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(originally published in From the Consultant’s Files on ICMI’s web site) Are You Still Part of the Back Office?If you run a call center, you don’t need me to tell you that call centers are high-maintenance organizations. Applications crash, people call in sick, marketing sends out materials without advance notice, etc. Putting out these fires while still figuring out ways to meet quality and service level objectives is more than a full-time job. But while it is dangerous to ignore these events, it is equally dangerous to get so caught up in them that you never stare out the window and think "What can I do to ensure that the upper levels of this organization understand just how valuable we can be?" Once you’ve done this, you’ve already taken the first step – accepting responsibility for the task of selling the call center to the rest of the organization. In a perfect world, the CEO, CFO, COO and all the other Cs in the executive wing would recognize the power of the department that converses thousands of times a day with the customers who everyone has worked so hard to attract. And maybe in your organization they do. But that’s not the case in most companies. More often than not, the upper-level executives never managed a call center and only know it as a people-intensive transaction-processing operation that is expensive to run. And let’s give the execs a break here, because a call center happens to be people-intensive and expensive, and there are a lot of transactions that get processed there. But it can be so much more. Consider the possibilities that exist when you are conversing thousands of times each day with the customer. Business journals go on and on ad nauseam with articles on how you should seek out your customers and converse with them, learn from them and gather business intelligence from them. And yet, in the call center, we don’t have to go and find them. They find us. They take time out of their day to spend with us. Far too often we allow the opportunity to slip out of our grasp, by focusing on driving down talk time instead of driving up value. So why don’t we take the time to talk with the customer? There are plenty of reasons. Maybe we’ve bought into that view of the call center as a "back-office operation," which simply processes transactions. Maybe we don’t have the staff required to add some extra time to the calls. Maybe we can’t get agreement that this exercise would be a valuable one. Or maybe we just don’t know what to ask our customers. All good reasons, to be sure, but they are also dead ends. Accept them, and the call center will never get the respect it deserves. The bottom line is that for others in the organization to understand the power of a call center, they need some examples. And no one is going to go out and find them – you need to deliver them. Most call center leaders understand that they represent the company to the customer. To really generate value, you need to also understand that you represent the customer to the company. Start by getting an understanding of the kind of intelligence the company really needs. Take note in meetings of the issues that are keeping people awake at night. Meet with marketing directors and new product specialists to find out what they most need to understand about the customer, then shape the questions that you need customers to answer (for a great article on how to do that, see "Turn Customer Input into Innovation, Anthony W. Ulwick, " Harvard Business Review, January 2002). I know what you’re thinking: "I’d love to do that, but I don’t have enough staff to add extra time to my calls." Keep in mind, you don’t have to ask tens of thousands of callers – a few hundred responses can sometimes shed a tremendous amount of light on a perceived problem. So take a close look at your service level results – by interval. Are there really absolutely no times throughout the day or week that you could afford to add time to your calls? If your call center is like most (even those that are understaffed), you’ll likely find specific hours throughout the week that you could safely add some time to your calls without driving service level down to unacceptable levels. Once you begin delivering some of this intelligence – well, that’s when things really start to get interesting. Imagine this scenario: The marketing director starts to learn about the untapped value in the call center. She asks you to start asking more questions of the customers and delivering more intelligence. "I’d love to," you say, "but I’m going to need another six people on staff to handle the increase in talk time, and I don’t have the budget for it." She replies, "Well, maybe I can help out with that…". And when other people in powerful places start plugging the value of the call center, you’ll know you’ve just stepped out of the "back office." - Jay Minnucci
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