urgent – need response asap

If you live and breathe by the AHT metric, your folks will start performing to it, instead of to what’s really important- your process capability/customer satisfaction.
I have a call center which also performed amazingly well to their AHT goals, but was terrible at satisfying our customers (abandoned calls, dropped calls, numerous call-backs, etc).  After about six months of resistance, we eliminated AHT as a primary metric, so it was no longer reported to the floor. In two months we eliminated all the dropped and abandoned calls without increasing staffing or OT and our (unreported) AHT actually went down by 30%. Someone (I wish I knew who right now) once said work expands to fill the time allotted, which I’ve found to be true.
So, in my opinion, AHT is rather meaningless or, at least, it’s a secondary metric to the important CTC’s.
Good luck

Jack,
Many years ago, I did an analysis on the sequence of length of calls for a call center that had the same problem: AHT of 2 Minutes 30 seconds was made, but transfer calls were out the roof.. What I found was a trend in a simple run chart that showed a pattern whereby the rep would answer 2 calls to the satisfaction of the customer, then transferred or abandoned 2 calls in order to meet the average handle time. Just run chart the AHT of individual reps over a period of time and see if you can detect patterns that allow the rep to “manage” their AHT. Also, stratify your data by more or less experienced reps (our cut off was 4 months, that’s when the rep was proficient). We found a very pronounced effect with the more experienced call reps. This might be a starting point.

We abandon a lot of calls but our AHT is within range … there’s not much need for a “Force Field Analysis” which comes out of social psychology. So, let’s stay with the problem and not drift off into Plotin’s 3rd or 2nd emanation :-).

Off the top of my head:
Spelling-101
 

Scree,
A few observations from projects in a very previous life:
1. The first point of contact to update correct information (address etc.) is the mail room :-). I once had a GB conduct a project on receiving, sorting and communication address updates between the mail room and the customer service department (not a very glamorous, but a very effective project).
2. Another project (more glamorous) involved the utilization of data mining techniques to match the purchasing of “right party contact information” received from various vendors with  actual hit rates. “Hits” were defined in three ways: (1) correct address and phone number (in comparison with data on file and updated data from vendor), (2) talking to the right person, (3) achieving the desired outcome. Desired outcomes varied. For example, if you are in the collections industry, you may get the “right party address”, but that does not mean that you’ll talk to the “right party”. In this case, we developed communications training for collections agents (quite interesting what “communications techniques collection agents will use to get to the “right party”).
So as for general strategies: This is as general an advice as I can give without knowing what type of call campaign you mean and subsequently what you call a “right party” in the context of the objective of that call campaign.
As for HGB^2 … I hate it that his answers are always shorter and more correct than mine :-))))).