Call Center Assessment and Evaluation

A large, multinational telecommunications company required an analysis of one of their larger customer call centers dealing with the residential consumer market. As a company known for its bright, hard charging management and its "first to market" new product strategy, this organization realized that it would need to fine tune its internal operations to maintain the profit margin advantage that it enjoyed over its competitors.

An assessment was conducted of the overall operations at their call center. We conducted several focus groups of the customer service representatives and of the first line supervisors, examined data that the quality assurance representatives had been collecting, and conducted surveillance of the operations over a three day period. We then analyzed the results of this data, and provided the client with specific recommendations that were projected to yield annual savings of more than 5 times the cost of our assessment.

These recommendations ranged from improvements to Average Handle Time, reduction of the time in queue for incoming calls, training considerations, and force to load analysis to training, scheduling and other operational considerations.

Automated Voice Response System

A large long distance telecommunications carrier needed to improve the transaction handling for their automated voice response system. They had made the decision to upgrade their technology, but reached the conclusion that they would not achieve their aggressive targets without changing the formatting of the voice response that they had been using.

Weanalyzed the customer requirements, review the operating systems and prompting sequence of the voice response, and design the optimum system for this client that would maximize their take rate for transactions.

Based on an annual volume of over 45 million calls, improving the transaction rate on the automated system would yield direct savings in terms of hundreds of customer service reps no longer being required.

Several focus groups were conducted of residential customers in the different segments that this client had identified. We also studied market data, and conducted our Critical Incident Technique to further bore into client requirements. Based on this data gathering, we utilized our system of requirement identification to build a matrix of customer requirements versus the functions of the system, and the technical requirements of the hardware.

Based on this analysis, the client was able to avoid some of the more commonly made errors in designing the automated system, and have created a robust automated design . The final aspect of this activity was specifically designed to review operational characteristics, industry and societal trends, and technology advances to understand what it would take to allow for a migration to an Internet-based capability in the next 2 years.

The results proved exciting, and profitable, to our client as they implement the system. Additionally, we were able to complete this detailed analysis within the ambitious time schedule that was assigned, working with client representatives and hardware system engineers to achieve success.