I’ve had a long held belief that we should not get hung up on the numbers. We measure so many things at work and make decisions based upon what the numbers say yet all they are telling us is a story. The numbers are an insight into what is happening. They are not what is actually happening. Numbers without context are just that, numbers.
I’ve said to the people on the Service Desk many a time that they are not to focus on the numbers. At some point we are going to be busier than we can cope with which means that on occasions customer are going to have to wait too long. We need to focus on flow and causes and effective procedures. We need to understand the problems and realist that because we have a bad day it doesn’t mean we are a bad service.
We used to have a plasma screen on the wall where the team take the phone calls from people who are having an issue with their ICT. It bothered me as I felt it was a constant reminder of the fact that people were ringing and that there was a queue. It was a constant drip, drip that would make the team speed up and try to get off the phone as quickly as possible to answer the next one. My view is that the most important customer is the one that you are speaking to and quality of response is ultimately better than speed. So I asked for the screen to be taken down.
This week I’ve been asked to put it back up, not by the management but by the people who answer the phones themselves. At first I was reluctant thinking that they were slipping back into bad ways of focusing on response times and queue lengths and so I asked why.
The answer was simple. They wanted to be able to gauge whether or not they could slip off for a cup of coffee or go to the toilet and were reluctant to do so if they knew that there were customer waiting to be answered.
I’m not sure if measuring call queues is the right tool for this job but I was enamoured by this small but important indication of how the Service Desk continues to take its role seriously. We’re using the numbers to tell a story and that is ‘Am I OK to come off the phones for a couple of minutes?’
It’s their call. The plasma screen is going back up.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 