Call Centers

Health Care Management The five step planning process is to identify the current situation, understanding what's important, determining what must be achieved, find out who is accountable, and then review this process (Forbes, 2011). It skips the key step of figuring out how to solve the problem, but I will include that as well. The current situation is that the organization has experienced a 100% increase in inbound call volume.

The budget for handling these calls has not changed, and indications are that it will not be changed, so the solution needs to be found elsewhere. There is an additional $20,000 that can be put towards the solution. What is important is delivering the best possible customer service under these conditions. Specific objectives will be set for call wait times and for customer satisfaction. A budget has also been set, and that is a the main constraint. I am accountable.

The plans will be reviewed once they have been implemented, and weighed against the measures that have been outlined. Teams are essential in health care, because people from different areas bring different experiences and talents to the team environment. This broadens the scope for solutions, and the abilities of the team to execute the critical changes.

Huckman & Staats (2013) argue that team familiarity is a particular dynamic wherein a team that is well-conceived and maintained over a period of time will be more effective even than a team that has just been put together. Teams in other industries tend to be multidisciplinary. They bring together people with different talents to work together for a common objective. The level of direction in a team can different depending on the dynamics of the team and the objective being sought.

In this case, dealing with tight constraints, the team might require a higher level of direction. A team to solve this problem might consist of customer service specialists, human resources, and IT, since those are the areas that are most affected by the problem or have the best potential for determining a solution. Lessons from other industries can definitely be applied to health care, in two ways. First, team dynamics tend to be the same in any industry.

In particular, team leadership is critical to the success of the team (Peterson et al., 2003). Knowing this ensures that I will place emphasis on leadership to guide the team and keep everybody focused on the problem. In addition, this is a call center capacity problem. Any call center business works more or less the same in this regard. The technology solutions are the same, capacity management is the same, and the human resources component of this is also the same.

While a doubling of call volume indicates that there are problems originating elsewhere in the organization with respect to customer service, dealing with the problem from a call center management perspective can easily be addressed taking lessons from other industries with large customer service call centers. Problem solving does not occur in a vacuum -- for an organization to be effective it needs to embed its processes with opportunities for problem solving.

Human resources management is a good starting point, because that is where a culture of problem-solving can be fostered, and the right employees with a problem-solving minds can be hired. The ability to identify problems is one that many employees have, and the organization needs to have communications channels that allow these employees to provide the.