iorgforum.org Blog

By IORG member Nitin Badjatia

While we often think of the productivity loss of information overload from an individual perspective, aggregating the impact of lost productivity across a large group can lead to some astounding realizations.  An example of this in the call center environment.  Over the last few years, I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing and observing process flows in dozens of customer service call centers across North America.  Most of these operations are at the ‘forgotten’ end of a product cycle, often times considered a cost center, enduring year after year of reduced headcount and shrinking budgets.  The same successful companies that spend vast sums of money to optimize their supply chain and partner network, overlook the lowly call center as a place to radically increase productivity through some simple process and systems enhancements.  Much of this productivity increase can come from simplifying the dizzying array of systems and databases that agents are required to interact with.  I’ve sat with agents who had to deal with a dozen applications or more, sometimes on the same inbound customer call.  Tabbing through screens at lighting speed, while under constant pressure to manage to an average handle time target, it’s no surprise that the attrition rate at many call centers can exceed 60% per year.  In many instances, this frenetic behavior could have been avoided by spending a few dollars upfront to integrate systems and simplify agent workflow.  By building a consolidated, trusted system organizations can reduce the number of places that agents need to search to find the right resolution.  In one instance, we identified an integration that shaved 30 seconds off the average 4 minute call.  Multiplied by each call for each agent, across a year, the savings were in the millions of dollars.  Now, that accounts for the savings, but it also had a radical impact on agent retention.  Agent retention increased by double digits as they felt less overwhelmed while handling customer exceptions.  They now had a trusted system, one location that they could rely on for most issues.

A second order affect of building a trusted system is that agents can be trained to process, and not to products.  Much of the information overload in call center environments comes from the constant flow of new products and services that organizations release.  As these products are pushed out the supply chain, agents are often sent – usually via email – ‘fact sheets’ or briefing documents on the new products.  In many environments, this can be a dozen or more new products and enhancements per week.  Trying to remember all of this new information can be a daunting task, if not impossible to master.  By building a trusted system, a single source of truth if you will, agents can be trained to trust the process of accessing the trusted systems for the best answer, instead of having to remember the best option.  This simple tweak in process flows has a major impact on agent productivity and reduced stress levels.

The return on investment for these two approaches, building a trusted system and trusting a process, is fairly quick.  I’ve seen successes with these techniques in many customer service environments, but there are still many opportunities for improvement.  With the massive expansion of data that we’ll see in the coming years, information overload will continue to be a major sore spot for organizations that don’t recognize the productivity loss in their call center environments.

The breakdown of the nation’s financial industry plus recent events in financial markets worldwide have made me wonder about the role of information overload in the current financial crisis.  Headlines have made it painfully clear that financial institutions were unsure of their assets and liabilities.  Usually, this would be attributed to an inadequacy of available information but that’s far from the case here.

The Panic of 1907, a financial crisis in the U.S. during which the stock market fell almost 50%, was accompanied by a recession and numerous runs on banks.  Bank panics were not unusual at the time; the Panic of 1907 was the fourth to occur in 34 years.  [It's hard to compare recent bank failures, of which there have been 14 this year and only three last year, with the thousands of bank failures at the onset of the Great Depression.  Today's banks have far more customers and accounts than those much smaller banks.  As of today, JPMorgan Chase has more than $2 trillion in assets and is the largest depository bank in the U.S.  By comparison, Citibank has a mere $1.3 trillion in assets.]

Unlike the bankers of today, who cannot give clear and comprehensible explanations of their assets because their instruments are so complex they themselves do not understand them fully, the bankers who visited the home of J.P. Morgan in 1907, which had become a revolving door of New York City bank and trust company presidents as he attempted to stave off a complete collapse of financial markets, were able to present everything about their banks’ financial conditions on simple balance sheets that did not require pages of footnotes.

The financial markets have become far more sophisticated in the past decade; ever notice just how many screens a typical trader works with?  L. Gordon Crovitz recently pointed out in the Wall Street Journal that better and more complete information was available in 1907;  the workflow device for traders then was a “simple pencil and scrap paper” but that’s all they needed.

The point is simple enough: rather than too little, we have far too much information today and that impedes our decision-making abilities and throttles our ability to resolve crises.  While Information Overload is certainly not a direct cause of the current travails, it nonetheless is playing a key suppporting role.

An observation: most of my best ideas come to me during business trips. Ideas that then lead to major projects or products, ideas that are worth a lot – they tend to materialize in a plane, or behind the wheel of a rental car, or in a hotel room far from home. In fact, this is not just me – I hear similar stories from many other knowledge workers and managers.

Now, during these trips we are typically hurried, harassed, and often exhausted with jetlag. So what is it that makes us more creative? I can speculate that part of it may simply be that when away from the normal office routine, away from the day to day duties of work and life, we are jarred out of some mental auto pilot mode. And certainly meeting new people from different organizations can lead to cross-fertilization of ideas (after all, that’s why I started IORG – to get and give the opportunity to talk to diverse professionals). But part of it is the fact that these trips may be the only time we have away from interruptions!

With knowledge workers interrupted every 3 minutes on average (that amazing finding by Prof. Gloria Mark et al in UC Irvine), it is not surprising that the respite of even a few hours away from it all – away from telephones, colleagues, cellphones, SMS, and incoming mail – can make a huge difference. Ah, being alone in a quiet hotel room, with one’s brain and computer but no outside distractions…

In fact, there is a classic story from the history of technology that illustrates the power of such a room. William Shockley of Bell labs is credited as co-inventor of the transistor in 1947. The actual fact is that he wasn’t; he was the team leader, but his teammates – Bardeen and Brattain – invented the point contact transistor without him. When he realized he’d missed out on one of the most important inventions of the century Shockley was so annoyed that he locked himself up in a hotel room for a number of days, only emerging when he had a better implementation – the superior Junction transistor. But it took the locked room…

The problem these days is that the isolation of these trips is showing cracks. All hotel rooms now have network access. Cheap telephony can bridge distance (luckily, in my case, most of my trips span half the globe, so many who might interrupt me are fast asleep when I’m awake). And even the airlines, whose planes were once immune to any incursion, are playing with network and cellular access. Bad idea…

Maybe all it takes is to do what Shockley did – intentionally book a room and disconnect. But this is not a done thing; no company would fund it for its employees (they do send teams to various retreats, which may be great for the team’s joint thinking – but not individuals). Oh well…