How Your Contact Centre Trainer Can Help You Win National Awards
With Vanessa Varela Escobar, Operations Trainer at Sykes Holiday Cottages
Show Notes
Vanessa Varela Escobar is the Operations Trainer at Sykes Holiday Cottages. She has more than 12 years’ experience in the contact centre industry, and has worked as an agent, Team Leader and Contact Centre Trainer.
As a Trainer, she was heavily involved in helping the New Zealand Automobile Association contact centres win the Member Support Services category, at the 2017 CCINZ (Contact Centre Institute of New Zealand - now CCNNZ) CRM awards. And then in 2018 helped the Association win the Supreme Gold award for contact centers over 50 seats.
She shares her tips on how the Automobile Association went about winning these awards, so your centres can do the same.
Top 3 Tips:
As a Contact Centre Manager, be clear about what award you’re trying to win, and ensure your Trainers share this vision. Then it will be very easy to lead you contact centre through the journey (15:34).
Get pre-audits from the people who will be judging the awards. They’ll help guide you in the behaviours they’re looking for in your agents (16:37).
Have your Trainers block out time in their calendars, to be out on the floor giving coaching or doing side-by-sides, to coach agents to use the behaviours the judges are looking for (17:04).
You'll Learn:
The ABC model which is critical to motivating your agents to use the behaviours needed to win (05:48).
The 2 things Vanessa credits for helping maintain momentum in her centres, leading to back-to-back awards wins in 2017 and 2018 (10:19).
Connect with Vanessa here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessa-varela-escobar-169386167/
Get your free copy of Game On here: https://bravatrak.com/game-on-book (you’ll also get the latest podcast episodes sent straight to your inbox).
Transcript
Blair Stevenson (00:00)
Welcome to the Secrets to Contact Center Success podcast, connecting you with the latest and greatest tips from the best and the brightest minds in the industry.
I am Blair Stevenson, founder of BravaTrak, the High-Performance Coaching System for Contact Centers. It helps you to embed an evidence-based coaching system, so you can beat your targets without burning people out.
I'm excited to be joined today by Vanessa Varela Escobar. Vanessa is an experienced Contact Centre Leader, and Contact Centre Trainer.
Vanessa was heavily involved with helping the New Zealand Automobile Association contact centre win the Member Support Services category, at the 2017 CCINZ (Contact Centre Institute of New Zealand - now CCNNZ) CRM awards. And then coming back in 2018 to win the Supreme Gold award for contact centers over 50 seats.
Today, Vanessa is going to share how the Automobile Association contact centre went about achieving these awards. So welcome, Vanessa, it's great to have you here.
Vanessa Varela Escobar (01:01)
Thank you.
Blair Stevenson (01:01)
Now, just for the sake of listeners, just tell us a bit about who you are, what your expertise is and your background.
Vanessa Varela Escobar (01:12)
Sure. Well, I'm a language teacher, that turned up in the New Zealand contact centre scene 16 years ago, from Colombia where I am originally from.
And at that point I got recruited by the iconic company, the Automobile Association, and I navigated through a number of different roles, from quality control to Team Leader and then the Trainer for their four national contact centers. It was an almost 12 year journey, which made my career a lot more fun.
And as of the most recent years, I've been running my solo practices, my business practices. Basically trying not to fire myself every morning as I do that!.
And I'm working very closely as a Master Coach for BravaTrak, and even more recently a Trainer for Sykes Cottages and Bachcare. So it's quite wide. However, most of my history really is in contact centers.
Blair Stevenson (02:43)
Mmm. And for listeners who don't know, Sykes Cottages is a very large company based in the UK. And Bachcare is...
Vanessa Varela Escobar (02:54)
Yes, [Sykes Cottages] are I think currently the fifth largest property management company in the world. And as you were about to say, they have purchased Bachcare here in New Zealand. So yes, I'm super excited.
Blair Stevenson (03:11)
Yeah. Cool, fantastic. I think from a contact center performance perspective, you and I are pretty much on the same page in terms of the power of good coaching to do that. And what we both know is that good coaching focuses on the high-performance behaviors that make the difference.
And so, as a starting point, given that the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) awards are run by an external organization - there are external judges - how'd you go about figuring out what those critical behaviors were that they were looking for, that you needed your Team Leaders to coach on?
