Customer Satisfaction And Input In Call Center Agent

The call center provides services for all the cardholders, which became an important channel for service management in bank. And ICBC has established professional call center for its customers, like other giant bank in China. But how to set appropriate agents, can not only satisfaction customers service need, but also can control the labor cost, remain puzzled many call centers including ICBC. This paper takes the credit card call center of ICBC as an example, applying theoretical analysis on research data to explore management policy for inbound call centers for an effective operation.On researches of labor cost control, this paper takes the input of agent for the key research subject, which is the main labor cast to call center. Call center agents include direct attendant agents and quality control agents. The researches process set a precondition---ensure the certain customer satisfaction index.This paper clarify that ICBC credit card call center is now facing three human resources control problems:1.The calls amount is continuous rising, which needs to add more and more agents;2.The agents become more and more, but the customer satisfaction index upgrades slower and slower;3.There’s no idea how to set the appropriate quality control agents to make sure the service quality. The three problems will be respectively proposed management ideas by the demonstration.In the analysis of controlling the amount of agents, the paper will give some examples. We alter the self-help voice service, expect can bypass some calls in the case of not affect the customer satisfaction, so we can cut the amount of agents. We selected one province as an experimental region, and make two experiments. We designed a voice control program to customers for the first time, instead of they speak to the agents. Calls handled by live operator service reduced significantly after its implementation, but customer satisfaction level decreased drastically as well, the experiment had to be terminated. Before the second experiment, we carried out a telephone interview among the customers in the province. Based on the customer opinions, we designed a new voice service strategy, during the daytime peak hours, we limited only the simple inquiry service; considering the night calls were mostly urgent or from overseas, no limitation was set during the night. One result of the experiment is that the overall customer satisfaction degree only reduced slightly, and the other result is that the volume of calls transferred to live operator service significantly dropped.The paper will analysis the relationship between the input in agents and customer satisfaction through basic data in the next step, and to solve the labor input problems. In this part, we abandon the traditional way to calculate how many call center agents are required---total calls divided by working efficiency per agent. Because it is impossible for customers to wait for their turn as general work pieces do, we must to consider the time factor. Er-lang C formula, widely used in call center at present, indicates that the increase in the number of agents in the case of low service level plays an obvious role in improving the service level. However, there will be a little impact on service level after "Vital Few", showing obvious edge effect. Service level and customer satisfaction are in a positive correlation on the whole. The improvement of customer satisfaction becomes little obvious at a certain point, even no improvement will be achieved. Here, labor input is basically cost without benefit.To ensure the service quality, the call center also needs to set some quality control agent. But if we set agents in a fixed ratio in a traditional way, it will be a large labor input for such a huge ICBC call center. In this article, First, we analysis the method of quality control, for the purpose of being "fair", traditional quality control has many problems, such as score chart without any efficiency, sufficiency of sampling directly influencing the reliability of quality control. Secondly, we changed the method of quality control. The first step to change the way of quality control is reviewing our scoring criteria. Whether quality control is combined with customer expectation is the key factor to assessment. Sample frames are required to be made and stability of staff taken into account to solve sampling insufficiency. Sampling and stability are brought together to proceed differential sampling, which can more scientifically measure and calculate the minimum number of staff needed to complete the task.