The second phone call

For eleven years I ran operations at an agency in Ames that wrote a lot of contractors. If you had asked me then how our certificate desk was doing, I would have told you our turnaround: same day, nearly always, and usually inside two hours. I was proud of that number. It was the wrong number.

The right one was sitting in the phone log. Roughly a third of the contractors who asked for a certificate called us a second time before they got it. Not to complain. To ask where it was, because a superintendent was standing at a gate and would not let a crew through without it.

Why two hours is not fast

A certificate request is almost never made at a desk. It is made from a truck at 7:40 in the morning, or from a job trailer, by someone who has just been told they need one. The holder wants it now, and “now” is measured against the length of a phone call, not against a business day.

Two hours is an excellent turnaround by the standards of an office. By the standards of the person waiting, it is a morning lost. So they call again. And the second call costs the agency more than the certificate did: a CSR stops what they are doing, finds the request, apologizes, and moves it to the top of a pile that five other callers have also been promised the top of.

Count it for one week

You do not need software to find out where you stand. For one week, have whoever answers the phone make a tally mark each time a caller asks about a certificate they have already requested. Then divide by the certificates you issued that week.

• Under 5% and your desk is in good shape. Leave it alone.
• Between 5% and 20%, the work is fine and the timing is the problem.
• Over 20%, your CSRs are spending more time on certificate phone calls than on certificates.

When Morgan Ostrowski ran this count in Cedar Rapids before connecting Bevel, the answer was 31%. Ninety certificates a week, twenty-eight second calls.

What actually removes the call

The second call disappears when the certificate arrives before the caller has finished the first one. That is a different target from “fast.” It means the request has to be read, matched to a policy, checked and sent in about a minute, at any hour, without waiting for a person to be free.

Most certificates can be handled that way, because most certificates are routine: a holder you have issued to before, wording the policy already supports, limits that are simply what is written. Across the agencies on Bevel, a little over nine in ten requests are like that, and the median one goes out in 52 seconds.

The remaining one in ten should not go out in 52 seconds. A new holder, a request for a waiver the policy does not carry, a limit higher than the one on the declarations page: those deserve a person, and they should wait for one. The point of taking the routine nine off the desk is that the tenth gets real attention instead of a rushed glance.

Fast was never the goal. The goal was that nobody has to ask twice.

If you measure one thing about your certificate desk this quarter, measure the second call. It is the only number the person at the gate cares about, and it turns out to be the one that tells you how your CSRs are spending their mornings.