Running a customer service centre is hard It is a constant battle, trying to minimise cost and maximise customer service. But we all know the game, we get employed to play it: Squeeze your head count down as far as you dare Ride the variations in customer demand Manage the backlog Set up a turnaround […]
The “A” Team
The escalation What do you do when things get out of hand? When your staff are bombarded with queries that they can’t handle? There are two lines of thought… Management Model 1: First split your staff into two pools, the experienced people who know what they are doing and the less so (who presumably don’t) […]
Payback Time
Maz Iqbal told me a great story this week…. Imagine you were an employee of a large business. You worked in a factory, or a shop, or a warehouse or maybe you were an agent in a call centre. A big call centre where they measured your every move: how long your calls were how long […]
Call Centre Metrics the Zappos Way
This is a guest post by Ashley Furness Zappos is renowned worldwide as a standout performer in customer service, partially for the e-retailer’s unique approach to customer performance and productivity management. Zappos invests in its call centres, seeing them not as cost, but as an opportunity to market. Recently, I sat down with the company’s […]
Call Centre Forecasts: Don’t Waste Your Time
Every call centre has them; bad days. Call volumes are higher than expected and staff don’t show up. The result is a mile long queue of frustrated customers; a group of deeply fed up agents and a set of supervisors running around futilely trying to “manage” the situation. A bad day. The post-mortem If the […]