Hi,

I have done some research to establish the relative amount of time our phone agents spend on the call, in wrap up and in other work codes. However having done the work I now have nothing to compare it to?

My figures for a team of around 50 working on inbound calls show a split of 48% of time spent on calls, 28% in wrap time and 24% in other work codes. Whilst I am not concerned about the other work codes as i know what these are I would like an idea of whether the split between being on a call and completing after call work is reasonable?

Thanks

Mark

If are following the principles of Lean Thinking, why are you worried about comparing what you do to anyone else? Toyota doesn't benchmark themselves to others because no-one comes close to doing it like them. But the wouldn't benchmark even if they could.

Lean is about the value work so the time spent in different tasks should only be judged by whether it is value work or not. The proportion of time on calls, wrap and other codes matters not a jot.

Mark,

There isn't and can't be one!

It all depends on your processes.

As an average 30-35% of scheduled will be non call
related but as far as the actual relation to your
call flows that's, I'm afraid, is something you'll need
to look at yourself.

As you're running the LEAN bit this is going to be
the core of where you need to look.

Regards
DaveA

Lean is very new to the organisation I work in and as such the stakeholders I deal with are still learning about the concept of value. They are very much focused on external banchmarking so I often use it as a tool to support the work we do as the improvements we make almost always improve our performance relative to those benchmarks.

I do however take your point that in the pure sense I shouldn't care, however I think its still important to understand how much closer the improvements you make put you to the people who currently do it best.

At this point in the piece of work I still don't know which way the changes we make will move the figures I was just interested where we stand as a baseline.

Mark,

It is a journey, a hard one at that, so it is all the more important to start out in the right direction.

Here is my hard won experience. When I was but starting out as a Lean Consultant, I used to be quite flexible and let the client keep some of their old command and control measures, let them do a little benchmarking etc. But now I don't permit any of that stuff. Why? Because the most crucial change is the change in thinking. The must unlearn what they know so that they are totally open to doing the counter-intuitive things that Lean will lead them to. How do you get them to unlearn? You give them things to do. What things? Depends on the situation. Not much help to you perhaps, but letting them off the hook will doom the initiative to mediocrity. You should have seen the my first couple of contracts. It pains me to think.

I used a personal trainer for a few months to get me ready for a football tournament in Norway a couple of years back. He was an utter git from head to toe. He never let me off the hook, not once. I f**king hated that bloke. But when I got to Norway I was by far the fittest I have ever been, before or since.

The thing is what do you learn from benchmarking? Nothing that is going to help you improve your own system. The only relative measure is: Are we giving value to the customer quicker/better than we did before? The only source of answers to the question of how to improve are in your own system, therefore benchmarking doesn't help.

Hi Mark,

Rob has this spot on here, what others do is generally only useful for putting companies in a league table for higher management to do something with over whiskey and cigars at the golf club,

But more seriously the best benchmark is yourself, you know your own business, so comparing changes that improve against anyone else is limited in value due to your lack of knowledge of their business.

that's my 2 pence worth anyway