ICMI's Customer Management Insight - December 2007 - (Page 48) EXPERT’S ANGLE Start off 2008 on the right foot! Essential Skills and Knowledge for Effective Call Center Management coming to a city near you! You’ll Learn To · · · · Create a planning culture Meet service levels consistently Set the right performance objectives Improve quality and efficiency unnecessary service calls, escalation of calls and complaints to higher management, callbacks, etc., all of which drive service level down further. In short, poor service level tends to be a vicious cycle. There is no such thing as quality versus service level — at least not in the long term. Service level and quality go hand in hand. 4. When Service Level Improves, “Productivity” Declines Here’s a sobering immutable law, from a productivity aspect: As service level goes up, agents handle fewer calls each. Put another way, as service level goes up, occupancy goes down. The better the service level, the more time your agents will spend waiting for calls to arrive. Occupancy is the percent of time during a half-hour that those agents who are on the phones are in talk time and after-call work. The inverse of occupancy is the time agents spend waiting for inbound calls, plugged in and available. Looking again at the table, a service level at around 80 percent of calls answered in 20 seconds (82/20 in the example) equates to an occupancy of 86 percent. If service level drops to 24 percent answered in 20 seconds, occupancy goes up to 97 percent. The relationship between occupancy and service level is often misunderstood. The incorrect logic goes something like, “If agents really dig in, service level will go up and so will their occupancy.” In reality, if occupancy is high, it is because the agents on the phones are taking one call after another and another, with little or no wait between calls. Calls are stacked up in queue and service level is low. In the worst | DECEMBER 2007 48 Unlock the secrets of the best call centers at the industry’s highest-rated seminar-attended by more managers than any other call center seminar! Upcoming Dates: December 11-12, 2007 January January 15-16, 2008 January 22-23, 2008 January February 5-6, 2008 February March 4-5, 2008 March 11-12, 2008 March 25-26, 2008 April 1 2 2008 1-2, Ponte Vedra, FL (Seminar Symposium) Ponte Vedra, Symposium) Atlanta, GA Phoenix, AZ Las Vegas, NV Vegas, Baltimore, MD Baltimore, San Francisco, CA Francisco, Seattle, WA Seattle, Boston, MA Boston WE’LL COME TO YOU! WE’LL COME TO YOU! ! Have more than five people to train? Bring this seminar onsite an experience t and nd practices Contact Cindy ces ntact the benefits of proven practic tailored to your environment. Con Smith at 410-414-9962 or cindys@icmi.com to bring this seminar onsite. cin ndys@icmi.com r onsite. For more For more information or to register o register please call 1-8 1-800-672-6177 800-672-6177 www.icmi.com/ www.icmi.com/essential /essential to slip, agents often try to clear the queue. If this proves to be a futile effort, they eventually settle in for the long term. Call-handling time goes up. If this condition continues, employee morale will sink. Turnover and burnout go up. So do recruitment and training costs. Somewhere along the way, quality begins to suffer, which has a icmi’s insight further negative impact on service level. When agents are overworked due to constant congestion in the queue, they become less accurate and can become less “customerfriendly.” Callers are telling them in no uncertain terms about the tough time they had getting through. And agents make more mistakes. These mistakes contribute to repeat calls, www.icmi.com http://www.icmi.com/essential http://www.icmi.com
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