All too often companies continue to use their inbound customer service call centre as the ‘garbage processing’ function of the organization. Then when the noise about poor service gets too loud and the costs of handling all this garbage gets too high, the trend is to outsource the call centre to a cheaper operator, which is often an off-shore location in a developing country.
Today, outsourcing call centres is the biggest trend since the rush to implement ERP systems of the late 1990’s. A perceived benefit of the outsourced arrangement is that the company is able to prescribe service delivery through performance metrics as defined in the Service Level Agreement (SLA). This is supposed to ensure that customer service levels and customer problems are suitably addressed. Due to the visibility of call answering times and call resolution, Speed of Answer (SoA) and First Time Fix (FTF) are often the favorite metrics defined in the SLA. The interpretation is that the Call Centre that can resolve customer queries quickly and preferably in the fist contact with the customer can take more new calls. The irony is that these metrics are often mutually exclusive. However, the call centre management team and Customer Service Agent (CSA) are bound by the SLA to chase these elusive targets.
At the same time companies are rushing to physically remove the call centres from core business, there is considerable effort being made to remotely reconnect the call centre through the use of technology. The objective is to use technology to empower the CSA’s to fix customer problems in their first contact, FTX. A wide selection of Information Technology (IT) and Telephonic applications have been designed (and sometimes over-engineered) to specifically address these challenges. So with all the SLA’s and technology in place, why is first time fix so elusive? Why are customers continuing to complain about their service experience?
Read more: Solving Core Business Problems by listening to Call Centres and Leveraging Lean Six Sigma
In revolutionary change, one person orchestrates change, from the top. The change is often about cutting costs or regaining control over an organisation that has lost its way by taking inappropriate risks or perhaps by developing a myopic inability to look externally and becoming inwardly driven.
Revolutionary change tends to continue to be driven by one individual surrounded by a small group of trusted “lieutenants”. The change process itself becomes reliant on the individual.
In evolutionary change, a leader still orchestrates the change. However, the leader tends to empower people all through the organisation to take on the change. The leader provides the resources, training and authority for people to engage in the change and become leaders of the change in their own right.
Which method of change is right? Whilst most people have an intuitive preference for evolutionary change, it is not always appropriate.
If an organisation has a “burning platform”, then a revolutionary approach is often the only method applicable. Much of the oil industry in the mid to late nineties was forced to slash costs to survive as margins declined sharply due to increases in supply from previously unavailable sources behind the “iron curtain”.
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