Why no-one wants to play for the losing team

Mark Turner, one of our Principal Consultants at Curium, has 20+ years experience in call centers and operational excellence projects. Over those 20+ years, Mark has had to manager failure demand and the effect it has on the entire company from CEOs to frontline phone agents.

Failure demand is the term used in any operational area with a primary function of servicing customer demand when contacts come in regarding a fault of the company within the customer journey and it is estimated, for example in a typical call center, failure demand is around 40-60%. This means that of the hundreds of calls received everyday, up to 60% of them are a result of a failure that could have been avoided. These calls take time and resources away from “value demand” calls that could be generating business.

In most call centers, it’s been proven that you can reduce your overall call demand by over 30% just by reducing your failure demand. Not forgetting the added benefit of improving your customer experience.

Failure demand negatively impacts the company reputation, generates high costs for your business such as compensation, redress and write-off’s, decreases your efficiency and has a huge impact on your employee motivation.

If working in a call center was compared to playing a sport, Football for example, failure demand is equivalent to showing up week after week and losing 10-0, every week, every game, for months on end. Never winning. The sport you once enjoyed just isn’t fun anymore.

Now, before each game you lack the motivation to even lace up your cleats, let alone go out onto the field and give maximum effort for four full quarters. If this continues for much longer, what would you do? Probably quit the team, right?

On the flip side, if your team is winning games, you’re celebrating together and having fun you’ll think “I love this game” and continue to play week on week, brimming with energy and adrenaline.

The golden question. Truth is, there are so many factors that may be contributing, and, in many cases, teams are ‘trapped’ in a cycle of failures that quite often need some intervention to correct the course.

Whilst it is natural to assume that this is driven by not having enough people in the team (supply) to meet the demand being received, there are often a range of influencing factors which contribute towards the organizational and operational pain being experienced. For example.

• Do your people have the right skills to deal with your demand?
• Are your people in the right place at the right time to service the demand received?
• How accurate and useful is your demand forecasting to enable you to schedule your people appropriately?
• Have the processes and procedures your people use kept pace with evolving customer expectations?
• Do your people have easy visibility of demand changes, in real time, to enable them to react positively to these events and also understand what may be causing these spikes?

The root cause is typically linked to something which affects your people There are of course amazing technological solutions being launched and developed every day but all of these need to be aligned to your people in order for them to consistently and brilliantly serve your customers.

The good news? This is where our expertise comes in as a people first change organization!