In the many contact centers I've worked with, I have found that more often than not, the service level goals are set at 80/20 - 80% of calls/contacts answered within 20 seconds. When I ask why clients use that as their goal, I often hear the answer of "It’s industry standard" or "That's what we've always used."

Is 80/20 an industry standard? Maybe 30 years ago. It also doesn’t seem like most people even know where 80/20 came from. One recent client did, and reminded me of the source: AT&T did a study in the early days of call centers that determined that customers were likely to start hanging up at around 20 seconds. That 20 seconds was actually the amount of time that a phone call would physically ring before customers assumed no one was there and would hang up. In other words, three or four actual rings of the phone.

This was before the days of IVRs, front-end messaging, music on hold or sold-on-hold messaging, etc. Very rarely do custo... read more >

On recent travel for work, I found myself thinking about my customer experience at a hotel. I was staying at a hotel in a major international chain. (Yes, I admit it – I collect the points.)

I noticed that one of the ceiling tiles in the bathroom had brown stains from what appeared to be a water leak at some point in the past. I thought that was a little strange, as replacing or painting that drop tile would have been relatively inexpensive, probably under $10. 

I looked around my hotel room after this, and I noticed that there were some cobwebs hanging in one of the corners of the room—small cobwebs, but cobwebs none the less. These two items made me suddenly wonder what else might have been overlooked in my hotel room. I won’t elaborate, but you can probably guess the items I wondered about next. 

This all made me start thinking about my experience as a customer with this hotel. The hotel staf... read more >

Years ago, I was a newly promoted contact center operations manager.  During that time, our contact center began using workforce & performance management systems to track call volumes, create trending, and use forecasts for scheduling.  While this was a culture shift, the visibility into new performance metrics for agents yielded some interesting results.  

My previous supervisor (with over a decade of experience) suddenly changed how she managed her team.  Prior to having these reports, she would observe calls, perform side-by-side coaching sessions, and obtain customer feedback to measure performance.  When we started distributing performance reports, she cut back on the use of the “other tools in her toolbox” to only focus on some standard operational metrics.  When I sat down to discuss it with her, she told me that for the first time the management of her agents’ performance was not subjective, but was fact-based and... read more >