Call Center customer perspective
So the idea of having to pay long distance charges to get the “free” support from a company seems bad? How about waiting in a queue while they get around to answering the call because the call center management, in the interest of “continuous improvement” didn’t staff up correctly. They inaccurately believed that by saving a few dollars by lowering the number of people on the phone ready to take your call, that they somehow have saved the company money.
What they’ve actually succeeded in doing is making their customer based angry and shifting the cost of their decision over to the customer. How many customers wiat 20 minutes in a queue for an agent at a minimum of .05 per minute. Now a dollar isn’t a lot of money per customer but is more than enough to aggravate the customer into remembering the poor treatment. These one dollar tolls paid by customers are part of the reason why brand lyalty is no longer as important as previously understood. Customers remember these types of tricks the next time to purchase another product is being purchased.
Call Center Phone traffic:
There are two ways to manage phone traffic in a call center environment. The first is based on LOSS. This plan is based on unsuccessful attempts to get into a call center by the customer. This is based on a different ERLANG model but the result is to plan for a certain number of customer that could be expected to get a ‘busy signal. .
The most popular traffic management modeling is based on a delay or queue system. Here’s unsuccessful calls are placed on HOLD or in a queue while waiting for resources to become available. When customers call into a call center and all agents are busy, they’re placed into a queue waiting for someone to become available to answer their call. This is usually fine as long as a customer isn’t paying for the call. Many times however, companies have moved away from support call centers toll free numbers to requiring customers to pay long distance charges for the privilege of gaining support for a poor performing product.
Call Center Staffing and training:
By using a few simple observation rules, some data and a simulation model software program, it’s possible to determine the ideal level of training. As we know, training has a measurable cost while the benefits of that training are much more subtle.
By measuring the benefit of training through the use of a pilot project or Design of Experiments, it’s possible to gain insight into the benefits received by better trained employees. We’re not talking here about the benefits or perceived benefits to the employees, rather the direct financial benefits that accrue to the company when better trained agents are on the telephone taking calls.