Hello all-

I currently manage a team of 6 doing technical support for a proprietary software product. Our staff deals with incoming calls from every conceivable type of person - from a non-technical user in a Mom and Pop shop to a highly trained IT professional in a Fortune 100 company.

My issue is with determining workload and finding a reasonable metric to compare staff members. Due to the great variation in call types a call can be 10 minutes of several hours - so the sheer number of calls or incidents is not a good measure.

We are also in the process of considering a new CRM system - optimally I'd be able to manage workload through whatever tool we choose. If anyone has suggestions for either a good metric or strategy for workload balancing in this type of situation, or even just experience with a CRM that they really recommend, I'd love to hear about it.

We currently use our CRM on both the Sales and Support side, and manage all tickets through that tool. We are looking to add web ticketing and possibly a customer knowledgebase to our current system.

Thanks!

Kristin

Hi Kristin,

I can refer you a vendor who can offer web ticketing and customer knowledgebase. Please revert with any other technical specifications so that I can confirm the same for you. This can also help you to get a direction for the further process.

In case of any further queries please feel free to write back to me or contact me on 650 230 7508.


Regards,

Tim Johnson

How about you look at what the real issue is, and measure that? Namely, competency of the staff? The number of calls taken, resolved, not resolved and the time it takes to do this doesn't seem to me to be the issue. Rather, it seems that establishing the core set of competencies to perform the job, then assessing team members against that core set will get you what you need.

And if you open it up and gather feedback from team members, i.e., ask them to rate themselves AND team members, a lot of performance (or non-performance) issues will arise.

I would measure things like:
Listening
Customer Focus
Written / oral Communications
Integrity and Trust
Timely Decision Making
etc., etc.

(I could go on forever)

Good luck!

Even though your calls are of varying length, you still need to measure the time it takes to solve problems. Your goal should always be to reduce the average. They will be able to solve more problems, if they are solving them faster, that is what will keep a company in business. (You don't need to 'judge' them on their call lengths, maybe just their improvement over time.)

If you can easily poll your customers to find out their satisfaction ratings, that might help. I think their candid opinion would be the best feedback - not the choices 1-5, but the open ended text they are allowed to write. You can simple compare the comments that each or your 6 get to see who is doing the best.

Lastly, I would suggest that you make sure your team is cross-trained. In other words: all 6 of them can work on different types of problems equally. Don't let any of them cherry pick their problems. That leads to silos and problems down the road when 1 of them leaves. Problems for the team should be given randomly, or simply to the first one available. They shouldn't be allowed to pass the problem on to the 'expert'.

I hope that helps.
Todd
http://worldclasstech.wordpress.com/