Blog Post: A Third Workplace Scenario – Final Comments

You work for a customer service phone center.  The work is more involved and more interesting than you thought it would be because you have to know a lot to solve caller problems and to provide callers with the wide range of information on the company’s products and services.  You have a come a long way in three months and are now one of the most knowledgeable phone representatives.  You have also mastered the ability to calm and reassure agitated customers.  However, last week the company hired a new supervisor for the customer service phone center.  Two days ago your supervisor chewed you out for being 10 minutes late.  Yesterday he told you that you spent too much time on the phone with a couple of callers.  Today the new supervisor installed a policy where all breaks and lunch hours are scheduled for set times.  Your buddy, who you go to lunch with every day, has a different lunch time than you do.  And to top the cake, everyone now has to ask permission before leaving their workstation to go to the bathroom.

What are your impressions of the new supervisor? 

First of all, yes the supervisor has made a key mistake, but it isn’t what the majority of the people that have responded to this scenario in the past identify.

Many people respond with comments like:

• The supervisor is a control freak.
• The supervisor is power-hungry.
• The supervisor is treating everyone like children.
• The supervisor has his/her priorities wrong.

The answer is: The supervisor has poor communication skills.

The supervisor has implemented the correct workplace rules for a customer service phone center.  Let me address each item to inform you why that is the case.

(1)    10 minutes late.  One of the goals of a customer service phone center is to minimize the time callers are on hold.  Callers that wait a long time on hold are dissatisfied customers and that could cause them to do business elsewhere.  Therefore, phone centers forecast the number of calls they expect in given time frames, and hire staff to ensure that the vast majority of calls can be handled in a timely fashion.  If you are 10 minutes late, the call center will not have the representatives it forecasted it needed to provide good customer service (acceptable hold time before speaking to a phone representative).  In fact some may wait so long they will hang up and call back later.  That results in additional calls later in the day, at a time when the phone center may not have enough staff to handle the increased volume and maintain good service levels.  Now, even more callers will hang up and call back another time; some may even call the next day.  So a ten minute tardy could result in poor service levels for days.  While this is not always (or even in some phone centers usually) the case; if it does happen, the results are always major problems for the business.  So good phone center supervisors manage their phone representatives time very closely.

(2)    Lunch and bathroom breaks.  The reason for scheduling breaks is the same as in number (1).  The supervisor needs to manage the number of phone representatives to the expected call volume.  If you are scheduled for a lunch time and want to switch, good supervisors will allow that assuming you can find someone to switch with you (on a permanent schedule basis, not day-to-day basis since too much time will be spent looking for someone to switch if done daily).

(3)    Too much time on the phone.  This is a concept many phone representatives find difficult to embrace.  After all, many believe they should spend as much time as needed with a customer to solve his/her problem and keep him/her satisfied.  However, the goal of the company is to provide good customer service to all.  If you spend 20 minutes with one customer, the result may be that 5 other customers are now waiting too long to connect with a representative.  Even of their questions are handled fine; they may be dissatisfied because of the long wait on hold to get to a phone representative.  One extremely satisfied customer and five dissatisfied customers is not a good outcome.  So what do you do?  Be sure that you only spend time with customers where the time is genuinely needed.  Do not spend extra time thinking that you’re providing superior service.  And after a necessary long call, be aware that a backlog of calls may have arisen and look to handle simple calls that follow courteously, but quickly.  In this case, assume you spent too long on calls that could have been handled more quickly.

Now onto what the supervisor did wrong.  Before implementing the changes, the supervisor should have called the staff together and explained why the changes were being implemented.  One of my favorite lines when I performed this task in the past was, “If you don’t like these rules, don’t say it’s because I have an ego problem, or that I’m treating you like children, or that I’m a control freak.  Instead say that you think my capacity planning model (the phone representatives I need based on expected call volumes) is bull.”  I found that after explaining how phone centers work, and why I implemented the rules at work that I did, that most representatives asked on their own, “how may callers are waiting” before asking if they could go to the bathroom.  They realized that if I managed the call traffic well, they had to deal with fewer irritated customers.

If you are a manger, supervisor, or business owner and like my scenario approach to training, click here to find out how I can create custom scenarios for your workplace.