Uniqueness of managing a Call Centre

Since the rise of the call centre, many commentators have said that managing a call centre has many features that are unlike managing any other type of organisation.

The emphasis on technology, the importance of the customer, the high cost of staffing, the difficulty of forecasting ever changing call levels and the constant need to avoid wasting money by over servicing, is a unique combination of challenges. (Little wonder that an experienced call centre manager with a track record of success, can command such a high salary.)

However, despite the uniqueness of call centres, in some ways, you can argue, that managing a call centre is rather like managing a manufacturing plant.

In the post war period, for example, production environments were fuelled by large pools of human labour. In most industries in most parts of the western world, it is only in recent years that these labour pools have been replaced by technology, automation and, in some cases, robots.

Today, customer contact centres, using telephones, interactive voice response systems, instant messaging applications and e-mail, handle, in piecework fashion, the interactions of the largest corporations with individual customers. The large number of people involved in this activity, make the call centre environment look very like the old style factory floor.

The features for recognising a production environment include:

• Inflexible and rigid demands on workers;
• Consistent and uniform processes;
• Low levels of process variation;
• Strong emphasis on quality management programs; and
• Plenty of monitoring of quality and production.

Clearly, there are some real similarities when comparing these features with a call centre.

The only one of these five points that might initially stand out as radically different is the rigid demands on workers. After all, many call centre managers take pride in the thought that they give agents flexibility.

In reality, there is very little room for flexibility in the actual work that call centre agents carry out. They may have flexible working hours, but for the work itself, most call centres can offer very little flexibility. The rules for handling customer requests and enquires are well established and individual agents are not free to do their own thing.

The other elements that need to be present in a production environment such as uniform processes, an emphasis on consistent quality and ongoing monitoring, are all readily recognisable by call centre specialists.

For call centre managers, one of the core challenges is to balance the requirements of cost effectiveness and service. It is not good if the pendulum swings too far in either direction. If there is too much emphasis on costs, callers will almost certainly feel the pain. If there is too much stress on providing impactful service, the costs to the company will almost certainly soar.

Callers do not wish to wait in exorbitantly long queues until they can be helped. Management, therefore, must provide sufficient staff and inbound capacity to ensure that the quality of service is maintained. However, staff costs generally form more than half the cost of running a call centre and so management must minimise the number of staff present.

It is in this area of staff costs that call centres stand out most. Very few production facilities would have so much of their budget devoted to people. And it is because of the cost of people, the need to nurture them, to retain them and continually motivate them, that the call centre manager’s role is especially challenging.