Call centres don’t work. Outsourcing moves problems not deliver services

THE CHALLENGE

Call centres don’t work. Outsourcing moves problems not deliver services.

MY THOUGHTS

In the 1950’s and 1960’s old school management separated thinking from action with the educated managers making the decisions and the unskilled workers implementing the tasks.

Technology advances from the 1970’s thought to the 1990’s sought to automate this with “user requirements” or “business-requirements” often articulated by a senior technology manager rather than the “end-customer” in a manner that leaned toward a technology solution with measures and controls rather than “right first time” service delivery to customers.

This process has de-skilled the people answering the phone who are increasingly required to follow ill-thought-out scripts which seldom recognise the needs of the people calling. This results in confusion, failure, repeated calls and stalled an in-efficient services. The call is then passed around, dropped, lost, repeated perhaps many times.

This increases costs and reduces services. The only beneficiaries are the consultants hired to develop systems that they’ll never have to use, and technology vendors who will never have to answer to the customers whose data is keyed in, but whose problems remain logged somewhere in the ether.

I have taught on the CMI NVQ4 and NVQ5 Management Programme and when-ever I have talked about call centres I have always suggested that the focus should be on “income per call” or “value per call” rather than volume of calls. This is because logically staff incentivised by volume are not disposed to spending lots of time on the phone ensuring service but instead closing the call and moving to the next as fast as possible. Unsurprisingly not fixing the problem first time creates repeat calls, but ironically that is better for a work-force rewarded by volume rather than value.

Even if the call centre does want to spend lots of time on the phone ensuring service, the system doesn’t allow this since it assumes that the system (logic, code and scripts) understands and will solve the problem and the human should not (possibly due to legal, compliance, security or other risks) . Unfortunately life doesn’t happen in neat predictable ways that can be anticipated and coded for. Computers can do simple tasks really fast, but to do really complex tasks requires a human.

The reason more than 60% of IT Projects failing (either time, budget, scope)is that creating a system as clever as the human brain is simply not possible within the constraints of commercial or public funding.

The solution must therefore be to put the human at the centre of the process and instead only use the technology to support the mundane aspects. This should be a warning to e-government and government reform which seeks to amass big-data, sucking information in and making thinking redundant, rather than facilitating service delivery.

It might be informative to look at the investment and 10 year costs of technology solutions compared to the price of staff education needed to resolve the problems. I suspect the former will create lots of data and cost a fortune whereas the latter should reduce repeat problems and be more satisfying and beneficial overall.

YOUR CHANCE TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE

I have recently The WHITEHALL Effect, by John Seddon which has caused me to reflect on my own experience in project and change management and in particular business transformation and government reform.

I am really interested in gathering peoples experience and recommended reading which might inform and direct my thinking and sharing with others. My long-term aim is to perhaps publish a guide, blog, perhaps some “Best Practice Papers” or book based on that research.

The WHITEHALL Effect, by John Seddon
http://www.conservativehome.com/localgovernment/2014/11/john-seddon-we-need-a-shift-from-whitehall-to-local-accountability.html

In the book..

Why don’t public services work very well? One key reason is that  they have been 'industrialised'. Part 1 explains why call centres, back offices, shared services, outsourcing and IT-led change almost always lead to service failure. It explains, in particular, why 'economies of scale' are a myth.

Part 2 proposes a better (and tried-and-tested) alternative to the alienating and unresponsive experience of industrialised public services. Good services are attuned and sensitive to peoples’ needs. Where the 'industrialised' approach tries to drive down costs but invariably drives them up, the better approach – managing value – drives costs down significantly.

Part 3 challenges conventional thinking and received wisdom about public services. Targets, inspection and regulation have to be part of the solution, don't they? Seddon explains why they're actually part of the problem and shows that the most effective lever of change and improvement is to stop 'managing' the people (public sector staff and managers) and start managing the system they work in.

Part 4 discusses some of the current fads in public-sector reform:  ‘choice’,  ‘managing demand’, ‘nudge’ and ‘lean’.  Politicians pursue them  because they are plausible and fit their narrative, the story they like to tell about reform. But these fads only make public services worse or, at best, detract from the opportunity at hand.

The opportunity John Seddon describes is breathtaking. We can undo the costly debacle of public sector 'reform', but only if we first change Whitehall. In Part 5 he describes how Whitehall is systemically incapable of listening to and acting on evidence and finally turn to how Whitehall needs to change if we are to turn away from the mistakes of the last 35 years and realise the profound opportunity.






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THE AUTHOR

Tim Rogers is an experienced Project and Change Leader. He is founder of www.ciChange.org and curator for www.TEDxStHelier.Com . He is Programme Manager for the commercialization of Jersey Harbours and Jersey Airport, and prevously Operations Change and Sales Support for RBSI/NatWest, and Project Manager for the Incorporation of Jersey Post. He is also Commonwealth Triathlete and World Championships Rower with a passion for teaching and learning and is a Tutor/Mentor on the Chartered Management Institute courses. He is a Chartered Member of the British Computer Society, has an MBA (Management Consultancy) and is both a PRINCE2 and Change Management Practitioner.

Email: TimHJRogers@AdaptConsultingGroup.com
Mob: 07797762051 | Twitter @timhjrogers | Skype timhjrogers