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Pseudo Call Center Process

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  • March 5, 2014 at 8:30 am #54691

    simar at hsbc
    Participant

    Last year all RM assstants were consolidated into a centralised unit onshore. The idea is that RM Assitants are people who can provide service to customers, and RMs can focus on sales. The assistants book appointments, schedule cold calls with customers (have real time access to RM calenders). The RMs introduce theier assitant to the custoemr, so customer can call them directly, and get serviced. etc.

    We are in the area looking at ways to improve area, and we are struggling to put some metrics around activities that assistants do.

    The challenges are
    1. They dont have a standard way of recieving work,
    2. Every customer interaction is different
    3. anyreporting has to be self reported !!
    4. they have a lot of ad hoc work

    has anyone done something similr in the past?? what should we be looking at?
    .

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    March 5, 2014 at 12:21 pm #196726

    john
    ★ 20 Years ★
    Guest

    Start with asking what is the goal or objective of this centralized support team? Is it agreed upon and artitculated across RM and RM assitants? Now determine what is constraining this group from achieving more of this objective? For example, you have taken out-of-cycle work away from the RM and given it to dedicated assitants under the assumption it will increase RM throughput (ie sales). So has it? What were sales like before centralization? After? Is there a statistical (and practical) difference? What were/are the economic tradeoffs? What did you spend in fully loaded FTE costs for RM assistants + centalized overhead vs the (supposed) increase in sales? Where is the inflection point (ie sweet spot)? Start here…you can get into process-level metrics only if the aforementioned questions and answers support the economics…In terms of process level metrics, I would look for RM assitant performance indicators that correlate strongly to increased sales or sales opportunties. Beware measuring what you have or what is easy to measure vs what you really need to know to improve the business (ie profitability).

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    March 10, 2014 at 7:42 am #196754

    Jeff Marth
    ★ 10 Years ★
    Participant

    I will respond by addressing each of your challenges…

    1. You won’t get very useful data with your metrics if you don’t have standard work to measure. Put some effort here right away, then determine how you can measure the consistent process to determine both performance and adherence.

    2. Being told “but we’re different” is nothing new to process improvement people. This hasn’t stopped me, and I always find that they aren’t as different as they think. In your situation, look for commonalities and build from there. For example, the team may think that because they are talking about different products each time there is no way to look at each call the same. In reality, there are probably common elements; greeting the customer, soliciting interest, product information, aquiring a follow up call, etc. Where there really is difference, ask yourself if everyone should even be doing those things.

    3. If they are on a call, there must be a way to at least measure call times. Manual collection isn’t desirable, but it also doesn’t have to be horrible. Choose points that can be evaluated against another metric or person, to determine validiity and accuracy. For example, if your assistants convert a call into a sale call to an RM, then both roles should have counted that. The output of one call FROM the assistant is the input of one call TO the RM.

    4. Time to 5-Why those!! Determine the purpose of each, and if they bring more value than they are worth in producivity cost. Control your inputs or they will suck up all your resources.

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