Tough calls
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Improving call centre management with value-based metrics
The highly automated approach to call centre management can frustrate employees and customers alike. Is there a better way?
When 7,000 staff at 37 Jobcentre Plus contact centres went on strike for two days in April, it highlighted an issue that has simmered since contact centres first appeared in the UK during the mid-1980s.
That issue is the high degree of monitoring and control that call centre managers exert over their employees through technological means, and the impact it has on employee satisfaction and, ultimately, customer service.
In the typical contact centre, IT systems manage the working lives of agents down to the second. There are targets for average call times, for example; the length of every break they take is monitored. Scripts must be followed and supervisors can listen in at any time. Software that monitors the tone of both caller and operative is often used to flag up calls that may be going awry.
These contact centres are, for many organisations, the primary point of interaction with customers. And while technology can of course be used to make them more efficient and more effective, it can also make agents’ lives a misery, it seems. Besides driving up staff turnover, dissatisfaction among employees may well be passed on to the customer.
Experts are now calling the very concept of a contact centre into question. At the very least, they argue, the metrics that are used to manage call centres must be improved to put the interests of the agents and customers
above targets and efficiency.
Micro-management
Jobcentre Plus is a division of the Department for Work and Pensions, and its contact centres handle calls from the public about entitlements to state benefits.
According to the unions that led the strikes, these call centres are micro-managed to an uncomfortable degree. “For every minute of the day, staff have to enter a code to account for what they are doing,” says Jane Aitchison, president of the Department for Work and Pensions Group at the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) trade union.
Staff are not only monitored by their immediate supervisors, Aitchison says, but also by managers at the Jobcentre Plus head office in Sheffield. These managers can intervene in calls at any time, based purely on the numerical metrics they have before them.
“They just deal with the numbers and the statistics, and manage solely on that basis,” says Aitchison. “It’s a very impersonal method of managing.”
The software used by Jobcentre Plus was installed about two years ago, but not every feature and function was initially deployed. As the new features were progressively rolled out, however, tempers started to boil over, culminating in the recent series of strikes.
“It’s not that it is bad technology, but the way that it is being used,” says Aitchison.
The same system is used elsewhere within the Department for Work and Pensions without provoking nearly the same level of hostility from staff, she says. “They don’t use the system in the same crude way and the management there is a bit more reasonable.”
The dispute exemplifies the ongoing tension between employees and management in contact centres. Staff want more freedom to work in their own way, while managers need to make sure they are working effectively towards the collective goals of the organisation and not wasting time.
But when managers and supervisors deploy every weapon that the latest contact centre software provides, the balance of power is tipped decisively in their favour.
NEXT>>> Confessions of a call centre worker
