In-person Seminar.
What is Service Engineering?
Achieving the "right" balance between service quality and efficiency is a fundamental
operational challenge for call center managers. All too often, high levels of efficiency
come at the cost of low service quality. Or, high quality service comes at the cost
of profitability.
If companies paid their customers a cost per minute each time they made them wait,
things might be viewed quite differently. By giving a value to both the center and
the customer, competing demands, priorities, and issues can be balanced. A coefficient
of value allows the objective balancing of quality, efficiency, and profitability,
and rewards customers and employees with a great experience with each and every
contact.
Understanding call center science is vital to running an effective call center.
Effective operations, and resulting services, can be engineered based on science
and metrics: science for direction, and metrics for status and verification. Service
Engineering is the study and application of scientifically-based design principles
and metrics to balance service quality, efficiency, and profitability. The ultimate
goal of Service Engineering can be paraphrased with one word: value.
Overview
This 5-day intensive bootcamp training course combines and presents material on
the subjects of Call Center Engineering Boot Camp, Data Analytics, Reporting, and
Six Sigma Call Center Design. Attendees will be introduced to the mathematical and
statistical bases for high-performance call center re-engineering. The course is
taught by James Abbott, the industrial and service engineer who literally wrote
the books on the subject: The Executive Guide to Call Center Metrics, the
most widely read book on this topic; Preparing Call Center Engineering Boot Camp;
Designing Effective Call Centers; and The Executive Guide to Six Sigma Call
Centers.
Attendees of this training course will go back to their support centers with practical,
real-world knowledge of how to prepare information for effective call center reporting
and how to design call center processes to deliver the highest quality service with
minimal wait times. You will not be overwhelmed with baffling rules, frustrating
formulas, and confusing tables that may be useful only in theory. Instead, you will
discover the proper tools to use at the right time to achieve maximum performance.
Who Should Attend
This course is for professionals responsible for support center performance management,
reporting, call center operations, or implementation of performance improvement
strategies. Participants that will benefit most from the course include CIOs, COOs,
VPs of operations, directors, designers, and managers, and those who are or may
be pursuing the CCCE certification or Call Center Six Sigma Black Belt credentials.
The 5-day Call Center Engineering Boot Camp fulfills one-half of the courses required
to earn the Call Center Six Sigma Black Belt designation.
Prerequisites
This course is designed for call center and help desk professionals. There are no
prerequisites for this introductory metrics and six sigma design course.
Agenda
Day 1: The Principles of Call Center Engineering Boot Camp
The impact of methods and decision-making
- How and why to build a metric blueprint for your facility
- Understand, identify, and track metrics that are key to your center's effectiveness
- How to validate business and statistical assumptions for better metric preparation
- The three steps for preparing metrics
- Techniques for call center metric reporting
- Using statistics to prepare your metrics
- The role of SLAs in metric preparation
Day 2 Strategic Metrics and Reporting
Management's tools for assessing your call center
- How strategic reports differ from, and work with, tactical reports
- Assessing the call center's capability
- Advanced statistical studies for call centers
- Comparing call centers and departments within a call center
Day 3 Tactical Metrics and Reporting
Operational tools for running the center
- Analyzing and controlling call center variability
- Using metrics to manage call center time and cost
- How to build a real-time reporting system
- Building a call center GUPPI® for cause and effect analysis
- Call center charts for tactical decision-making
Day 4: Support Center Design Concepts, Issues, and Philosophy
- Four road-blocks to improvement and how to break through them
- The difference between efficient centers and effective centers.
- The four traits of an effective center
- What a Sigma is, and why Six
- Six Sigma in the help desk and call center world
- The methodology for call center simplification and optimization
- Why technology has not solved your center's problems
- Life cycle and its impact
- What it is
- What has happened over time
- The s-curve
- Management science
- Details of queuing science and metrics
- Effective SLAs
- The multi-dimensional aspect of service level agreements.
- The impact of properly built and communicated SLAs
- Building strategic SLAs for your organization
- The tactical and strategic importance of SLAs
- How to implement SLAs at your center
- How and where to use SLAs in metrics
- Process Management Principles that provide a "True North" for operations
- First Principle
- Second Principle
- Decision-making (policy, strategy, tactics)
- Division of Labor
- Metric support for decisions
- Third Principle
- Correct, Consistent, and Capable for Design, Improvement, and Sustainment
Day 5: Six Sigma Design, Engineering, and Reengineering
- How to design or reengineer your center
- Defining management, supervisory, and agent roles and responsibilities
- Providing the tools required for each function
- Design approach for process design and script writing
- Process design and dependency development
- Key metric development
- Advanced design and engineering
- Building, using, and understanding express lanes
- Contact center process segmentation
- The art of designing an effective triage
- Building a knowledge dissemination system
- The six tiers of knowledge for running an effective support center operation
- Building the metric blueprint
- Building the dependency diagram
- Factor tables
- Target settings
- Metric status reports
- Quick auditing tools
- Methods to assess correctness, consistency, and capability
- Strategic and tactical process viewer
- Building a strategic plan for maintaining an optimal center
- Tools and methods for determining the correct staffing requirements
- Staff development for managers, supervisors, and agents
- Queuing theory and wait time optimization
- Tactical allocation of resources
- Effective grouping strategies
- Integrating the strategic design into your support center
What Past Attendees Say About the Course
"These classes have been the best, most applicable, I have attended since becoming
a Call Center Manager." -- Paula Mezo, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN
"The instructor gave great explanations and examples [of the formulas] to clarify
how to apply them to a real-life situation. [He] taught the practical application
of statistics, which I found very useful." -- Stacey Love, The Hartford Insurance
Group, Hartford Connecticut
"Outstanding class! I appreciated the quality of the materials and the instruction.
I particularly valued the caliber of the instructor and his ability to answer questions
and convey complex concepts. Going over examples and applying concepts specific
to my business was helpful as well."
"When I first sought out classes on call center management and metrics, I thought
that I needed to focus on theories and concepts... of course such an approach can
become quickly outdated. The approach of this class, however, provided tools that
will not become obsolete and will afford not only initial, but ongoing assessment
of operations. I [see] the lasting value of [my] investment!" -- Patricia Scott,
Northside Hospital, Atlanta, Georgia
"Excellent! A good guide for me to know where to get started and how to go about
it." -- Laurie McIntyre, Hydro One Networks, INC. Toronto, Ontario
Registration Fees
The per student registration fee for this seminar is $3,795, and includes the seminar,
course materials, and refreshments each day. Dress is business casual. Laptops are
optional. Class begins at 9:00 AM and ends at 5:00 PM each day.
To register, click the "Add to Cart" button or call 443-909-6951.
