Call center forecasting – Massachusetts underestimates green rebate program

Call centre planning and forecasting are both integral pieces in managing a client call campaign. When meeting with a new client a call centre must fully investigate call forecasts and build a model for staffing and support resources around that model. Scheduling and resource management are critical components in delivering a successful inbound call campaign and having the appropriate resources, fully trained and with the requisite tools to perform the job are vital. Call volumes and pattern projection for an inbound call project must assess the full scope of high and low end projections, having the staffing needed to cover each eventuality and managing toward a median level is a worthy approach. Online resources if used must also be structured to provide the bandwidth and server capacity to handle the highest levels of support. If these practices are adopted a call centre will be positioned to deliver the service levels required to deliver customer satisfaction, however as the story below demonstrates sometimes the best laid plans simply don’t work out.

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Assessing the potential success of a program has to be gauged as accurately as possible, although this example is rather extreme. The state of Massachusetts introduced a major appliance rebate program as a part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Some US $5.5 million in appliance rebates was available to consumers who sought to swap out their existing appliances for more energy efficient models. A great and worthwhile program by all means but it would seem that the public response to a $250 per household rebate was underestimated as the program was launched only to have the online tool crash and the call centre be overwhelmed due to the volume. The approximate 25,000 rebates to trade in old appliances for energy star models were grabbed in only two hours when the campaign launched last week. It turns out the state has used the grant money faster than any other so far as a result of the overwhelming response. The level of interest was so high that at any given time as many as 3,000 people were trying to secure the rebates online and the call volume related to the program may have exceed 1 millions calls over the two days (naturally many of those were redials after failing to get through).

Consumers were left scratching their heads after a program that was heavily promoted in the previous months failed to run smoothly when the big day arrived. Busy signals on the phone and a website that stopped functioning and delivered error messages led to severe frustration. One customer who had deferred a major purchase for four months due to the rebate had to give up and place her name on a waiting list. The waiting list is filled with names who will gladly take the rebate if an approved recipient fails to make a purchase withen a given amount of time. The customer said:

“With all the hype — this has been going on for a few months — you would think they had prepared for something like that, I even killed the battery on my cordless phone by redialing so much. Fortunately, I have more than one handset.”

The situation went into meltdown within the first hour as call volume could not be handled and shortly thereafter the website crashed due to the vast level of consumers seeking the rebate. The state issued an apology and cited ‘technical problems’ although it is unknown if that will satisfy the public who failed to get their rebates or even have their call answered. While its not possible to know all the inner workings of this scenario it would appear that the projections by the state were very inaccurate and/or the call center vendor didn’t manage the process to account for the ceiling potential of the program. In a tough economy with consumers wanting to green their energy usage the MassSave program was obviously a huge hit – unfortunately too huge it would seem.

For expert inbound call center services and management please learn more about Miratel, we will help you to develop and then manage the optimal inbound or outbound call centre campaign.