Garrett Bidewell

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Valued members,

From where I stand, Winter is here. As we come into this holiday season I wanted to take a moment and wish everyone a joyful filled time. As this season is usually spent with friends and family, time is what really matters. Time with the ones you love. 

A recent team exercise turned up this bit of history for us. It’s interesting how TAS companies can be their worst enemy at times. We learned from this experience, mostly from our own perspective, but some we picked up from other TAS companies. Maybe you went through something like this too? 

Before the widespread use by TAS companies of computer-based telephone systems, the most common method of tracking how busy customers were was by the message or by the call. This was an improvement over billing each customer a fixed amount since customers were billed according to how much operator time their account required. In other words, this was fairer to the TAS company because the billing rates more closely matched the direct cost the TAS company paid. Except that, well, it wasn't perfect. First of all, this billing rate needed to be negotiated when the customer was starting. Invariably, this meant that many customers got a different rate, which wasn't necessarily fair but was based on the customer and sales negotiation. Secondly, some customer's calls were more involved and some less, so calls for different companies required differing amounts of time on average. It appeared that the best solution was time-based billing so that the amount of time that required a TAS company to spend on their account could be billed, instead of the simpler call based billing. So, time-based billing is more generally fair to the TAS company.

But, what happens at your service when the calling traffic spikes upwards? For your customers who are paying for time, are those customers able to receive the service they desire? It would be fair, even during busy times, to staff according to the level of work that is needed to be done. But, as I've seen, a TAS company will instead focus on tasking agents to handle calls faster during busier times. This is where TAS companies can be their own worst enemy, they allow customer service to suffer during busy times. In my experience, busy times means that customers receive less service: rushed or faster calls and work is delayed until inbound traffic slows down. This is a significant cost saving in terms of agent costs for the TAS company, but is it what the customer wants and is paying for?

Perhaps a fairer way to look at this issue is to assign the time based value to each call, let's say $1 per minute. If a customer is willing to pay $1 per minute for an agent's time and, during normal, non-rushed time a call takes about 45 seconds, then is that customer not being treated more unfairly when, during busy times due to staffing levels, the agent spends 30 seconds on each call? Sure, the call only costs $0.50 instead of $0.75, but did the customer not receive $0.25 less value? In other words, faster calls mean that customers get less value, even though they have time-based rates and are willing to pay for operator time.

It's worthwhile to consider that customers expect excellent service even during busy times, and if your service is unable to handle the volume of calls during these times with the same level of customer service as during normal times, then the best response is to increase your staffing levels rather than require operators to handle their calls faster. This response is what the customer wants and is paying for. When was the last time a customer of yours asked for agents to handle their calls faster in order to spend less time on their calls? A high quality professional call means that the agent is confident, accurate and certainly not rushed.

Looking forward to seeing you all at CAM-X 2020. It’s really going to be an amazing event, and I can’t wait to see what surprises Brad has in store for us. 

Your President, Garrett Bidewell. 

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