www.frost.com/ccw “We Accelerate Growth”

Thought Leader Spotlight An Interview with Kathryn McGavick Vice-President of Customer Support, Coinstar In her 15 years experience, Coinstar’s Vice-President of Customer Support, Kathryn McGavick, has worked with small contact centers, with megacenters and with contact centers of every size in between. At Coinstar, she oversees more than 400 agents supporting English, Spanish, French and Chinese languages at four call centers in two countries. Kathryn recently caught up with Frost & Sullivan’s eBulletin Editor, Erin Lindholm, to discuss the unique challenges and rewards of working in a small-to-midsize contact center. Erin Lindholm: All contact centers these days are being required to do more with less. Do you think the economic climate has affected small-to-midsize contact centers to a greater or lesser degree than the large call centers? Kathryn McGavick: One of the largest challenges that I see with every small-to-midsize contact center is that you have to run with a very lean staff, and yet the scope of support that’s required for a small-to-midsized center is very similar to that of a large center. While the scale may not be there, you still have the scope, so when small-to-midsized centers are being asked to do more with less, the impact can be greater. EL: What happens in these circumstances? How do these contact centers respond? KM: In order to survive you’ve got to get creative. You’ve got to look at who the superstars on your team are and really redefine the roles they have; you have to take a look at who might be able to take on different types of tasks, different types of skills, to support the center and support the team. It’s really important that people in a small-to-midsized center don’t define themselves in a box, the mentality that “my role only goes as far as what I’ve been assigned to do,” and that people are really reacting cross-functionally and are able to pitch in with wherever it’s needed. When you talk about the economic climate, it’s even more critical that people align across positions and hierarchies and are able to dig in and get done what needs to get done. EL: Can you share with me any great examples of that kind of cross-functional engagement? KM: There are a lot of people across the industry, who do this regularly as part of the course of their work. Take a site director, for example. A site director’s main function is to be the strategic face of customer service and work with their business partners in the company, but also to be the fervent leader of the staff, and that might mean they actually get on the phone during tough times and take calls. Usually what I see is the positions that end up becoming at risk are those in the support areas, so you’ve really got to think differently about, “Who’s servicing the customer and how do we get the support done?” Sometimes it really means splitting up the role. Maybe you’re a quality analyst, but you’re not only doing quality; you’re taking calls or responding to e-mails for a certain amount of time. EL: I would imagine that another key component these days is to demonstrate and measure the value of the

contact center to upper management. Do you have any tips on how to justify how a contact center is creating value for the company, rather than just being a cost center? KM: I’m in the automated retail industry, where customer service is about delivering a product or service at a machine. This is a little bit of context because the type of calls that we get here are really when that service transaction breaks in some way, or there’s a question of how to make it work better. So from the type of calls that I see, the way that you create value is by actually improving the process and creating that feedback loop back to your software unit or your hardware unit to say, “Boy, if we did this a little bit differently, we could actually reduce the number of contacts that are coming in the center and when we reduce the contacts, we create value for the company.” For more of relationship-based businesses, there’s always value in trying to help the customer see how they can leverage whatever portfolio of products you’re offering. Not just cross-selling, but being really strategic about: What makes sense for this customer? Can I talk to them about a different service that would make their life easier? Can I talk to them about something that would save them money? Really, just the basics of sales as a service that has been a part of business for

www.frost.com/ccw “We Accelerate Growth”

years and years. We just have to be a little more creative on the phone of how to make that relevant and how to make it valuable for the customer. EL: Of course, there are also some great rewards of working at a small-to-midsize contact center. What have you found rewarding in your work at Coinstar? KM: One of the things that I’ve found very rewarding, since Coinstar is a very innovative type of company, is that you get to use a lot of creativity on the job and I have felt really empowered to come up with new and different kinds of solutions for customer service and how to function better operationally. And I think having that kind of empowerment and the ability to actually execute some of those ideas can make working here really, really rewarding. Another thing that I would say is that there are great people within the company, and at many different levels people have the opportunity to give feedback and get connected with executives and really give their opinions. And there are great ideas that come from the front line that get implemented, so that can be very rewarding at many different levels. EL: Communication is so critical to all contact center operations, and I would think especially so in small-to-midsized operations. Can you talk a little bit about what steps a company can take to help foster open communication channels? KM: At Coinstar, we offer some of the same things that many companies offer in that we do employee surveys and other internal/departmental surveys, to solicit feedback about what people like and what people would like to see changed in their work environment. And we take those surveys to heart and implement action plans that address the associates’ feedback.

In addition to that, we do a lot of executive roundtables and visits, and so in some of my remote locations I’ve organized visits where leaders from different parts of the company will actually come out and will do focus groups, listen to calls. They’ll have the opportunity to engage one on one with the associates and so there’s visibility around that. As far as myself, I’m a pretty active leader. I like to get to know all of the people who work in our centers and to be able to have a relationship with them so that when something is a question, they feel comfortable coming to me and saying, “Hey, I just found out about a new policy or procedure and I don’t really know why we’re doing that.” That way, we can have a conversation and I can help them through that. I actually think that’s one of the advantages small-to-midsized centers have over large centers, which is communication is so much easier. EL: Can you give an example of something that was brought up by an associate and transformed into an action? KM: In our Kennewick center, which is a rather new center, they were getting some new business, new call types, and as they were trained on the services they were providing, some of the representatives actually created a knowledge base. They were able to create that knowledge base through a share point site, and it’s fantastic. When you look at it, it actually looks like a Web site. You wouldn’t even really know it’s a share point site. It’s got scripting and it’s got links that will take you to step-by-step procedures, and it’s all very concise so that it’s conducive to a new agent on the phone being able to just point and click and being able to see the information they need in order to process a transaction. EL: On that note, looking ahead toward 2010, things definitely do seem like they’re on the upswing. What’s next for Coinstar? KM: Our company’s focus is on automated retail, and we have two core businesses that we focus on, DVD rental and self-service coin counting. We’re in a great position for any future innovations into automated retail or self-service because we are leaders in automated retail and we’ve got a deep history and consumers and retailers are really looking for self-service solutions.