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Rule 2: Don’t Make Your Customers Wait

14 June, 2015 by James Lawther 10 Comments

Head in the Sand

Why leave them waiting? If your customers are phoning you, texting you, mailing you and some have even gone to the lengths of visiting you and are standing there looking at you, then it is a fair bet that they want something. Rule 1 is to prioritise the work, but prioritising it isn’t enough, you can […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: abandon rate, cost of poor quality, customer behaviour, customer focus, gemba, queue, surge capacity

A Stitch in Time…

19 November, 2014 by James Lawther 4 Comments

Stitches

Running a customer service centre is hard It is a constant battle, trying to minimise cost and maximise customer service. But we all know the game, we get employed to play it: Squeeze your head count down as far as you dare Ride the variations in customer demand Manage the backlog Set up a turnaround […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis, Tools & Techniques Tagged With: abandon rate, call centre, capacity planning, customer focus, service improvement, supply and demand

Call Centre Metrics the Zappos Way

10 November, 2012 by xAshley Furness 6 Comments

Call center metrics

This is a guest post by Ashley Furness Zappos is renowned worldwide as a standout performer in customer service, partially for the e-retailer’s unique approach to customer performance and productivity management. Zappos invests in its call centres, seeing them  not as cost, but as an opportunity to market. Recently, I sat down with the company’s […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: abandon rate, average handle time, best practice, call centre, key performance indicators

Call Centre Forecasts: Don’t Waste Your Time

5 November, 2012 by James Lawther 15 Comments

call centre forecast

Every call centre has them; bad days. Call volumes are higher than expected and staff don’t show up.  The result is a mile long queue of frustrated customers; a group of deeply fed up agents and a set of supervisors running around futilely trying to “manage” the situation. A bad day. The post-mortem If the […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis, Tools & Techniques Tagged With: abandon rate, call centre, forecast accuracy, supply and demand, volatility

The Worst Thing That Can Happen in a Call Centre

1 May, 2012 by James Lawther 2 Comments

How bad can a day in a service centre get? Let’s be honest, nobody is going to die, not unless they are spectacularly unlucky and trip over a trailing cable What does a bad day look like? A bad day looks like this: Your colleagues in Marketing or IT or Pricing do something stupid to […]

Filed Under: Blog, Tools & Techniques, Wild Cards Tagged With: abandon rate, average handle time, bullwhip effect, call centre, capacity planning, queue

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