Quit Treating Your Contact Center Like a Manufacturing Plant

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The mass production, economies-of-scale mentality that has a place in the demise of manufacturing in the United States has long been the model copied in contact centers. With more and more manufacturing going away, we are getting former manufacturing managers bringing this mentality to service business. Service is not the same; and copying failed concepts in manufacturing will surely lead to trouble in service.

Mass-production in manufacturing was soundly defeated by better thinking, which post-WWII Japan adopted from the likes of W. Edwards Deming. It wasn’t even close. The United States had all the economies of scale and resources to boot and we lost to a country that was beaten up and had few natural resources. It was possibly one of the greatest upsets in economic history.

Even with this history contact centers have been set up to perpetuate the mass production thinking that was routed in manufacturing. Contact center managers still emphasize activity and not flow.

In part this is the work design, as contact centers are regularly considered stand-alone profit centers. Functionally separated from the rest of the organization, contact centers try to optimize what they can “control,” leading to sub-optimization. Customers experience the functional separation of work that results in transfers to other departments, specialists.

The end result for the customer? Frustration.

And the end result for the contact center and the organization it serves is increased costs.

Customers don’t care about your profit center or the other departments; they care about a system that delivers end-to-end service that serves their purpose. Functional separation of work is internally-focused and what matters to the customer becomes secondary or even tertiary.

Management is concerned with the number of calls, how long to handle them and what service level to provide. These are measures similar to the mass-production mindset of manufacturing. They are not representative of the end-to-end measures customers are concerned with when service is provisioned to them.

Additionally, the focus of these measures leads to dysfunctional activity like focusing on reducing costs by outsourcing for lower transaction costs. They ignore failure demand (demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right for a customer) and treat all demand as demand to be worked. This leads to the outsourcing of failure demand and waste.

Now, we even have Lean tools that were developed for manufacturing that are being used in contact centers. Contact centers (and service organizations) have a different problem then manufacturing: variety. The variety of demand in service is greater than manufacturing, and the move to standardize using scripts, best practices, IVRs and technology does not allow for the absorption of variety. When contact centers cannot absorb variety, the result is failure demand.

Demand offers us an opportunity to approach service problems differently than manufacturing. Well-designed work that achieves what matters to customers is what creates value and less failure demand. This requires contact centers to study customer demand and derive new measures pertinent to customer purpose (what matters).

Managers with better customer measures to improve the business can focus their attention on working on the flow and waste (the causes of costs). This is a better approach than focusing on costs, activity reports and functional targets that destroy both value and flow. The paradox is that the focus on flow and waste reduces costs.

Report Abuse   tribabbitt 10/28/2010 10:20:27 AM EDT Barryk- I was not talking lean. I would agree we don't need just efficiency, we need efficacy -efficiency + effectiveness. Resolving issues is failure demand. Contact centers must work with other parts of the organization to turn it off. Redesigning the work so that agents can handle all value demands and eliminating failure demand will reduce calls and make for more time to spend with customers when that is necessary. Replies (0) Post a reply Sign in or Sign up to post a comment

Report Abuse   barryk 08/16/2010 4:56:41 PM EDT I agree in most respects and disagree in some others. I agree that focus on handle time as a priority over quality is an errant thought process doomed to fail in the eyes of the customers. I disagree that using Lean tools in contact centers is not a good thing. Lean tools have a place in organizations that require interdepartmental handoffs. Concepts such as requiring secondary approvals when historically the approval is 99.9% are redundancies that can be removed and free people up to do other things. This is more common in the shared service world. I think the important thing to teach CSR's is simply this: respect the value of a customer's time. What that means is take all the time we need to resolve immediate issues, educate on particulars of your organization that may cause related confusion in the future, and ensure the customer is satisfied with the outcome. However, do not waste the time of a customer by fumbling around trying to find answers to complexities beyond your current training level. I see this in the newer agents in our organziation because we are rated on transfer %, hold % which results in agents, overwhelmed by complexity, leaving the customer in the air while they seek assistance. Solving that is a different topic. Briefly, with respect to complex issues, provide your customer a choice such as "Sir, I am going to need assistance to resolve your issue. Would you rather hold while I get help, or can I have a specialist call you back (fill in expectation model and meet that expectation)." I am more interested in whether these two things occurred: Did we express value for the customer's time; did we offer the customer choices on comples issues. Handle time is a tool for staffing, but not a performance criteria. Note that expressing value for the customer times does excludes meaningless chatting that has no purpose other than to avoid the next and call. Yes, some people actually do that. Next up, After call time?? Replies (1)   Report Abuse   tribabbitt 10/28/2010 10:22:30 AM EDT Pretty soon you will run into problems that require thinking and not tools. Post a reply Sign in or Sign up to post a comment