More "Art of War" applied to the call center

This is the second in a series where we examine "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu, the oldest strategy book in the world, containing many lessons which can be reimagined for the contact center.

Today, let's examine rule # 12:

"12. Therefore, in your deliberations, when seeking to determine the military conditions, let them be made the basis of a comparison."

Here we can perceive that using a comparitive analysis of military conditions would be similar to the calibration of contact center benchmarks. Calibration is used in many world class call centers in order to evaluate the evaluators. Calibration can be used to identify scoring trends which may be unusual or anomalies. Adjustments can then be made to the evaluation process.

The call center translation for #14:

"Use benchmarks and calibration in order to improve your evaluation processes"

Excerpts from "The Art Of War"...applied to call centers

"The Art of War" by Sun Tzu is a classic Chinese military book which is often reinvisioned for business. It may be the oldest strategy book in the world.

As each lesson can be intrepreted for the business world, my thought is it could also be reimagined for the call center.

Today we'll examine rule # 14:

"14. By means of these seven considerations I can forecast victory or defeat."

This one is easy as it can apply to using your statistical analysis to make projections:

- will we meet our goals?
- will we fail miserably?

Using evaluation tools, call centers can define their own criteria for success. Scoring the performance of each agent can result in identifying a trend which may be altered for improvement.

The call center translation for #14:

"With this performance criteria we can forecast success and where we need to make improvements"