Original Publication: Customer Management Insight - June 2008
View Online
Display technology has come a long way, baby. These information tools are turning into agent engagement and motivation tools. And vendors continue to improve clarity and offer installation flexibility.
The call center has come a long way since the early days… back when you could fill up your car’s gas tank for $5, when credit card security meant keeping your messy carbon paper, and rotary phones roamed the earth. Because early call centers relied on “tick marks” by agents to track calls, they could get by with a primitive form of the readerboard, like a chalkboard.
The first evolved readerboard was some drab little thing with one color, one font, and if you were lucky, a couple of symbols and some primitive animation effects. (In some cases, a chalkboard was probably a better bet.) As the call center, became the main point of intersection between a company and its customers, the readerboards had to become more useful than those sad little ticker displays that would scroll a monotonous, continuous line of text. And little by little, in tiny increments, the technology blossomed.
Now, agents have to have real-time information to do their jobs: details such as average wait time for callers, longest call in queue, number of agents working, warnings about hoax calls and reminders to push particular initiatives during calls. There’s even room for a little humanity, with readerboards carrying announcements for birthdays, the arrival of doughnuts in the breakroom (good ones, not day-olds), car lights left on in the parking lot, that sort of thing.
Along the evolutionary march, the continued merger between information and humanity is yielding impressive results in motivation and performance.
Playing for Productivity
Converso Contact Centres Ltd. in Southend-on-Sea, UK, implemented such an approach toward monitoring staff performance while simultaneously increasing staff motivation. Converso’s approach, as Director Dino Forte puts it, “is to give people a real-time representation of how they’re achieving against target. We wanted something visual — and fun — to build a competitive element.”
Forte’s idea was to introduce games into the working environment, initially commissioning a software company to write them. The entire system works by the server base transferring real-time data to a separate database through which the games are then run.
Screens throughout the center continually show animated games, such as the steeplechase, where each contact center team is represented by a horse. “The horses are driven by the data; there is some really complex programming behind it all,” says Forte. “The horses start off brown, then go silver as they hit target and go gold if they are exceeding target.” During each race, boards come up on screen, naming leading individual associates for their efforts.
As a motivational tool, it works well. “People like to have their names up in lights,” says Forte. It’s also more interesting than the usual readerboard. “We wanted to create something more pleasing to the eye,” says Forte. Steeplechase is just one idea. Others, including PlayStation games, have been used, as well.
“Over the first three months after implementing the games, we saw a 14 percent to 18 percent increase in productivity,” says Forte. “Our outbound salespeople are naturally competitive, yet we’ve seen an increase of 5 percent in sales, too.”
Obviously, it can’t all be just fun and games. All that information from all those sources also means that call centers can’t be staffed by just randomly hired people who robotically talk into headsets all day long. Agents have to have brains, tact and the desire to do their jobs.
Back in the day (that’s Old School for “a number of years ago, don’t press me for an exact date because it isn’t crucial to the point being made”), many call centers relied on the traditional one-size-fits-all LED wallboard. LCD and plasma screens soon began to roam the planet.
“[Using a plasma display isn’t] necessarily putting your best foot forward because it has this characteristic called phosphor burn-in. You can actually destroy the display if you have the same alphanumeric information on the screen for an extended period of time,” says Jeff Blankensop, director of business development at Itasca, Ill.-based NEC Display Solutions of America. “The trend right now is a strong migration to LCD. LED has been dominating call center display technology for the last 15 years or so,” he says. “It mainly has to do with the cost of LCD displays. They’re coming down.”
The other trend identified by Blankensop is the performance and flexibility offered by LCD screens. “You can have sophisticated graphics on the screen if the call center software allows for it. With LED screens you have limited graphics capability, so it’s very alpha-numeric oriented.”
NEC Display Solutions recently introduced an internal HD-SDI video input/output card. This card installs internally, offering convenience compared to an external converter device that would require additional cables and a power source. The card’s ability to fit into the option slot greatly reduces setup time for a display. “Display failures are few and far between,” says Blankensop. “But when you have 100 or 1,000 units displayed, you want to make the process easier.”
LCD vs. LED
An LED screen is visible from all angles, from a wide range of lighting conditions, and from farther away than a high-resolution LCD screen, but is best used for alphanumeric material.
“When deciding between LED and LCD displays in a call center setting, you need to consider the size of your office and the distance over which the display must be visible,” says Larry Moulis, Engineering Manager at Charlottesville, Va.-based Inova Solutions. “LED
displays offer increased visibility, not because of the size of the display, but because of the contrast and brightness level. LED displays can be visible in an office setting up to 100 feet, whereas text on an LCD screen is only visible from about 35 feet away.”
Hang on, just a second. How big a screen do you need in order for it to be visible at 35 feet?
