Maz Iqbal told me a great story this week…. Imagine you were an employee of a large business. You worked in a factory, or a shop, or a warehouse or maybe you were an agent in a call centre. A big call centre where they measured your every move: how long your calls were how long […]
Call Centre Metrics the Zappos Way
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 […]
The Worst Thing That Can Happen in a Call Centre
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 […]
Processes are Built to be Broken
If you work as a housekeeper for a hotel, one of the jobs is “turn down”, or preparing guest’s bedrooms for bed time. Some hotels are content to close the curtains, turn down the bed covers and put a chocolate on the pillow. Not the Four Seasons hotel chain. They have a 150 point “turn […]
Average Handle Time
If you have ever done any operations analysis in a contact centre you will know all about average handle time, the average time it takes your agents to “handle” a customer call. It is a key performance indicator (measure is a shorter way of putting that) designed to instil the fear of god into any […]