How American Airlines Measures Call Center Performance, Prepares for the Future

Call Center IQ Leadership Q&A: Judy Brown, American Airlines

In this exclusive interview with CCIQ’s Shawn Siegel, Judy Brown, Manager, Customer Experience with American Airline’s AAdvantage shares her insight on improving workforce performance.

Judy, who manages a 200-person call center for the airline’s massive customer loyalty program, will present at the upcoming Call Center Performance, Productivity & Metrics conference.

Which metric do you think has the biggest impact on customer experience?
In AAdvantage Customer Service we have metrics around Caller Experience, Expertise, Ownership, and of course the operational metrics such as slippage, AHT, hold time, etc. We have the greatest positive impact on our customers when we exceed expectations in the Caller Experience arena — which includes Making a Connection; Being Friendly, Personable and Professional; and Being Respectful of Time, Needs, Uniqueness. We can literally make someone’s day with what we identify as a “wow” call – and it doesn’t have to be around an extraordinary situation. A personal connection can evolve around the simplest request, and leave our customer feeling so much better than before the contact with us.

On the other hand, the greatest negative impact stems from not meeting expectations for Expertise. Nothing is worse for a customer than to reach out to us for information or to make an update and we get it wrong. Expertise is such an essential part of our performance that there’s nothing remarkable – no Brownie points! – for getting it right. That’s simply what’s expected. But falling short on this metric can have truly drastic consequences for a customer.

What is your favorite approach to motivating and measuring employee performance?
Variety keeps things fresh and energizes your workforce, so in AAdvantage Customer Service we employ many different strategies for motivating and measuring employee performance. One size does not fit all – different approaches will resonate with different people. Of course our favorites involve having fun and rewarding people in unexpected ways. For example, we run a 12 week game consisting of a different question each week. If you get at least 10 correct answers in 12 weeks, then one of your rewards is an entry into a prize drawing. 10 winners are picked, one of whom wins the designation of AACS GOLD and gets First Class perks for 12 weeks – everything from a certificate presented by the Director of ACS, a welcome email from the President of AAdvantage, warm cookies every day for a week, a new American Airlines logo cup and luggage tags, priority TL for one day, and gift cards for music/books/movies.

At least monthly we run contests to incentivize behavior – or retroactively reward achievement. The focus might be perfect attendance, customer compliments, operational efficiency, increasing revenue opportunity, etc.

How do you convince executive leadership that customer service is not just a means to band aid problems, but a key component of business strategy?
All of our convincing is done through our actions rather than words. It’s easy to make the case that Customer Service drives value for the Company when we build personal relationships with high-value customers that drive incremental business, when we contribute to revenue goals, when we deliver actionable feedback about customer perceptions, when we provide insight into anticipated customer reaction to Marketing initiatives and when we serve as an “early warning system” of any technical glitches impacting a particular campaign or promotion. There’s little value in simply smoothing over customer dissatisfaction – but using it to make improvements is beneficial all-around.

What will the call center of the future look like?
Some ideas:
• Mix of Home-Based and Office –Based workers delivering service 24/7
• Facilitates communication through whatever channel the customer prefers – including phone (inbound and outbound), email, live chat, mobile and social media
o At least some of these channels need to be interactive with what the member is doing online at the time
• Workstation provides complete and easy access to customer data and accounts, policy information, procedural steps, scripting and talking points, and communication history in addition to enabling transaction processing and feedback capture
• Analytics to capture key words and phrases in all inbound and outbound communication channels to support training and data gathering