P>The William Olsten Center, which is supported financially by the Olsten Corporation looks at a number of workforce issues from time to time. Lately it's taken a look at call centers and their management practices.
After reviewing 424 call center managers representing North American companies, the center has the following to say.
Seventy-three percent of the call centers maintain an interactive Web site and 43% maintain automated voice response units. Those technologies combined help reduce the volume coming into the call centers. Fifty-nine percent of the managers report at least a 10% decrease in overall call volume as a result of Web pages and voice response units.
The study also looked at how the overall performance of call center employees is measured.
- Customer service skills (75%)
- Call handle time (64%)
- Accuracy of answers (56%)
- Number of calls taken per shift (56%)
- Technical skills (47%)
- Ratings on caller satisfaction surveys (42%)
- Sales volume (27%)
WALLY'S COMMENT ... Take a look at those performance measurement items for a second. They divide cleanly into things which are countable and automatically generated - call handling time, number of calls taken per shift, and sales volume, and other softer measures.
What I've noticed wandering around businesses for the last 30 years or so is this. If you give a bunch of managers some measures that look like they're good hard numbers and a bunch of measures that seem like soft subjective stuff, they'll almost always pick the numbers as the way to make their judgements. In other words, the automatically generated statistical stuff on number of calls handled and average time per call will get weighted more heavily than the stuff that requires the managers subjective judgement.
When I went to school, we were told that we weren't supposed to make subjective judgements, but that's just not possible in real life and it's not possible in measurements like this. The danger is that because we find it more difficult to make subjective judgements, we fall back on statistical measures that may put the emphasis in the wrong place. The fact is, that a call center representative may not be more effective if he or she takes more calls or handles them more rapidly. In many environments they will be more valuable if their average time per call is longer. It takes time to listen effectively to find what problems are in many situations and it takes time to explain difficult, complex, or unfamiliar solutions.
In call centers, like everywhere else, you have to be very careful to assure that your payment and rewards systems reward the behavior that is most valuable to you, rather than that which is the easiest to measure.
This article originally appeared in Wally Bock's Briefing Memo newsletter in May 1999.
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