ICMI's Customer Management Insight - December 2007 - (Page 45) EXPERT’S ANGLE What Managers in Other Departments Should Know About Incoming Call Centers BY BRAD CLEVELAND To create companywide support for your center, start by The days of the call center as an island unto itself are fast fading. As call centers have grown in importance, call center mangers are increasingly working shoulder to shoulder with colleagues in other departments and with upper-level managers to develop strategy and integrated processes. An important prerequisite to getting good support from managers outside the call center is that they have a basic understanding of how incoming call centers operate. But providing the right level of awareness is a balancing act. On one hand, they don’t have the time or inclination to become call center managers themselves. On the other, decisions based on little more than “common sense” can damage the call center and the organization it supports. SEVEN TOPICS TO SHARE building a basic awareness of how call centers operate. Theorem One of incoming call center management is, “Calls Bunch Up!” Fortunately, in virtually any inbound call center, calls arrive in predictable repeating patterns by time of day, day of week and season of year. With appropriate interdepartmental coordination and judgment — e.g., What’s the marketing department doing? How is the call mix changing? — forecasts for the aggregate workload can be quite accurate, down to specific half-hour increments. But even with near perfect forecasts, the actual moment-tomoment arrival of calls within the half-hour is a random phenomenon — the luck of the draw (see Figure, below). It is ultimately the result of countless decisions made by callers, based on a myriad of individual habits and motivations. It is simply not possible to plan for handling the workload in an incoming call center the way you would plan work in most other parts of the organization. There are two important implications to random call arrival. First, base staffing must be calculated by using either a queuing formula that takes random call arrival into account (e.g., the widely used Erlang C formula, developed by A.K. Erlang in 1917) or a computer simulation program that accurately models this phenomenon. Traditional approaches to staff planning, common in other areas of the organization, almost always lead to insufficient staffing in the call center. And, unfortunately, it’s not just staffing that will be off. Because staffing impacts the load the network and systems must carry, miscalculated staff inherently leads to miscalculated system and network resources. What should they know? The seven points to follow provide an important starting place. These are issues that, as a minimum, key outside managers should understand. Together, they form an important overall message: inbound call centers operate in a unique environment. The Effect of Random Call Arrival: Calls Bunch Up! 6 5 4 Calls 3 2 1 0 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 Minutes After The Hour Calling Pattern A Calling Pattern B | DECEMBER 2007 45 1. Calls “Bunch Up” Take a look at a monitor or the readerboard on the wall. Watch the dynamics. In comes a call. Then one, two more… there’s another. And, two, three, four more… icmi’s insight 30 www.icmi.com http://www.icmi.com
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