Don’t Try To Over Optimize Your Call Center Staff

About once a week I have a conversation about call center staffing, and it’s almost always focused on the various ways we can minimize the cost impact on the call center.   Staffing decisions are often made by people who are driving to hit a budget number, with labor being the largest dollar category – typically 75% or more.   With those numbers, it only makes sense that the labor cost line gets a lot of attention from just about everyone in the organization.    The mistake made by many is that they focus too much on the dollars and create new “efficiency” programs to drive down the number of people needed, thus reducing the overall cost.

 

We then start to make assumptions on what it would be like if we operated with a lower call handle time or if we got more of our customers to use self-service applications.   The problem with these conversations is the ease in creating the paper- based ROI.  Such ROIs often look really promising – so promising that it becomes the focus of the new budget plan.   Lost in the cost-focused and efficiency-focused conversation are two critical elements for providing customer service in a call center: 1) the customers themselves, and 2) the call center’s agents.

 

Customers must have a say in the self-service tools they use; trying to force customers to use such tools without asking them for permission is a recipe for disaster.  Similarly, a call interaction time that is focused on speed will leave the customer feeling rushed and limits agents’ ability provide holistic service and proactively provide solutions and recommendations.   It’s a bad idea to ignore agents and assume that they all will be able to adopt the new “efficiency” guidelines and become more productive.   Initiatives that focus to heavily on efficiency will fail because leaders become obsessed with numbers without realizing the impact on those that provide service.    Focus solely on efficiency and you’ll surely witness agents burning out at a rapid pace, leading to higher costs brought n by bad service and rampant turnover.

 

The best call centers fully understand that they need to provide a balance in both agent workload and customer-driven self-service.  Spend time with agents getting feedback on the things that add additional and unnecessary time to their customer interactions.   Get on the phone and call some customers that recently interacted with the call center -, ask them about their experience and how you can make things easier for them in the future.  When service is the first priority, profits will follow and the staffing conversation is focused on value vs. cost.