Monday, July 23, 2007

Call Center Creep

The latest procedure is that we are no longer to troubleshoot remote access issues other than resetting passwords. The claim is that we spend more time per call on these issues than on anything else. Since the Help Desk is not really increasing their staff to account for the increased call volume, they are working to develop "Call Reduction / Avoidance strategies."

The claim is made that to serve everyone, we need to limit out calls. In fact, what we have decided to do is to sacrifice everyone else's productivity to boot our own numbers. If I do no troubleshooting for a remote access issue, I can turn a 15, 20 or 30 minute call into a 5 or 10 minute call. That allows me to take four calls in the same amount of time. Good for my numbers. Good for the Help Desk numbers.

But what about the person who can't access via remote access? He can't get to his email to service clients. Can't make trades. Can't post wires. Essentially he cannot do his job for the HOURS that it can take for second level support to finally get back to him.

The claim is that this is to "provide timely service to all of our callers" but it doesn't make any sense to me. Sure, I'm not taking those other 4 calls but the additional wait because of that, spread among a score of other analysts, can be measured in seconds. That's not even enough to be recognized by a caller as an inconvenience. And even if there is a lot of people in the queue, at worst those seconds might compounds themselves so that the last person in line may have to wait additional minute to receive service. Compare that to the remote access user who can do NOTHING for hours and it's pretty clear that the Help Desk has its priorities wrong.

And, in the end, I don't think that cutting out the time it takes to troubleshoot remote access calls will not significantly affect our overall numbers.

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