Costa Rica Call Center Blog

1) Insure touch points with employees and customers. Ask yourself How and an will I as a Call Center Operations Manager insure my employees feel “TISP” Trusted, Important, Special and Pleased? Despite technology, the people are still the most important resource in a call center. Be specific. What will you do today to insure TISP Factor?

2) What is the quality of the coaching and motivation provided by call center supervisors? Turnover is expensive and supervisors will cost you quality employees. What initiatives do you have in place for employee retention which is as important as recruitment?

3) What scripts and monitoring services do you have in place to maximize per agent sales and service quality ratings? Have you applied the latest brain science and NLP voice coaching techniques to maximize sales and quality results?

4) Listen to calls every day without exception and Keep a Journal. What was the most difficult customer call and why? What was the best customer call you heard and why? (Be sure to tell or write a note to the agent about that best call of the day) What are customers saying about the product and or/service.

5) Most importantly observe and ask as operations manager. How might/can we do this cheaper, faster, better and provide a more energized environment for employees. (Review every protocol and procedure from scheduling to the employee break areas and look for ways to make operations better)

6) Know your Flow! Vulnerable service times, process and procedures. Have protocols in place for all worst case scenarios.

Source:  Costa Rica Call Center LinkedIn Group

• Sector has 53,000 employees and expects to generate more jobs
• Reform encourages facilities in lesser developed areas

The approval of the new Free Trade Zone Law with the support of an overwhelming 44 congressman, allows Costa Rica to comply with a World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement that will take effect in 2015.

A Free Trade Zone is an area defined within a country that enjoys tax benefits, such as withholding of import duties and some other local and national taxes.

With the newly approved law, companies will have greater legal certainty when investing, and industry representatives agreed to the Costa Rican Coalition for Development Initiatives (CINDE).

This greater certainty –according to some of the companies- will result in an increase in employment in the services, electronics and medical devices sectors.

“With this achievement, we expect that 2010 to bring better results for the country” were the words almost euphoric Vanessa Gibson, director of Post Establishment Care at CINDE.

Karla Blanco, manager of corporate affairs at INTEL was very positive on the news. She reported that the parent company in California “has already been notified and received the news with great joy”.

INTEL is the largest exporter in Costa Rica. Its sales account for 20% ($ 1.9 billion in 2008) of total exports of the country.

With its 3,000 direct employees, Intel is one company that particularly advocated for this law to be voted affirmatively. Not long ago the company decided to do an investment in Vietnam that with the approved law, may have been done in Costa Rica.

“Although the company is not evaluating a new investments, the approval of this bill puts us in a stronger position in the future” added Blanco, who thanked “the early Christmas gift to the Costa Rican people” from Congress.

Roy Rojas of Bridgestone, said from their perspective the country now has “capabilities and strengths to keep growing”.

