Call Center Office Furniture
|
The city with the most call center office furniture stores just might be Omaha, Nebraska. It is, after all, the city with more call center employees per capita than any other city in the country. The city has that distinction because the inhabitants have the feature of possessing, to most listening ears, a non-accent way of conversing. No southern drawl, no northeastern r's on the end of words, no brooklynese and no Minnesota long o's. It is very difficult to capture any locale revealing clues from the way the natives of Omaha talk. So if a person were so inclined to originate a customer service or telemarketing service anywhere in the country, the east end of the Cornhusker State would be the place to do the deed.
Mr. ABC has indeed moved to Omaha and found the perfect building in which to begin his telemarketing company called the I Will Annoy You Just at Dinnertime Communications Company. The entrepreneur has found a cozy four thousand square foot building in which to set up the foray into the telemarketing business and needs to hire fifty employees to begin selling plastic swimming pools shaped like dachshunds. Focus group research shows that the pools will be a big hit at AKA conventions. However, Mr. ABC does face budget limitations and will need to do as much research as possible on buying not only the office furniture, but also the reception office furniture for all the clients that will be screaming for his unusual product. "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." (John 3:16)
The boss will have to first decide what the philosophy of the call center will be. Promote an open, transparent kind of atmosphere where the employees can interact with one another while working, or will the center be a more singular, enclosed atmosphere for each employee, providing a more undistracted ambiance? The boss needs the call center to be highly productive, but is pained to think about each person in a gray cubicle all day. Mr. ABC first considers floor space and knows that the area in front with its reception office furniture, rest rooms, small kitchen with a few tables and the executive office will take up about fifteen hundred feet, leaving only twenty five hundred feet for the call center. Allowing for enough aisle space in between stations, the square footage drops to sixteen hundred. Dividing the staff between two shifts, ABC has about sixty nine square feet per employee work station, so counts on sixty square feet per call center employee to have a little more breathing room for the staff to move around.
Call center office furniture that is creatively designed has taken on the look of the bridge of the starship with the Vulcan. Sleek and edgy, with boundless ways to put the stations together that then begin to look like DNA models, they are eye candy for those who hate the Spartan look of most office furniture. They would give his enterprise and its employees a real sense of a cutting edge work atmosphere. The problem was the cost which was way over budget for the call center office furniture budget. Our purveyor of inflatable dachshunds went with the cubicle approach, mainly for the cost, but did approve a worker friendly design. Mr. ABC bought twenty four cubicles that were six by eight feet, of various colors, cherry wood laminate counters, and four foot high walls. His workers could pop up, say hello, yell across the room, and the employee friendly atmosphere could be maintained.
By now the reader has surmised that Mr. ABC has done all this figuring and designing himself, using no call center office furniture consultants for advice or guidance. This will definitely come back and bite him in his office chair later. For now, our new Omaha citizen turns attention to the reception office furniture. He chooses, and remember, he hasn't even consulted with his wife on this, four lavender oak chairs and matching end tables to go between each chair. The man's thought was that those people dumb enough to buy dachshund shaped swimming pools really wouldn't care what color and how 1960's looking the chairs were. Then Mr. ABC began making the really fatal mistakes. The guy begins by buying a rolltop desk for the soon to be hired receptionist's use, and thirty bargain basement office chairs that had the ergonomic seal of approval from a board of chiropractic school dropouts.
A rolltop desk is not the best design for a receptionist's desk, because the employee cannot be seen behind the giant roll top and cannot give a good reception. Also, there is very little desk top space on which to do work. He bought a pink colored version of the same chair purchased for the call center, but decided to hire a man for the front reception desk position. Within a week of the staff beginning work, four employees missed eighteen man hours of work because of trips to a chiropractor. Soon, employees were bringing lawn chairs from home. In addition, the cubicles that were purchased were not crafted in such a manner as to properly house all the cables for computers and phone lines and electrical outlets. Mr. ABC had to the next door neighbor to come in, disassemble all the cubicles and drill new holes in the front, ripping the fabric off some.
The rules for purchasing call center office furniture and the adjoining reception office furniture? Use not just a furniture consultant, but one who knows the world of the call center. Next, seek help on the call center layout, putting a great deal of emphasis on cable placement and management. For the reception office furniture, know your target customer's likes and dislikes. Finally, give the call center staff a dollar figure and let them pick out their own chairs.
|
|
|
|
