Lassoed! Texas school board association ropes in member responsiveness and call agent productivity with advanced contact center capabilities

Communications News, July, 2004

Rick Tillotson is a student of best-practice telecommunications. He has to be. As telecom manager for the nonprofit Texas Association of School Boards (TASB), his hands are full keeping TASB responsive to the wide-ranging needs and expectations of its 1,042 member school boards. At the same time, he faces the perennial pinch of nonprofits everywhere: keep costs down yet service levels up.

That is no easy task for Tillotson, given that TASB is the largest school board association in the country. In addition to representing every school district in the Lone Star state, it also counts as members 146 educational cooperatives, 46 junior colleges, 38 tax appraisal districts and 19 regional education service centers. The school boards alone preside over combined annual expenditures of $28 billion, employ more than 560,000 people and serve four million Texas students.

With the help of some 400 employees, this 55-year-old organization fulfills a mission as enormous as the state is big. It provides members with state and federal government advocacy; legal and governance services; legislative information and training; parent and community outreach; and assistance with school operations, especially purchasing, financial and human resource services, benefits and risk management.

Among scores of activities across this wide-ranging service portfolio, TASB manages a multibillion-dollar investment pool, runs an online purchasing cooperative that sells everything from pencils to school buses (even dump trucks), ,and publishes an online policy manual for its member districts that compiles and updates a comprehensive collection of all relevant federal and state laws and regulations. "And it's all done within the strictest cost controls, because our bedrock reason for being is to save our members' money so they can focus more resources on their students," Tillotson says.

To help deliver on that, just more than 100 of TASB's employees are in member-Facing roles as front-line contact agents, support associates and supervisors who answer more than a dozen toll-free service numbers. They operate out of six relatively small contact centers, all located at TASB's Austin headquarters except for one, with 10 agents located in Houston to serve the risk-management side of its operations. TASB offers members health, property-casualty, unemployment and workers' compensation insurance policies.

CALL VOLUMES GROWING

Because risk management is TASB's biggest undertaking, it has the largest contact center that fields the most calls at TASB--some 165,000 of the 190,000 calls that come into its contact centers each year. These volumes were growing, and Tillotson says that to better serve its members, TASB needed a way to streamline its call handling, increase first-contact resolution of issues and leverage the expertise of its entire organization. Productivity gains were important, too.

"In general, people's expectations of how they want their calls handled have risen dramatically over the years, as they experience the sophisticated contact center capabilities of large commercial enterprises," he explains. "That's the level of responsiveness and service we wanted to give our members, too, but our budgets just couldn't afford it."

With TASB's other contact centers having as few as two to three agents, often its old system would place the caller on hold when those agents were busy, Tillotson says.

"We were giving our clients music and announcements while they were on hold, but no information about their estimated wait time or alternative means of contacting us," he explains. "Conversely, we had no way of knowing whether there were one or 100 calls in queue, nor did we know who in our organization might be available to help in handling the calls."

As a result, the customer experience could be maddening. When a teacher called TASB for an insurance claim, for example, she might be left in a "black hole" of a call queue for an indeterminate time, without options for leaving a message and without knowing how long the wait for an agent would be. During school hours, teachers have limited break time, so sitting on hold for several minutes was not acceptable.

"The only way to give them choices was at a given point to automatically route them out of the automated call distribution system (ACD) and over to the voice-message system," Tillotson says. "But if they wanted to continue holding, they would be put back in the queue and lose their place in line."

A SERVICE-ORIENTED APPROACH

In addition, when a call center agent needed to transfer a caller to a financial analyst or other TASB associate, the agent had to manually track him or her down. "They would stand up and shout over the cubicle to see whether Bob or Alicia was available," Tillotson says.

Altogether, this was not the informed, responsive and customer-friendly face TASB wanted to give its association members. "Agents were especially frustrated that, for lack of tools, they couldn't give members the service and responsiveness that they experience themselves when they call large companies for their own personal business," explains Tillotson.