I don't think this will help with your presentation...
There is a new way of thinking about call centres. Maybe it is not so new but it is very different from the way call centres are thought of at the moment.
It seems to me that call centres are thought of as a place to take calls. A business that takes a sufficient number of calls will at some point have a call centre. And herein lies the problem. If you think of your call centre as a place to take calls you will measure it on "call taking" measures such as AHT, wrap time, agent availability etc. You would manage to increase capacity, to be able to take as many calls as possible. You would buy by big, expensive software and hardware to help you manage, track and measure your call taking.
But what if call centres were not there to take calls, what if they were there to serve customers? Indeed what if you stopped thinking of your call centre as being a separate call taking entity and started thinking of your organisation as a big system to serve the customer. You might find that the specialised call centre agents stopped being that and started working in the organisation again. And the call centre was absorbed back in the organisation so that the people who did the work and created the value were the people who picked up the phone and served the customers.
You would also realise that the measures relating to calls were the wrong measures. You would find that measures relating to the end-to-end process of delivering what the customer wants, when they want it would be more useful. Suddenly all those calls to complain, to chase progress and to repeat a query that has already been asked would cease to be viewed as genuine work. In a traditional call centre, they are calls thus they are work. In the new way, they are waste, a product of the organisational system making mistakes or being too slow to deliver value. The system would then be changed to get rid of the source of these waste calls. Thus customers are happier and costs go down.
In short, the call centre should be absorbed back into the organisation and not be a separate part and the agents should not be taking calls but delivering value (sometimes on the phone!!) and they should definitely not be fixing problems since the organisation should be designed not to cause those problems in the first place. |