Types of Control Measures

            As managers for a timeshare vacation customer call center, we will define the types of control measures that are used to see how efficiently and effectively an employee is. In addition, our team will choose the measures to be used at the time of the call center’s evaluation process.

  For many companies, including the smaller ones, labor is the biggest cost. Wages and salaries include major items of expenditure for manufacturing, retail and small scale companies, but the work also tends to be sensitive to productivity improvements. To reduce labor costs, employers should consider measuring the efficiency of employees and setting aggressive performance goals to make the most of their money (Robbins & Coulter, 2012).

Measuring productivity

            Productivity is simply the number of units of a product or service that manages an employee on a defined time frame (Robbins & Coulter, 2012). An employee, who makes widgets, can make 20 widgets per hour, or an employee of a coffee shop can serve 15 customers per hour. Simple productivity is neither good nor bad, and service industries, can vary depending on factors beyond the employee's control, such as the number of clients who come for service (Núñez Montenegro, 2013). Productivity is the basic measure of the employee work production.

Service Unit determination

            Productivity and efficiency requires a defined service unit (Robbins & Coulter, 2012). Which means, specific analysis for the job, and is more relevant for employees who have repetitive  tasks.  For example, a spot welder could have "finished welds" or "completed parts" as their analysis of service units, while a housekeeper at a hotel could have "clean rooms per shift" as the analysis shows. Some jobs, particularly professionals who have variable output measurements defy reasonable analysis of service units (Núñez Montenegro, 2013).

Measuring effectiveness

            Efficiency is the ratio between the actual times an employee uses to perform each task against the theoretical time required to complete it (Robbins & Coulter, 2012). For example, an employee may collect 80 packaging DVD’s in an hour. If the goal of best practices is 100 DVD's in an hour, the employee is 80 percent effective and has the capacity to produce 20 units per hour. It is often useful to report separately the payout percentage of time an employee is actually spending for the direct work. For example, an employee who is paid to work 8.0 hours, but due to meetings, and lunch breaks working spends only 6.0 hours, his productive time is only 75 percent in terms of the analysis of service units. Only the six hours he spent working will be considered for the scoring (Núñez Montenegro, 2013).

Parameters and objectives

            Some industries have established baselines. For example, call centers have service levels that identify the ideal amount of time it should take common transactions that are consistent across all industries. However, most companies will have to establish how long they basic tasks should take for themselves, and set performance goals accordingly. The reference measurement task should be done with a time study, which on average,  is the amount of time that multiple transactions takes, or evaluates the amount of time an average employee uses to perform the task (Robbins & Coulter, 2012). It may not be right to require the employees to be 100 percent effective, especially when employees have no control over their own productivity, as in customer service jobs that employees depends on customers. If an employee cannot reach 100 percent, then the morale can suffer.

 Longitudinal Reports

            The real benefit to measure the efficiency of employees is with the longitudinal data. The calculation of efficiency over a period of time can identify the opportunities to reorganize the staff, add or remove employees based on the volume of business, and individual long term employee productivity can be taken into account in merit increases and bonuses. The score can also help with predictive modeling (Núñez Montenegro, 2013).

Evaluation of the entire call center control measure

            After the analysis and evaluation of all the above mentioned methods for measuring effectiveness and efficiency, the team considered to evaluate the entire call center by using the Concurrent Control, because it takes place while a work activity is in progress  (Robbins & Coulter, 2012).  Considering the tasks and goals performed in a call center, there is no space for accumulative errors, it is very important to correct any errors immediately, because a mistake can result in further operational costs in the future, or maybe undesired legal problems.

A call center as well as take calls for customer service, and resolve any customer situations  , also uses to make arrangements for collection and/or payments. For this reason it is very important to make a good selection of control measures for each work area. It is not recommended for all departments to be evaluated with the same control measures.

 Conclusion

To improve the quality performance at the call center, the team understands that the best option is the concurrency control measure, based on the facts that this process is good for concurrent execution of transactions on a shared database and in turn to ensure the sequence of those mentioned transactions.

This type of control measure helps to prevent future problems in consistency; loss of updates, uncommitted data, and recovers the inconsistencies. Access to work with concurrency control is when the amount of data is large enough, and there are possible multiple processes, then we can ensure that everyone has the current same information in order to avoid the possible errors.

References

Núñez Montenegro, E. (2013, September 20). http://www.fundapymes.com/blog.    Retrieved

September 20, 2013, from FundaPymes.

Robbins, S. P., & Coulter, M. (2012). Management. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey:       Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Prentice Hall.