Rewriting values results in improved performance, customer feedback for one high-volume contact center
By Jessi Torres

The Travis County Tax Office’s Contact Center had to be a well-oiled machine. Its employees interacted with more than 1,400 customers every day at its Austin office, answering questions about vehicle registrations, title transfers and property taxes. But at the end of the day, sometimes it seemed like the oil was leaking.

The department had been experiencing frustration among its customers and a high turnover rate among its employees.

Managers in the Tax Office began to investigate the persistent question of why. They noticed that some customers were having to call back multiple times for the same question, and employees seemed to be frustrated over the absence of realistic performance expectations. In addition to the vehicle registrations and title transfers that all assessor-collectors handle, the department also collects property taxes for 95 jurisdictions on more than 350,000 properties and manages registration for 550,000 voters. With the staggering volume of transactions the department conducts daily, the Contact Center had been focused on completing a high number of calls, which often left customers confused from incomplete answers and employees exhausted from the frantic pace.

“The push for quantity over quality had inadvertently created a cycle of repeat callers due to inadequate quality standards,” said Tina Morton, the office’s director of Public Information and Training. Morton worked closely with Contact Center Supervisor Tiffany Seward over two years to discover the best course of action for improving the department. They looked at the Contact Center’s strengths and its weaknesses and re-evaluated the office’s values and mission statement, determining that the Contact Center needed something more personalized than the Tax Office’s general mission statement. “A mission statement that means something lives every day in the organization,” Morton said. “We adopted ways to make the values of the Contact Center mission statement live by first recognizing the pride in being the informational resource.”

In June 2006, the Contact Center launched the Connecting Values and Performance Program aimed to both bolster customer confidence in the department and eliminate employee turnover.

The mission statement now more accurately reflects the Contact Center’s goal of providing professional and accurate service to its customers. After implementing the new mission statement, Morton and Seward created a call-flow standard to apply to all customer interactions. The new call flow teaches employees how to interact with customers using a step-by-step process. It emphasizes quality interactions and places the importance on meeting each customer’s needs.

“I had a Contact Center agent say that one of the things she liked is that she wasn’t rushed,” Seward said. “She said she likes finding out how to answer a customer’s question so they understand it.”

While employees seem to appreciate the new attention to customer service, customers provide the true test. The office created multiple opportunities to encourage customer feedback, all of which is disbursed among staff. When a customer sends feedback that the Contact Center employees are doing a good job, they know about it.

Allison Thompson, who works for a large state agency, recently called the office to inquire about a title transfer. Her interaction with the Contact Center was positive.

“Having worked most of my life in a large bureaucracy, I really appreciate someone in another large bureaucracy that provides such fantastic customer service,” she said. “This almost makes me glad to write out my property tax check each year!”

Thompson, who has lived in Travis County for 25 years, said she was surprised by the exceptional customer service she received. “Unfortunately for so many, it seems that folks just aren’t getting real job satisfaction out of their employment situations,” Thompson said. “So when I called Travis County, I was expecting an unhappy employee to answer the phone.”

Instead, what Thompson received was high-quality, helpful service from an employee who Thompson said was “genuinely interested in my need for information.”

“High-quality customer service is critically important in dealing with the public, whether one is working for a state agency, higher education institution, public school district, county or city government,” she said. “All employees at these institutions are, for the large part, paid out of public funds — our tax dollars at work.” One way the Contact Center has measured customer satisfaction is through follow-up emails to customers.

Like Thompson’s reaction, other customers’ responses to the follow- up emails have been overwhelmingly positive. On its telephonesystem hold message, the Contact Center also includes the option for telephone customers to speak with a supervisor at the end of each call if they want to comment on the service they’ve received.

Travis County Tax Assessor-Collector Nelda Wells Spears wants Contact Center agents to build a relationship with the customers they serve.

“The focus on quality versus quantity helps the agents create a relationship with the customer,” Spears said. “They take the responsibility for satisfying the customer’s needs.”

What about employee turnover?

After creating a comprehensive mission statement that emphasized the value of customer satisfaction, the department focused on its other major issue: employee turnover.

“In his book Process Consultation, Edgar Schein notes that employees have the highest and very best impression of an organization on the first day of the job,” said Morton, the Public Information and Training director. “From that point on, it’s a downhill slide. Well, we thought if that’s true, how far do they slide? And what’s the cause?” After determining that the absence of realistic performance expectations was a large part of the problem, the department began to evaluate its existing structure for performance expectations. “It was grim,” Morton said. “Employees received mixed signals. They seemed to be confused and tended toward underachievement.”

Morton began to wonder if the tools used to attract, select and retain employees were consistent with the values of the department’s mission statement. She wanted to ensure that the values could be pinpointed in hiring, training, development, and performance-feedback practices.

“We revamped evaluation instruments to emphasize values associated with accuracy and professionalism,” Morton said.

“The missing piece was the way we were evaluating performance,” said Seward, the Contact Center supervisor. “It just didn’t match. We would look at how many calls our agents were taking during the day when our mission was supposed to be about quality. We had to create a system of valuing performance that reflected quality. Now, we’re looking at the quality of each interaction.”

After developing new standards for performance evaluations, the department began creating detailed task analyses for job duties in the Contact Center.

“A task analysis states a general job duty or area of responsibility then breaks it down into smaller units,” Morton said. “The smaller units give employees the opportunity to demonstrate proficiency in each one.”

A general overview of a job’s task tells what the job is, but not how to accomplish it. By constructing a detailed analysis of each function, the Contact Center sought to offer its employees a higher rate of success in each responsibility.

“We have lots of job aids available so it’s really comforting to know that if I don’t know something, I know where to get the information I’m looking for,” said Clare Cunningham, an office specialist at the Contact Center. “For new employees, it’s invaluable to have that information in front of you. It’s also a good reminder for staff who’ve been doing this for a really long time.”

Another way the department has increased employee satisfaction is by sharing the positive feedback it receives from customers. Employees regularly receive copies of the positive emails customers send to the department, along with recognition from supervisors.

“We automatically receive helpful and positive feedback when we do a good job,” Cunningham said. “Customer feedback also gets shared with everyone in the department. When we do well, we’re immediately given credit and praise for that.”

Those involved said they believe the Connecting Values and Performance Program has successfully improved customer service and satisfaction. Morton also said the department has fewer job vacancies due to job dissatisfaction than in the past. Because the Contact Center’s program has been so successful, managers and supervisors from other departments have been contacting Seward for advice.

“We’ve worked with several other departments who’ve seen our work and have developed other models for customer relationships,” Seward said. “They’re implementing very similar strategies for call flow and feedback.”

Assessor-Collector Spears insists the success of the program lies in giving supervisors the freedom to come up with new ideas. “This program has grown out of a need to keep improving the way we serve our customers,” Spears said. “The division manager is very creative so we’re able to make this kind of change because all our managers are free to be creative and come up with solutions to any problem they may have.”

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