Rating: 
Summary: An excellent overview in Call Center Management
Review: I love this book, it provides an excellent overview on a myriad of call center topics, including staffing, forecasting, metric assessment and performance review. It definitely proved to validate some of the observations and concerns that I had regarding my own call center. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a reference on call center management, or any person new to the field of call center management. The book is very well formatted to be used as a stand alone reference or a cover to cover read, each chapter is very thorough in explanation without going into excruciating detail or debate. This book will help you do your job better!
Rating:
Summary: An excellent overview in Call Center Management
Review: I love this book, it provides an excellent overview on a myriad of call center topics, including staffing, forecasting, metric assessment and performance review. It definitely proved to validate some of the observations and concerns that I had regarding my own call center. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a reference on call center management, or any person new to the field of call center management. The book is very well formatted to be used as a stand alone reference or a cover to cover read, each chapter is very thorough in explanation without going into excruciating detail or debate. This book will help you do your job better!
Rating:
Summary: Wow! So This is How Call Centers Work!
Review: I've generally been an IT Director and Project Manager, so I read this book to get a better idea of my customers' needs. I was pretty excited to discover that there's at least one good summary of what call centers do and how they do it. For my own sake--and perhaps yours--here's my summary of Brad and Julia's summary: 1. Incoming call center management is the art of having the right number of skilled people and supporting resources in place at the right times to handle an accurately forecasted workload, at service level and with quality. 2. Though average call load may be predictable, calls arrive randomly--which means that they often bunch up. 3. A service level is defined as "X percent of calls answered in Y seconds", not as "X percent answered" or "Average Speed of Answer". (The ASA is skewed by the bad times when calls bunch up.) Abandonment rates matter, too, but fixing abandonment problems usually means fixing service levels. 4. Service level and quality don't conflict. If you try to fix service level with poor quality, it comes back to bite you with more calls and demoralized reps. 5. A good forecasted call load--including talk time, after-call work, and volume--is critical for budgeting people and circuits. Often, a good forecast should predict load by the half hour, using previous data, knowledge of upcoming plans, and good judgment. 6. To determine staffing needs, use a variation of the Erlang C formula. Its input is the number of reps, number of callers forecasted, and the time to serve each caller; its output is a prediction of waiting time. (Even better, add an input for response time, and you'll get the percentage who'll wait longer than that!) If agents have different skills, you'll need forecasts and calculations for each set of agents. 7. More staff, less waiting, fewer phone lines for people on hold. Less staff, more waiting, more phone lines. Formulas exist for phone lines, too. 8. Not everyone scheduled is always working on customer service. Schedule accordingly. Be clever about work schedules to get the right number working at the right time. Service level results tell you whether you got it right. 9. If you have too few reps on duty, queues get long (service level goes down), more circuits are needed, and customers get frustrated, sometimes abandoning the call. If you have too many reps on duty, you spend too much paying for them to wait. 10. Give senior managers good reports, but make sure they understand the points above. 11. Monitor the number of calls in the queue and the longest current wait. Service level and other metrics tell more about the past than the present. Be ready with plans for unexpected load (reassigning, rerouting, delay announcements, busy signals). 12. There are lots of tools and graphs to measure aspects of quality. Use them to identify root causes, not beat your employees. Reps should adhere to schedules, and do good work. Use monitoring capabilities to coach. Measuring based on "calls per hour" is unreliable, and invites cheating. 13. Customers are getting more demanding, automated systems are taking the easy calls, so reps have to be better trained and more skilled. 14. Create a good environment that uses technology well. The book was written in 1997, and I don't know whether it's been updated. The authors have some commentary about email-based, web-based, and CTI-based systems, but the next edition might want to say more about the similarities and differences between those and the traditional call center. Overall, I'm happy to understand more about the math and science behind this discipline. As another reviewer commented, it's clear that IT Help Desks have something to learn from the Call Center experience.
Rating:
Summary: Wow! So This is How Call Centers Work!
