Call Centre disadvantages: The Digital Channel Service Desk imperative
AI might mean you have a portal-first strategy that's now more important than ever.
Flow Management is the means to make it happen easily - without user resistance - with nothing but advantages.
The Principle
Activity Prioritisation (AP) is surrounded by several principles. One is that all urgent support needs must be identified and quickly handled, even if for only one person unable to do something essential. Of course, this outcome is an operational necessity.
The Universal Problem
The problem is that ordinarily, an IT organisation's approach for channeling and prioritising support does not provide for the outcome, even when sought through a Service Desk's Call Centre.
Of 16 disadvantages intrinsic of using and operating a Call Centre, listed below, five harm an IT organisation's ability to reliably meet urgent needs, highlighted in red bold. Although the Call Centre is intended for servicing urgent needs, reliability falls well short, so the principle cannot manifest in reality.
The Solution
Portal Purposing is one of three primary aspects of Flow Management. It enables the urgent needs principle to be met and removes all 16 Call Centre disadvantages by making a service portal the unanimous preferred choice.
Urgent support needs are consistently identified, for prompt address through AP.
Flow Management's basic form of AP, called "Progression Point Prioritisation", which can be implemented very easily in any service tool through configuration alone, is equally suited.
Then, two complementary Portal Purposing capabilities altogether remove any need to phone the Service Desk.
One is for channeling chase events, when a service customer needs to chase ticket progress. Flow Management absolutely minimises how often a chase is necessary, but they will still occasionally occur.
The other is for arranging support appointments.
Like tickets that are given an "urgent" status, chased tickets and appointments also integrate into Activity Prioritisation, ensuring timeliness for both.
Benefits for Service Recipients
A portal becomes the most sensible channel to use for practically all support situations. Timeliness and responsiveness is assured, with less time and effort spent, making support far easier to receive:
- Tickets are assigned directly to the correct resolver team, treated as urgent when applicable, so...
- There is less likelihood of an attempted fix being unsuccessful, or it taking too long.
- No time is spent waiting in a queue to speak to someone.
- Less time is spent on the phone while a team member carries out initial checks.
- A high proportion of needs can be met in the background with no requester involvement.
Industry benchmark data shows that a portal is already the most popular channel for Service Requests, i.e., for non-urgent needs.
With Portal Purposing for urgent needs, chases and appointments, recipients can be expected to happily avoid the Call Centre altogether.
Benefits for IT Organisations
The imperative to become a Digital Channel Service Desk is doubled because there are more benefits for IT organisations in making the transition than there are for service recipients.
A first advantage is that all support needs are prioritised as they should be. Service customers can no longer "jump the queue" by phoning-in with non-urgent needs that detriment a teams ability to service genuinely urgent needs.
The extent of call centres servicing non-urgent needs should not be underestimated. Typically, only a very small percentage of phone calls - well under ten percent - are for information requests (which ideally should be provisioned through a portal or digital assistant anyway), and other urgent support needs.
A second key advantage is that because Portal Purposing relies on an optimal Service Catalogue design with mapping to the correct resolver team, ticket assignment mistakes become rare, minimising how often tickets need to be reassigned (bounced).
The biggest benefit though is that moving away from being on the phone all day long is great for IT employee experience.
Most Service Desk professionals - most people - prefer not to be in a role where the phone is ringing all-day-long. Apart from the continuous pressure, on a Call Centre there is no space to plan how tasks are to be addressed, no ease of collaboration and teamwork, and when a ticket is not competed during a phone call, there is limited capacity to follow-through to completion in a timely way.
By marginalising the Call Centre through Portal Purposing, the benefits enjoyed by second-line support are brought to a Service Desk's other half - first line. By removing Call Centre reliance, the Service Desk is no longer split is half.
Being a single unified team means the environment is right for everyone to acquire the full complement of Service Desk knowledge and skills, which is ideal for efficient workload management, collective teamwork, ease of cover during periods of leave, and for career progression.
All of these benefits positively impact service delivery, so benefit service recipients too.
AP with Portal Purposing can be shared out to other enterprise service divisions, and best of all, to external Customer Services, for maximum value realisation.
How is it set up?
The transition necessitates an optimal Service Catalogue as its foundation. Well-designed service classifications must leave no confusion as to which to choose when raising a ticket. A complementary well-designed portal is essential too.
The benefits are big. In addition to reliable direct ticket assignment, a quality catalogue produces support service information that is also highly accurate, and therefore actionable for decision-making.
For AP, the key gain is that classifications deemed to be urgent are mapped to an "urgent" ticket status that has a very short progression threshold, so urgent needs appear ahead of all others in the order for progression.
Service tool dependant, for reliability, urgent tickets can appear in everyone's ticket list for a team-wide swarmed approach, or can be covered by working from a "Progression Dashboard" (in basic AP, advanced AP, or Perfect Prioritisation).
The importance of promptly covering urgent tickets (before progression thresholds breach) makes recognition of it a key performance metric, through Team Performance Management's Flow Metrics.
For service customers, what are the disadvantages of using a support Call Centre?
- There is often a wait to be connected, sometimes for too long.
- If the need is urgent, a long wait results in particular frustration, or service failure if the call is abandoned.
- Less experienced team-members are sometimes unable to efficiently meet a support need, or at all.
- The caller must wait if documentation must be found / read, or if collaboration is required.
- Only first-line support is available - needs are often for another team.
- When the need is for another team, a ticket assignment mistake causes substantial delays.
- When urgent and for another team, the urgency might not be quickly recognised by the receiving team.
What are the disadvantages for a service provider?
- To minimise call queue wait-times, work shifts with continuous minimum cover must be closely managed.
- IT employee experience: Generally, people do not like being on the phone all day long, and:
- 1. Capacity for collaboration is limited - a "first-time fix" requires answers from co-workers to be immediate.
- 2. There is no preparation time - support is "on the spot", which can be stressful.
- Compromised prioritisation: "Jumping the queue" with non-urgent needs is allowed.
- Servicing non-urgent needs as if they are urgent harms quick response ability for truly urgent needs.
- If first-line staff are not allowed to maintain ticket ownership due to difficulty finding time to progress
ageing tickets, the job satisfaction of following through to completion is lost.
- Alternatively, if first-line staff are allowed to maintain ticket ownership, progression is untimely.
- At quiet times, staff time is badly utilised in doing little else than waiting for a call.
A principled question
Old habits die hard. Some service customers will still prefer to pick up the phone. So, the question might be asked:
Is the preference of a few good enough reason to keep the Call Centre openly available?
Or, will a service management principle of adopting modern digital ways take precedence, for all of the many advantages that benefit customers and service providers alike? After all, it is quite usual for line-of-business (lob) products and services to be supported soley through a portal form or online Chat. Where a Call Centre is available, a call-back if often a presented option. So considering that successful lob support is critical for any business, can it be justified that IT support be very different?
Whatever the answer, a portal-first approach is highly advantageous, to whatever extent it might be.
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