 | Ignorance is bliss? |
To quote JC: “…many people working in such systems who have sort of ‘fallen into it’ in some way.”
Isn’t this just the case - and it rings true in every job in the land. The most frustrating thing is that often these people, and John’s example is a good one, don’t understand what they don’t understand. If you’re with me?!
I had a similar problem. I was trying to show a guy how to average service level figures. The stats in question being number of calls answered within x seconds, as a pecentage of offered calls. What he couldn’t understand is that you need to “weight” the figures depending how many calls were recevied in each period.
His logic:
% from period a * % from period b / number of periods (in this case; 2 periods).
My logic:
(% from period a * number of calls from period a) * (% from period b * number of calls from period b) / (number of calls from period a + number of calls from period b).
Would he listen? Nope. His incorrect figures then went to the client - who couldn’t understand why they didn’t tally with the daily figures. Some bizarre explanation was issued and eventually he got the client so confused they gave up trying to understand. Blinded without science.
This was a professional call centre operation and they weren’t even releasing accurate figures to their clients. You’d assume that such an organistation should go out of business, but as with John’s story the practice is rife. The clients themselves don’t have the knowledge, or the time, to be able to be checking up on such things. It’s one of the reasons I decided to start my own company. I wanted to ensure that what I put my name next to was 100% correct.
There are a lot of good centres out there - but there’s an awful lot of bad ones too.
So is this morally wrong? You’re giving your client incorrect figures, and at the end of the day you don’t know how to do what you’re charging money for. Would you pay a mechanic who didn’t know how to change an oil filter? I appreciate that this isn’t malicious, it’s ignorance. But I still find it totally unacceptable.
This ignorance brings me round to my favourite topic of the moment: silent calls. We just can’t get away from it at the moment - mainly because there’s plenty of fuel for the argument and the press are more than willing to fan the flames.
The public’s getting quite angry with it - and if not controlled it’s going to turn quite nasty for the call centre industry. To my knowledge most companies keep within reasonable limits such as the DMA guidelines. However, it needs to be remembered that a lot of dialler users are not DMA members, and a lot of dialler users are not even in the marketing business. The implication in the press is that the DMA should answer for all silent calls, which isn’t correct.
But it only takes a few “Kitchen Directs” (1) to cause an awful lot of silent calls - usually multiples to the same people on the same day - and this causes the problems. These companies are ignorant to what they’re doing.
If you use a dialler, review your practice. Even if you’re convinced that you’re compliant. Make sure you stay within the DMA’s guidelines, even if you’re not a member or your calls are not for marketing purposes. Don’t let youself be one of these people that were ignorant to the diallers misuse.
Regards,
DB