Help For Help Desks - 2
Last week, I looked at some of the main problems facing CallCentres and their staff. This week, I will examine in more detail what to do to reduce their impact.
Your Call Centre and/or the way your business handles calls is
your reputation and dictates how successful your business is at retaining
customers. Don’t just concentrate on sales. You need to retain to maintain revenue streams. It’s three times more
expensive to get a new customer than to keep one. I wrote earlier about an example of a call
that I made to a company about buying its products and got the impression that
they couldn’t really have cared about my interest.
Whether your Call Centre is owned/operated by your business
or by a third party, here are some key pointers for effective service:
Knowledge: staff must
know your product/service intimately. Don’t let them “on the shop floor” before
ensuring that they have this knowledge.
They should also have thorough customer records of who said/agreed what
to/with whom and when. If they don’t
know the answer, they should know where to find it - fast.
Training: this
should be on the various aspects (positive and negative) of your product or
service, any important terms and conditions of use, and how to use your business’
(or Call Centre’s) systems.
Additionally, staff need training in customer care: for example
questioning, or how to handle upset/angry people. Surprisingly, some of the “common sense”
approaches aren’t known, understood or appreciated. “Telephone Courtesy” courses are more
relevant than ever.
Speech: staff must
sound “natural”. Often, I feel that the
person speaking to me has learnt something by heart, but doesn’t realise that
it sounds unnatural (and worse, long-winded or irrelevant).
Above are the skills on which staff can be trained. However, there are also skills that are more
“innate” – someone described them to me as “either you have them, or you
don’t”. They may be there and need to be
developed. These are:
Empathy: the
ability to understand and share the feelings of another. I have had to deal with complaints that
arose because the staff member concerned couldn’t empathise with the customer’s
problem. With the outsourcing of call
centres overseas, cultural differences may exacerbate this.
Attitude: you can
tell whether the person on the other end of the line feels that they are “here
to help”, or see you as an intrusion into their day. Staff need to be able to take “ownership” of a
problem and see it through to the end.
Finally, you’ll never know how you’re doing unless you can
measure:
Performance: the usual
measures are: number of calls answered; time taken on calls; percentage of
problems resolved. If you’re using an
outsourced service, what measures do they use, and how they actually work? For example, if they say that they spend an
average of three minutes per call, does that mean that they resolve the problem
in three minutes, or hang up after three minutes have passed? If calls are “always answered after three
rings”, does that mean that they switch to an automated system or to a “real
person”? Have qualitative as well as quantitative measures.
Whether you’re looking to set up your own "Helpdesk", Call Centre, or to
outsource it (not always a wise idea), there are consultants who
can help either in the setting up of your own centre, or to select a provider. The key is to know what standards you want to maintain.
Ask questions such as: “When it’s busy, do you put more staff onto
answering calls, or do customers wait longer?”
All standards agreed must form part of the Service Level
Agreement. Check regularly to ensure
they’re being maintained. One of the
best ways of doing this is to use “mystery shoppers” who can report in detail
on the standards that you have set.
If you outsource your Call Centre, remember that providers
will negotiate price and then do as much as possible to make profit, often at
the expense of service. Understand what
you get for the price that you pay. How
long is your contract, how easy to break, and how easy to find another
provider?
I have spent more than half my life working in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With more than 20 years in the world financial services industry running different service, operations and lending businesses, I started my own Performance Management Consultancy and work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email . My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services.
Labels: Customer Care, Productivity, Selling
posted by William Martin @ 16:45
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