Contact Centers: Keep the Hub Humming

• Perform an operations assessment to discern the root causes within your forecasting and management processes that may be creating backorders. Such root causes may include pre-season planning problems, vendors’ broken promises and an inability to accurately forecast sales of new items. Rethink your processes, systems, vendor relationships and organizational structure. A re-engineering may offer benefits such as improved customer service and sales, and even a decrease of $7 to $12 for each back-ordered unit of merchandise. Some of this is from call-center savings in reduced calls for back-order data and telecom expenses.