“Screen size doesn’t drive viewing distance as much as contrast and brightness,” says Moulis. “With a large-format LCD screen, say 40 inches or larger, text is only legible from about 35 feet away because of the contrast of the screen under office lighting. You could make the text ludicrously large, but then you’ve lost the main advantage of the LCD, which is rich content. An LED display capable of displaying a two-inch character is legible from roughly 100 feet away due to the higher brightness and contrast of the characters in the office lighting environment.”
An LCD screen is the better choice for material that requires high-resolution display. For instance, a call center for a shopping network might screen its own channel on an LCD screen in order to help agents have a better understanding of what a customer is ordering. LED displays, according to Moulis, are preferred by call centers for larger, unobstructed areas, and LCDs are preferred in smaller work areas or break rooms.
But there’s a risk of putting up so much information that the agents overload on eye candy.
So, why bother with readerboards in the first place? The agents have screens right in front of them as it is, can’t they use just those? Isn’t a fancy-shmancy giant display screen just one more expense and problem? Won‘t the eye candy cause your agents to stare, slack-jawed, up at the screens, while calls pile up behind them and your company plummets into fiscal ruin?
Absolutely not. You couldn’t be more wrong!
We (Heart) Our Readerboards
The readerboard helps the agents see their workload in the context of what the entire group is doing, as well as giving call center managers a more central view of operations from anywhere they might be standing. Putting some information on readerboards limits the number of individual items going onto the agent’s personal screen. That helps lower distractions during calls.
“However, we often see customers set a few template views and rotate them through,” says Rao Kachibhotla, director of product management at Inova Solutions. “After awhile, this routine desensitizes viewers to the information, thus rendering the screens useless to their intended purpose. So, the best practice is to continue to keep LCDs refreshed — this may require someone’s dedicated attention or perhaps a partnership with the vendor. We do see a trend of larger teams allocating an employee to keep the signage interesting with fresh content.”
Respondents to a recent QueueTips question discussed the uses of readerboards at their organizations. Along with the use of plasma screens for “multimedia experiences, such as our current TV commercials, agent recognition for outstanding performers, [and] company announcements (including Webcasts from execs),” a salad bar of display item choices were brought up by respondents: current service level, longest call waiting, number of available agents, number of idle agents, number of working agents, and number of calls waiting.
Two sides, however, emerged on the number of calls waiting metric.
“We have readerboards at our call centers, but site leadership generally frowns on including how many calls are in queue based on their perception that it would have a negative impact on performance,” writes one poster. “They believe that, in order to avoid the psychological impact this information would present to consultants on the phones, it’s best they not know how many calls are truly ‘piled up’ in the queues. I’m not saying I necessarily agree with this, but that’s the way it is here.”
The other way of looking at the issue was raised, as well. “The agents like to have the information so they can know what kind of day they are going to have,” writes a poster. “They approach work with a better mindset if they have all the data. Plus, they can see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
The same poster also observes, “Of course, we also had agents who, as soon as the queue rose above 10 calls, would disappear into the restroom.”
But don’t worry! You needn’t brick up the bathroom doors. A solution is provided in the same posting: “We found that when calls were in queue, the supervisors went into panic mode and became much more diligent about what their agents were doing than when no calls were in queue. We helped them understand that they need to be aware of their agent activities regardless of the queue. Now, when calls are in queue, it is handled like any other day. The agents feel the sense of urgency that the queue creates, but not the sense of panic.”
Display Placement: Doing What You Can with What You Have
Ask anyone who has lived in a slightly crummy apartment about the unpleasantness of discovering that the living room or kitchen (or both) has outlets on only one wall. And you stand there and have the debate you cannot win: Do I run an extension cord across the room so that I can put the coffee maker on the counter (and trip over the cord every morning from now until the end of time)? Or do I learn to live with the coffee maker perched on top of the refrigerator?
Some call centers are located in places that weren’t designed to be call centers. They face the same sort of agony. No outlets where needed, pillars in the way, strange corners in the floor plan. Are you really ready to start tearing up the entire floor to rewire everything?
“When beginning discussions with a contact center, one of the first things we do is ask for a floor plan to see how high the ceilings are, where the windows are, what kind of lighting there is, and the orientation of agent seating,” says Inova Solutions’ Kachibhotla. “We are then able to make recommendations on which type of display will work best in their environment and where those displays should be placed.”
Back in 2006, Inova introduced LED displays that draw power through an Ethernet cable, allowing for greater flexibility in screen placement. According to Kachibhotla, “a typical two-line PoE [power-over-Ethernet] display is practically indistinguishable, half the weight and draws only around 25 percent of the power [of] a traditional AC-powered one. Additionally, it is generally believed that it would take more than $100 to add a power outlet needed for a traditional display, and a PoE display doesn’t need one, thereby reducing initial deployment costs, as well.”