Why leave them waiting?
If your customers are phoning you, texting you, mailing you and some have even gone to the lengths of visiting you and are standing there looking at you, then it is a fair bet that they want something.
Rule 1 is to prioritise the work, but prioritising it isn’t enough, you can prioritise it all you like and still have a whacking great big queue.
Queues are bad
If you have a whacking great big queue, one of only two things will happen:
- Your customers will call you again, and again and again, and your queue will get bigger and bigger and bigger, and your customers will get angrier and angrier and angrier and it will cost you more and more and more to fix it — If you haven’t picked up the subtext, this is bad.
- Your customers will take their business elsewhere — This is worse
Kill the queue
And then — better still — find out what caused it so it doesn’t happen again. But please don’t ignore it, that is the management equivalent of sticking your head in the sand.
Rule 2: Don’t make your customers wait
If all else fails, get your wallet out. This is what overtime was invented for. Just do it quick, unless of course you like paying for overtime and have a very big wallet.
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Image by Blake Imeson
I wonder if Rule 2a might be to conduct a root cause analysis. Or perhaps it’s a rule between 1 and 2.
Annette :-)
It is a sin to go jumping ahead on with the rules Annette.
It is up there with telling others what happened in the last episode of Breaking Bad :)
LOL!
James,
Coordination and communication across an organisation is key to managing and anticipating queues. I wonder if many queues are not caused by marketing and ops not talking to each other, where marketing launches a campaign that is very successful but ops don’t know about it and are unprepared.
Adrian
Hello James,
I find myself in agreement with you. Here’s where I am at with this:
1. Drive out the unnecessary (not valuable) demand by cutting out all the failures (on the part of the organisation) to do what is right by the customer. Time after time, looking at demand, I have come to the conclusion that the call-centres are being asked to clean up the mess created by folks in other functions.
2. How about reducing the queues by capturing the customer’s contact number and calling the customer back? Not all incoming calls have to be dealt with there and then. In some instances customers are happy to be called back – as long as they are called back within an acceptable time.
All the best,
maz
I think you hit on the reason why I am fully employed Maz (and likely to remain so)
I have come to the conclusion that the call-centres are being asked to clean up the mess created by folks in other functions.
Queues may be bad, but not as bad as you think.
If a company has a strong brand identity built up through its marketing efforts, customer experiences, its emotional impact and how it places itself in the culture. It’s a mark of quality and status. In other words, it’s the reason one company succeeds and another company fails.
Think of Apple. Why do people happily queue for days for the latest upgrade to a mobile phone? Apple have tapped into consumer’s emotions. They have a consistent brand concept which helps consumers to be part of what the brand stands for in the midst of their competitors.
So waiting isn’t all that bad, if its for a reason.
Interesting perspective Rob, though maybe Apple is the exception that proves the rule? — Sorry that was dreadful