Source: La Nacion

1. MECE – SLAs should be Mutually Exclusive and Completely Exhaustive (MECE). By this, no two SLAs should measure the same thing, and there should be a SLA for every important aspect of the program. Too often we see SLAs that overlap, creating double jeopardy situations and misleading positive or negative performance reports. In addition, we often see important areas that are left unmeasured due to oversight.
2. Defined – Service levels must be thoroughly defined. For example, abandonment rate within a call center ought to be defined so that parties know whether blocked calls (trunk blockage), calls that terminate in the IVR, calls that terminate in the first 5 seconds (we don’t agree with this, but someone people do), or calls that answered by agents but are the “wrong number” are considered abandoned calls. Check this Q&A section out if you need some idea of how varied definitions are. If you don’t define the service level, you don’t know what you’re measuring.
3. Calculated – Even though you spend time defining service levels, you need to define any calculations. For example, if the service level is abandonment rate, the calculation should defined as “the number of Abandoned Calls divided by the total number of Offered Calls”. Where we use capitalized terms, these are predefined earlier in the SLA section. Vendors and vendor managers should never, ever be surprised by calculations. Give examples in your written SLAs.
4. Measurable – Don’t waste anyone’s time with SLAs that can’t be measured. For example, if you’re measuring customer satisfaction in a call center environment (typically done via a 3rd party after the primary call is concluded), but you don’t have the means to measure customer satisfaction (e.g., your call center doesn’t have the ability to use 3rd parties or your agents aren’t trained to collect satisfaction data), its a waste of time. Typically, angry customers will whip out unmeasurable SLAs and argue that vendors failed to achieve them, which is a huge waste of effort.
5. Easily Measurable – It’s one thing to measure something, its another thing to spend oodles of dollars to measure the same thing. If the cost of measurement doesn’t warrant the benefits of the SLA, don’t use it. The best example of this was a measure where customers call to complain about a bad transaction they’ve recently received in the mail. The vendor didn’t manage the call center, just the backoffice transactions. So, the call center needed to take notes on bad transactions and track them in a manner that allowed auditors to identify if the vendor was the cause of the bad transaction or not. Since the vendor only handled one of six steps in the backoffice process and the mainframe systems didn’t track transaction history, it was impossible to determine who caused the error without significant system modifications.
6. Time Frames – SLAs should cover a specific time period. Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, etc. They should also only be assessed once. The example provided in #4 is a bad example of this, since customers could call to complain months after the transaction was completed, making it difficult to understand when to assess a month’s quality number. Essentially, the vendor would be in jeopardy forever, since a customer could complain at any time about a month – and every complaint would only lower the quality score, until the vendor had to pay penalties.
7. Singled Barrels – A SLA should contain only one measure, not two, three, or even four measures. If you’re SLA is “99% of transactions must meet quality standards and achieve customer satisfaction requirements” you need to track both conditions, which is nightmarishly difficult. In questionaire terminology, these are called double-barreled situations, and typically provide misleading or inaccurate pictures of operational performance.
8. Serve a Purpose - In some contracts, a minimum number of SLAs are required (to reduce the vendor’s risk, of course). That’s great when you need 3 or 4 SLAs, but what if you only need two SLAs and are therefore required to make-up another one or two to meet the contractual guidelines? These typically become “gimmes” and are a waste of time. Every SLA should serve a purpose.
9. Actionable – Every SLA should be capable of being influenced through actions of the vendor or the company. If the SLA can’t be influenced, don’t bother. A bad example may be measures of employee satisfaction with compensation in a HR outsourcing relationship, where the vendor has no control over compensation or employee /supervisor communication/training program. Since all employees will naturally dislike their compensation to some degree, the vendor has very little ability to create positive results.
10. Realistic – Look, we all want to be perfect, but those who belong to the cult of zero defects don’t understand contracting and real-life BPO and ITO. Achieving 100% of anything is simply unrealistic in most situations. Your goals can be aggressive (or evenly progressively more aggressive over time), but they should achievable.

Source: 360 Vendor Management

March 4, 2009

Costa Rica is the location of Georgia Tech’s newest Trade-chain Innovation and Productivity (TIP) Center. The complex joins the Supply Chain and Logistics Institute in Atlanta and The Logistics Institute Asia-Pacific in Singapore as part of a focused effort to utilize research, innovation and education for increasing trade across borders and making existing trade more productive.

With trade across borders becoming increasingly challenging due to varied components owned by diverse enterprises, the TIP Center aims to combine analytics, digital services and supply chain management to address trade-chain productivity. The goal of the TIP Center is to help develop the knowledge, data, analytics and technology necessary to generate and execute trade-chains and to provide education to relevant and potential stakeholders.

The TIP Center will initially focus its efforts on three trade domains: food products, high-value electronics and digitized business services.

The TIP Center is a joint development of the Supply Chain and Logistics Institute, the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the College of Management at Georgia Tech in partnership with PROCOMER and the Chamber of Industries in Costa Rica. The TIP Center will join Georgia Tech in establishing a network of international centers focused on improving existing trade and creating new trade.

A private donor provided initial funding for the center to expand Georgia Tech’s activities in Central America for the benefit of the Costa Rican economy and scientific community. The center will utilize expertise from Georgia Tech as well as Costa Rican universities along with U.S. and Costa Rican partners in government and industry.

Permalink: http://www.gatech.edu/newsroom/newsbriefs.html?m=03&y=2009

By Nick Taylor, 08-Jan-2009

The FDA has established its first permanent presence in Latin America by opening an office in Costa Rica as part of “Beyond Our Borders Initiative”, which has also seen the agency set up three sites in China.

More US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) offices are scheduled to be set up in the region over the next 12 months, with Mexico and a South American country the likely sites.

These offices fit into the FDA’s “Beyond Our Borders Initiative” which the agency has launched in an attempt to more closely monitor standards in countries that have significant imports to the US.

Consequently China has been a primary focus of the initiative, with three FDA offices now set up in the country, but the agency has now turned its attention to Latin America.

Secretary Michael Leavitt, who leads the US Health and Human Services, said: “The countries of Central America, along with Panamá and the Dominican Republic, create the third-largest US export market in Latin America, and, every year, the United States imports millions of dollars in goods from these important trade partners.

“An HHS/FDA presence in the region will improve collaboration, strengthen our partnership and hasten the flow of quality goods to our markets.”

The establishment of an office in Costa Rica began in June 2008 when Leavitt met with Health Ministers from the region at a summit in the Central American country El Salvador.

This follows on from a busy period for the agency, in which it has opened an office in Brussels to collaborate with the European Commission, set up at three sites in China and announced it will establishing a presence in two India cities.