Taking Stress Out of The Call Centre Makes
Tesco a Winner

Four prestigious Innovation Awards show how successful contact centres
are raising the bar, by putting the needs of their customers and employees at the heart of resource planning and change management..

The Awards were presented to Tesco, West Midlands Police, Coventry Building Society and Yell at Call Centre Planning 2006, the 5th annual conference of the Professional Planning Forum, on 26th April 2006.

The prestigious Contact Centre Innovation of the Year Award 2006 was presented this week to the Tesco Customer Service Centre for an Every Little Helps initiative that significantly reduced stress in the call centre in the Christmas shopping weeks - their busiest time of year when volumes rise
by 25%. This year, service levels improved by 45% and attrition by 42%, by resourcing smarter and training people to 'choose their attitude' at work.

The award was presented at Call Centre Planning 2006, the Professional
Planning Forum's fifth annual conference in Glasgow on April 25th. Over 200 industry specialists gathered for the two-day conference at which all the award winners presented their work and the latest annual benchmark survey results were presented.

"How you handle your peak periods is a key differentiator of the best centres", comments Paul Smedley, Executive Director of the Professional Planning Forum, the Awards organisers. "Tesco had gained fantastic employee engagement through their cultural change training and so they tackled the challenges of their Christmas peak period in entirely new ways, by involving CSMs and team leaders in
suggesting and implementing improvements."

"It sounds simple but it's hard to do sometimes", explains Paul Reed,
Resourcing & Information Manager at Tesco. "You need to get the practical routines right and remember to do them when you're busy. A reason for our success is that most (81%) of employees now feel their manager listens to them."

The Every Little Helps programme at the Tesco Customer Service Centre tapped into a rich vein of talent among team leaders and CSMs, creating a team of Firelighters who feel that if they suggest something it will really happen. A Rapid Action Team (RAT) of Firelighters were tasked with creating plans for the Christmas peak which included changes to recruitment of temps, dedicated seat planners for hot desking, a show-you-care programme to support new starts including extra (temporary) team leaders, buddying with experienced employees, and a rigorous focus on daily planning procedures. The reduction in attrition freed up time to invest in much higher skill and confidence levels among new starts.

In an industry where sickness and attrition are considered key
management problems, this initiative shows the huge positive impact that
can be made on the everyday working life of call centre colleagues, by
combining people initiatives with operational resource planning.

The Public Sector Innovation Award went to West Midlands Police for a new call handling strategy that increased customer satisfaction to 96% and made £2.5m efficiency gains, by focussing on reducing "waste" contact, transforming the role of the switchboard, re-organising teams to focus on issue resolution, introducing resource planning, offering flexible working and using technology to streamline call handling.

The Innovation Award for Strategic Change was presented to Yell for
transforming local offices into a virtual call centre operation, integrating new technology into successful people and customer processes. 80% of managers' time is now spent with their people, schedule flexibility has been introduced though the work of an employee task force and customer feedback recordings are used regularly as part of the team performance management process.

The Performance Management Innovation Award was gained by Coventry Building Society for developing a service culture that share skills between the call handling and administration teams - increasing consistency of performance at peak periods, so that days achieving telephone service increased 57%, despite a volume increase 22% with the same budget. This was an entirely voluntary scheme and take up has risen over 40%, supported by changes to the PIPS performance incentive scheme, which encourages teams to help each other out.

“These centres are leading the way in demonstrating how we can 'raise
the bar' in our customer contact centres." explains Paul Smedley, Executive Director. "We offer these Innovation Awards because we want to
show the huge progress that is being made in call centres to improve life for both the customers and the employees – and to demonstrate that planning analysts are often critical to making these improvements happen”.

Visit www.planningforum.co.uk for more details.