TMCnews Featured Article
December 29, 2011
A Tale of Two Call Center Operations
By Susan J. Campbell, TMCnet Contributing Editor
The term ‘call center’ tends to conjure up specific pictures in the minds of individuals, visions of skilled agents occupying spaces within a cubicle, headset in place. While this may be the standard visual approach, what is happening in performance measurement within call center operations can vary significantly from one call center to the next.
This Knowlagent blog post shares the tale of two call center operations, both with similar employees, structure and target customers. For the manager in call center A, the traditionalist approach means he is focused on basic metrics, including customer satisfaction, average handle time, time spent in the queue and more.
This manager is often dissatisfied with agent performance and each time he focused on one metric improvement in his call center operations, the others seemed to change in the opposite – and negative – direction. He emerged frustrated, unsure what to do as every attempt to increase metric-based performance resulted in the same negative outcome.
For call center manager B, the same problems occurred within her call center operations. The difference here is she sat down to put together a plan. The first step was to shadow her best agents for two days, gathering valuable information in the process. She did not coach, critique or interfere. She simply listened and learned, which helped to form an idea.
Why did she spend the time observing her agents when she could have accomplished so many other things within those two days? Basically, her two key metrics included customer satisfaction and average handle time. She kept identifying a problem every time she examined the summary of metrics. Her best agents were periodically showing up on out of compliance lists in terms of skill, customer satisfaction and overall ability.
When pressed as to why, her top agents finally admitted to doing whatever necessary to ensure the caller was satisfied each and every time. It doesn’t matter to the agent how long it takes, as long as the customer ends the call happy. She wanted to observe this phenomenon for herself, which prompted her to observe calls for two days.
In this process of monitoring her call center operations, the manager realized that the two metrics she pays most attention to may actually be in conflict with each other during certain calls. She changed her approach by making customer satisfaction the primary goal and the leading metric within the center. Average handle time was still tracked, but agents paid more attention to customer satisfaction overall.
Call manager B realized what call manager A could not – pushing metrics that conflict with customer satisfaction can leave call center operations consistently missing the marks on paper. When one element is the focus, all others will naturally fall into place.
Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. To read more of Susan’s articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Jamie Epstein
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