Customer Service King

Call centers ought to hire really ugly people, since their customers can't see them. But they never do. I've never worked with any tragically scarred people. But I've worked with some weird people.

Probably the most interesting person in my department, possibly in the entire mega-building, was Lady Margarita, sometimes called the Queen. She was quite short, spoke with great intensity, and worked out every day. She also kept a personal injury attorney on retainer. I suppose that was in case someone injured her personally, which had happened before. She also studied karate in case her legal remedies were exhausted.

One time Lady Margarita returned from lunch in great indignation: "I cannot believe it," she reported. "I got a ticket while parking at the gym. As you know, I work out on a daily basis, and there's no reason why I should get a ticket. I'm going to contact my attorney immediately."

It turned out she had parked in a handicapped spot.

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John Joseph of Envox Worldwide offers suggestions on how to train virtual call center agents, who work at home:

If you go virtual, your organization must make a corporate commitment to modify hiring and training practices accordingly. At-home agents require additional skills.

First, the agents have to have the knowledge and mindset to work independently.  Tools such as instant messaging can allow agents to confer with their colleagues, but at-home agents must be able to get by with less interaction with other agents. 

Next, they must have the ability to be mentally “at work” and focus on work despite the distractions of being physically at-home. 

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Today's guest writer is John Joseph, vice president of corporate marketing at Envox Worldwide, a voice solutions provider based in Westborough, MA.

With VoIP and standards-based CTI software, at-home agents can be a practical technical solution.  VoIP puts the voice traffic over the network and makes the contact center software available to anyone on the network, so with as little as a PC, an Internet connection and a phone, agents can work from home and have essentially all the control and capabilities of agents physically sitting in the contact center.  CTI software ensures that calls and data can be routed to remote agents as seamlessly as they could if the agents were all in the same room. 

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One example of the effective use of VOIP-based virtual call centers comes from Alta Colleges, which is headquartered in Denver and is the parent of Westwood College, which in turn has eighteen campuses in five states and a significant online presence. Alta uses CosmoCall Universe, an enterprise VoIP-based IP-based contact center platform, to seamlessly unify student/administration relationships. No matter how students contact the administration (telephone call, email, or any other medium), and no matter which of the three contact centers they reach, the students will get intelligent responses as if they have contacted a single, unified contact center.

We asked Segar Annamalai, chief information officer at Westwood College, about how the system is working.

What can you do with VOIP-based CRM that you couldn't do before?
Annamalai: With CosmoCom's unified approach to multi-channel communication, we will be able to provide an even higher level of service, while gaining efficiency by making one virtual contact center out of our three locations that now function as completely separate entities.

Why do you have three contact center locations in the first place?
Annamalai: We have three contact centers because of the contact center rep availability/labor market, each center specializes in a segment of the customer and the need to have redundancy between contact centers.

Where are they located?
Annamalai: Two are located in Denver and the other in Colorado Springs.

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In our tech support department, we had to develop some of our expertise simply because we had so little respect on our own. We were just customer service reps, really. So every time we sought help from a bigger company or a bigger department, we had to come loaded for bear.

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My own tech support group's hobby, because nobody else was willing to specialize in it, was working with tiny independent local phone companies who had telephone outages that involved our company. Probably the classic example involved Navajo Communications, a local phone company which served... well, it served Navajo Indians, of course (who call themselves the Diné). The outage meant that none of our mutual customers could make long distance phone calls, but since we only had fifty mutual customers, the problem disappeared under the radar. Our network technicians at our mega-company's nerve center never noticed the problem until we brought it up to them.  

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In an effort to help customers whom no one else would, the staff of our now-defunct call center tried some creative approaches.

For example, we learned how to game our own call center's policies. Not allowed to make outbound calls during busy times? Pressing Line 2 to dial out instead of hanging up first would keep another incoming call off our phones, and it wouldn't show up in our stats as an ordinary outbound call. Or placing the call with the customer still on line would count as a transfer even if we strongly invited the customer to hang up when they got bored. Most were so desperate by this point that they insisted on staying with us.

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It's so easy for the customer to get caught in the middle. "That's handled by another department." "But they told me to call you." "That's something that the other company needs to solve." "I'm getting the runaround. They insisted it was your problem."

So several of us at my first call center job became very skilled at dealing with other companies. We put ourselves in the middle, with the customer.

Because we were committed as a call center to solving problems no matter what (that center is now defunct), we developed a cottage industry in explaining to other companies why they needed to fix the problem and stop blaming us.

Since we were a phone company, most of the companies we had to negotiate with were other phone companies. We tried to use their own particular jargon, even their acronyms. We learned how their VRUs worked ("press 4, then 2, then wait on hold").

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Some call center management philosophies say, in essence, "It's easier to limit an agent's power to help a customer than it is to train the agent how to use that power properly."

This was particularly common at our telephone company. It got my juices flowing, but other CSRs didn't mind at all telling customers, in essence, "Maybe somebody around here can help you, but I can't."

It's true, phone companies have computer systems by which someone with telnet access can log in and add, change or delete your telephone number in real time. An agent with access to such a system can fix a problem (or cause a problem) before the customer has time to hang up. In the days before I was hired, every customer service agent had to use such a system. And if they typed something wrong, the results would be instaneous and hard to correct.

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One of my pet peeves, as a tech support person, was the habit of many agents to make up arbitrary times by which their customer's problem would be repaired. One of their favorites was "two to twenty-four hours." Any problem would be fixed in two to twenty four hours with emphasis on the twenty-four,  by which time their shift would be over and they wouldn't have to explain to the customer why the problem was still happening.

The truth was that our systems had gotten faster, so that if a phone problem wasn't fixed in about one hour, something had gone wrong and the problem wasn't going to be fixed at all unless an agent did something about it.

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