Reframing Productivity for Entrepreneurs
Leveraging Insights from Contact Centers to Improve Performance
Today’s post will be a bit different than usual. I will share some straightforward, intuitive guidance that utilizes the best practices of how some of the most productive operating machines on the planet work: contact centers.
Yes, you read that right. We are all familiar with contact centers (you may refer to them as call centers), and I'd bet these two words likely evoke frustration and resentment based on your personal experiences with them.
But I’m not talking about when you call your local electricity provider and must jump through hoops to get ahold of the right agent, and somehow, after resolving the issue, three hours have passed, and the day is wasted.
I’m referring to the rare experience you get when you call a toll-free number for some pressing issue, wait only a few minutes, and get routed to the right agent who welcomes you and promptly resolves your concern. I know this sounds rare, but believe it or not, this does happen.
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Assuming that the company is not simply throwing bodies at the problem, positive experiences like this are a result of a high-performance organization and one that prioritizes its customers’ needs. And while it seems so simple, running a high-performing contact center is incredibly difficult to pull off at a large scale. This is especially true if the underlying business it supports has considerable seasonality (i.e., retail, events) or complexity (i.e., multiple geographies, agent types, products, languages, etc.).
A well-functioning contact center balances capacity and utilization- not too much capacity so that agents spend their days twiddling their thumbs (shoutout to Big Head), and not too much utilization so that agents drown in water with an eternal queue. Striking this balance can only be achieved with the right people, technology, and processes in place.
Productivity continues to be one of the trending topics of 2024, even as many forget about the resolutions they set just a little over a month ago. During a recent YouTube rabbit hole, I found that many self-proclaimed productivity experts often overlook the most basic ideas of what it means to get things done efficiently.
To make long-lasting changes in your overall performance, explicitly being more productive in this case, you need to have the right foundational mindset. It requires a framework that many of the latest calendar or “second brain” tricks completely overlook.
In entrepreneurship, the best way to improve your long-run performance is to increase your “focused work time”, not hours worked.
The idea is surprisingly straightforward. It doesn’t require expertise, a Notion second brain, or sophisticated note-taking regimens, just a conscious decision to reframe how and when you get work done. We’re learning to walk before we can run in order to build a strong foundation for future success.
For some background, I used to practice this stuff for a living at Apple, where we directly managed and monitored the performance of tens of thousands of people across both retail and contact center sites. It sounds a bit Big Brother-ish, but I promise you it’s not like that. I’ve also studied extensively on the topic and have been through the wringer as a college basketball player, so time management, performance, and task prioritization have always been top-of-mind since I was a young gun.
While I am no Adam Grant, I can assure you that leveraging these industry-standard frameworks can make driving productivity gains in your own life more approachable.
The Most Powerful Productivity in Contact Centers
Let’s take the example of an agent named Pat, who takes incoming calls at his desk related to billing at a large enterprise software company. He works 40 hours per week, is paid hourly, and his activity is recorded through the contact center’s software. For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume Pat works eight hours, five days a week.
For an eight-hour day, there are lots of things that Pat could be doing. Much of his day will be spent fielding calls, but he may also spend time in meetings, training, at lunch, in the restroom, checking his latest TikTok post, browsing the web, or socializing with other employees. Notice that there are work and non-related activities within his day, though. Not to say that it’s wrong (we are all human), but the main idea here is that although Pat works eight hours a day, he spends a fraction of that time on work-related matters and even less on fielding calls, where he adds the most value. We’re conditioned to view his eight-hour day as “work”, but things are much different when we search or do anything entrepreneurial.
We can break down his day into four components which tell us more about his overall productivity, measured in hours:
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