Archive for September, 2007
Thomas the Tank Engine recall: could it get any worse?
I sympathize with the agents who are answering the phone at RC2 Corp right now, while several more Thomas the Tank Engine toys are being recalled for higher-than-acceptable levels of lead paint. I'm sure that right now they could use the Anglican pastoral skills of Thomas's creator Rev. W. V. Awdry to reassure angry parents who want to know how it happened in the first place.
In my experience, inbound call center work is primarily disaster response. Often the disaster is caused by the company. One of the best ways to aggravate a disaster in your call center is not to tell your employees that a disaster is coming. You would think that the "customer-facing" staff should be the first to know about a potential problem. But no. Sometimes when they find out as the queue climbs and the service level drops, management is slow to believe them.
Our friend at Call Center Comics has a great strip that rings true to me, where management doesn't bother to tell the call center about a new product, so they all assume they're getting crank calls, not sales calls. It rings true because I think it's happened to me at least once. Another cartoon basically says, "That product was released a few minutes ago, so the call center agents will be informed about it in a few weeks."
I've worked in public relations as well as call centers, and I've learned that you can't effectively deal with a public relations disaster without speed and honesty. Your company needs to quickly show that it understands the problem and has a good solution. There is no time to wait as the PR department formulates an ideal response. The moment my phone rings with the first of hundreds of angry customers, I am already doing public relations work. I am already speaking to the public. I'd be glad to speak what the company wants, if they would tell me what to say, and if it's effective and honest.
Employee attrition - correct it before everyone leaves
Employee attrition tends to be high in most call centers. The reasons for this phenomenon can be many; however, the fact remains that the issue must be addressed. While simply hiring more people to replace the reps that leave may be an option, it is always more cost effective and better for morale to try to keep current employees.
Nike Air Native: microsegmenting and marketing
I'm a fan of micro- segmentation in marketing, but Nike's latest shoe has reached a new level. They discovered that Native American feet are much wider and higher than the average American, so they developed the Nike Air Native N7 shoe, even using traditional colors.
I've been joking for years that call centers should have separate teams for separate dialects, just to make everybody feel at home. But this goes beyond emotional comfort - this shoe supposedly provides greater physical comfort for Native Americans, even though they make up less than 1% of the US population.
Mind reading skills for the call center agent
Once someone in your call center has spotted a trend in calls - several callers with the same question or problem - it's important to make sure all agents are trained to deal with that trend. I've gotten pretty good at guessing what callers are going to say.
- If a caller uses the expression "you people" in the first sentence or two, you know he's only temporarily controlling his irritation, and if you don't act fast, he'll unleash his irritation on you.
- An elderly female caller with an East Coast (USA) accent is probably calling from Florida and wants a few cents credit for "dropped calls" on her phone bill.
- A caller who is belligerent about wanting a free long distance call placed for him is probably trying to trick you into giving him a call he doesn't deserve.
- A caller who is overly anxious about troubles with his calling card, but who is evasive about exactly where he's calling from, is probably calling from a correctional facility (jail or prison). Especially if his voice sounds hollow, as if it's echoing off concrete cell walls.
Reading your next caller’s mind
One of the keys to successful inbound call center work is the development of "overlapping skills." That means the ability to do several things at once, while still listening (or appearing to listen) to the caller online. Without overlapping skills, a rep ends up staring at his computer screen waiting for the customer to finally explain what he wants. Your assignment, as a call center agent with a long-winded or irate caller, is to guess what he wants before he tells you.
The more calls you take, the more your sixth sense becomes developed to read your caller's mind. If you don't pay attention to what you're hearing, if you aren't focused on customer service, you'll miss the patterns.
Do customers rock or do they suck?
You may have seen that excellent blog Customers Rock, but there is another blog called Customers Suck. Employees post their worst, sarcastic customer service stories.
I've had my share of mentally and emotionally challenged callers, but somehow I never acquired the attitude that customers suck. We're all customers sometimes. We all suck sometimes. It's interesting how many customer service agents, when they're off the phones, become as annoying and demanding as their worst customers. I admit I've found that happening to me. I've learned how to get things done on the phone, and sometimes being nice doesn't help. Polite maybe, but not passive.
I approach my job with the firm attitude that customers need help. That's why they call me. Some of them need more help than others. The poor, trembling widows who don't know what to do with their phone bills: it's easy to realize that they need help. But inside, maybe we are all poor trembling widows.
Call centers: it’s not just a job but it’s not your life
Reading some more funny call center stories, I realized that some applicants need to prepare better for their job interview if they want to get hired. What was wrong was not their lack of knowledge of call centers. It was their lack of knowledge about life.
I'm not too old, I'm only middle-aged, but I've noticed that passion helps you to advance. It also helps you to get hired. If you don't have a passion to help people, you probably shouldn't work in a call center, either inbound or outbound. Even telemarketers need to be confident that their product or service is going to benefit the people they're calling. Right?
To prepare for a call center job interview, you need to prepare for life first. You need to know what you are passionate about. If you're not passionate or excited about anything, you need help. I don't know how to help you to get excited.
Let’s brand them, cowboys!
Most call center agents are encouraged (required) to "brand the call" by including the name of the company in the opening and closing of the call. But others are expected to include the company's latest advertising tag line as well, I'm in favor of the first, opposed to the second.
I always want to know who I'm talking to, and some reps don't understand how important that is to customers. It's not rare at all, as carefully as I am, for a customer to tell me about a problem that another company needs to handle. I have to listen carefully to make sure the customer doesn't think they're talking to someone else, along with everything else I listen to. So I have no trouble with mentioning my company name as clearly as possible.
But there's a limit to how much I can say after I say, "Hello." The customer doesn't want much more. The customer wants the time between "How can I help you?" and "I've fixed your problem" to be as brief as possible. When a call center rep tries to insert (or quickly mumble) a corporate slogan into my conversation, it annoys me a little. They get paid to listen to me. Don't tell me, "My goal today is to give you excellent service." Just do it. If they have a corporate slogan, it had better be about two word long.
Are you your company?
For the caller, the agent on the other end of the phone becomes the company. They become the brand. I realized this when I was finding out about the telephone company that my brother-in-law signed up for. (Does he know never to buy from telemarketers - oops, no offense intended? Doesn't he know to ask me first, instead of second?) But anyway, he signed up over the phone and wanted me to tell him whether the company was reputable.
That turned out to be a good question. When you search Google for the official Preferred Long Distance website, you find one dead website and one pretty sick website. What you do find is a blog that says Preferred Long Distance is a SCAM! If I were Preferred Long Distance, I would invest a little time and money into making my website look reputable, even if my company wasn't.
I'm not even saying that Preferred Long Distance is a scam. What was interesting about the blog comments, as one of them pointed out, is that few people had any problem with the company.
They had a problem with the telemarketers who sold them on the company.
Rehearsals for call center disasters
How do you know your disaster plan will work until the disaster actually strikes? Ken Wisnefski, president of VendorSeek, suggests that practice makes perfect. Experience is the best teacher. Conduct “rehearsals” of possible disasters when possible. Make sure your plans are current, viable, and that all elements involved work. You can never be too prepared, and a problem can occur at anytime. Concerns will wan as time goes by without issues arising, so regularly rehearse and test all prevention plans.
Planning for a problem does not make you a pessimist - it makes you a realist. Unfortunate circumstances occur, but being prepared for them ensures that the least amount of negativity will come from it.
