Managing Accessibility
1 Nov, 2003
By: Brad ClevelandIn recent years, heightened customer expectations, the introduction of new contact channels, and the emergence of strategic initiatives focused on building customer loyalty have underscored the importance of call centers. In turn, call center processes, customer contact technologies, and the skills and knowledge requirements of call center personnel have developed significantly to meet evolving demands. These developments haven''t diminished—but rather have strengthened—a long-standing tenet of effective management: Get the right contacts to the right places at the right times.
Ensuring that the right contacts go to the right places at the right times—call it "accessibility"—is an essential prerequisite to effective strategy and efficient operations. In fact, accessibility is as important as ever, particularly in today''s fast-changing environment.
The following article outlines important principles of managing call center service levels. Making these principles part of both strategic and day-to-day operational decisions will ensure that the call center is prepared to deal with even more important matters—serving customers, building loyalty and contributing to the organization''s value.
Categorize contacts correctly. Without concrete objectives for call center accessibility, the answers to many important questions would be left to chance. For example: How long will customers have to wait in queue? What is the optimum level of staff and supporting resources? Are you prepared to handle the response to marketing campaigns? How busy are your agents going to be? What are your costs going to be? How do you compare to the competition?
Service level is often used in a general sense to refer to an organization''s responsiveness to customer contacts. When applied to resource calculations, however, service level has a specific definition: “X percent of all contacts answered in Y seconds” (for example, 90 percent of calls answered within 20 seconds). It is a concrete and stable objective for transactions that must be handled when they arrive, e.g., inbound phone calls or text chat. Response time, defined as "100 percent response within N minutes/hours/days" is the related objective for transactions that don''t have to be handled when they arrive, such as customer e-mail messages or faxes.
Two Major Categories of Inbound Contacts:
1. Those that must be handled when they arrive (e.g., inbound telephone calls). Performance objective: Service Level
2. Those that can be handled at a later time (e.g., customer e-mail). Performance objective: Response-Time
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Differentiating between service level and response time is essential because base staff calculations vary for these two major categories of contacts. Telling the two apart is usually straightforward—service level applies to contacts that must be handled when they arrive, while response time is for contacts that can be deferred.
Apply appropriate queuing calculations. Because of random call arrival, base staff requirements for those contacts that must be handled when they arrive must be predicted by using either a queuing formula that takes random call arrival into account (e.g., the widely used Erlang C formula) or computer simulation, which is more flexible for analyzing complex, contingency-based environments (i.e., skills based routing).
To calculate the staff required for contacts that do not have to be handled when they arrive, you can generally apply traditional methods of industrial planning. For example, let''s say you expect to receive 400 email messages by noon, and the average handling time is expected to be five minutes. To complete the work by 5 p.m., you''d need at least seven agents:
400 / (300 / 5) = 6.67 (7 agents)
Ensure service levels are in parity across contact channels. Being in parity in this context doesn''t necessarily mean being equal—for example, it doesn''t mean you respond to email as fast as you respond to a phone call. Rather, it means you are operating within customer expectations across contact channels. The customer who expects a reply to an email within a few hours but doesn''t get it may pick up the phone and call. Now you have two contacts going, which sends call center productivity down the drain. Similarly, if a customer ends up in an endless telephone queue, they may send an email.
What are your customer''s expectations? Ask them. And observe their behavior. They may expect a 24-hour response time on email messages, and no more than a minute or two telephone queue. Also, tell them—tell them what to expect. Your web site, customer literature, automated confirmations of orders and other sources of information can help establish expectations, as well as provide information or services that may obviate unnecessary contacts.
Manage accessibility by increment. As illustrated in the scenario in Figure 1, 30 agents will provide a service level of about 24 percent answered in 20 seconds. With just one more agent, service level jumps to 45 percent answer—a quantum improvement. Adding an additional person yields another big improvement. But keep adding beyond that, and additional agents bring proportionally decreasing benefit—the law of diminishing returns.
This principle underscores the importance of getting the "right people in the right places at the right times" during each increment (typically, half hour) of the day. Being even slightly understaffed will cause big problems in terms of low service levels, high agent occupancy and heavy telecommunications network usage. Further, those half hours producing a service level of 100 percent in Y seconds may indicate that you have far more agents than you need during those times of day. Getting workforce planning (forecasting, staffing and scheduling) tuned up is a sure path to better performance.
Support service level with multichannel workload planning. Incoming Calls Management Institute (ICMI) defines call center management as "the art of having the right number of skilled people and supporting resources in place at the right times to handle an accurately forecasted workload, at service level and with quality.” This definition can be boiled down to two major objectives: 1) get the right people and supporting resources in the right places at the right times (service level, used here in the general sense) and 2) do the right things (quality).
Multichannel planning involves the totality of forecasting, staff and system calculations, scheduling and real-time management. The most successful call centers have an established, systematic planning process. They understand how the call center supports the organization''s mission, and they ensure that everyone in the call center and those with key supporting roles outside the call center have a basic understanding of how call centers operate. They take the initiative in coordinating with other departments. Systematic planning necessitates communication about values on issues such as resource allocations, budgeting and workload priorities. It is a catalyst for the kind of collaboration across the organization that effective customer services require.
Ensure that budgets reflect today''s workload dynamics. Although the convergence of Internet, telecommunications and computer technologies enables organizations to automate many aspects of contacts once requiring human contact, it is also creating new types of services and multiplying the connections between and among customers, organizations, suppliers and industry interests groups. Today''s customers demand user-friendly self-service systems and the means to reach well-informed and capable customer service and support representatives when they need them.
Organizations across virtually every economic sector have invested a growing portion of their overall budgets into call centers in recent years. The seemingly incessant growth in operational budgets (although shrinking when viewed in terms of costs per overall volume of contacts) is driven in large part by the age-old economic principle of elasticity: The more channels of access you provide and the better you make your service, the more services of all types your customers tend to use. This is not a bad thing if you are increasing customer loyalty and wallet share in the process.
It''s important to do everything possible to provide and encourage customers to use automated support alternatives, such as web-based services. However, it''s also necessary to be realistic about demand for agent-assisted services in operational budgets.
An Enabler
In the end, service level must be viewed in the context of much larger objectives: higher levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty, and improved shareholder value. Accessibility does not guarantee a satisfying customer experience. But it cannot be minimized, either. It is an enabler – an enabler to more important business that you can then get on to.
