Making mistakes at work

[workerrors]

How many mistakes would you say is acceptable in this scenario? And would you expect your manager to ask you about each one
Mistakes down to not being a computer basically!

Taking phone calls for appointments/customer service but complex ones along with various other stuff, also emails, website appointments etc
Nothing life threatening or health related

On average each person doing 120 calls/emails a day or 2500 per month

5 I guess

Per day or month?

I’d be focusing less on volumes of mistakes and more on how they can be avoided. For example how are you taking down the details? Is there a form or document you could use?

It's all via computer but because of the volume of calls there are errors and there's also a lot of rules to follow so obviously remembering them all

I'm being vague but things like "this salon in London doesn't do Botox, this one in Oxford does but only on a Monday, the one in Glasgow does but you can only book 6 weeks before and it's every other Friday"

Things like misquoting a price as Glasgow is cheaper than London , clicking the wrong appointment, booking a Botox appointment for Oxford on a Tuesday

They sound like quite basic / fundamental mistakes. Not good.

If there are lots of rules you shouldn’t really have to remember them, I’d expect system notifications or at least a crib sheet somewhere.
If it’s incorrect data entry that shouldn’t happen at all.
The volume of mistakes should decrease with experience regardless.
Doesn’t sound like the right job for you @workerrors

If you are embedded in the role, I don't think regular errors is great. If you're 2 weeks in and getting to grips with it, then some errors are reasonable.

It's not a complex role, by the sounds of things; just a basic admin role with a strength for attention-to-detail required. The key thing is, what is being done to minimise errors and to improve performance? I'd suggest writing down processes and key information that can be cross-checked quickly to minimise errors. Depending on how long you've been in the role, I'd perhaps raise with your manager that further training would be beneficial.

They're accepted as usual mistakes due to the amount of information we have to recall and the sheer volume of customers

Normal for people to make them still after 10 years because the rules also change weekly so this week i could book Botox at Oxford, next week I can't, the week after it would change to now we can but only on a Friday, then it goes back to not being able to
With 20 different locations so each has different rules

There is a crib sheet however there is also a limit on how long our calls should take and that is also monitored

It's a call centre role but with additional admin work

I'd have thought that rather than making mistakes like booking things in on the wrong day because you can't keep up with changes, you should be saying to customers 'I'm not sure about that, let me just check' - then spending 2 minutes checking and getting it right.

Management should be giving you time to do that and resources to be able to check. Ideally there should be an automated system that doesn't even let you book something in on the wrong day.

I've been in it for 9 years but deliberately haven't said how many mistakes we are targeted on so I didn't sway it!

For instance if you are allowed 1 mistake in 300 calls and you make 1 mistake in 1000 would you expect to be treated as if you were making multiple mistakes?

Well there's literally no point in the service you're providing, if no-one's checking for changes and giving out wrong information.

If everyone is making the same volume of mistakes, then I'd blame the system.

If not, I'd say the individuals need to be held to account.

If it's that complicated I would expect my employer to have some sort of automated lookups that tell me the correct answer.

We don't get time off the phone to read changes, it's a call centre so has to be done in the time between calls which is generally none or before your shift

I can't say exactly how many rules there are without counting (I am not working today!) but I would say 10 for each different location plus another 50 general rules

At the end of the day if it's so complicated that a lot of people are making mistakes, customers will be unhappy and the business will fail.

Your employers should be mitigating for this. It's not your fault you can't hold huge amounts of information in your head - you're not an encyclopaedia.

It's not going to fail as it's a huge business

It would be like Boots or Superdrug failing in a way!

Well you sound like your defending your mistakes maybe rightly so. Do you want to work there with the management as they are?

Why do you have recall the info? Can't you write it down as you get it?.

@workerrors Do your colleagues manage OK with the work?

You can but you need to trawl through it all, it's not a small amount of information
It's a 10 page excel sheet you need to check while keeping a phone call under 6 minutes and dealing with often very angry calls

Colleagues all make mistakes too, some more than others, and obviously more common if you're new

Sounds like a really poorly designed system frankly.

The answer is "the number the employer says". What we think is irrelevant. If they can always recruit staff, and there are bums on seats making as few mistakes as possible, then that is all they care about. From their perspective it is not about the fact that 9 out of 500 calls log mistakes - it about the fact that they have 9 bloody unhappy customers who might go elsewhere and tell all their friends.