Call Center Management on Fast Forward: Succeeding in Today's Dynamic Inbound Environment (Paperback)

by Brad Cleveland (Author), Julia Mayben (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review
Call Center Management on Fast Forward is an outstanding treasure-trove, loaded with information critical to call center managers' successes. I keep my copy under lock and key -- Ross M. Scovotti, Publisher, TeleProfessional Magazine

A must for call center managers. A thorough and practical guide to successful management in today's dynamic call center environment -- Steve Pollack, U.S. Customer Support Center Manager, Hewlett-Packard Company

Call Center Management on Fast Forward is an outstanding treasure-trove, loaded with information critical to call center managers' successes. I keep my copy under lock and key. -- Ross M. Scovotti, Publisher, TeleProfessional Magazine

The winners in this book are our customers who will receive improved service through better informed call centre professionals -- Tony Murphy, Chairman, Call Centre Management Association, United Kingdom

This book is an absolute must for every call center professional -- Ian and Lis Angus, Co-editors, Telemanagement magazine

This book is an absolute must for every call center professional. -- Ian and Lis Angus, Co-editors, Telemanagement magazine

You will never again be stumped for an answer or business case by your finance or technology folks -- Mary Murcott, Vice President, Call Center Management, American Express Business Travel

You'd be nuts to run a call center without devouring Fast Forward. This well-written and eminently usable guide addresses every arcane aspect of call center management in a readable way -- George R. Walther, author of Phone Power, Power Talking, and Upside-Down Marketing

Product Description
This is the only book available today that provides a very readable, step-by-step guide for managing an incoming call center. The book combines theory with practical advice and is filled with over 100 charts and graphs, several case studies and an extensive glossary and index.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: Call Center Press (1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0965909301
• ISBN-13: 978-0965909303
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #326,672 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow! So This is How Call Centers Work!, August 22, 2002

By	Eric Berglund (Mountain View, CA United States) - See all my reviews

I've generally been an IT Director and Project Manager, so I read this book to get a better idea of my customers' needs. I was pretty excited to discover that there's at least one good summary of what call centers do and how they do it. For my own sake--and perhaps yours--here's my summary of Brad and Julia's summary:

1. Incoming call center management is the art of having the right number of skilled people and supporting resources in place at the right times to handle an accurately forecasted workload, at service level and with quality.

2. Though average call load may be predictable, calls arrive randomly--which means that they often bunch up.

3. A service level is defined as "X percent of calls answered in Y seconds", not as "X percent answered" or "Average Speed of Answer". (The ASA is skewed by the bad times when calls bunch up.) Abandonment rates matter, too, but fixing abandonment problems usually means fixing service levels.

4. Service level and quality don't conflict. If you try to fix service level with poor quality, it comes back to bite you with more calls and demoralized reps.

5. A good forecasted call load--including talk time, after-call work, and volume--is critical for budgeting people and circuits. Often, a good forecast should predict load by the half hour, using previous data, knowledge of upcoming plans, and good judgment.

6. To determine staffing needs, use a variation of the Erlang C formula. Its input is the number of reps, number of callers forecasted, and the time to serve each caller; its output is a prediction of waiting time. (Even better, add an input for response time, and you'll get the percentage who'll wait longer than that!) If agents have different skills, you'll need forecasts and calculations for each set of agents.

7. More staff, less waiting, fewer phone lines for people on hold. Less staff, more waiting, more phone lines. Formulas exist for phone lines, too.

8. Not everyone scheduled is always working on customer service. Schedule accordingly. Be clever about work schedules to get the right number working at the right time. Service level results tell you whether you got it right.

9. If you have too few reps on duty, queues get long (service level goes down), more circuits are needed, and customers get frustrated, sometimes abandoning the call. If you have too many reps on duty, you spend too much paying for them to wait.

10. Give senior managers good reports, but make sure they understand the points above.

11. Monitor the number of calls in the queue and the longest current wait. Service level and other metrics tell more about the past than the present. Be ready with plans for unexpected load (reassigning, rerouting, delay announcements, busy signals).

12. There are lots of tools and graphs to measure aspects of quality. Use them to identify root causes, not beat your employees. Reps should adhere to schedules, and do good work. Use monitoring capabilities to coach. Measuring based on "calls per hour" is unreliable, and invites cheating.

13. Customers are getting more demanding, automated systems are taking the easy calls, so reps have to be better trained and more skilled.

14. Create a good environment that uses technology well.

The book was written in 1997, and I don't know whether it's been updated. The authors have some commentary about email-based, web-based, and CTI-based systems, but the next edition might want to say more about the similarities and differences between those and the traditional call center.

Overall, I'm happy to understand more about the math and science behind this discipline. As another reviewer commented, it's clear that IT Help Desks have something to learn from the Call Center experience.

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not only for call centers - IT help desks need this too!, February 10, 2001

By	Mike Tarrani "www.tarrani.com" (Deltona, FL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

I am writing this review from the perspective of an IT consultant who sets up processes and procedures for service delivery. A call center and an IT help desk are two very different animals. This book is written for call center managers, yet should be required reading for IT help desk managers and staff.

As someone who has set up IT help desks and has also provided application support to call centers I often wondered why typical call centers were so well managed and IT help desks, for the most part, are not. This book goes a long way towards explaining the dichotomy by showing how call center professionals approach service. It contains a wealth of information that should be carefully read by IT help desk professionals who want to implement a world-class operation.

The planning and management framework section of this book starts on the right note: service levels. This is followed by clear explanations of quantitative factors such as call load forecasting, staffing and service level metrics.

Some things that set this book apart are the sections on quality and productivity, and new technologies. The authors go well beyond how to effectively manage call centers by discussing how to integrate new technologies and exploit technology to provide the best possible service. I also liked the section on characteristics of best managed call centers - the information provides an effective roadmap to excellence and benchmarking tool.

Although I am not familiar with the entire body of technical literature on call center management I have to believe that this is one of the most complete books on the subject. I am familiar with the body of literature on IT help desks and can attest that this book needs to be included in the libraries and required reading lists of all IT help desk professionals.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Easy Win!, July 14, 1998

By A Customer

A great book for anyone who works in the inbound call center environment! It's takes the science of call center and transforms it into an easy to read guide. This book will help everyone from senior management to front line service reps gain a better understanding and appreciation of the dynamic call center environment. In the call center world, we often get caught up in the technology and lose site of the fundamentals - this book puts is all back in perspective. Good Luck.