It is quite difficult to know exactly how long operators should be spending on each call. Sometimes a client really does need detailed advice or reassurance, at other times the call could be dealt with very quickly indeed. There’s a minimum amount of time just to go through the courtesies. But there’s also an upper limit. No matter how complex the call, our systems should be able to cope with it within a set time limit.

Said Duncan Hindes, Mortgage Services Manager, Beadles Bank. Duncan was speaking just after the bank had made a considerable investment in its new call centre information technology project.

The new system had been ‘up and running’ for several weeks and was generating considerable amounts of data. The average length of phone calls was of particular concern to him. He had a suspicion that the calls were varying too much and that operators should be able to control even the longer calls. He also felt that it should be possible, at the same level of service quality, to get the average call time down to under two-and-a-half minutes.

If operators spend too little time with clients, we can lose valuable opportunities to collect information, make them feel ‘dismissed’, and waste an opportunity to sell them further services. On the other hand, if operators spend too much time we are obviously wasting valuable operator time Duncan decided that he should chart the average call length, and its variability, over time. He used the system to sample six conversations at random every hour, requested the system to calculate the average length of call for the sample and the range of call lengths for each sample. This is shown in Table 12.4. What does the information indicate?