Question by Mp: What must be considered when deloping a new customer service department, from a organizational behavior?
What must be considered when deloping a new customer service department, from an organizational behavior perspective?

Best answer:

Answer by Joubert
Ah, customer service. My home.

Without question, you must have a clear set of corporate expectations. That is, you must KNOW how much the company’s senior management is willing to invest to reach a certain level of service.

I had one inbound call center than answered more than 85% of its calls in less than 20 seconds. The CEO wanted me to cut the wait to 10 seconds. When I showed him the math (Earlang tables and queueing analysis — fun stuff), he realized that he would actually have to hire not just a few more bodies, but 50% more roughly. That’s because calls come in randomly, and a call centter manager can pretty accurately get to daily fluctuations, but even the best WFM (workforce management) folks have trouble at the quarter hour mark.

Once you know what level the company wants to set, you need to build in two things:

1) A root cause analysis team
2) A feedback mechanism for product/service improvement.

The root cause lets a (hopefully) cross-functional team analyze what is going wrong most often. Maybe a label is beng printed with blurry type, but not every time. There could be one machine out of whack or a defect that causes the last label to smear. By working with the folks in marketing, sales, accounting, operations and other areas, you can find the problem.

The second thing is feedback. You need your senior management champions to stand behind you so you can create change. The label problem example above is a perfect example. If you get 10 of those calls a day and each one costs $ 10, you’re only spending a fraction of the money necessary to change those machines if they cost a million dollars each.

Ah, but what about lifetime value? You need to be able to watch those customers’ behavior and determine if you can, in fact, make a cost justification for the fix. If not, you need to tightly script and set expectations throughout the organization that X number of calls each month will be based on this issue.

Start a log and keep revisiting the issue. Maybe the technology changes. Maybe someone has a brainstorm that lets you go back 4 months later and cut the incident rate in half.

So, to make a long answer longer:

1) Senior management expectations and buy-in
2) Cross-functional root cause analysis
3) A feedback loop that constantly revisits old issues to search for new answers.

Customer Service, the department, is not responsible for customer service, the function. Service quality is everyone’s job, and that’s why #1 is so important.

Hope that helps!

Best,
George

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