No single index is a definitive measure of the health of the industry but only one of many measures that should be examined. The NACC Investment Portfolio has a bias toward smaller capitalized stocks since US$10 bought more stock in these companies than it did in the higher capitalized stocks. The NACC Composite Index is biased toward the larger capitalized stocks since the algebra has floated shares as a key variable. Professionals in all industries should know the performance of companies in their industry and how their company stacks up to such indices. We hope to give you a jump start to informed professional status with our new NACC Investment Portfolio and Composite Index (look to the left-it was a tough week).

If your favorite publicly traded call center stock was not listed, don't cry, just send me an email, we will talk about it, and heck, I might go out and purchase US$10 worth of that stock to add to the portfolio and the index if it makes sense. On a completely separate note, but part of this same paragraph, if you are going to interview for a professional job in the call center industry, knowing the NACC Investment Portfolio value and the NACC Composite Index number and the health of the call center industry would impress would be future bosses-or at least a person like me.

What the Call Center Industry Can Learn from Manufacturing: Part I

Dennis Adsit, VP Business Development, KomBea Corporation. dennis.adsit@kombea.com

Call centers are extremely complex operations: Constantly changing telecom and computer technology, business continuity challenges, scheduling agents, predicting call arrival patterns, globally routing and balancing calls it is enough to make your head spin.

Manufacturing operations are enormously complex as well. To much of what was listed for call centers, you can add mind-numbingly complex logistics, parts and materials quality and availability, safety concerns, recalls, environmental regulations, etc.

It would be a watt-less discussion to argue which industry is more challenging, but one key difference between the two is in their track record of results. Most manufacturing operations and especially world-class manufacturing operations have an enviable track record of dramatic year-over-year (YOY) improvements in quality, productivity and customer satisfaction. And the best are not resting on their laurels; a few years from now, all three of those output measures will be up from where they are today.

Few call centers have achieved that kind of output measure hat-trick. Productivity might be up and costs down because more calls have been automated or the customers have been directed to self-service or the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) initiative has lowered telecom charges.

But is quality in the form of agent compliance with requirements or best practices improving dramatically YOY? Is it even approaching a five-nine's (99.999% reliability)? Is customer satisfaction with live agents systematically improving YOY? Though few centers are driving improvement in all three measures, they could be if the leaders were willing to look at what other complex operations are doing to improve.

You might feel there is no way call center leaders could learn anything from manufacturing. People are not machines after all and call center leaders are dealing with people on both sides of the transaction. There are three leverage points used in manufacturing that call centers could benefit from: 1) define the process (call flow) exactly, 2) don’t focus on improving the workers (agents), focus on improving the process the workers (agents) are using, 3) give more to and expect more from your vendors (outsourcers).

Define the process exactly. A Harvard Business Review article entitled "Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System" outlined the four key rules that were critical to the success of total production system (TPS). The first rule was “all work shall be highly specified as to content, sequence, timing and outcome.” The level of specificity in manufacturing can be down to exactly how many turns to tighten a screw.

This is not the case in call centers, not by a long shot. First of all, there is not a single process in a call center even for one call type. If there are 100 agents handling a single call each will be doing it differently: some slow, some fast; some in compliance, some not; some appropriately building rapport with customers, some not.

Why is this? Well one reason is that call flows and expected behavior for all the possible branches are rarely exactly scripted out. You may not believe it, but we have gone into some of the best centers in the world and sat with agents, monitors, trainers and coaches to begin to map a single call flow and the groups do not agree on how to do it. Is there really any wonder we see the variability in process and output measures that we see when there is no agreement on how a credit limit increase call or a cell phone activation call is supposed to go down?

This then is the starting point for beginning to achieve the kind of results seen in manufacturing: call center leaders have to start scripting exactly how each call should go end-to-end with all the branches. This is the minimum and this is a solution that many vendors in the marketplace offer. Though a script is the minimum, for the reasons previously sited, I do not feel scripts alone are enough.

Once the call is scripted, software and voice technology can be used to get the agents to execute the designed call flow. Since the agents are live on the call, they can still vary it if and as they need to. Leveraging technology for the agents to execute the call you designed means you can engineer-in quality, best practices and compliance and remove the lion’s share of the within and between agent variability. This is how they do it in manufacturing environments: establish a single process and then continuously improve that process that all the workers are using and this is the new frontier of the call center industry.

Part II of What the Call Center Industry Can Learn (from Manufacturing (forthcoming Nov 23, 2007, issue) will make the case for focusing the bulk of the improvement efforts on the process not the agents. Part III (forthcoming Dec 7, 2007, issue) will cover how to better leverage outsourcers.

Call Center Comics (NEW...ish)

If you like this comic and would like to see more write Ozzie at  callcentercomics@yahoo.com and visit his website at http://callcentercomics.com/cartoon_categories.htm or just click on the comic to take you to his page. The NACC appreciates Ozzie letting us use some of his comics in our newsletter.

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Copyright 2007 National Association of Call Centers