Outsource This! U.S. Cellular Takes Home-Grown
Approach To Customer Care
Telephony
July 11, 2005
By Vince Vittore

Inside the cavernous building just off Illinois
Route 53 in Bolingbrook, you occasionally can
hear echoes. In the middle of a space that looks
big enough to land a plane, U.S. Cellular is
germinating what CEO John "Jack" Rooney says is
the call center of the future.

Opened in May, the place from all outside
appearances could pass as any modern call center.
But take a deeper look and listen into the rooms
that snake around the central core of the
facility, and it becomes immediately apparent
that this is not just any warehouse for customer
service representatives (CSRs), or "associates"
in U.S. Cellular parlance. Entering into one room
where about 15 soon-to-be customer care reps are
in the middle of a four-week training regime,
Rooney casually tosses out the phrase "customers
expect it." Almost immediately and in unison, the
class thunders back a room-rattling "And we
deliver!"

This place is different all right. From the mere
fact that U.S. Cellular, which is majority owned
by TDS Telecom, continues to expand customers
service operations in the U.S. to the design, the
call center is a reflection of what Rooney wants
the world to think of the carrier. Unable to play
on the same level as the large national carriers
when it comes to net additions, U.S. Cellular has
for the past several years - coinciding with
Rooney's arrival from the former Ameritech
Cellular - measured itself more on customer
service metrics than on the numbers that pop eye
balls on Wall Street. At the end of the first
quarter, the company reported a churn rate of
1.5%, which is one of the lowest in the industry.

"Customer care is a core competency," Rooney
said. "It's not just that we have to provide
customer service; we want to provide customer
service."

That kind of talk borders on heresy in some
quarters of the industry. For most of the largest
wireless carriers, call centers are something
that can easily be outsourced. Why staff an
operation with 400 or so highly paid Americans in
a facility in New Jersey when you can do it for
less than half the cost in India or China? For
Rooney, the answer is simple: Saving a couple
bucks on customer service ends up being more
expensive if the people answering the phones
don't share the same geography and cultural
mores. For wireless carriers that may be getting
calls about dropped calls in specific locations,
it's even more important.

"There is no way I want to send customer care
call to Pakistan, India, Ireland or China," he
said. "If someone calls and says, 'I keep getting
a drop at State and Madison,' how is that person
going to know that State and Madison is in
Chicago and not Minneapolis?"

U.S. Cellular, in fact, has taken the local
approach to almost an extreme. The Bolingbrook
center is the most modern customer care center
for a carrier that covers 150 markets but
certainly not its only one. The other facilities
are in Knoxville, Tenn; Waukasha, Wis.; Cedar
Rapids, Iowa; Tulsa, Okla.; and Medford, Ore.

Though housing only around one-quarter of its
capacity, Bolingbrook is likely to serve as a
model for all the other locations. "Opening a new
call center isn't that special, but this is the
one we want to hold up as the gold standard,"
Rooney said.

Take the design of the facility, which ironically
was originally built by Sprint PCS as a customer
care location. Like most call centers, it's
largely open. But instead of lining the outside
walls with offices, the call center's manager
sits in an open-top office surrounded by glass
walls. In the office, one gets the true meaning
of "living in the fish bowl." It's intentional,
according to Rooney.

"We found that the associates like to know where
their leadership is," he said. "We made it so
there's no place for the leaders to hide. If you
give them privacy, they tend to use it, and call
centers are hives of speculation."

Not that the CSRs have many places to hide, nor
are their results easy to conceal. Posted high,
near the entrance of the Bolingbrook call center,
is a live ticker that tracks the number of CSRs
available for each of the three general product
categories (post-paid, data and prepaid), the
number of calls waiting in cue and the longest
time that a customer has been on hold.

Unlike most other call centers, U.S. Cellular
doesn't measure CSRs on how fast they can get
people off the phone or the number of calls they
can process. The company looks instead at the
percentage of times a customer care rep can
resolve a subscriber's issue on the first call.

The carrier tries to limit the number of CSRs in
each center to less than 400, in part because
Rooney believes that any more and "a bunker
mentality" begins to develop. There also is a
competition between U.S. Cellular customer care
facilities with the top two or three getting
bonuses to distribute.

"We're constantly rewarding associates," Rooney
said. "We know what the appropriate call measures
are, but we don't measure against them. If you're
being held to rigid metrics, you're not providing
service. We don't want them on the phone for 25
minutes trying to solve world hunger, but we're
not measuring them by how many calls they handle.
That goes against their nature."

Besides treating associates differently, U.S.
Cellular also doesn't just take anyone that walks
through the door and throw them behind a console.
Associates go through a four-week training
regiment followed by a period of "nesting," in
which they are watched closely on the floor.
Though early in the process, the company is now
bringing in "coaches" from other call centers who
will be instructing associates in their
locations. Additionally, employees in the
company's Chicago headquarters go through their
own education dubbed "Camp Dynamic Organization,"
which includes repeating the "And we deliver"
mantra.

"It's really the culture of the business," said Rooney.

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