I want to update the forum on what I am doing, My thread ‘ Have you ever worked in a call center ‘ generated some very interesting responses and I want to thank everyone who did. I had a long hard look at my position in the company and in my arguments. I decided to stay in my job. No more raging against the machine if you like. So where to start, I had for some time been looking at call drivers. We were clicking on a call code for each call however the system gave me over one thousand choices for the type of call I could select. As someone who takes calls I knew I picked my favourite call codes as there is no way to go through them all. My colleagues were doing the same, this meant our call driver information was inaccurate. Also this information was tracked and put onto several reports but it seemed to me no one done anything other than make graphs. So I brought this up a few months back and we had our IT department move the call choices around and put our lowest drivers at the top of the lists and our highest at the top. You can guess what happened next. I then with encouragement from my head of department began to put measures in place to stop calls coming in to us. I have been allowed to use any means I thought necessary and liase heavily with everyone who impacts on the call center. I was able to show reductions in call volumes but had no accurate way to trend what I was doing. I now have calls monitored as they come in, I get 600 a week out of 20k in calls, I then get these trended out and put measures in place to stop specific call types and watch the calls drop off on graphs. To the point you say, I am bloody good at it! So far I changed 3 words on our bills, from ‘payment now due £1CR ‘on a credit bill to ‘ No payment due £1cr ‘ And watched credit bill enquiries drop like a stone. I had a misleading add pulled from the press and re worded. I changed the way crews install services slightly, wrote a new sales script or two for the sales departments, Identified a hole in our basic training and wrote a training package which is was made compulsory for everyone to attend. I put up an internal web site about call drivers and root cause analysis. I can prove what I do in spades and it takes me about 3 hours a day on average, The list above is not all I have done but they are my favourites. I still work as a CSR and take calls but I now look at the way the call center is functioning in a new light. By the way I have dropped our call volumes by 5% in a few months. I have more things I am going to try in the pipeline and I am so confident I have projected another 5% drop by the start of Q3 so a lot of eyes are on me but hey I can and will do it. my work life is suddenly very very interesting. Oh yeh some of the office political animals have tried and failed to hijack my project as I simply dont let them know what I have done until I have done it, I leaned this when I found a report I had written with someone elses name all over it. That backfired on them though as I had an e-mail with the draught and date I had made up which I forwarded to their head of department with a suggestion they speak to me in future before using anything I do. I have decided to stick with it. I will drive down the call volumes as low as I can for as long as I can. I know I am being used by at least I have my mind occupied.I do learn by trial and error. My one failure was I changed an internal procedure which instead of removing the calls it caused customers to call another part of the company, oops, I did not think that one quite through enough. Last thing is everyone in this company now knows my name and I get calls and e-mails from the gods asking me to look over things for them and asking for my input re possible call drivers. They really dont want me showing up at their doors saying look what you did to my calls with that .
Soooooooooo where is my Trumpet I want to do some serious blowing with it. Thanks Forum this change in me was brought on by you and those who resonded to my post.
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