Contact Centre Council

A interesting quote from an article in public service http://www.publicservice.co.uk/feature_story.asp?id=10223 about the "Contact Council, the body established by the Cabinet Office to promote best practice across the public sector in all matters relating to customer contact".

"Part of raising their game is setting goals that are relevant to contact centres, using feedback from their managers, rather than imposing centralised targets from above. "They have got to be relevant to the organisations concerned, because it's very easy when you are sitting in the centre to think we can measure this and have it as a target, but actually it can drive some very perverse behaviour," Cleveland says. "We are only asking them to report the things that they need to manage their business." "

I understand why it's necessary to get the contact centre managers engaged in change and the value of the managers studying behaviours rather than asking for opinions, but would have prefered to see a much stronger emphasis on feedback from users. Whilst one can make assumptions about the cause of user behaviour it can be hard for managers to understand what drives the behaviour of people of very different backgrounds. Taking a national view has its merits - whilst it's uneconomic to conduct user surveys for every different contact centre there are valuable lessons to be learnt from a national study of contact centre user behaviours.