Where Have They Gone?

Brain drain is a social phenomenon wherein professionals educated, trained and practice here in the Philippines particularly, is enticed to go abroad to seek greener pastures. The result is that fewer professionals are practicing their chosen field in the country, having a shortage of manpower across all professions. It started with nursing, and then medical professionals such as doctors and medical technologists started to get into the trend as well. As the development of the world progressed and the internet becoming a super highway of information and facts, there has also been an increase in the demand for information and computer related professionals here and abroad.

And because of this demand there is now the “virtual brain drain”. But this particular brain drain has more of a positive feedback than the latter. The effects of the virtual brain drain is not actually bad, in fact it has helped the county’s economy if not increased the number of jobs available. Virtual contact centers and virtual call centers have been growing both in numbers and in popularity. This is the main reason that most fresh graduates flock to existing call centers. There is no experience needed, nor have any qualms about educational attainment. Regardless of the degree, call center jobs are still very popular. And even now that businesses and companies hire virtual agents that could work at home, the interest on the job just doubled.

Teachers, nurses and I.T. graduates all work for call centers while awaiting the board exam. Some do this to save up money for the review or as a temporary route to the original plan. But sadly, almost 20% of all future professionals who enter the industry never leave especially if promotion was offered or if they job pays higher than their chosen field. This virtual brain drain is evident by the lack of practicing teachers, while to some, like nurses, it has become their redemption after the over population of the profession.

But is it that virtual call centers and contact call centers here in the Philippine thrive regardless of the disinterest of the majority of the population to work in the industry? As stated before, the job is short lived, you could get a job part time and yet earn higher (you are actually paid in dollars but given as peso), no specific qualifications except good communication skills and a good grasp of the English language. Aside from that, the job is in essence, uncomplicated.

This apparent brain drain is a looming predicament to all of us. Yes, technologically we may be behind, but the emergence of these call centers in the country proves that when it comes to job performance and exertion, the Filipinos are a force to reckon with. The same problems are still eminent, lack of professionals in different fields, but virtual call centers also bring to light several other problems. One is that social interactions of people are limited to computers. While this may be a valid form of communication, it does not have the same human affect and contact we all need. the remoteness will cause problems later on such as long periods of isolation from human contact.

Increasing Productivity in Contact Centers

There are helpful technologies are available for agents to help themselves in improving productivity, the key agent self-help tools include:

*Collaboration tools (between agents and supervisors) to makes real-time planning, tracking and exception handling easier and allows agents to log in and view schedules and request changes. These not only automate shift bidding, but also introduce a higher degree of fairness in awarding shifts. An automated rules engine is able to factor in seniority or ‘bonus points’ and assign shifts accordingly.

*Knowledge bases intuitive to provide access to complex product/service information to the agent while interacting with the customer (and typically can be similarly accessed by customer self service applications)

*e-learning tools to provide focused training (‘soft’ call handling and negotiation skills as well as product/service knowledge and cross/up-selling techniques).

In virtual contact centers, there are not a large amount of tools that empower an agent to self improve. What does exist are systems and application that store and make information available to agents to improve themselves through e-Learning. These are usually merged with a Quiz that an agent would take to assess their level of knowledge. This is useful for teaching technical skills and keeping an agent’s product knowledge up to date but does little to improve the agent’s customer interaction skills. There are some new technologies that uitilizes call evaluation scores and feedback from customer surveys to generate an agent performance profile. This in turn can be used to identify specific agent weaknesses and make suggestions on areas of improvement. This can then be used to optimize the use of agent development resources. If knowledge is a weak area online knowledge systems can be suggested as a solution. If knowledge is good but tone is a problem then an interaction with a trainer may be recommended. The automation of development of the identification areas through the merging of quality assurance and customer feedback and analysis using modern statistical tools to is an exciting frontier. It must however focus on improved training resource usage rather than reducing the amount of agent training and up skill.

Workforce management can put up web screens for agents to measure themselves against numbers of contacts taken, adherence and improving their own resolution times as they mature. It can also allow them to see who is in the queue ready for taking contacts before they make a judgement move to go into research mode or whatever your classifications are for being in a "not ready state". The first time a representative listens to themselves taking a contact, they are able to start improving how they respond to customer needs. Recorded contacts are also used as training instances for new hires. Ticketing tools allow you to build knowledge by looking at other technicians/representatives answers or solutions to issues. No one needs to be there to help them search - and it allows us all to improve upon our communication skills.