Vanessa Varela Escobar (03:54)
How we figured it out what good sounded like, from the perspective of the judges, is we purchased a pre-audit.
A pre-audit is a quantitative analysis, run by the same judges that will then have power in deciding who the award winners will be. And in this analysis, they have a set number of criteria. Each criteria has rubrics, and therefore it generates a score, basically, for each call. And the calls that scored very highly were basically what good sounded like, according to them.
So from that point, it was simple to distill those high-performance behaviors and then translate them. To be honest, our contact centers were very, very good in 2017. However, we weren't at that level enough to compete and win, with other contact centers. And purchasing that pre-audit, and understanding what good sounded like from the perspective of the judges, was a super strategic move by the Contact Centre Manager at the time, Suhail Shaikh.
Blair Stevenson (05:29)
Nice. So it's critical to understand what good looks and sounds like, so that you can then build your whole program around that. So once you'd had those critical behaviors identified, how you go about communicating them to the Team Leaders and to your CSRs (Customer Service Representatives).
Vanessa Varela Escobar (05:48)
Aha. Well, I ran some hands-on practical classroom sessions. And the purpose of those sessions was really to get our CSRs - or our agents - to start thinking as judges. So we turned the classroom really into this ... I want to call it an awareness lab, because we had these audited calls that we were playing, role plays between ourselves.
Team managers and agents were all getting involved in recognizing, first, what good was like, and then reproducing it themselves. I did use the ABC model by the BravaTrak methodology, because it's so simple.
The ABC model says that and Activator - like a classroom session, for example - will influence a Behavior, or a behavior change. And then there will be a Consequence after that. And so in these classroom sessions, it was very important to listen to the calls. That was the Activator. So then in the roleplays, [we] changed the way we said things. That's the Behavior. And the Consequence was that our team players were receiving positive feedback from their Team Leaders and their peers.
So it's important to know your ABC's.
Blair Stevenson (07:29)
It is, it is. And it's worthwhile pointing out to listeners that when Vanessa is using the term, 'Consequences', one of the challenges we have is our brains go "Well, consequences, that's a negative word". We're talking about negative [consequences] as a general rule.
But what Vanessa is talking about are positive consequences when people take the right action. Providing some positive feedback, some form of recognition for making the effort to use those specific behaviours.
So this kind of draws us into the issue around translating that classroom course into on-job behaviour change. And you're talking about those consequences. So how did you make sure that there was attention being paid to that on-job behaviour change, and that that change was being encouraged?
Vanessa Varela Escobar (08:19)
Sure. I knew that those classroom sessions being activators were very short term. They were good to get everyone on the same page, and they were very good to get everyone motivated.
However, the key part, as you said, is that positive consequence part of it, where I would be available right then and there to catch them saying the right things, in the real calls. Because it is from doing this, that we can maintain a long-term performance improvement.
So I just blocked my calendar. I made sure that I was either plugging into the calls with side-by-side coaching, or listening to calls, or even getting them to tell me what went well on the calls.
And from then on, I would make sure I would give them that positive feedback on the specific things they did say in a particular call.
Blair Stevenson (09:30)
Fantastic. So what you're saying is as the trainer, you were proactively doing the on-job follow-up from those training sessions to ensure that people were getting sufficient positive coaching, to encourage and motivate them to keep using those behaviors.
Now, one of the things I am aware of is that you won these awards over two year period. You won that category award in the first year, 2017, you came back and won another category award the following year, but also you won the Gold award.
So I'm curious about how did you maintain that momentum? As the trainer, you couldn't keep doing side-by-sides all the time. So how did you ensure that momentum was maintained?
Vanessa Varela Escobar (10:19)
Two things, really.
Our call quality form was aligned with the criteria from the CRM awards;
So that the Team Leaders and the quality control team were always listening for what good sounded like.
So from that point of view, it was very easy to maintain what we had started.
And you are right, in the first year we won the Customer Service award. And the second year we retained the same category. We went for the Gold award, which is a Supreme award. And then one of our agents also got the Customer Service Representative of the Year. So by the second year, we truly had a system in place that worked and we were very happy with it.
