Most call centres measure the productivity of their representatives in terms of average handle time, on-hold time, number of rings to answer, transfers and so on. So an effective service call is held up to these heuristic elements with one lonely check box to note whether or not the customer’s issue was resolved. And that resolution is solely in the eyes of the rep.
A business owner or IT manager or accounts payable clerk measures the effectiveness of the call in terms of problem resolution. Period. They will stay on the phone longer if the problem is actually getting fixed (listening to inane promises of call importance doesn’t count). It’s a bonus if the representative is friendly but mostly it’s about fixing stuff.
Imagine what would happen if Average Handle Time became Average Helping Time. Reps who spend the longest having a genuine, productive engaging conversation with a customer would go home with all the goodies, while the ones who know how to game the system are sent to work at boutique hotels, where helpfulness is never a performance metric.
BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams,
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
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Biz,
I confess I’m a little confused. I stayed at a boutique hotel this summer and can personally testify to their graciousness. They totally overlooked my booking the single night available at their super deep, divinely inspiring, never woulda stayed their without that discount in the faint fond hope that I’d be back one day with deeper pockets. My depth of pocket will never factor in my decision to stay there again – their deep discount combined with our conjugal view of optimizing the farmer’s micro vacation are the only truly persuasive factors.
Also, in my experience, AP clerks usually stick to processing the invoice, pondering the performance metric just isn’t their bag.
But my confusion in part may stem from my inability to respond to any mention of call centre without immediately going to the (frankly possibly rednecked) assumption of their outbound, which is of course, my inbound. Biz, I would welcome your thoughts on the telemarketing approach to marketing. In my house we generally say, sorry, we do not accept calls that are made for the purpose of solicitation, well we think your free phone is probably tantamount to selling us something no matter how much you say you’re really giving us something gratis out of the goodness of your heart or because you like us cause you’re short on friends or some other such BS. Laterally my patience has been sorely taxed and one “gentleman” was curtly advised that, as a) his accent was impenetrable, and b) this is my house, so don’t phone me up and try sellin’ me crap. I cannot help but wonder what the future holds for this only-recently-encroached-on-by-legislation approach to marketing and further wonder what pearls of insight a cognoscenti such as yourself might bowl in my direction. After which unburdening, feel free to let it all hang out on the subject of the run-on sentence. God knows it’s been my life’s work developing it thus far.
So we need to come up with a metric for outbound call centres. I vote for the PITA (pain-in-the-arse) Factor. The greater the interruption to whatever you were working on, the higher the PITA Factor. And we could stuff our PITA Factor with aggressiveness of the agent, irrelevance of the offer and the length of time it takes to get back to doing whatever you were doing before you were interrupted.
Scott Adams totally nailed this in his February 12 strip: http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2012-02-12/
Thanks to Kempster for sending it along