Good afternoon,
I have extensive experience in this area which perhaps I could share.
#1. For a customer service call center you must first start with a sample plan that is ALL trasactions, to get going on the project. You do this to determine the next stage which is understanding the "regular" sampling plan. This approach is Statistical Quality Control not Statistical Process Control. To sample your entire transaction base you need technology: The phones should be hooked to an ACD system, you web page should have a CMR engine driving it, your fax order transaction must be tagged as "fax" in your order entry modules of your legacy system, etc.
#2. I agree with Imfoong that you also must do customer surveying to determine their "touchpoints".
#3. Look at the wall where the company mission statement is hung. Half your touchpoints are probably implied in the statement.
In our company we handle about 650 tele calls a day, receive 1,000 faxes, 400 on-line orders.
We have all the technology as mentioned above to gather data on an hourly basis so we are at an advatage here...
We used customer surveying to find out what our customers wanted in service and we used QFD to structure the department(s), and determine our "touchpoints".
Here's some data to think about, because I think that your customers may be somewhat the same ours;
1. Customers want to make contact easy, fast, and user-friendly.
2. they want prompt, timely & responsive service.
3.They want their request to be handled once and only once.
4. Service must be error free.
We measure the call center on # in-coming/out-going calls, # adandoned calls, # Overflow calls, average time per call, # input errors, # abandoned webpage hits, etc, etc. This is done daily but also the data is used for strategic planning therefore is charted by month, quarter and annual.
We have found that we have violated customer requirement when:
a. There are more than 5 abandoned calls,
b. There are more than 1 Overflow calls (these are calls that are bounced out of the que to receptionist)
c. A call takes longer than 2min 50 seconds.
d. There is a mistake on 10 orders out of 1,600 per day.
e. We don't communicate back to them about ambiguous information from our webpage within 2 hours of receipt of request and within 3 hours of receipt of fax request.
What I'm suggesting is that in your original message you had a margin of error of 4%, which you may find is quite liberal! Did you mean .004%. We have found by listening to customers that the margin of error in most industries today is almost zero, due to technology, competition, and the demographics of society....
hope this helps.
P.s.Rick Goodson...great response for sample plan!!! This approach is quit necessary in a controlled customer service environment. But control in a dynamic department like C/S and Sales takes time, determination and guts...it's one of the hardest things to control and measure. Only now are we reading about pioneers in the area of quality and sales i.e Paul Seldon, Cas Welch.