Quality Parameters for Service Industry - Call Centers

[kapoor]

Hi Members
Please let me know what can be the quality parameters which we need to control in a Call Centre.
a) for call centre which is working for their own product promotion

b) call centre which is providing services to other organisations located in some other country.

[Mike S.]

I'd say keep it simple. Ask yourself (and your company) what do your customers (internal and external) expect from their supplier? And how well are you providing that?

For example, I think of a call center at my credit card issuer. When I call I want fast access to a human to speak to, friendly interaction, a voice I can understand, and quick answers to my questions or solutions to my problems.

[Daveo]

Understanding variation and not to set arbitrary targets based on volumes of calls that have to be processed. With call centers as one example of a service industry as with others, demand variation is at the point of transaction, the customer is part of the process. By setting arbitrary targets of how many calls have to be processed the operators use there skills in a negative fashion to please the measure and do what they can to move the call on, dump the call etc leaving unhappy customers, unhappy operators, and failure demand (rework!) on the system. This is one of the biggest issues facing service and call centers today. Trying to use manufacturing techniques and measures to standardise operations and forgetting why they are there in the first place, to satisfy the customer. Variation in this case is part of the process, standardise with arbitrary measures at your peril!

Control charts will be the best way to measure, over time you will see an in control process with normal variation. By analysing the system, start to remove failure demand, ask why that customer could not get what they wanted on the first call and start looking at the system to address. Get the best out of your people by understanding that they will have the best ideas to improve the system, instead of letting them use there ingenuity and ideas to beat the system which they undoubtably will when the target based mangement stick is wielded!

[David Attridge]

I've had a couple of call centre clients and gi9ven the nature of their business I think a reasonable useful tool is to use COPC 2000 as a structure. Very much like ISO 9001 in philosophy, but focused on specs in a manner similar to ISO 14001 and TS 16949.