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.
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