I’m glad to say that I’m finally done with school again.  It’s been a long journey to get my degrees (14 years after the first time I stepped into a university), but it has certainly been worth it.  The challenge of balancing work, family and school has helped me in many ways and I believe that my degrees will be of great benefit in the long run.  I’ve graduated with a Bachelors in Business Administration and a Bachelors in Management.  The next step in my educational quest is a Masters, though I haven’t decided whether it’ll be an MBA or a Masters in Management yet.  I’ve got some time to figure that out as I’m taking at least a year off!

To make it more convenient for my readers, I’ve changed the RSS setting from summary to full. Now you can simply use your favorite email or RSS subscriber to read the blog and not have to follow the links in — though you’re welcome to! Comments and feedback is always welcome.

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On Tuesday, I attend “Best Practices in Call Monitoring Seminar series with Dr. Jon Anton“. I’ve been through Dr. Jon Anton’s College of Call Center Excellence and found it quite interesting, though there are some things that I thought they could improve. See here for my writeup on the Certification that the College offers.

I’m looking forward to the Best Practices Seminar series. It could be enlightening. Some of the topics that they’ll be trying to help answer include:

1. Is your team having trouble completing your intended call monitoring due to lack of time or resources?
2. Have you found that moving your top-performing agents to coaches hasn’t made a difference and has even made it harder to meet service levels?
3. Do you wonder if you are monitoring enough calls per agent to truly make coaching them a learning experience?
4. Are your agents less than enthusiastic about who is monitoring their calls?
5. Has your call monitoring program failed to deliver the ROI that you expected?
6. Are you struggling with high agent turnover?

When I’ve finished the seminar, I’ll add a review here as well. If you’re a reader and are attending Tuesday’s seminar in MN, please let me know! I’d love to meet some of you.

The Service Level Group write a blog entry that they called “Don’t Try To Over Optimize Your Call Center Staff“. It has some excellent points … the big one that they make is this:

QAQNA: Tips for Sounding Good on the Phone

His few tidbits come from an actor, vocal coach, casting director and professor … they all make excellent sense.

Posture - Slouches always sound … well, like they’re slouching.

Consonants - It’s difficult to understand someone that is slurring their words. It is also quite irritating to speak to someone who doesn’t seem to care how they’re coming across.

Breathing - Not only do the blog’s tidbits make sense, breathing is needed to survive. I’ve actually heard someone hold their breath while waiting for a customer to calm down. It simply stresses you, as the agent, out.

Smile - I’ve never understood this one, but it does work. Many call centers have mirrors next to their agents’ desks so that they can see themselves while they’re on the phone. Although corny, it does help.

The below came through on a mailing list that I’m on and I felt that it was an interesting take on things.  It’s something that I agree with and, whenever possible, my own endeavors wouldn’t pay on 100% commission either.  There are times when it’s the only option as I have had in a past business I ran (and closed down), however at the same time, I wasn’t expecting people to jump up and down for joy to take the opportunity.  Working on 100% commission, especially to start, is very hard.  It’s not a way to get your sales team focused .. they’ll spend more time worrying about how they’re going to feed their own family than they are on how to best make those sales.

Posted with permission…

Reality #1: You have a great company and a great product but need someone to professionally market it - to help your company make money.

Reality #2: I LOVE marketing, selling, introducing, recruiting and most of the other person-to-person business-related functions companies need.

Reality #3: 99% of the money for your company went into building your company and/or into building your product/services.

Reality #4: Prior to bringing on a Marketing/Salesperson/Recruiter such as me, your funding ran out.
Reality #5: Your business financials make no room for feeding me. If there is no food funding available for me from you, who will it come from - how will I eat? If I can’t or don’t eat, how can I be productive for you, your business, your products and services?

Because your asking me to work on commission is tantamount to your saying to me, “Vincent, ignore your hunger and help me build my business, ok? In 3 or 6 or 12 months, I promise to feed you more food than you can ever eat. Indeed, at that time, you’ll never run out of food, again.?”

Yet, 90 days, 120 days, 365 days is a long time for a person to go without food. Thus, the greater future food supply may mean nothing - unless the dreaming salesperson is fed *something* along the way.

This is not to be mean-spirited about your great dream, your great company, service or cause but, rather, to help us focus on bringing my stomach into your dreams, into the equation(for) your success, into addressing the mutual realities we both face.