Review: I've generally been an IT Director and Project Manager, so I read this book to get a better idea of my customers' needs. I was pretty excited to discover that there's at least one good summary of what call centers do and how they do it. For my own sake--and perhaps yours--here's my summary of Brad and Julia's summary: 1. Incoming call center management is the art of having the right number of skilled people and supporting resources in place at the right times to handle an accurately forecasted workload, at service level and with quality. 2. Though average call load may be predictable, calls arrive randomly--which means that they often bunch up. 3. A service level is defined as "X percent of calls answered in Y seconds", not as "X percent answered" or "Average Speed of Answer". (The ASA is skewed by the bad times when calls bunch up.) Abandonment rates matter, too, but fixing abandonment problems usually means fixing service levels. 4. Service level and quality don't conflict. If you try to fix service level with poor quality, it comes back to bite you with more calls and demoralized reps. 5. A good forecasted call load--including talk time, after-call work, and volume--is critical for budgeting people and circuits. Often, a good forecast should predict load by the half hour, using previous data, knowledge of upcoming plans, and good judgment. 6. To determine staffing needs, use a variation of the Erlang C formula. Its input is the number of reps, number of callers forecasted, and the time to serve each caller; its output is a prediction of waiting time. (Even better, add an input for response time, and you'll get the percentage who'll wait longer than that!) If agents have different skills, you'll need forecasts and calculations for each set of agents. 7. More staff, less waiting, fewer phone lines for people on hold. Less staff, more waiting, more phone lines. Formulas exist for phone lines, too. 8. Not everyone scheduled is always working on customer service. Schedule accordingly. Be clever about work schedules to get the right number working at the right time. Service level results tell you whether you got it right. 9. If you have too few reps on duty, queues get long (service level goes down), more circuits are needed, and customers get frustrated, sometimes abandoning the call. If you have too many reps on duty, you spend too much paying for them to wait. 10. Give senior managers good reports, but make sure they understand the points above. 11. Monitor the number of calls in the queue and the longest current wait. Service level and other metrics tell more about the past than the present. Be ready with plans for unexpected load (reassigning, rerouting, delay announcements, busy signals). 12. There are lots of tools and graphs to measure aspects of quality. Use them to identify root causes, not beat your employees. Reps should adhere to schedules, and do good work. Use monitoring capabilities to coach. Measuring based on "calls per hour" is unreliable, and invites cheating. 13. Customers are getting more demanding, automated systems are taking the easy calls, so reps have to be better trained and more skilled. 14. Create a good environment that uses technology well. The book was written in 1997, and I don't know whether it's been updated. The authors have some commentary about email-based, web-based, and CTI-based systems, but the next edition might want to say more about the similarities and differences between those and the traditional call center. Overall, I'm happy to understand more about the math and science behind this discipline. As another reviewer commented, it's clear that IT Help Desks have something to learn from the Call Center experience.
Rating:
Summary: The Call center Bible!!
Review: It's a magnificant read for all call center professionals.Forecasting,reostering ,scheduling.....no problem!!!!It's my Call Center Bible for sure!!!
Rating:
Summary: The Call center Bible!!
Review: It's a magnificant read for all call center professionals.Forecasting,rostering,scheduling.....no problem!!!!It's my Call Center Bible for sure!!!
Rating:
Summary: A must for aspiring call centre professionals!
Review: The authors' ability to demystify the mathematics of call centre forecasting and planning is head and shoulders above any other author I have read. This book will provide you with an invaluable 'aide-memoir,' especially in those times all call centre managers know : when the whole world has decided to phone your call centre just when the latest flu virus has hit half your staff. I can honestly say this book is a must for any aspiring call centre professional.
Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive handbook for management
Review: The perfect book for the people that are managing the call centers. Especially when call center is just a part of your responsibility and you need a comprehensive and ehhaustive in-depth description of call center activities. Great book. Good for both excecutives to understand what the call center managers are doing (even in terms of languages they speak, very usefull, if you are not able to undestand sometimes the cc managers you need the book) and call centers managers in order to understand how to present their work to the executives.
Rating:
Summary: Very Goos Spanish Translation!
Review: The Spanish edition is one of the few books that can be found about the "Call Center Managment Universe".
Besides that, it gave me a really good vision about what a Call or Contact Center should be.
Really enjoyable......
Rating:
Summary: An outstanding book
Review: This book compiles the main points of call center management that help you to get the big picture. An easy to read workbook for naive readers and source of new ideas for experienced managers.
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