In my role I am current responsible for Business Improvement changes that will increase efficiency and quality in a Contact Centre of approximately 170 heads.

The current project that I am working on is to increase the department overall calls per FTE.

The two main focuses has been to have staff that are currently doing off the phone work to now be taking calls off the frontline queues. The other approach that I am investigating is to make efficienty gains by increasing the number of calls taken per day by the CSRs that are already on the phones. Whether that be finding a way to reduce the wrap time per call or finding a way to reduce the amount of transfered calls so that CSR availability time is increased. e.g multiskilling.

One of the major concerns that I have is that by making efficiency gains to increase calls per FTE will have an effected on sustaining the quality of service that we are able provide to our customer base.

I'd be interested to hear other opinons or approaches about how you would approach this task if you were in my shoes. From what I have seen in these forums there is a wealth or experience and knowledge in these kinds of areas.

Thoughts?

Richard,

You have identified the major risk of focusing on activity measures. You say, "One of the major concerns that I have is that by making efficiency gains to increase calls per FTE will have an effected on sustaining the quality of service that we are able provide to our customer base."

Calls per FTE is a measure of "activity" not "productivity".

A process is only productive if it delivers against customer purpose. I.e. the purpose as defined by the customer. So if the customer is a tennant of a housing assoiciation and they call the repairs dept about their leaky tap, their purpose is to get the tap fixed ASAP and fixed right first time. The repairs dept should measure itself against those measures and NOT against how long it takes them to pick up the phone.

I don't know the purpose of your call centre but I bet if you asked your customers they would not care about how many calls an FTE took per day.

The first thing I would do is map demand. Split off value demand and failure demand. Then find out if each is predictable. If you can remove the root causes of the failure demand then suddenly you will free up CSR time to deal with the value demand.

Then look at the processes to transact the value demand and ask if each step is value or waste. Tip: any waiting, sorting, inspection or rework is waste (there are others, but those are the easy ones). Remove the waste, and get the value steps in the process to flow together thus reducing cost of errors and shortening lead times.

Next look at variation. What are the sources of variation and error? How can they be elimiated or reduced?

The last thing is to use the frontline staff to do this stuff with you. Do not do it to them.

The above is a very high level and glib (and incomplete) description of a Lean Thinking improvement process.

Implement all that well, and you will improve so much that 10% more calls per FTE will be eclipsed by the gains you will see.