Quote:
Originally Posted by ChiTown
I can't believe how stupid Corporations are. It's so ****ing simple to run a good business, but people can't wait to get in the way to **** it up with inane rules and policies.  |
These rules and policies might seem inane to anyone who has not worked in a call center environment, especially if you haven't worked in one on the management/planning side of thing.
To stay open, a call center in the U.S. must do its job at a cost-effective level. If the costs spiral out of control, most companies look to foreign solutions (which everyone hates, right?)
To be cost-effective, a call center must (among other things based on the individual line of business:
1) Meet contractually guaranteed service levels (i.e. percent of calls answered in the first 90 seconds)
2) Meet service levels without large amounts of ongoing overtime
3) Keep turnover (or "burn") rate low enough that training costs don't skyrocket (only other solution would be lowering the amount spent on training, which leads to poorer performers and a higher burn rate. Nasty cycle).
There's an incredibly difficult amount of planning and forecasting that call centers must do. To be effective at forecasting, schedule adherence - what Ms. Rifkin ran into - must be maintained and enforced. Here's an example:
Company A's workforce management department forecasts that 9 calls will come in at 10 am today, and 9 more will come in every ten minutes thereafter. Let's just say this call center has an average handle time of 9 minutes (which is long). It has an 80 percent service level. To meet that service level, it needs to have 8 people on the phone at 10 am, and 8 people at 10:10, so on. Accordingly, it schedules 8 people to start at 10, and 8 more to start at 10:30 (to handle the overflow of calls and catch up to the deficit).
If everybody is there and on time and adheres to the schedule - and nothing unexpected happens - Company A will remain within service levels. Most companies cheat to the high side (have too many people on the phone initially to prepare for unexpectedly high call volumes) and offer voluntary time off if they end up having too many people scheduled. But that doesn't always work, and starts to break down as people call in sick, take extra time off the phones, etc.
But let's say Ms. Rifkin is one of the 8 people scheduled to start at 10 am. She's late getting to work that morning because she had to stop and use the restroom on the way to the office. That means one call that should have been answered at 10 is not, and the call center starts falling behind. Every time Ms. Rifkin has to use an unplanned bathroom break, the call center falls behind.
That's what is at play here. It all comes down to the nature of the work. If it's extremely timely and every second LITERALLY counts (like in a call center), the company must have strict adherence rules. If it is less timely and critical, the company can afford t have less strict guidelines about bathroom usage/time away from the desk.