• Your measurement or goal is not to see how many calls you can handle.
• Your goal is not to handle calls in the minimum amount of time.

• Your goal, is to lower the number of calls!

For several years, I worked part time in a Sales Support Call Center.

• The manager of the call center I worked in [name available upon request, because you really don't want to hire her] bragged about how many calls were being answered on a monthly or weekly basis.
• Contests were run to see who could handle the most calls per shift.
• Teams were encouraged to compete against each other.
• Monthy reports to her management bragged of "up and to the right" graphs for "number of calls handled."
• Call center workers were chastised for taking too long to answer calls.
• Statistics were kept to make sure that call durations were kept to a minimum.

Then an interesting thing happened to me.
I got a call from a sales rep, asking for reliability (MTBF) numbers for one of our products.

"Why," I asked him, "did the customer want this information?" ...

"What's the application?" I asked.

After the Sales Rep described the application, I explained to him that the customer didn't need our [proprietary, anyway] reliability statistics.

What did i learn? The application was on a transoceanic telecom cable-laying ship. The computer controlled the rate that the cables were spooled off the ship. If the computer controlling the cables failed, cable could get tangled by excessive slack or pulled too taut and snap from inadequate slack before the captain could bring the ship to a full stop.!

What they needed was a redundant computer installation with automatic cutover to a standby computer so that, if one computer failed, the on-board maintenance technician could repair the downed computer without having to tell the captain to stop the ship during repairs!

The call took about 45 minutes to complete -- a bit longer than the target "3 minutes."

But instead of selling just some spare parts, the Sales Rep got to sell the customer two computers instead of one, plus some valuable [and expensive] failover hardware and software, plus some spare parts!

I, of course, was called to task for taking so long for the call, thus ruining my average call time as well as the statistics for the call center for that day or week.

At that point, I suggested to the call center manager's supervisor that "more calls faster" just might be a poor way to measure the call center, and that growing her empire by handling more calls might be the worst possible goal for the organizations we were working with.

(Soon after that, the call center manager stopped emailing everyone the latest statistics, and also found herself another position. Unfortunately, it was in a marketing department for our company, and not for one of our competitors. Even worse stories about her are available, too.)

So, if you manage a call center, take note:

• shorter, quicker answers aren't always the best for the call center or for your company
• you must include a feedback system for the types of questions and their content to the organizations who own the products being supported
• probably the biggest possible added-value of a call center is reducing the number of calls through reducing the reasons for them!

But you knew that, right?