Most discussions on variability start from the unpleasant fact that we have to live with randomness. We want uniformity for business efficiency, but the world throws us variation.
In the contact center, variability comes into play at every step of the interaction—when customers call or make contact, what they ask for, and how effectively agents deliver services. While we can’t eliminate variation, there are ways to manage it.
Harvard Business School’s Frances Frei has been a public commenter on customer service and on quality-versus-efficiency decisions that affect the customer experience. I came across an interesting (and readable!) overview paper that Professor Frei has written on variability in the delivery of customer service.
In her article, Frei doesn’t specifically address contact centers. Trying to extend her ideas to the contact center environment, I jotted down my thoughts on two forms of variability she discusses:
Arrival Variability
According to Frei, the traditional way to manage arrival randomness involves a reservation system. While this scheme works well for restaurants, theatres, and sporting events, it’s not a practical option for the contact center.
We have no choice here: we’re dealt the Erlang model, which describes random customer arrivals and agent talk times (ATT). However, contact centers can manage this kind of uncertainty through workforce management software that predicts arrival volumes and calculates appropriate agent staffing requirements.
Request variability
One way to manage the range of customer requests is to funnel queries into known categories. There’s a lot of evidence that by limiting choices—for example, the no substitute rule at restaurants— customers will reframe their selections according to existing patterns, leading to quicker service and a better customer experience.
IVR menus that route to self-service solutions are the obvious adaptation of the choice restriction idea to contact centers. For non-automated responses, request variability is controlled by matching a customer request to a specifically skilled agent. One way to think about skills-based routing is to view it as a mechanism for managing request randomness.
Frei adds an interesting new form of randomness that’s not often considered – capability variability, which is the skill level of the customer! I’ll take up this variability creature in a future post.
