For a little over three years, information technology companies serving the service industry have been advocating call back technology.  Before you rush out and spend unnecessary capital, consider what you are actually getting – something to add costs to your already poor work design.

So, let’s take a look at what traditional thinkers say about call back technology.

From call center helper and their article titled, Everything you Need to Know about Call Back Technology.

• High abandon call rate – for example, 10%+
• Low abandon rate – for example 3%, with overstaffing for peaks
• New business call centre, where you don’t want to lose a single call
• High agent attrition
• Staffing difficulties and resultant problems managing call flow, for instance, during unpopular shifts
• Customer satisfaction issues
• Headcount restrictions and/or space constraints
• Training and agent deployment

These are the same management problems that every contact center faces, so why not call back technology?

Customers are calling when it is convenient for them and your organization is calling back when it is convenient for you.  Although customers don’t have to wait on the phone, they still have to wait.  We are solving the wrong problem.

Contact centers are concerned about the wrong things.  The problem they have is their thinking about the design and management of work.  Better designed work through better thinking can increase both capacity and capability.  Failure demand (the failure to do something or do something right for a customer) is the product of poor thinking and work design.

Failure demand runs upwards of 75% of all calls and sometimes more in contact centers.  Instead of treating all calls as work to be done, why not design a system (with better thinking) that doesn’t create all these calls in the first place?

The real beauty of redesigning the system is that it gives you capacity to take calls and provide good customer service.  Even better, it costs less . . . a lot less.  Want to learn more?  Download the Transforming Call Centers guide.

Come hear me speak at the CAST conference in San Jose, California!  Re-Thinking Management . . . Re-Thinking . . . IT!

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com.  Learn more about the The 95 Method for service organizations.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.