How to handle variation in a call center environment:
Ok, now that we̢۪ve established the fact of variation, what is a good manager to do about it? Managers should first to understand and act on the causes of variation in agent performance. Beating the employees until morale is improved will NOT succeed. Neither will those taudry games, prizes and other attempts at making the call center a good place to work.
Managers should enlist agents creativity and skills and direct it toward contributing and improving themselves rather than working to develop methods to cheat the system By changing the focus from managing the system processes instead of the people, there is a certain cooperation that is developed. We should manage cattle and lead people the saying goes.
Management should focus on work flows, processes, procedures to make things run easier and with fewer defects or problems. This also provides management with the opportunity to be value add from the customers perspective and removes the typical adversarial role between managers and staff. This has a profound effect on performance and morale. Try it and you may never need to put on that ridiculous costume of a giant anteater again!
in transforming a call centre, management’s focus changes from managing people - ensuring that people do as they ’should’ - to managing the system - understanding and improving how well the work flows, end to end, to fulfill the customers’ expressed value. It is a fundamentally different role for management and it has a profound impact on both performance and morale.
In call centers these ideas translate into the principle of designing against demand. The first and often major opportunity to improve performance comes from turning off the causes of failure demand. This can often mean an increase in productivity of more than 100%.
The second opportunity to improve performance comes from the ability to design exemplary performance against ‘value demand’. To put it at its simplest, if a customer makes a demand on a system and the system recognizes and does what matters to that customer, service improves and costs fall. It is an idea that traditional managers find counter-intuitive, as they have always equated service with cost.
Present the control charts to your agents. Say: “If we accept the theory of variation, these charts tell us we can expect to do between here (lower limit) and here (higher limit) and all results between these limits would be normal.” To prepare yourself for doing this read the articles on call centre issues:
Call Center Staffing Models and Erlang C
A Danish telephone engineer AK Erlang has been credited with development of the mathematical model and formulas to model call center production and attempt to hit the identified “service level.â€Â Actually, the Erlang C model calculates the potential or expected number of unsuccessful calls that can be expected.
It̢۪s no longer necessary for call center management to do the actual calculations however. Over time, the calculation has developed into a series of tables to make using the formulas much easier. The problem however is that the formula, although considered acceptable by in the box thinking call center management, shouldn̢۪t be used as the final determining factor of staffing levels.
Although considered by many to be the basis of good call center service level and staffing designs, the Erlang models are limited by the variability inherent in a call center environment.
Call Center Service Center
Call Centers have become the hub of a service center for many businesses. The call center acts as a contact center for customers. Some call centers also handle mail. all types of postal contact, telephone, email and online forms submissions. All these types of contacts are handled through a full service call or contact center.
Call centers are typically in low cost areas of the country or overseas. Although many are ourside the us borders, these are typically limited to certain contact types. These types of contact are email and telephone.