Call Center Management Featured Article
Time Constraints Create Tension at Veterans' Call Center
Veterans are getting the shaft once again according to call center workers in Topeka, KS. A group of around a dozen call center employees staged a protest earlier this month outside the Topeka call center campus for Colmery-O’Neil VA Medical Center. The workers claim that call center managers have placed time limits on the calls they receive, cutting short veterans who call the center in need of assistance.
The time limits have been an ongoing issue for the approximately 400 call center workers, who are employed through the Veterans Health Administration Member Services. But the impact on veterans in need recently came to a head after workers received a letter threatening them with termination if they allow calls to exceed the prescribed time limit of five minutes and 57 seconds.
Veterans dial the call center through a hotline number serving the Medical Center, seeking assistance with a variety of issues including billing, prescription refills, eligibility and enrollments. Call center employees maintain that many veterans need additional information and time to get their issues properly addressed, and also pointed out that retrieving baseline information from the call center’s computer system can take up to two minutes.
This isn’t the first time call center management practices for veterans have come under fire. An investigation by the Veterans Health Administration’s inspector general a few years ago revealed that a portion of calls to the Veterans Crisis Line (VCL) were being routed to backup crisis centers and in some cases were answered by voicemail. The VCL is a suicide prevention hotline and obviously response times and call quality assurance can be a matter of life or death. After a rash of bad press following the investigation, the VA responded by opening a third VCL call center, interestingly, in Topeka, to better handle call volumes.
In response to call center employee complaints about time constraints, the VA stressed that veterans come first in all their management decision-making. "In order to provide veterans and their families with fast and accurate information through our call centers, we set high performance standards and expect our employees to achieve them," Stacy Rine, executive assistant for Veterans Health Administration Member Services, told the Topeka Capital-Journal. "We make no apology for that, because at VA, service to veterans must come first in all that we do."
Melissa Jarboe, executive director and founder of the Military Veteran Project, believes the time constraints are impractical and prevent call center workers from getting their jobs done. "I just don't know how productive you can be or how much assistance you can actually render in that time frame," she said.
The solution, and compromise, may lie in call center metrics that show how much time is actually needed to resolve an average call. By analyzing the average time needed to complete requests and satisfactorily resolve issues, call center managers can set reasonable time constraints and goals for agents that reflect callers’ needs along with the time required to complete specific tasks.
Edited by Maurice Nagle