Things You May Not Know

Here are a few things you may not know about a call center:

1.) They're rarely located in the same state as where they service.
2.) They're subcontracted out to the companies that do service your local area.
3.) The companies that subcontract the call centers hold them to certain "Service Levels". Example: Every month, the call center is to answer at least 85% of the incoming calls within the first 30 seconds they come in. Calls that are holding for any longer than that negatively impact the service level. Should the SLA not be met, the call center is required to pay them, usually in excess of $10,000.00 for failure to meet contractual obligation.

Now, let's take a look at how this affects customers. At my particular call center, we have a customer base of 400,000. The total number of Customer Service Representatives (CSR's) is sitting at about 60. This leaves us a ratio of 6666.67 customers per representative. Not all CSR's are working every day, round the clock. So it'd be safe to say that around 45 representatives are manning the phones during the peak hours.

45 people to handle 400,000 customers that may call in. If a tiny fraction of our customers call in, we still may be overwhelmed, beyond the point of saving the SLA.

We smoke a lot of cigarettes.