interesting but controversial idea

[remy]

Hi,

I just thought of the following and I'm very interested to find out what your opinion is on the matter. Instead of serving customers based on the first in first out principle, I would like to propose the first in last out principle in periods that are very busy or for call centers that are always busy.

Imagine customers coming in at a certain very busy period, the waiting time for the next customer coming in exceeds the servicelevel norm (longer than 30 seconds f.e.). Instead of helping this customer it could be an idea helping another customer that just came in.............

This will result (I think) in the following:
-Servicelevel will rise, more cusomers are answered within 30 seconds
-ASA, I'm not quite sure of this all depends on whether the clients will wait indefinately or will hang up the phone, if so ASA wil drop, if clients will wait ASA will rise
-Abandoned calls will definately rise
-Customer satisfaction will depend on the customer, the ones that are waiting will not be happy, however the ones that will be answered quickly (last in) will have the idea that the call center isn't busy at all.

Have a ball thinking about it I'm sure we will

[dlexmond]

This is probably a bad idea . . . Effectively it means (somewhat depending on how many calls you receive per minute and what your resolution time is) that once you are in queue you will not get out without hanging up. Whether your call gets serviced or not becomes a random probability. I think that even predictable poor service is better than unpredictable service, good or bad.

It would be more honest and more cost effective to allow calls into the queue only when you have an agent available, and to busy out the remainder, or tell the next customer to call back another time. At least you'll save yourself some connection cost if you pay for the call.

[Steve Turton]

Yikes.... not for me or my Centre.

You should consider a Virtual Call Centre as a 'partner' to your existing centre.

Through reports and experience, I'm sure you know your most often occuring peak periods. Program your queues to overflow to the Virtual Call Centre, which will then pass calls equally to part-time home agents..... or to other less busy employees internally (who have complete control whether they are ready or not to receive calls, but this is a management decision/process). The VCC can be used when needed most.

I find that most Call Centre Managers are not familiar with the benefits of Virtual Call Centres (not outsourced centres, there is a big difference).

Look into it ..... it's a shame, but the VCC is the best kept secret in the CC industry.

Steve

[remy]

Hi Steve

All the things you metion we already have. The thing is I want to trigger you all into thinking about stuff like this. Of course I realize that by reversing waiting standards your call center won't get any better...even worse. However if you just look at pure figures you can make your call center perform better this way......
We sure won't be implementing it. Hope that someone over there has done some simulation on this topic just to see what the results are

[JoeB]

This sounds to me like a case of managing a call center by the numbers instead of by quality of service...

I estimate that using LIFO instead of FIFO will have an unproportional negative impact on ASA, abandonment and customer satisfaction. In other words, you will make many more unhappy customers than before implementing this method. It is not going to be an "even exchange" of few satified customer by few irate customers...

I recommend call centers that run into unmanageable loads, to reconsider their service level and other performance goals. I find that often these numbers were set arbitrarily (sometimes many years ago) and may be too aggressive to the point that the call center works extremely hard to meet requirements that customers do not really require. Two articles to argue this point:

www.DiagnosticStrategies.com/SL_elasticity.htm
www.DiagnosticStrategies.com/abandonment.htm


Joe

[dlexmond]

JoeB,

I went to the links that you refer to in your response, and read some of it. I came away depressed: are we now defining customer service by the outer limits of what customers will tolerate? Whatever happened to 'exceeding expectations', 'dazzling the customer', and so on. We as call center professionals are reinforcing the poor image that call centers have in the customer perception, and joining the race to the bottom is not the right way to go about improving service . . .

I came across an article the other day that is instructive - hope you get a chance to read it if you have not already.

http://www.callcentermagazine.com/sh...171&classroom=

[JoeB]

Dlexmond,

Thanks for your comments. I think that you might have missed the message in these articles. They do not advocate finding how far you can push your customer’s patience or to suggest that service quality is unimportant. The message is that we often don’t know enough about or customer’s needs and behavior and use performance metrics blindly and therefore may be investing our efforts improving areas that our customers do not care about. One example is service level – I find call centers targeting service levels that they inherited or read about on the Web (e.g. the mythical 80/20) and work hard to reach it, but find that their customers are simply unimpressed because this wasn’t a critical factor in their minds; instead the customers wanted higher first call resolution rate, and were willing to wait longer in the queue. There is no sense falling on our sword if nobody cares…

The articles suggest that each situation is different, and that both the business and the customers have drivers, sometimes conflicting, that have to be considered. From the customerÂ’s perspective, we need to find their needs and expectation, and also how flexible qnd willing to cooperate, especially at crunch times. This is not to say that we shouldnÂ’t strive to exceed their expectationsÂ…

But there is another side to the coin, which is the business perspective. We must set performance targets that support our business objectives, and recognize that investing in improving areas that do not contribute to the business’ financial goals is not a good business practice and can be detrimental. To be clear, I do not mean that every goal must have a direct and immediate impact. Customer satisfaction and company (and call center) image are important, because they contribute to customer loyalty. But savvy businesses also recognize how far this should go, and, for example, when to let “bad” customers go.

The way to resolve this seeming conflict is to quantify the value (cost vs. outcome) of the call center activity and derive business-specific metrics. Then use a Balanced Scorecard or a similar approach to balance the impact (positive or negative) and the cost (income or expense) to create a consistent and balanced framework to set performance targets and make decisions. The balanced scorecard approach is useful in the grander business scheme as well as at the individual call center, to balance quality of service with responsiveness and not burnout our staff in the processÂ…

I hope this helpsÂ….

[dlexmond]

JoeB,
I'd like to take this conversation further, but maybe offline is better. If you send me your email address I'll get back w/ you.

dlexmond@callcpm.com

[gsimon]

Bad idea - this means that many of your incoming calls will be dropped during busy hours - you should probably examine your service levels again or find additional ways to provide self service.
Let me offer another aspect which takes into consideration the value of your customer and your ROI. The basic assumption is that you always want to give priority and the best service to your most valuable and profitable customers (namely, customers who spend LOTS of money on your company products). This is only logical since losing such customers due to bad expected service level. What you need to do is divide your customer database according to value, and 'teach' your call center to ID and prioritize these customers in the queue (for example, ID the dialed phone number, have them enter their customer ID etc.). Not all call center software have this feature, but many of them do.
A cheaper way would be to create a separate queue for valueable customers with special agents to take care of them (the number of calls should justify that).

[erangel]

Remy,
I see your point, but have you tried it , and driven the results expected?

I have to agree with the rest that your abnd calls numbers are going to raise, and that leaves a bad taste on our customers, that when they call back, are going to be upset.

We had once a problem on increase incoming calls due to a promotion, and what we did was dedicated couple of numbers to just take information for calls. It was not the best idea, but helped us to take down the calls that were waiting, and lower our abnd calls.

[Gina]

I have to agree with JoeB. If we are going to manage our call centers by numbers only - we may as well hang up our headsets right now. Service Level =/= Quality Customer Service. I also agree that for the most part 80/20 is simply "accepted" as the industry standard - and in reality no one really knows if it means anything to any of our customers.