculum with our clients’ strategies around customer lifecycle management and integrate our approach to better acquire, support, retain, and grow their customers.

By hiring the right people and building strong relationships through our "work hard, have fun" culture, we retain happy, successful employees who deliver next-level service while focusing on the customer.

Please describe some of the technologies you use in your center and what advantages they give you
The New Albany center utilizes a dialing platform that allows blended inbound and outbound calls to be handled by a single customer service representative. This enables us to deliver more efficiency for our clients, saving them additional expenses and providing multiple service options.

Outbound campaigns are further enhanced by our in-house data analytics and data modeling capabilities. Our analytics team is able to determine which customers provide the greatest lifetime value as well as the customers who are most likely to accept an offer. From this information, we are able to customize an optimized marketing strategy for our clients that will provide the greatest return on their investment for the least expense.

Our center also utilizes a call monitoring platform that captures data and voice information from customer interactions. This allows managers and customer service representatives to review recorded calls not only for phone etiquette, but also to ensure the execution of correct processes, call flow, and disposition. Additionally, this platform allows the supervisor to follow the customer service representative’s navigation through the system, which may provide opportunities for improvement in navigation and call flow. These tools help us reduce average handle time (AHT) and produce cost-savings and efficiencies for our clients.

Additionally, ACCENT develops customized applications for our clients, built to suit their needs. These applications allow us to gather valuable customer insight that would otherwise be unavailable to our clients. Because the application is developed in-house, we are able to make changes quickly to our systems in order to keep up with our clients’ business needs. If a new disposition is needed to track particular call types, it can be created and deployed to customer service representative desktops within minutes.

We also utilize IEX software to streamline our workforce. IEX accurately forecasts our clients’ call volumes and allows us to efficiently create customer service representative schedules, while maintaining their scheduling preferences. IEX also provides an excellent tool for real time adherence (RTA) that allows us to manage our workforce, adjusting to changes in volume in a real-time environment.

What plans do you have to continue developing your center in future years?
In order for us to ensure that we remain valuable partners with our clients, we must continue to manage their individual programs as if they were our own businesses. This includes finding process improvements that will enhance the customer experience while decreasing costs. It will be important for every team member to act as a thought leader by providing valuable insight into their customers’ perceptions, behaviors, and attitudes; analyzing buying patterns to better predict successful marketing strategies; reviewing process flows to provide greater efficiencies; reviewing call interval patterns to provide appropriate staffing; and reviewing and analyzing disposition to identify opportunities to increase conversion, cross selling, and up selling.

Why did you enter the 2009 awards for best contact center?
ACCENT decided to enter the awards because it gave us a wonderful opportunity to honor all of our loyal, hard-working, and dedicated employees. Our business is only as strong as the employees who support it. The commitment the New Albany staff has to creating a culture of performance and quality, as well as their client-centric focus should be recognized.

What are some of the challenges you have had to overcome to get to where you are today?
Like many other companies, the major challenge that we have had to overcome is the volatile economic environment that has strained not only our clients, but also our employees and the company as a whole. However, despite the economic challenges, ACCENT’s biggest achievement in 2008 was delivering growth – both for our clients as well as for our shareholders. We accomplished this by helping our clients build long-term relationships with their customers, further lowering our employee attrition rates, and consistently improving on the delivery of our client Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Building long-term relationships with customers is mission-critical. But our clients needed to do more than retain their most valuable customers – they needed to grow them. By working with our clients to identify who their best customers were and developing comprehensive marketing strategies to keep them engaged, we were able to build customer loyalty, drive sales, and increase clients’ share of wallet.

For those members who come along to one of our conferences to hear what you do, what will you be sharing with them? Please give some insights into what you would like them to go away with in terms of ideas to improve their center
I will be sharing the performance results of our center and the culture we have cultivated to maintain our commitment to our clients and focus on their customers. I would like for others to be able to use some of our best practices to enhance their performance. Additionally, I want others to learn from our disciplined approach of building a world-class contact center.

Lastly, as a presenter at our 2009 June conference, what do you hope to learn from other presenters?
I hope to be able to learn alternative methods to address some of the foreseeable challenges in our future as well as understand others’ ideas to help us continue our progression towards Best in Class. Additionally, I want to be inspired and challenged by my peers and their best-practice approaches to managing their respective centers. I look forward to bringing new ideas back to my team members so we can work together to continue this tradition of excellence and quality in customer care.

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