Archive for September, 2007
The cost of disaster preparation
They say that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And it's probably cheaper too, according to Ken Wisnefski, president of VendorSeek. A realistic prevention plan will involve calculating the numbers needed to put the procedure into effect. Some areas may be more important or considered integral to the life of the business. Calculate the costs for each measure of prevention for all areas and decide if your budget can realistically meet the demands. There are instances where prevention costs more than recovery, but ideally, prevention is more sought after.
Money is always a factor for any business. Rank the risks, options, and preventive measures in order of importance.
Just for example: what could go wrong in your call center
Ken Wisnefski, president of VendorSeek, gives some examples of disasters that could befall your call center and how to prepare for them. You can also catch each tip by subscribing to our feed.
To specifically label one “problem,” let us think about an electrical disaster. Lightning is one of the most odious threats to electrical equipment, and it can enter through a number of thoroughfares. Do you know of all potential pathways? Make sure a qualified electrician educates on your systems, ensures all equipment is properly connected to the electrical feed and backup systems, and optimal levels of lightning protection is in place and grounded thoroughly.
Let us discuss another possible situation. Many centers handle customer interaction via the Web. In the event that your site is down, is your center ready to handle calls coming in as an alternative? Is your center prepared to accommodate an influx in calls from customers who regularly use other methods of contacting your business? If not, the customers’ other alternative may involve contacting your competitor.
Possible disaster scenarios for your business
What could go wrong in your call center? Power outage? Data failure? Attack by irate customers? It's best to ask the question now, according to Ken Wisnefski, president of VendorSeek.
The ideal situation would be to avoid a problem rather than addressing it after the fact. This involves thinking of all possible scenarios and having all angles covered. Much like a “troubleshooter” booklet, plans of prevention must be mapped out in detail depending on what types of problems may arise.
Most “disasters” will be caused by extreme weather situations, power outages, and electrical surges. Think of all possible scenarios in relation to the physical facility, data systems, center systems and applications, communication networks, customer access points, etc.
Preparing your call center for possible disaster
When you consider the worst, how do you plan for it? Ken Wisnefski, president of VendorSeek, gives sound advice for call center emergency preparation.Your recovery team should be assembled before you need them. Include representatives from all areas of your business. The members should range from the most obvious – IT workers and managers - to other less obvious, but integral members – people in marketing, purchasing, legal, human resources, outsourced service providers, and any others pertinent to call volume.
Know your call systems and their limitations. Think about adding supplementary backup or duplicate systems to curtail the effects of a problem.
Poor customer service
In a recent call to a company where I am a client, I was forced to spend a lot of time on the phone to correct several errors on their part. Their errors had not only cost me time and money, but also a great deal of aggravation (This was the 8th call). When I say forced, I mean that in her effort to get me off the phone quickly, the rep actually made the call much longer than it needed to be.
What makes the interaction a worthy topic of discussion is the fact that as I worked to clear up all the issues the company had created for me; the rep told me that she could no longer help me. It wasn’t that her knowledge had run out or that my line of questioning was beyond her level of training. She simply meant that she could no longer stay on the phone with me because the queue was too busy. Of course, I requested to speak with a supervisor to make sure the rep’s approach was not an accepted policy….I was wrong.It’s amazing to me that after spending millions of dollars a year to gain and retain customers, a company will allow their call center to be inconvenienced by calls from customers.
How a call center manager can save the day
Ken Wisnefski, president of VendorSeek, asks, "Is your call center prepared for the worst?"
We spend a lot of time optimizing our businesses, devising plans to make them perform superbly, but not many of us play the pessimist. Recovering from catastrophe needs to be a top priority too.
Issues need to be addressed other than those relating to data processing and IT issues. A recovery plan needs to be put in place for partial, extreme, and complete system failures.
Distributing calls by dialect: is this a bad idea?
Many voice response units (VRUs), when I call a call center, answer the phone with, "Thank you for calling Immensely Big, Incorporated. For English, press 1. Para continuar en español, oprime numero dos [To continue in Spanish, press 2]."
My first call center had a similar recording. Actually, it said, "For residential service, press 1. For business service, press 2." But that part didn't always work. We had to manually transfer business customers.
We had a separate ACD (automatic call distributor) for Spanish calls. Many of our agents had Mexican ancestry, while many of our customers had Cuban ancestry, and our Spanish-speaking agents used to talk about the difference between those two dialects.
Long-distance call center management
In today’s post, Greg Brashier of Virtual PBX explains how a hosted PBX’s browser based management suite can be used to monitor employees' activities - even if they are thousands of miles away.As part of its browser-based management suite, Virtual PBX allows managers to see exactly what is happening from any computer with internet access. Whether employees are located in the same facility as the manager or telecommute from home offices, management can monitor activity levels and ensure that calls are being taken in an efficient manner.
Managers can see when agents are logged in and out of queues, when they logged in, if they are on a call, how long it has been since they have received a call, which have logged out or marked their extension as unavailable and how many employees are actively answering calls for each queue.
Microwave popcorn lung disease: could it strike call center agents?
We have just been informed that the main food source for call center workers can lead to buttered popcorn lung disease or whatever they call it. They won't call not black lung disease - that occupational hazard is already taken. This threat comes courtesy of Con-Agra, the massive US food producer who has also been the subject of ground beef recalls.I can't count the times that someone (usually Lady Margarita) has left a bag of buttery microwave popcorn next to my desk. This has always happened without my permission. I don't like microwave popcorn. Anything that resembles a packing material should not be eaten by humans. Strangely though, I find actual biodegradable grain-based "packing peanuts" rather tasty - like toasted rice cakes.
Sending the toughest calls to the best virtual agents
In today’s blog post, Greg Brashier of Virtual PBX details some of the benefits of virtual ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) and how it can improve business.
Virtual PBX’s ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) skills-based call routing feature allows administrators to rank employees in ACD queues by how skilled they are or by the priority the employees should have in answering calls. There are several important ways this can be used to improve business operation. Here are two:
