Monday, October 27, 2008

10 Tips to Keep Smile in Your Voice


1. Before you speak to a customer on the phone, remember to smile. It keeps your tone friendly and upbeat.

2. As a reminder to keep smiling, place a mirror where you can see yourself smiling.

3. Use the Golden Rule as your guide: Give all the customers the respect and courtesy that you'd like to receive.

4. Keep your cool with tough customers. Listen patiently, apologize for their inconvinience, and work to fix the problem.

5. Take a deep breath if needed so you can refocus on providing the best service you can.

6. Leave personal issues at home. When your at work, let your professionalism shine.

7. Get plenty of sleep each night, exercise regularly, and eat well-balanced meals in order to keep stress in check.

8. Use mistakes and challenges as opportunities to learn.

9. Keep within sight a picture of something that makes you smile.

10. Remember to count your blessings often. Write down something each day which you are grateful.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Managing remote call center agents: 14 best practices

By Donna Fluss
  
As companies have come to embrace the concept of at-home (remote) call center agents, managers find themselves struggling with how to oversee this new workforce.

Enterprises constantly struggle to find the right agents to deliver an outstanding customer experience. Some have turned to offshore outsourcers that claim to have an abundance of high-quality agents available for reasonable prices, while others prefer to keep their call center activities domestic, provided they can find agents with the right skills for the job. The remote (at-home) agent business model has proved to be a creative and cost-effective approach to staffing contact centers with skilled, high-quality and loyal employees. It's also a cost-effective method for addressing contingency planning and disaster recovery.

Managers in call centers throughout the U.S. are weighing the benefits and challenges of employing remote agents. As technology is no longer viewed as an impediment, the most significant concern is how to manage remote agents without personal contact from the call center supervisor, particularly for single-site operating environments that have never had agents based in multiple or satellite locations.

Some of the best practices for remote agent oversight have long been used to manage agents in secondary locations. The most important practice is to invest time in hiring qualified agents – individuals who are highly motivated, satisfy all competency and skill requirements, have the right working environment and technology already in place, and are technically savvy and able to troubleshoot at home. My consultancy, DMG Consulting, recommends that contact centers employing remote call center agents use the following best practices for hiring and managing their staff:

1. Use a competency-based assessment tool as part of the hiring process to evaluate potential remote agent candidates. This tool should make sure that candidates have the necessary contact center skills and are highly motivated self-starters.

2. As part of the interview process, ask agents whether they meet all of the criteria on a remote agent readiness checklist.

3. Establish a three-month trial period to determine whether a new hire or a premise-based agent who "transfers" to a remote location can properly perform the job. Whether hiring employees or contract staff, you should make it clear in the agreement that the enterprise has the right to terminate the relationship without cause during this probationary period. (Involve your human resources and legal departments in addressing this issue.)

4. Create an online training program that addresses your products, systems and general corporate information. This program can be delivered via an e-learning mechanism or on paper, but it must test the agent's knowledge. Supervisors must be available to review and assist remote agents with training challenges.

5. Give remote call center agents the same training opportunities as premise-based staff. If you generally put new hires in a protected pod for the first two weeks after they come out of training, do the same for the remote agents. Be sure to make a supervisor available, particularly immediately following the initial training.

6. Establish and document job responsibilities, requirements, procedures and policies. This document needs to address all standard operating policies plus specific remote agent requirements.

7. Establish a formal communication process between supervisors and remote agents. The process should include a daily conversation with the supervisor or manager. It's critical that management adhere to this schedule. Remote agents must also be made aware of the process for escalating inquiries to supervisors. (It's recommended that premise-based and remote agents follow the same escalation procedures.)

8. Use chat for handling the majority of agent inquiries. Supervisors need to be available to respond immediately to chat inquiries from agents.

9. Ensure that remote agents have access to all product and service information, whether it's online or paper-based. If paper-based, the documents should be shipped to remote agents as part of their set-up process.

10. Establish a defined number and frequency of quality monitoring (QM) sessions for remote agent evaluations. Provide regular, scheduled feedback on agent performance, covering both strengths and coaching on performance opportunities. It's important to involve remote agents in all quality-monitoring and training-related activities.

11. Reward remote agents for performance excellence, just as you would premise-based staff.

12. Ensure that remote agents have access to performance management reports and quality assurance (QA) evaluations for self-managing performance.

13. Include remote agents in all team meetings and up-training activities. It's recommended that remote agents be part of an agent team that includes both remote and premise-based staff. If your staff is 100% remote, run team meetings at least once a week to keep staff connected and interacting with one another.

14. If your center is using both premise-based and remote agents, pair agents to ensure and reward cooperation. Be creative in identifying ways to promote a sense of "connectedness" or "team spirit" for agents who work at home. If you are having a holiday party at the site, be sure to communicate this to remote agents so that they have time to prepare and join in, if they choose. Do not leave them out just because they are not on-site.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Five Tips For Handle Telephone Answering Properly

In call center business phone answering is one of the important key skill require to perform the better results. The call handling skill with the customer is also an important one. The main role of the call center is depends on the types of call center services offers. The way telephone is replied in the call center form your businessCustomer's first printing. These make the phone call for the reply secret to guarantee for the call center that, the visitor knew they deal with business, which wins. Here are the key tips to handle different types of call center services.
 
1. The first and foremost thumb rule of the phone answering is pickup the phone after the second ring. It is a professional approach and generally inbound call centers people are using this practice generally pickup call at first ring.
 
2. The second approach is well come to the customer in a good manners with interest. Handling call is one of the important tasks. It requires good listening and answering habits. Finally it leaves your client's impression good or bad depends on your ability.
 
3. The third important thing is when the reply call center telephone, clearly enunciates, maintains your sound capacity to be moderate and slowly and clearly speaks when
replied the telephone therefore your visitor possibly easily understands you. 
 
4. The fourth one is Completely and accurately adopts the telephone messages. If has something you not to understand or is unable to spell then you can ask the caller again.
 
5. The last good quality phone answering ability is to do not use the Speakerphone. It will give bad impression on the caller and your client too. After you are representing your client.
 
Effective communication is one of the essential tasks for the call center agents. It needs lots of training and experience to handle the calls properly.
 

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

CALCULATING SCHEDULE ADHERENCE

by: Laura Grimes , 

Schedule Adherence is a measurement of how much time an agent spends on a call, wrapping up a call or available to take a call during his shift. In the simplest form, the calculation is:

(Talk Time + After Call Work + Available Time)/Shift Time

The above calculation has a few problems. First of all, shift time needs to be defined by an organization (do agents log off during breaks or do they put themselves in an unavailable mode). Furthermore, it is extremely important that the center defines how all activities conducted by agents should be logged and enforces those rules as standards. It is also of importance that centers define exactly what constitutes shift time. Do you include time spent in “approved and planned” non-phone activities (training, meetings, coaching, etc)? Additionally, adherence does not measure whether or not the agent worked the assigned schedule.

Another aspect of schedule adherence is setting the goal. It must be realistic and attainable or you will encourage agents to attempt to play the system, leading to a distortion of the real activities of the agents. Some centers choose to back all auxiliary time out of the shift time. While this has the impact of not penalizing agents for “approved and planned” non-phone activities, this blanket deduction also allows for a multitude of “sins” to be hidden and creates very high adherence numbers. A much better practice is to define the auxiliary work codes that an agent needs for all aspects of his job (from bathroom breaks to assigned projects) and then determine which if any auxiliary codes should be subtracted from shift time.

If your systems will not allow for tracking at that auxiliary level of detail, take the time to set realistic adherence schedules. Is some centers, it is in the 70's. In most centers it is in the 80's. If you are striving for and reaching a goal in the 90's, it is possible that you are either not looking at the complete picture OR you are burning agents out.

A final note: Consider looking at schedule compliance as a measurement. This measurement allows call center managers to consider how closely agents are working to their schedules.

Monday, September 29, 2008

UPSELLING IN SERVICE CALL CENTERS

By: Art Hall, NetBank

How to implementing UPSELLING IN SERVICE CALL CENTERS??

This is a very difficult question to answer, but a question that must be addressed. In my experience in transforming a service-oriented call center to a sales and service oriented call center, I was under tremendous pressure to produce results quickly. Senior executives underestimated the level of change management that is involved in taking an entire operation from pure service to an operation that was cross-selling/up-selling to customers where it made sense.

Here are some things that I have learn and done in the process:

1. Develop an overarching strategy for service and sales and communicate that strategy constantly to your team and the customer service agents. The way I had to break upselling down to my team was to ask them if they ever have been asked to super size a combo at a drive through restaurant. That is essentially what they are doing: determining if the customer is in a "super size mood" today. If not, move on, if so, give them the bigger fries and coke!

2. Develop a visual sales process - Everyone in the call center must get a visual picture of the sales process end to end.If you have Microsoft Visio or Excel you can map that out pretty easily.

3. Listen, Listen, Listen. You will find out that there are some customer service agents that are not fit for sales, and that is okay. You have some decisions to face if it is required for the entire call center operation to sell. But you will be surprised what agents will say/not say that impedes their ability for sales.

4. Start slow and establish quick wins. You may want to start with a simple tag line at the end of every call or start with an easy product/service in order to start momentum.

5. Make it fun. In our environment, the Operations Manager created a literal mountain that hung on the wall and superimposed his face on a person that is hiking up the mountain, representing our maturity in the transition.

6. You Need QA (Quality Asurance) and You Need Sales Coaches. This is a "both and" type of deal and not an "either or." QA should listen for the opportunities capitalized as well as missed; sales coaches should be on the floor shadowing the reps and giving them pointers. You may want to take one or two of your best sales agents and make them the coaches if you don't have the budget to hire additional coaches.

7. Need to establish KPI's (Key Performance Indicators) at a strategic and tactical level. A good strategic KPI is cost of service - it is an efficiency measure that will let you know how efficient each rep is in asking for the sale. Another good one is number of cross sells per 100 calls handled. There is a benchmark in financial services of 3 products/services sold per 100 calls. I am not sure if there is a benchmark in your vertical. At a tactical level, measure the agents on number of units sold - it's easy and they can control it.

8. Re-think your incentive compensation - if you are a B2C (Business-to-Consumer) shop, I would extract learnings from B2B (Business-to-Business) companies that have a mature and defined incentive compensation plan and use that to develop your compensation plans and incentives (both monetary and non-monetary).

9. Set up recurring sales meetings with senior execs so that they can understand how well your organization is adapting to the change and the challenges you are facing. This helps level set expectations and establishes your credibility BIG time!



 

Friday, September 26, 2008

An Underestimated Principle In The Call Center

As a call center manager or supervisor, you may pride yourself on your fairness. You understand that treating agents with an evenhanded and equal approach is important. However, it's not your perception that matters: it's your agents' ideas about what is fair that matters. If your call center agent pool is comprised of mature adults with long careers behind them, thick skins and a high degree of tolerance for criticism, then you are fortunate. However, chances are, you employ a lot of young people who may be new to a workplace environment, particularly one where a workforce is almost literally elbow-to-elbow, as in the call center.
The causes of high turnover in the call center are not always clear-cut to company management. Sure, you understand why an employee quits if he complains that he's not getting the shifts he wants or is offered more money by another company. But more often than not, it is soft, intangible things that cause friction in the call center. Agents feel their goals are poorly communicated and measured. That another agent was trained better than him or her. That supervisors always choose to monitor on the agent's "bad" days while ignoring the good conversations. That supervisors are keeping a closer watch on him or her than other agents. That company management is stressing training on issues the employee feels he or she has already mastered, while skimping on areas the agent would truly like help in (but is unwilling to ask).

Today's call center technologies go a long way toward creating and maintaining fairness in agents' jobs. Workforce optimization solutions allow for schedule and vacation swapping that is done automatically based on seniority, coverage needs and who asked first rather than supervisors picking and choosing who gets the good schedules and who doesn't, which tends to bring about accusations of "favoritism."
Quality surveys of customers can be done randomly, helping catch a more representative range of opinions. It's well known that in the contact center, if you leave it up to customers to decide when they want to offer feedback, they are generally going to take time to offer it only when they've had a negative experience. And if you allow agents to "push" surveys to customers, they are, of course, only going to "push" when a call has gone well.
Speech analytics, too, can help supervisors become aware of where agents really need help, and where they are strong. Supervisors can take steps to correct errors - or areas where training may be thin for certain agents -automatically by pushing the appropriate e-learning modules to call center agents, allowing diem to learn at their desks during their downtime with no judgmental manager standing over them. In this way, a supervisor need not either publicly single out an agent for a problem; i.e., "Suzanne, you really need to improve your close rate," or take the time out to pull the agent aside for private, individualized learning, which carries its own stigma.
Call recording allows you to record and store all of your agents' calls, if necessary, and access them easily. Not only do many industries today require 100 percent recording of customer interactions, it can be a good idea to avoid agent/customer "he said, she said" scenarios. You can use the recordings to find out where agents are weak, but on the flip side, you can use the recording to let agents know what they are doing well.
Improving the perception (and the reality) of fairness in the call center can go a long way toward reducing agent attrition and nipping the "disgrunded agent snowball effect" in the bud before it blooms into resentment of company management. Because when a group of people is working is working elbow-to-elbow in a call center environment, disharmony is the very last thing that's needed.

Sunday, September 21, 2008

Call Center Culture

 
Victoria’s Secret Is Out. Dress Barn Is Safe at Home!
Call Centers are mainstream. You see call centers in TV commercials and on the cartoon pages of your daily newspaper. Both are great indicators that the call center is a “household word.”
Ten years ago if you told someone you worked in a call center, they responded by asking, “A call what? What’s that?” No more. In fact, I’m waiting for the TV sitcom to come out because the life in a call center is such “real life” and full of story after story. So it’s no surprise that call centers make the news as did Victoria’s Secret recently, and it’s no surprise that in a letter to its credit card holders, Dress Barn alerted its customers to a change in the location of their call center operations.
On August 23rd in the Columbus, Ohio Dispatch the closing of Victoria Secret’s call center, located in the greater Columbus area, was reported. (The newspaper story can be accessed at www.dispatch.com.)
The fact that they ceased operations makes it a newsworthy story. How they did it makes it a noteworthy story for the call center community. I am well aware that this story most certainly has layers I am not privy to that would shed light on the circumstances that caused the company to cease operations. The story’s headline was,Victoria’s Secret Sends 470 Packing.” Staff was in the call center, on the phones with customers and the phones went dead. Staff was then called into a meeting and told the call center had been closed. Every person was offered a transfer to one of two other call centers, one in Kettering Ohio, about 70-80 miles west of Columbus, or to the state of New Mexico. Here is a quote from one of the staff: “I started working there in November of 1992 and I just cracked $10 an hour. So you can just imagine how hard it would be to try to move or commute to Kettering”.
The company was quick to point out that they were not like “other American retailers” who were cutting jobs. No, they were transferring jobs. Pay no attention to the fact that the new locations were 70 miles and 1,470 miles away so you could choose between a little over an hour’s commute or a day’s!
A remarkable attempt to appear pure and caring. In all fairness, it’s important to report that they did offer 60 days’ severance pay to anyone who could not accept the transfer. Somehow it would not surprise me to find out that offer had holes in it, but I’ll never know and don’t want to know.
If you taste or smell something foul, it’s the company’s culture. No one denies a corporation’s need to make tough, difficult business decisions. We accept that no decision is good for everyone and in fact, people are often hurt even in the best of decisions that come down from on high.
Now, take a look at a different view of life in a call center. In a letter I received in August from an American retailer, The Dress Barn, was this statement: “We have expanded our telemarketing, website and fulfillment operations and moved them in-house. At Dress Barn we are committed to offering you superior customer service.”
What is remarkable about this letter is the notification of the move “in-house” of their operations. Yes, the call center is mainstream!
The letter goes on to explain that past customer experiences have fallen short of expectations both for the customer and for the company. Now neither you nor I know if the letter is purely a marketing effort or a demonstration of the real essence of caring. What we do know is that Dress Barn didn’t need to inform cardholders of the change. What we can hope for is that this is a real demonstration of exactly who they are and want to be.
We can hope that when the tough and difficult decision was made to bring operations back in-house, they didn’t pull the plug in the middle of the phone call. We can hope that if they face a new tough and difficult decision to close or downsize, they will not pull the plug in the middle of the phone call.
If something tastes or smells fresher, it’s the company’s culture.
It’s gotten very popular to talk about “culture” and apply it to business settings and strategies. While references to good ol’ Webster can be trite and space filling when an author has little to say, I find this one remarkable enough to insert. Pause for a moment and think about your definition of “culture” and then return for Webster’s (On line Merriam-Webster to be exact).
Culture: 1) The act of developing the intellectual and moral faculties especially by education. 2) Expert care and training (beauty culture). 3) Enlightenment and excellence of taste acquired by intellectual and aesthetic training as in the acquaintance with and taste in fine arts, humanities, and broad aspects of science as distinguished from vocational and technical skills. 4) a) the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon man’s capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations. b) the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group c) the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes a company or corporation
What I take as the most common meaning of the word, i.e., the references to customs, beliefs, and all other things sociological, was down in the 4th spot. It didn’t surprise me that “4c” referred to the use of the word in the business world. That indeed speaks to the pervasiveness of its use.
Notice the distinction made in the third definition saying that this is not about vocational or technical skills but about enlightenment and excellence through acquisition of intellectual and aesthetic training. It’s as if the third definition defines both the first and second while the 4th applies it.

Monday, September 15, 2008

Good Call Center Training Creates a Positive Atmosphere

By STEFANIA VISCUSI
TMCnet Assistant Editor for Channels
In the call center, agents are the touch point between customers and the company. Ensuring they receive proper call center training to handle stressful situations, answer caller requests accurately and portray the image of the company, is critical.
Achieving successful call center training isn’t as easy as saying, "Ok here's a list of what you need to do, do it." For years, call centers have relied on agents who just answered phones and did as they were asked, but this is the same reason why call center training has failed.
Call center training needs to be in place not only from the minute an agent decides to join the operation, but call center training must be a continuous effort to improve and maintain success throughout the entire operation.
Training call center agents on how to talk to customers, what to say and when to say it, and reinforcing all of their decisions with the right mix of feedback and coaching are all elements of good call center training.
One of the best ways to achieve a successful call center operation is by giving agents time to practice. Just simply telling agents what to do and sending them off hoping they will do it right, is not good enough. Showing them and giving them a safe environment to practice what you have told them will yield great results.
Call center jobs can be extremely stressful, especially when callers want answers, or may be upset or emotional. Good call center training provides agents with the skills and tools needed to eliminate the stress of these situations.
If training takes place in an environment that is comfortable and allows mistakes to be made, without sacrificing those mistakes on actual customers, it becomes beneficial to agents and gives them a chance to better develop their skills.
An important thing to remember about call center training is that it is ongoing. It does not end on the first day of the job.
When good, continual call center training is in place, management and supervisors can rest assured that their job and the entire operation will run smoother, customers will be more satisfied with the service they receive, and a positive environment will surface.
Stefania Viscusi is an established writer and avid reader. To see more of her articles, please visit Stefania Viscusi’s columnist page.

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Ideal Call Center Suite

Ideal Call Center Suite is an innovative all-in-one business solution based on latest technology that is designed to ensure significant improvement in contact center productivity and highest customer satisfaction. It offers top-of-the-line capabilities, such as Predictive Dialer, IP-PBX, IVR (Interactive Voice Response), ACD (Automatic Call Distributor), Voice Logger, Unified Contact Messaging, CRM and Reporting. It offers a host of features such as Multiple Campaign Management, Performance Management, Unified Messaging (Chat, E-mail, SMS), Skill-Based Routing, Call Compliance, Centralized Management and many more. It provides a powerful value proposition to its call center customers in form of easy scalability, ease-of-use, low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and ability to work seamlessly over TDM or VoIP. .

Monday, September 8, 2008

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Learn the Top 8 Reasons to Use a Virtual Call Center

Companies have spent decades fine tuning the traditional brick-and-mortar call center model. But, it’s tough to make further improvements given the constraints of physical location, people, and complex on premise equipment.  And, a major trend over the past decade offshoring  –  simply chases lower cost labor at the cost of customer service.
 

The virtual call center model – with on-demand platform and remote agents - offers new options to significantly improve performance and reduce cost structure.

Download the white paper here





Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Better Communication Skills — Three Tips for Conference Calls

The conference call has been a way of life in business for many years now. So why are so many frustrating, ineffective calls being held every day? This simple list of reminders is intended to help keep conference calls from becoming wasted time.
1. No multi tasking — I've been guilty on this count, I must admit. But if you force yourself to follow a no multi tasking rule, you get another benefit. You're force to confront the question of whether the conference call is an effective use of your time. It's easy to say yes if you're thinking you can appease someone while you do your email. But if the call isn't worth your time, you need to speak up and say so.
2. It's a meeting, so treat it like one. The call should have a clear PAL (Purpose, Agenda, Limit). Participants should be invited, and attendance taken. Be clear about who is leading the call. Start on time. The leader needs to keep the call/meeting on track, and document actions taken and follow up activities (who, what, by when). End on time. Send an email with the documented action items promptly, preferably before you do anything else.
3. Test for agreement. In face to face meetings, body language and facial expressions provide clues as to whether people are engaged in the topic, even if they choose to remain silent. Not so on a phone call, and while we'd like to live by a rule of silence equals acceptance, that's dangerous. If the number of participants is reasonable, call the roll so everyone has to say yes or no on key decisions. Beware of voice inflections that indicate uncertainty, and tactfully call them out.
Avoid ex partee one to one conversations after a conference call, especially the kind where someone calls you right away to express their frustration or anger. On the other hand, if you're leading a call and you're convinced that someone has been disenfranchised or needs some help dealing with a topic, go ahead and reach out to them.
One more point — the speaker phone is a great invention. But poor quality speakerphones can really bog down a call. People end up talking over one another and sometimes don't even know it. It can lead to repetition and frustration. If you're relying on speaker phones, get high quality equipment. Otherwise encourage people to use handsets or headsets

Monday, August 25, 2008

7 interesting call-center facts

1. A study by Ventana Research threw up the following interesting facts
• 50% of call centers target less than 4 minutes per call
• 48% track revenue generated by the call center
• 46% employ up-sell or cross efforts
• 12% of call center companies do not measure customer satisfaction at all
• 60% rely on the agent to assess the customers satisfaction
What do these points tell us – mainly that call centers are focusing more on extracting “volume” performance from their employees and customer satisfaction which they all harp about is essentially secondary. Not different from any other business!!
2. An IDC report states that the cost of a home-based agent is two-thirds that of the cost of an office-based employee.
Am sure they must be using different performance metrics too to judge the two types of workers. Going by this piece, telecommuters must be outperforming their office-going counterparts.
3. South America is set to be the dominant global flavor of call center pie according to a report from Datamonitor. The number of agents in Caribbean and Latin American based contact center agents servicing offshore customers to more than triple from 16,200 in 2005 to 44,900 in 2010. Mexico is set to emerge as a major force set to cater to the US Hispanic market.
It’s slow progress for these countries in my opinion; maybe they don’t have a pool of English speakers that an early mover like India had.
4. According to a study by the Yankee Group, 24% of call center employees are home-based and this number is increasing by 24% each year. On similar lines IDC estimates the number of home-based phone representatives in the United States, to grow from 112,000 today to over 300,000 by 2010.
5. VoIP has had a huge impact on how call centers function and according to an In-stat study Asia is where the action is. The study states that the VoIP market in Asia will be worth more than $10 billion by 2009 with a major chunk coming from the developed nations of East Asia.
6. An interesting find by Purdue University – an astonishing 92% of callers/prospective customers form an opinion about a company based on their call-center interaction and a very high percentage – 68% - will not hesitate to switch brands if not satisfied with call center performance.
7. A probable reason why many SMBs remain just that – don’t know the source of this but it says that a staggering 51% of SMBs did not think emails were worth responding to, they didn’t respond to them at all and 70% of these SMBs took more than 24 hours to get back. This compared to 41% of enterprises not responding at all and 61% not responding within 24 hours.

Sunday, August 24, 2008

New Capabilities in Call Center Technology

By:Howard Baldwin

Not all of today’s call center capabilities are new; what’s new about call-center technology is the ability for these capabilities to be quickly and inexpensively integrated. “Small businesses have always needed call center technology,” insists Chris Lyman, CEO of Fonality. “They’ve just never been able to afford it. Not just the call-center technology, but tying it into your back-office systems has been heinously expensive.”
Twenty years ago, telephone company equipment was proprietary — both the hardware and software were created solely for the use of the telephone company, so that when you wanted to integrate computer equipment with telephone equipment (known as computer-telephony integration, or CTI), the costs were exorbitant because the computer systems were probably proprietary as well, so you needed programmers who understood the intricacies of not one but two arcane systems.
In recent years, considerable change has taken place. Call center software runs on industry-standard servers, just as databases do; integrating applications is much simpler than it used to be. Even more important, most telephony systems now also run on industry-standard servers, rather than on proprietary hardware.
Finally, the convergence of voice and data networks — on which voice transmissions use the Internet protocol — makes call-center integration even less complicated, and less expensive to implement.
At the same time that voice and data networks have converged, specialized call-center capabilities have been integrated as well. At one time, you may have had to separately purchase automatic call distribution (ACD) software, which distributes calls into queues for agents, and integrate it with IVR software, which, as noted, routes calls to the appropriate department. It seems silly now, but Bern Elliott of the analyst firm Gartner notes that a major shift in the last few years has been for vendors to offer a full portfolio of such products. “The differences between the products have been reduced, and people want to get them through a single vendor or through a partnership,” he says.
“Any vendor that you select now comes with the complete package,” notes Dan Coen, vice-president of call centers for CallSource, which offers call-center services on an outsourced basis. “You should be leery of a niche player, not because they won’t do that particular thing well, but because they can’t scale” as you need to add capabilities.
And that integration, insists Bern Elliott of the analyst firm Gartner, is what a call center is about. “It’s people supporting people. All you really need is for the most basic call center is a person and a phone. People get so caught up in the technology that they forget what’s important.”

Thursday, August 21, 2008

TRACKING FIRST CALL RESOLUTION WITHOUT TECHNOLOGY

How can you track First Call Resolution (FCR) if your center is not using any kind of technology or support application? 
One pitfall of asking agents to mark a ticket as "closed" or "resolved" is that some agents, in order to boost their resolution rate, will mark a case "resolved" or "closed" when in fact, they are escalating the call to a more specialized agent, or when the call is terminated by the customer without resolution (customer does not have time to troubleshoot, or is not at the equipment to try the agent-suggested solution, or the resolution is dependent upon resolving an issue with a third party which cannot be contacted or conferenced in - is not available). In this instance, a completely new case has to be opened by the higher-level agent.

Another ringer - which can skew data in either direction - is the customer with a recurring technical performance issue. If the issue no longer appears at the conclusion of the call, one must ask whether the customer's issue has truly been resolved, or whether the agent has just applied the most recent strategy against a moving target. Many agents will mark the case "resolved", per the (probably-temporary) resolution. Other agents will hesitate to mark the case "resolved", keeping it "open" for the customer to monitor the product's performance for a period of time. Often these cases are never marked "resolved".

Additionally, escalated-level agents may hesitate to mark as "resolved" a case that they have truly resolved, if they believe that their agent IDs will be correlated with an outgoing customer satisfaction survey -- some higher-level agents believe that the customer will only remember the initial agent or agents, who either were unable to solve the problem, or whose actions may have complicated the issue -- reflecting poorly on the advanced agent's real ability to resolve the complete suite of issues and satisfy the customer

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Tips for Handling Angry Callers as a Virtual Call Center Agent

As a telephone customer service agent, you are often the first contact a customer has with a company. When you're working with customers directly, you'll eventually have to help customers who are irate. During these conversations, it's important to focus on your job and solving the problem at hand. You're being paid to assist customers - the good and the bad. Take a deep breath and follow these tips to successfully handle angry callers.
Don't Personalize
Regardless of the negative attitudes or unpleasant tones of angry callers, it is essential that
you, the customer service representative, do not get emotional, too. The first key to successfully handling these calls is to remember not to personalize anything these callers say to you. The easiest way to do this is to remember not to react to anything angry callers say. Instead, take a moment to hear what they're saying and offer a response that will help calm them rather than incite them. Using phrases like, "I hear what you're saying," or "I understand," can help calm angry callers.
Listen and Be Patient
Don't interrupt angry callers Be patient and let them finish speaking. Sometimes they just need to vent their frustrations then they can relax a bit and work with you as you try to resolve their problem. Sometimes they aren't interested in getting help at all. Instead, they may simply want to voice their anger and complaint. If the customer knows you're listening and want to help them, there is a strong likelihood they'll calm down.
Empathize
Put yourself in your customers' shoes. An angry customer has a problem, and they need you, the customer service agent, to help them fix it. How would you feel if you were in the same situation? What would you want a customer service agent to say to you in a similar situation to make you feel better? Those are the same words any angry caller wants to hear. They want to know you understand, and they want reassurance that you can help them.
Apologize
A critical component to successfully handling angry callers is to apologize to them. Even if you know the customer is wrong, take a moment to apologize for the inconvenience the confusion caused. Many angry callers simply want acknowledgement from the company that a mistake was made. For other callers, an apology is the first step to overcoming their anger and opening a dialogue about resolving the problem.
Offer Solutions
As the customer service representative, it is your responsibility to resolve customers' problems. Once you've identified the problem, you need to take responsibility for finding a solution that not only follows company policies but also satisfies the customer. If you aren't able to resolve the customer's problem immediately, offer reassurance that the problem is being worked on and will be resolved for the customer. Provide details about the next steps you or the company will take to resolve the problem and ensure the customer leaves with realistic expectations at the end of the call.
Bring Closure
Your goal is to bring closure to every call whether that means a completed sale, a change of address or resolution to a problem from an angry caller. By working with this goal in mind each time you answer the phone, you'll be setting yourself up for success, and you'll be offering customers first-rate service.

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

COMPONENTS OF A QUALITY CALL

Great question. First, I would say that there are certain components that make up a quality call that are fairly consistent across every industry. There are also many components that will be very specific to your specific industry, customer base, type of call, the overall mission of the center and so on.
In terms of the components of a quality call/contact, the following list, which must be credited to
Brad Cleveland since it comes from his book, Call Center Management on Fast Forward, represents the basic components that span across industries, contact types and customer types:
  • Customer does not get a busy signal when using telephone or "no response" from Web site
  • Customer is not placed in queue for too long
  • Agent provides correct response
  • All data entry is correct
  • Agent captures all needed/useful information
  • Agent has "Pride in Workmanship"
  • Contact is necessary in the first place
  • Customer receives correct information
  • Customer has confidence contact was effective
  • Customer doesn't feel it necessary to check-up, verify or repeat
  • People "down the line" can correctly interpret the order
  • Customer is not transferred around
  • Customer doesn't get rushed
  • Customer is satisfied
  • Unsolicited marketplace feedback is detected and documented
  • Call center's mission is accomplished
After this, it is really a matter of determining the specifics for your center (as mentioned above). A great way to truly understand and accomplish this list is to ask your representatives...get them involved in defining a quality call. Not only is this a wonderful team meeting exercise (which spurs a lot of excellent discussion and ideas), but since they are truly the main point of contact with your customers they will know better than anyone except for the customers themselves. Which leads me to suggest looking at your customer surveys for what customers say is important or conduct some surveys asking them what is important.

Article Source: Rose Polchin, Senior Consultant, ICMI rosep@icmi.com

MEASURING TRAINING EFFECTIVENESS

Incoming Calls Management Institute (ICMI) recently published a study guide for CIAC certification on People Management and included information on evaluating training effectiveness. The following is an excerpt:
At a basic level, evaluation consists of defining objectives, specifying those objectives measurably, and then assessing the extent to which learners have mastered those objectives. To determine the results of training, management must establish baseline performance metrics based on the needs assessment. That is, "What measurement is used to identify the gap?" After the training has been conducted, these performance metrics can be evaluated to determine the effect of the training. Of course, other influences (e.g., a change in procedures, new technology) should be noted to ensure the positive or negative effect was due to training.
Training programs should be evaluated on four levels:
  1. Reaction: What are the participants' feedback on the training? This is typically measured through a survey and usually covers such items as program methodology, group and individual exercises, quality of materials and media, facilitator capabilities, facilities, etc.
  2. Learning evaluation: This is the process of collecting, analyzing and reporting information to assess how much the participants learned and applied in the learning environment.
  3. Application to the job: This step assesses the degree to which the knowledge, skills and abilities taught in the classroom are being used on the job.
  4. Evaluating the impact and ROI: This is the process of determining the impact of training on organizational productivity, improved customer satisfaction and the organization's strategic business plan. What is the change in business metrics attributable to training? What is the return on the training investment (typically calculated by dividing the net dollar value of the benefit by the costs of training)?
   
Article Source: Debbie Harne, Director of Educational Services, ICMI, debbieh@icmi.com

Sunday, August 10, 2008

5 Crucial Factors In Call Center Management

Call centers spring up everywhere. It's the latest hub in business world. These call centers efficiently connect companies and customers wherever they maybe around the globe. From product inquiries to technical support, call centers offers varying services. It can accept calls from customers ( inbound) as well as initiate calls (outbound). Some call centers even do both.

At the heart of a call center industry lies the wonder of proprietary technology and keen management. If you plan to put up a call center or have been called up to supervise one , here's some crucial management factors you should know :

1.)CAPITAL

If you are a business man and want to diversify your portfolio by putting up a call center, please know that such business venture requires a significant start up capital. Study your options well and take stock of your funds before engaging in such costly endeavor. If possible, do some appropriate researches. Drop by and arrange interviews with call center owners. Leave no stone unturned.

2.)EQUIPMENT

A call center basically needs, office space,phone lines, computers, dedicated servers, and a broadband connection. It also needs a specialized software. These costs money. Anyway, equipments can be tailored to the growing needs of your proposed call center. You can start up with a small office space, invest in four computers or so, some telephone lines and equipments. Just remember to get reliable equipments or your call center will suffer an early demise. Then you can upgrade these devices as the need arises.

3.)PERSONNEL
Call centers requires staffing. And staffing means hiring people to do the job. In other words, call center rely heavily on people manning their jobs. It's the backbone of the call center industry. It's labor-intensive. A large chunk of your investment will go to wages. In addition, remember to give the right training to your call center agents. Your personnel can spell the difference between success and failure of your call center.

4.)LEADERSHIP

To supervise effectively a team of employees in a call center, you must provide the right leadership to them. You see, being a call center agent is a demanding job. Employees gets tired easily. For a start, you should design your office space so would be conducive for workers. Plus, you should build rapport and goodwill between you and your call center agents. Tempers can run high in any given moment and as a manager, you should be knowledgeable enough how to diffuse such situation before it could escalate into a big scenario. Keep your cool. And always strive to talk softly, amiably, but firmly so you will respected. Otherwise, you will get a high turn-over volume that could drastically affect your investment.

5.)MONITORING

If you can, select top-notch, high-end call center software because it incorporates an excellent employee monitoring features. Pick the best. You can make a choice because there are many of them in the market. Again, this type of software costs money. The good thing is , it offers you monitoring tools and real time access to call center agent's conversations with their customers. Thus, you can track their performance as well as institute needed improvement in weak areas.

Sunday, August 3, 2008

Is a Call Center Right for Your Small Business?

Outsourcing has turned so many services into commodities that the personal touch that used to distinguish one business among its competitors is rarer today than it has ever been. Consequently, that personal touch is also perhaps more crucial than ever for a business that wants to pull ahead in a competitive marketplace.

But delivering that “personal touch” may not necessarily mean that your own employees are responsible for all the contact your company makes with customers. If you choose wisely, you can get a fully outsourced call center service that can uphold your standards for good customer interaction.

You may also decide to develop your call center services in-house, in which case you can support your customer service or sales staff with technology that helps to route calls, offers multiple ways to interact with customers, and manages the information your customers provide. As a third approach to setting up your company’s call center, you may choose a hybrid option, relying partly on outsourced services and partly on your own call center system and personnel to take care of all your customer contacts.

The good news for small businesses is that there are affordable tools and services in all these call center options. Call centers are no longer formal, complex, and expensive solutions only for those with dedicated agents. Managing communications, and integrating the management of that information along with other aspects of customer relations, including customer history, is now available to businesses of any size at a fraction of the cost from five to 10 years ago.

Call centers come with different functions; there are special functions that make a contact center different from the phone-only interaction of the traditional call center. There are different levels of call center service and technology, from fully outsourced solutions to the software and hardware that will allow you to set up your own in-house contact center

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Call Center Management: 3 Simple Ways To Drastically Trim Down Call Center Operational Costs

A call center business demands a significant cash investment. These include employees, key equipment, and business location. You could effectively cut down costs and provide good call center management if you have a clear understanding of these basic sources of call center expenses.
1.  
EMPLOYEES ( Staff)
People make up 90 % of your call center investment. They are the frontline fo your business. Hiring the right people and offering them the right incentive could spell success for your investment. Without the proper renumerations, a call center will suffer from a high turn-over. People won’t stay long in the company and it cost more in terms of training lost and resources. How could you trim down the employees aspect of a call center? Well, it’s simple, actually. You implement a sensible hiring process. Screen applicants to weed out the “ unfits” , the “ misfits”, and the people who do not have any customer service inclinations. This way, you hire only people who are best fitted for the job. Go for quality, rather than the
quantity of recruits. It is better to hire 15 best performing call center employees rather than hire, train, and pay 30 mediocre employees. And once you have good workers, constantly monitor and upgrate their productivity. It is worth mentioning that you should also make pro-active plans regarding :
a.) Agents’ Talk Time— you should implement the necessary metrics to gauge an agent’s work output. The longer your employee stays on the phone for one caller, the more costly it will be for your company.
b.) Resources —- the agent should be able to resolve a caller issues and not transfer the call to a supervisor. Provide your employees with comprehensive trainings.
c.) Total volume of contacts— while a call center welcomes calls, there are some call types which are best blocked at the start. This generally refers to prank callers, stray calls, and other unproductive callers. Your call center must decisively handle these types of calls.
2.
EQUIPMENT
Call center operations need dedicated phone lines, computer workstations, and proprietary software. You
will incur bigger expenses if you go for used equipments or worse, inferior hardware. While these equipment may initially cost less at start up, you will be plagued with server downtime, choppy receptions, and costly repairs. Better select the best equipment and software available at the start to have a worry-free call center operation, than suffer from periodical interruptions due to faulty equipment. I n  this regard, you should do some research on the hardware vendors. Conduct business only with legitimate and duly licensed vendor companies.
3.  
LOCATION
US-based companies pay premium fees on employees’ salaries and building costs. However, outsourcing your call center to other locations— like Philippines or India– results to substantial cost reduction. No wonder companies prefer to invest in call centers abroad. Basically, it costs less building call centers in foreign locations outside USA.

Cutting down unnecessary call center operational costs can be achieved with sound call center management strategies. You should exercise caution, though, on what , where, and how to cut expenses for greater impact and effectivity. Otherwise, you will be spending more than you hope to save in the long run.

Article source :
http://24hourscall.wordpress.com
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