Blair Stevenson (11:20)
Fantastic. So I don't exactly know how the judging for those awards happens, but I'm guessing there's a period of time when the judges are calling in as mystery shoppers in some form.
That would be important to maintain, really make sure that momentum was happening during that period. How did you achieve that?
Vanessa Varela Escobar (11:49)
There go my ABC's again.
So I would send daily emails in the form of a campaign. And that was basically the Activator - a little Activator in the morning. So that prompted the Behaviour of the CSRs - paying attention to what I was saying and [emailing me what they'd done on calls].
And the outcome of this was that they would get a 'point', and they would get recognition by their peers. So Activators, Behaviors and positive Consequences. And as we did this, day in, day out, I managed to get more of a perspective of who was a little bit off-track, as well.
Here's a particular example. So the campaign that we ran was, "Hey guys, we're running the day three [of training], and be sure to send me some examples of what good sounds like in your calls, in relation to call control or sales awareness, et cetera".
And, I would then receive an email. And in that email I could see if this person was really, really onboard and on-track, and I would go and praise them.
Or if they were off-track, I would then provide what we call 'Corrective Feedback'. I would be very specific as to what they should say, or maybe say less off. And I would give them the chance over the next two to three calls to correct and change that behavior. And then I would again come back to reinforce that with positive feedback.
Blair Stevenson (13:52)
Cool. So as the contact centre trainer, you were very hands-on in teams of coaching people. Kind of almost setting up a competition. You talked about a points system, how did that work?
Vanessa Varela Escobar (14:07)
That was a success. Everyone was keeping an eye on the scores. They knew where they were in relationship to their peers. And it just really got the momentum going. From the Activators, from the training sessions, it was really what kept everyone on their toes as the judges were calling [the centre as mystery shoppers].
Blair Stevenson (14:31)
Very good. Hey, thank you. You've really nicely described the process, the system you put in place to help you win that Gold award.
Just perhaps just to finish up, Vanessa, what would be your top three tips for contact center managers who are considering entering the CRM Supreme awards each year? What would be your top three tips for utilizing their contact center trainer to help them win those national awards?
Vanessa Varela Escobar (15:08)
The top three tips would be.
Be clear about your result.
Get your judges to tell you what good sounds like from their perspective, if you can.
Follow a model in which you plan and implement time to observe [agents].
Tip #1 (15:34)
Being clear about your result means that as a contact center manager, your vision will be so aligned with the trainer's vision, that it is a very easy process to then lead the whole contact centre into the journey. So the more in-sync those visions are between the contact center manager and the trainer, the easier that process will be.
There is also clarity around what award you're actually going for, because you will see that there may be two to three other categories that apply to your organization, that you might be wanting to go for. Like the first year we won one award. And the second year we won three because of us being very clear about which awards we wanted to go for.
Tip #2 (16:37)
So, on the second part with knowing what good sounds like, and getting this from the judges, it's really important because the business needs change, but also the customers' needs change. And so what sounds good today may change from year to year. Investing on those pre-audits, it really, really does pay off.
Tip #3 (17:04)
And finally, blocking your time so that you can be out there on the floor or [doing] side-by-sides, listening to when those good behaviors, when those good words are said ... what I want to say is you will be wanting to focus on the training part and on the email part, and this is good, and this is very important. But also bring in the parts where you observe and provide very specific, either positive or corrective feedback to the agents.
Blair Stevenson (17:51)
Well, that's all we've got time for today. Vanessa, thank you for coming on the show. As I've said, you've given us some wonderful tips into how contact centre trainers can contribute to contact center success.
Now for listeners, you'll find the link to the show notes in the episode description below.
And if you'd like to connect with Vanessa on LinkedIn, or ask her any questions in relationship to this podcast, you'll also find the link to her LinkedIn profile description as well (https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessa-varela-escobar-169386167/).
Now, if you've tuned in today, looking for a way to embed an evidence-based coaching system, so you can beat your targets without burning people out, have I got an offer for you!
You're welcome to a free copy of my book, Game On: How to Increase Sales, Productivity, and Customer Experience by Turning your Managers into High-Performance Coaches.
The link to that offer is also in the episode description below (https://bravatrak.com/game-on-book).
Well, that's it from us today, have a productive week.