|
September 2000 Volume 2.02
Answering the Phone
by Rodger Gallagher
How quickly do customers want their phone calls
to be answered?
It seems intuitive, doesn't it, that people want to wait for their
phone calls to be answered in the minimum possible time. The New
Zealand Herald newspaper published a series of articles on this
topic. The newspaper made a number of phone calls to a few service
industry businesses then published the results. The average answering
times for the businesses ranged from a few seconds to over 40 minutes.
Why should there be such a difference? In the article the Herald
had assumed that customers want their calls to be answered quickly.
Is this assumption correct and are there some businesses who do
not care how long they take to answer the phone? Or perhaps these
businesses think that customers do not care how long they wait on
the phone to be answered.
Answering time for phone calls often seems simple to
measure and with many businesses now answering phone calls in call
centres, they often measure the time customers wait in the call
centre queue. They do this as the queue waiting time is easy to
obtain from most telephone queuing systems. Companies sometimes
then set standards for answering phone calls in a certain number
of 'rings' or in a number of seconds. One company had a 'five rings'
target which the Directors had decided on at a planning meeting
without any consideration for what customers wanted. They had decided
on this target for the company based on what was typical in other
countries. The Call Centre manager was then told to manage answering
time to meet this target. This might be far from what customers
want, though.
Determining what customers want
A better way is to develop a set of service metrics
and targets that measure the key service factors customers really
want when they phone for service. Then overall service can be managed
to the targets. When clients ask us to investigate Call Centre service
for them we usually find that answering time is one of the key service
factors, but it is never the most important factor. The most important
one is often handling the query, and resolving it to the satisfaction
of the caller. If this is done well, customers are often prepared
to wait a while for their call to be answered. But how long are
they prepared to wait? To answer this question we need to look at
the excellence ratings customers give for answering times in customer
surveys and the actual answering time we are measuring in the Call
Centre. The following chart compares these two types of data for
an imaginary technical service centre handling fairly complex enquiries
from customers.
In the previous graph we can see a fairly strong link
between answering times and how the customers rated the speed of
answering in terms of Excellence in the customer survey for the
corresponding period. Each dot on the graph represents a time period.
As the answering time improves the customer rating out of 10 also
goes up. But even when 100% of calls are answered within the target
of twenty seconds, the highest that customers rate us is only 7.2
out of 10. And even when they only answer 20% of the calls within
twenty seconds they still rate us 6.0 out of 10. Perhaps this is
a case where customers are prepared to wait a little while for their
calls to be answered.
But there may be other factors at work. Today many
phone numbers for service numbers do not go to directly to a customer
service representative. First a caller is presented with a voice
response menu and a number of options. The quality of these voice
response menus varies greatly. Some voice response menus give a
confusing range of options, while others make it difficult to get
through to a customer service representative. And at times the menu
systems break down completely when the computers go down. So perhaps
the reason why the excellence rating never gets above 7.2 out of
10 lies with the voice menu system. So for the customer the time
to answer starts as soon as ringing is heard for the first time
rather when they leave the voice menu system and enter the 'priority
queue' for a customer service representative. So this particular
business needs to measure the total time customers wait for a customer
service representative from the time the call is answered automatically
by the phone system, rather than just the time they are waiting
in the phone system queue.
But what about the low end of the graph where customers still gave
us a 6 out of 10 even when we only answered 20% of calls in twenty
seconds? With a service centre handling fairly complex enquiries
that take quite a time on the phone to resolve, this usually means
that callers are prepared to wait a while to be answered. When the
actual interaction with the customer service representative takes
ten minutes, experience indicates that callers are prepared to wait
a little longer to get answered.
Investigating both customer and internal service metrics
in this way allows us to set measures and targets that matter for
the customer.
(To be continued in the next issue)
New Tools For Measurement
A few years ago I read Dava
Sobel's book "Longitude" on the discovery of the first accurate
method for measuring longitude and was struck by the similarity
of that story and the situation faced by many companies today. The
18th Century mariners had known for sometime how to measure latitude
- where they were between the North and South poles. In the same
way companies today have a highly developed accounting system and
know their financial position precisely. But the 18th Century mariners
only had a very rough idea of longitude - where they were around
the world. They used to sail back and forth on a given parallel
until they found a sign as to where they were. This was such a major
problem to the safety of shipping that the British Government, realising
measurement of longitude was critical to the development of trade,
offered a king's ransom of 20,000 pounds for the development of
a chronometer that could measure it accurately.
One man, John Harrison took up the challenge. He went through the
development of four models of chronometer before he made one good
enough to win the prize.
Measuring customer satisfaction is a bit like John Harrison's four
steps towards the goal of measuring longitude - the CVA (Customer
Value Added) approach takes us one step closer to having a system
as precise as an accounting system. When you look at an Income &
Expenditure report, what are those 3 main numbers you look for?
Income
Expenditure
Profit
Accounting systems provide very concentrated reports such as the
one showing income and expenditure with a series of line items focussed
into these three main performance measures. Wouldn't it be good
if companies had a customer value report that was as precise and
as easy to understand as a financial report?
Well, the CVA approach provides three similar main performance
measures that businesses can focus on: Value Added, Products &
Services, and Costs & Price.
Regards,
Rodger Gallagher
|
