Business Managment

You are the supervisor of a call center. Lately, there have been many misdirected or dropped calls. Develop one or two research questions and three hypotheses that might account for misdirected or dropped calls. 

A quality customer experience is always the goal for a call center. We are finding that customers really like to try and resolve as many issues as possible online. In our market, which is right in the middle of Microsoft land, customers tend to go to our website first and if they don’t find resolution there, they call our agent access center. A lot of our customers are not happy they have to call, so that sets a bad tone from the start.

If I was researching misdirected or dropped calls I would ask the following questions:

Q: Is our IVR Menu too complex for our customers?

Hypotheses: Our IVR Menu has recently changed, its adding time to get to a queue. Customers are frustrated and they zero out, in hopes of getting to someone quicker. This throws the calls into a general queue.

Q: Are we having this issue because of a lack of training or is our knowledge base not functioning properly?

Hypotheses: We recently updated our customer information system and our knowledge base is lagging behind in development. Agents can find the information they need.

Q: How can so many calls be misdirected? What are the customers trying to do? What numbers are the customers looking at? What is the number posted on our website?

Hypotheses: Calls for construction questions are constantly being sent to major accounts. Customers are claiming they are calling a number on our website. We need to update our contact listings, because customers are calling the very first number they see.