Fortunately (and unfortunately) as a Manager you will frequently get involved in the process of hiring new staff. The unfortunate downside is that as a Manager you will also have to sometimes terminate staff – see my post on PIPs earlier – but this to some extent goes with the territory. Let’s look at the […]
Job Search & Resume Essentials Read More »
An extremely funny story that demonstrates the importance of listening to your customers. This is some correspondence which actually occurred between a London hotel’s staff and one of its guests. The London hotel involved submitted this to the Sunday Times. No name was mentioned. ————————————————- Dear Maid, Please do not leave any more of those
Communication and Customer Service Read More »
A very important point to remember at all times is that you need to have a more aggressive Internal SLA vs. the one that you are offering to your customers. I know it sounds self-evident doesn’t it, but there is no end of organizations that I’ve dealt with where customers are offered a 4hr SLA
Internal & External SLA’s Read More »
Skill-Based Routing Simpler to say than actually execute, SBR is a way of ensuring that your contact reaches the agent best suited to deal with and address their issue. This assists in first call resolution but is also key when it comes to things like languages and specific technologies. An easy example is ensuring that a
Erlang ‘C’ & Scheduling for Call Centres – III Read More »
Escalation Matrix – OK, great, we’ve got an SLA, we have the appropriate staff in place to take the call when they make it … now, what happens if they are not able to fix the problem? Easy! You get the problem to the right people that can fix it in a timely manner. This
Erlang ‘C’ & Scheduling for Call Centres – II Read More »
SLA – this is a difficult one. You obviously want to offer all of your customers the premier, best in the world, platinum level of service, but unfortunately, that does not always make financial sense. Customers need to be tiered dependent on the amount of money they pay you (see my post on the 80/20/30
SLA & Tiered Service Levels Read More »
Erlang ‘C’ is a Nobel winning formula used in the Call Centre and Operations industries to determine the correct and appropriate level of staffing based on key call metrics. The scary looking formula for this is below and the even scarier explanation from Wikipedia is here. From a Call Centre and Staffing Point of view,
Erlang ‘C’ & Scheduling for Call Centres Read More »
Continuing from my previous post here, we’re going to get more in depth into KPI’s and their measurement now. How do I measure KPI’s? Get the data (whatever is important to you … if you use the examples previously mentioned, then track service outages by minutes for example vs. a specified date) into your spreadsheet or other
KPI’s and the Importance of Measurements (part 2) Read More »
There is a great quote that goes something like – “If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it!” … this is so true and especially so in the Technical Support, Customer Service, and Operations areas. There are great KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) and not so great ones. The key is choosing the right one
KPI’s and the Importance of Measurements Read More »
