How bad can a day in a service centre get?
Let’s be honest, nobody is going to die, not unless they are spectacularly unlucky and trip over a trailing cable
What does a bad day look like?
A bad day looks like this:
Your colleagues in Marketing or IT or Pricing do something stupid to a lot of customers. Maybe they send them all the wrong bill, or they switch off the internet, or they publish an offer that is to good to be true and then…
- Your customers all phone you at once (the queue grows)
- You don’t answer all their calls, you didn’t staff for them, so they phone you back the following day, along with all the other people who were going to phone you that day (the queue grows)
- When a customer eventually gets through to an agent they complain about the wait, vociferously. And whilst they are busy complaining… (the queue grows)
- Your agents get fed up with all this complaining, it is hardly their fault, so they have an extra cigarette at break time (the queue grows)
- Your boss complains about all the overtime you are paying for and cancels it (the queue grows)
- To work the work faster, you put some stuff on hold, the less time sensitive stuff. But your customers notice that you haven’t done what you said you were going to do, and … (the queue grows)
- Customers get creative, because they can’t get through they write a letter, or an e-mail, or try live chat, or all three. One call becomes two e-mails. But nobody is answering letters or e-mail, and the live chat has been suspended, they are all on the phones (the queue grows)
- After a week or so, your agents feel a bit low, faced with an endless stream of complaints, no breaks between calls and no chance of overtime they decide to pull a “sicky” and don’t show (the queue grows)
OK, nobody tripped over that cable, but it is horrible.
How do you stop the queue?
Short term, here and now, lay on a lot of staff very quickly, hire temps, ship people in from outside, get your managers to take calls, pay for lots of overtime, anything and everything you can think of, you only need to kill the queue once. Yes it will cost you money, but if you don’t spend the money now, you will have to spend it later. One way or another you are going to pay
Medium term, build the flexibility, cross train your staff, simplify your processes, work through a contingency plan, decide what you are going to do next time the queue grows
Long term, make sure nobody does anything stupid in the first place. (just a thought)
Read another opinion
Image by Looking Glass
Hello James
If there is one thing I have learned in organisational it is that the people who generate work will continue to do so for as long as they do not have to deal with / pay for the work they have created.
The most effective solution is to minimise the lack of care (about consequences falling on others, externalities in economics jargon) by applying penalties that recover the costs and charge penalties. I once inherited an overworked and demoralised web dev team. The root cause was the nature of the demand placed by various marketing. I designed a new game, new rules and explained them. And I introduced penalties for ‘lack of care’ that meant that marketing teams were charged cost plus 50%. They yelled and screamed. And they did not get their way because the new game, the new rules had been agreed with the CEO and the CFO.
Do you have a similar arrangement in place in your organisation?
Maz