You are the supervisor of a call center team that handles incoming calls related to health insurance billing. Your department primarily works with healthcare providers and facilities to verify the status of patient claims and answer related questions. After the first of the year, when health plans generally undergo considerable change, call volumes are much higher than normal, so it is important that all representatives work to meet key performance indicators pertaining to efficiency and quality of service. Not only are individual reps evaluated based on these criteria, but as their supervisor, your monthly performance bonus is also tied to these goals. It’s about halfway through January, and your team members are all meeting their targets except for two. By and large, Shawn is an ideal representative for your department. He listens intently to each caller’s questions and is extremely thorough in his responses. He fully documents each call as required by policy, including a high level of detail. Further, he has established an excellent rapport with some of the more frequent callers, consistently receiving positive feedback on post-call customer experience surveys. Despite Shawn’s overall exemplary performance, he is drastically pulling down your team’s stats in a big key area: his call handle times. Handle times are assessed based on an overall average, often referred to as AHT, of the durations of all of a representative’s calls for an entire month. If the representative has a few complex calls that take more time than normal here or there, these times should average out over the course of the month so long as the majority of the rep’s calls meet the goal. In your department, the target handle time is 400 seconds, or about 6m 40s per call. Shawn’s AHT so far this month is approaching 650 seconds, or nearly 11 minutes. Lexi, another of your team members, is the epitome of efficiency. Her AHT is typically well under goal at around 280 seconds, and she is among the leaders in the entire center for the number of calls answered each day. Generally speaking, her calls are handled in accordance with policy, though some of her claim adjustment requests are flagged by quality assurance for incomplete or inaccurate notation. Your desk is close enough to Lexi’s that you sometimes overhear her calls, and you’ve noted in the past that her tone leaves a bit to be desired in terms of friendliness with her callers. This had not been a serious problem in terms of quality assurance scores until two months ago when she received her first negative feedback terms of quality assurance scores until two months ago when she received her first negative feedback on a customer experience survey, which immediately disqualified her from her monthly quality bonus and placed your own bonus in jeopardy. Her performance in December was uneventful, which is to say that she met all KPIs, and actually achieved the lowest AHT for the department, however this week she received another negative customer survey. The common element in both of the complaints she’s received involve her being very curt in her tone, and even going so far as to interrupt callers when they are trying to explain their issues. You’ve met one-on-one with both Shawn and Lexi to discuss these performance concerns. Shawn was very understanding and receptive to the feedback, and seemed genuinely invested in trying to improve his call efficiency, but was unsure how to do so without sacrificing in quality or accuracy. Lexi’s response was a bit more mixed. She acknowledged the errors in documentation that she had made on her claim forms, but even after listening to the recordings of the calls for which she had received negative feedback, she maintained that she had done her job correctly. She expressed to you that she felt it was her position to show up and do her job, not make friends with the callers, and she pointed to her minimal AHT as a way of working hard to help her team meet its performance goals. 1. What are some strategies you might work on with Shawn to increase his productivity, thereby shortening his AHT? 2. What are some strategies that Lexi could employ to decrease the number of errors made during her calls? 3. How would you respond to Lexi’s assertion that she is performing her job correctly despite the negative feedback she has received? What are some corrective steps that could be taken to address this behavior?

Ken Jen’s Airconditonng & Heating Service, Inc. makes an averages of 1,200 service calls per year. In the past 2 years, 200 and 260, service calls respectively were made in fall, 360 and 310 in winter, 140 and 175 in spring, and 340 and 615 in summer. Since demand for services is increasing, Ken will need to hire more employees. Ken Jen projects service calls next year to increase to 1,400. Based on the increase in next year’s overall demand for airconditioning and heating service, the anticipated demand for Summer will be (enter your responses as whole numbers): Season Demand Fall Winter Spring Summer