I love your product but, food tastes good, too. Thus, I await your answer to Reality #5 but, until there’s an answer which mutually shares in the putting of food on my table, I can’t, I don’t, I won’t work for 100% commission.

–
Vincent Wright
MyVirtualPowerForum.com (8,900 members)

From the blog –Service Untitled » Make a quick attempt. - customer service and customer service experience blog

“If you have the customer’s phone number (from a voicemail or a callback
request), put it into your system and see if anything comes up. If you
have their email address, look it up. If you have their name, see what
you can find.”

Phenominal.

“Once you’ve found the customer’s account, see if there is anything
obviously wrong with it that could be causing a problem. Check to see
who they are. When did they last call? The goal is just to glance at
the screen and get a basic idea of who this customer is and what their
story is about.”

Perfect.

If you’re going to call the customer back anyway, take the time to know who they are. This is very important and really quite simple.

As a story of a situation where this has not happened, I have a company that delivers water to my house. The only reason I am still with them is because their water is some of the only water that I can actually drink (I hate water… but it’s good for you!).

They are supposed to deliver to our house every 2 weeks, take the empty 5-gallon jugs of water and replace them with new ones. It doesn’t sound too hard to me. The problem is that since the beginning of the year, they haven’t hit one delivery date. I call up the next day and ask for a new delivery. About 1/2 the time, I get water the next day. The other 1/2, I have to call up a SECOND time. And so forth — sometimes it takes over a week to get the water that should have been there on a pre-scheduled, every 2 week basis.

So! Lately, I’ve gotten completely irritated with it and have been escalating to their route representative. I did that 3 months ago. I talked to him twice, but it didn’t get resolved. So I escalated to their Central Texas area manager a month ago. The way this works is that the contact center sends my information over to him by email and then he calls. When he called me, he didn’t know what I was calling about.

He should have asked for information if the call center didn’t provide it. He should have known exactly how many times I’d called up before, exactly what it was I was calling about, and what he was going to do about it.

To make things worse, they missed my delivery three weeks ago again. So I called up once more and escalated to him a second time. He called back — and left a single message saying “I guarantee you’ll have water tomorrow, thank you.” Come on!? That’s the best you can do after you’ve already talked to me? Ridiculous. But fine. I’ll accept that your service sucks, your water’s good.

Well, that was the case until this Monday. When, for yet another time, they missed my delivery. 2 delivers, 2 escalations.. don’t you think they’d get it right? Now, I’ve escalating to the Vice President level and am waiting for a call back. I wonder if he’ll call and have no idea who I am, why I’m calling. Granted, he was supposed to call yesterday — and didn’t. I called their call center again and they’ve said I’ll get a call today. If not, I guess I’ll go talk to their area President.

Well, I rambled some, but the idea is still the same. If you have a customer with a problem and you’re calling him back, at least know why they called and why you’re calling them back — if not more than that. More than that, as Service Untitled said, would be a great experience.

“I believe that an over reliance on metrics plague the call center industry at the expense of the customer experience.” (Metrics-Schmetrics « rich mclafferty’s customer experience weblog)

Rich has an interesting point. Although I only partially agree, the fact is that metrics alone is not the way to measure your call center. Measure your center by understanding what it is your customers are looking for and then focusing on those aspects. As he said, a customer that doesn’t get a resolution when the phone is picked up because the agent is rushing through is a customer that will be extremely dissatisfied. The point of the call isn’t to get the customer’s question rushed through … it is to get the customer’s question answered. If it’s not, then reconsider why you’ve got a call center.

Customer satisfaction. Isn’t that why you’re answering the call? Look at the reasons — the REAL reasons.

Possible Reasons

1. My product doesn’t work. I need help. — What is this really? It is an unsatisfied customer who, if resolved, will be satisfied.
2. My bills wrong and I want it fixed. — Again, what’s the customer looking for? They’re currently not happy. They want to figure out what it should be and hope to walk away satisfied.
3. I can’t find X. Where do I buy Y? — Again! Satisfying the customer is the goal behind the reason for the call. The customer can’t find something. Help them find it. They wan to buy something. Help them buy it by telling them where that can be done.

I’m sure there’s reasons that customer’s call up because they’re not looking for satisfaction, but I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Because of this, think about why your call center is currently running and focus on the necessary aspects of managing it.