Effective Call Management
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Contact management in the modern service operation is an increasingly complex affair. The customer base can no longer be
seen as a collective mass – multiple channels of contact are subject to different demand patterns and used by different customer
groups with different needs and behaviours, which continue to become more service active and demanding. In addition, service
delivery itself is also becoming more complex and, unless managed more diligently, will be subject to significant failure rates.
This increasing complexity across the customer experience drives costs upwards. When the work and activities of a customer call
centre are analysed with a coherent evaluation model, it is found that in many cases up to 80% of the service work is failure related.
Clearly this does little to enhance or encourage longevity in the customer relationship. The progressive elimination of failure related
work from the call centre is the key indicator to achieving long-term value and stability with customers.
By having a better understanding of the mix of calls and their business implications, organisations can optimise the types and
levels of calls to create and deliver a more effective and efficient contact centre operation. When one also considers that every
failure call processed might have been preventing a potential new customer getting through to the organisation, the benefits to better
call centre management, analysis and, ultimately, service provision become even clearer.
As a programme of contact optimisation is undertaken, it is not uncommon to find that call abandonment rates are completely
inaccurate, that service levels are way off the mark and that most of the work generated is failure related. Organisations will
probably find that just 20% of their customers are generating 80% of the work undertaken. What is more, these are often the low
value customers.
Establishing a call optimisation programme is not an easy task but it can pay huge dividends – and once institutionalised it
can be cycled again and again to deliver continuous improvement in operational activities.
Adrian Mellor, senior consultant, SECOR Consulting
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