Best Place for a Reality Check: The Call Center
- May 7th, 2009
- Posted in Systems Thinking and Contact Centers
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Command and control thinking has to manifest itself somewhere and no where is it more prevalent than the call center. The call center has the worse set-up. Let’s look at the typical call center:
- Productivity charts for team, unit and individual performance (complete with targets)
- Display monitors with number of calls in the queue (and other worthless information)
- Coaching sessions for those that don’t “hit the numbers”
- 4-6 weeks of training on phone calls one will never get
You get the idea. I have the greatest empathy for folks who work in the call center environment. I have heard them be called “lazy, stupid, unmotivated” and the like. But inevitably (as always) those call center workers are the most savvy, innovative and knowledgeable workers in any organization. Unfortunately, they are rarely tapped as sources of knowledge. Worse, they sometimes put that savvy and innovation to cheat the system at the expense of the customer. Command and control thinkers this means that we need more inspection and monitoring (at great cost), but these call center workers are always one step ahead and the game with its accompanying waste continues and escalates.
Call center management is playing an expensive and losing game when taking a command and control approach. The call center worker is a tremendous source of information for any organization and if they realized this they would rarely outsource. Workers can help tell us what is broken with the system and changes in demand from customers, but call center management must be willing to dump the productivity mindset.
Productivity measures (and targets that accompany them) like call volumes and handling time may be useful for resource planning, but tell us nothing about how to optimize the system. Yet, the call center is rife with information to improve any organization. If we engage the worker to study customer demand (type and frequency) they can share information management could never have thought of unless they spent time there (which I suggest). Workers can also help call center management with whether that demand is a value (calls we want) or failure demand (problems, follow-ups, etc.) My Vanguard partners and I have found that failure demand runs from 25 – 75% of all call center calls. Instead of pounding the desk for faster handling time, we can reduce the number of inbound calls by reducing failure demand and learning better ways to handle value demand.
The call center worker is engaged to get the information and can tell us if demand changes more capably than some report a manager gets way too late. This information provides crucial information to managers to fix the service system or product and maintains a perpetual feedback loop changing culture, achieving business improvement and corporate cost reduction. All for changing the way we think.
Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public). He is focused on exposing the problems of command and control thinking and the termination of bad service through application of new thinking . . . systems thinking. Download free Understanding Your Organization as a System and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at [email protected]. Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbitt.
I completely agree with the idea that the insights of call center employees are not leveraged adequately. There are some statements/suggestions that I differ on. Specifically, 1) The notion that if organizations leveraged call center agents’ knowledge appropriately, they would never outsource. The underlying assumption is that the organization has less control over outsourced processes. This is simply not true. The customer (outsourcing organization) always has control over the vendor. If management realizes that they can outsource call handling buy not customer intimacy, they will put appropriate feedback loops in place. In other words, outsourcing is not a barrier to customer intimacy – management mindset is. 2) The notion that 75% of the calls in an inbound call center are failure calls is indicated as an undesirable thing. Actually it is highly desirable and in fact the most optimal scenario for an organization is to drive this number to 100%. In other words, if all that the customer seeks is information, it should be available through self service channels such as online or IVR. The only times that it is desirable for the customers to talk to agents is when customer has a problem that the agents can help them resolve. Of course the task does not end there. The organization should perform root cause analysis, eliminate the cause of the problem and drive the contact ratio down.
Gauravi Pal: Thanks for your comment. Since this is a blog I didn’t go into depth on outsourcing, but if you read my other blogs you will find additional information. Here is one such link that explains in more detail my stand on outsourcing: http://blog.newsystemsthinking.com/blog/it-outsourcing-strategy/0/0/think-first-call-center-outsourcing In summary of my stance: The call center is part of the system, it is not a part to outsource a piece from the rest of the system. The only reason we do this is because technology allows it to happen, with out technology, no outsourcing. Control of the Vendor under a “contract” that requires time to come up with the contract (huge expense), teach the new vendor about the business (never easy), most cases teach the language or have to take classes to get rid of accents (if another country), measures have to be found for the SLAs, and turnover, etc. All costly items that companies never account for when they see a reduction in per head cost. This is command and control thinking at work lower the transaction price, but total costs go up. I can’t let you get away with #2. IVRs are loathed by customers and the poor use of them drives customers mad. The website is useful but a poor design can drive up failure demand (more unwanted calls). Ridding an organization of failure demand should occur before any talk of outsourcing, I rarely see this done and the waste is outsourced. People become too busy with the outsource contract and savings and not working on the system. This isn’t about a customer calling with a problem the agents can help resolve, this is about never getting the call in the first place. If the failure demand hits the call center it is too late, you have incurred the cost of unwanted calls. You are right the mindset of management needs to change, form the per transaction cost (productivity) mindset to a systems thinking one where we operate our organizations as systems. Lowering costs and improving service, outsourcing gives me neither.