There’s a fast-service restaurant near my house that specializes in frozen dairy products. Let’s say it rhymes with Fairy Shmeen. My order is usually something fairly simple. The drive-thru experience is usually pretty quick and painless. Sometimes, however, there’s a problem, and I have to repeat my order several times. Sometimes I have to repeat it after I’ve gotten to the window. Each time there’s a problem, it’s the same girl taking my order. I’m sure she’s an excellent employee. Maybe seniority dictates that she should have the headset. But she can’t seem to get the hang of it. At least not in my case.
In the last decade, there’s been a move to remote order taking at drive-tru restaurants. A call center handles all the orders for a number of restaurants. Rather than multitasking employees taking orders while they’re blending shakes and making sundaes, the agent taking the order is focussed on that one thing. There’s not a lot of wrapup needed for this task, just accuracy and speed. The faster the agent can process the orders, the more orders the call center can handle, and the more money the restaurants can make.
In many senses, the call center is the new factory floor. It’s knowledge work rather than manual labour, but the concept is the same. Agents can specialize in certain tasks, and through specialization, efficiencies are realized. Efficiency translates to additional profit for someone in the chain. By collecting similar agents in one place rather than scattering them around the country, things like training and management are greatly simplified. What Henry Ford did with the assembly line is being replicated at workstations in communication centers.
Voice communication, like restaurant orders, are an obvious addition to the call center, when voice has historically been the point. Drive-thru orders aren’t exactly like regular calls, though, even though they may seem similar to the agent. Call center software that can handle alternative media like this can also handle things like email queues, social media, and text chat in the same manner. Requests get queued, handled by the correctly skilled agents, and the client benefits. By streamlining this way, everyone benefits.
When you’re handling non-call media in a streamlined way, reporting, quality assurance, and adherence to metrics all become easier. In the future, it may even lead to me getting my caramel shake reliably.