Does anyone here work in a call center?

[RNMOM]

I worked in a health care based call center and I can tell you that everyone knows who the slackers are. It's hard to hide in a shared office even with partitions.

I don't feel it was motivational at all to have performance information posted. We did not do it but I was given the job of reviewing my peers and giving the information to the manager. Some people needed some assistance and others excelled.

Just because you can process your calls rapidly doesn't mean you do a good job on each call. Lots of the fastest people took shortcuts and gave poor advice or were not very personable.

 

[jen0610]

While not a call center, the credit department I use to work in tried using this type of posting to motivate calls, which would increase the volume of cash coming in each day.

Each of us were assigned a group of accounts based on the alphabet. We also had a portfolio that was exclusive to 2 divisions of the company. They wanted us to make X number of calls per day. They tracked our calls, both in and outbound.

Because I had the exclusive portfolio, I had the largest dollars always open and on each account they would have a 100 more invoices processed each day. Just based on the volume of invoices I had to deal with, it had been determined a couple of years earlier, that any and all accounts that I could communicate with via e-mail would be better.

We each had goals to meet that would entitle us to a bonus. Each month that we met our goal, it pushed us to a higher tier on the bonus level. The number of calls was a factor. When they started posting the call numbers and bonus levels, it caused waves that I was at such a higher level, than many others, but had one of the lowest number of calls. It took pulling reports of how much money was posted each day/week/month in each portfolio, before many of them finally understood. While I many not have made 20 calls in an hour, that 1 e-mail I sent out that had a spreadsheet that took 2 hours of work to put together, got that 1.98 million dollar check released, overnighted and in the bank before year close.

I have never liked the judgement bar of how many can you do in X amount of time. A lot of times the outcome they are looking for, goes way beyond that number. You can have someone with a huge number of calls, but a small amount of money coming in.