One Measured Result, In Full
Nineteen minutes to four. And the customer still had to pay the bill.
19 min → 4 min
Average handle time on one call category at a municipal water utility contact center, over about forty five days.
They measured it. I did not.
The answer never changed. The customer still owed the money, still had to pay it, and still got told no. What changed was how long it took to get there, and what it cost the agent to say it.
Everything below is how that happened, in more detail than you probably want. Where the nineteen minutes actually went. What I heard when I listened to the recording twice. How they counted it. And the parts that make the result look smaller than the number sounds.
Where the nineteen minutes were going
In a lot of municipal water systems, an unpaid balance attaches to the property rather than to the person. So somebody signs a lease, moves in, calls to have the water turned on, and finds out she has to clear a stranger's debt before anyone will turn a valve. She was expecting to pay a deposit.
She is not being unreasonable. She is being ambushed by a rule nobody told her about, by a person who did not write it and cannot waive it.
That is where the nineteen minutes went. Not slow agents. There was simply no move available after the word no. The agent explained the policy. The customer rejected the explanation. The agent explained it again in slightly different words. The call went around until somebody gave up.
Their system tracks that kind of call in a category of its own. The one for calls where what the customer wants is not something anybody in the building can give her.
What I heard on the second listen
I had a recording of one of those calls and I played it twice. The first time, the agent sounded fine. She delivered bad news cleanly, she was not rude, and she did not lose her temper.
The second time I heard the actual problem, and it was not a tone problem.
She had no language for the moment the customer refused to accept her answer. She had been trained to deliver the no. Nobody had given her anything to do after it.
That became psychological priming, which I now teach in every workshop.
What it does, and what it does not do
It is not a better way to say no. It is a way to move the customer's attention onto the next thing she can actually do. Check the lease. Talk to the landlord. Find out whether the balance can be disputed.
The debt did not go away. Nobody's water got turned on for free. The policy did not change, and I never asked them to change it. What changed is that the agent had somewhere to take the conversation after no, and the customer left the call with a next step instead of a wall.
How the number was produced
A name is what most case studies use to make a number believable. This is what I have instead, and it is longer than a name would have been.
Their data, their system, their categories. Someone on their team pulled average handle time for that category before the workshop and after, over about forty five days, into her own spreadsheet. She told me the number on a follow up call I had scheduled to answer questions about reinforcement. I had not asked for it.
What I do not know, and will not claim
I did not design that measurement and I never saw the raw export. I do not know whether those customers called back, because nobody checked, and if they were simply calling again the next day then the handle time drop means considerably less than it appears to. I do not know whether it held past forty five days. I do not know what else changed in their operation during that window. One category, one organization, one measurement I did not run.
Why I think it travels
The caller cannot go anywhere else. The service is not optional. She arrives frightened rather than annoyed, and she collides with a rule the person on the phone cannot move.
If that describes your queue, it probably travels. If your escalations are mostly driven by a policy nobody will revisit, it probably does not, and I would rather tell you that on the call than after you have paid me.
One more thing, since you have now read what I do with a client's result.
I do not put a client's name on a page unless they have read the exact words and said yes to those words. Not a logo, not a quote, not a sector. If we work together, you see anything I might write before anybody else does, and you can strike any of it. And if you would rather I never mention the work at all, that is a normal answer and it costs you nothing with me.
