You wouldn’t wittingly imperil your brand or corporate reputation or image, would you? Your board of directors wouldn’t consciously devalue your share price. Your marketing and sales people wouldn’t intentionally drive clients into the arms of your competitors, would they? But maybe you’re all doing just that.
The scenario: The company or organization’s been around for a long time. It’s grown to the point where managing the number of customers and service requests is a real challenge. Your switchboard operators are no longer coping. You’re the key decision-maker on how to resolve the problem and move the company into a new dispensation. An organization presents to you.
The suggestion is that they’ll ‘take the calls off your hands’. Every call will be answered in a maximum of seven rings. They already handle calls for many other companies in your league and this is the way of the future. Their intelligent, motivated, dedicated staff will treat your business like their own. So you fall for it and outsource your hard-won corporate and brand reputation to a call centre. Poor you!
Call centre quality in South Africa has become like military intelligence. An oxymoron of note. Although the RSA has been identified as a call centre growth market, the industry generally delivers unacceptable dis-service via incompetent, uncaring, ill-educated and socially unsophisticated people. (So don't get excited at the picture with this posting!) Once upon a time, if you were a real loser, you left school and joined a bank. Today, call centres are the magnet for directionless and unthinking people. This needs to change.
Most call centre staff earn peanuts. They wouldn’t understand what you meant if you offered to send them on a conflict-resolution training program. They don’t read, they can’t think creatively or independently enough to respond to an ‘off-script’ enquiry or situation. Judging by the background cacophony of chatter that invades the average call, the ergonomics under which these people work are equally appalling. I’ve actually heard social or romantic dates being organised in the background, so it’s questionable whether they’re actually listening to you with any degree of attentiveness at all. This is despite the call being recorded ‘for your protection’. Other than with direct insurance providers, I seriously doubt whether those calls are indeed recorded, and if the prevailing administrative chaos in call centres is anything to go by, I doubt whether anyone would subsequently be able to track or trace a specific verbal undertaking or agreement.
The very call centre agent dealing with your car problem can be the same person taking a call a moment later about a medical emergency or a variety of other topics. It just depends on which line rings as to how they answer.
The only way you can run a call centre that will do genuine justice to your business is by in-sourcing it, and rigorously supervising it. With union and agent permission you have to be able to ‘eavesdrop’ on calls – live. You need a regular review process where a sample of calls over a period are played back and you discuss with the person concerned how they might more effectively handle such a call in the future. The call centre staff should be seen as vital cogs in the marketing machine of your operation. So they should have both in-house and off-site coaching and development.
Encourage agents to read. Start a development program or book club, where one person reads a book and chats about or presents a synopsis of that book to the others. That way, everyone’s ‘reading’ several books a month. Get them on creativity enhancement processes. Send an individual showing potential, on a listening and empathy skills awareness course and ask them to come back and share what they learned. That does two things – it grows the individual and it also makes sure they pay attention on the course because they’re going to have to present to and discuss their new-found knowledge with colleagues.
Ensure that they have a life outside of their call centre job. Do what many businesses do today. Have a ‘get a life’ program. So you pay something towards their gym, their horse-riding, their computer or flower arranging course, or whatever it is that’s going to grow them outside of working hours.
When you invest in people at this level, you’ll create loyalty and commitment which will lead to them delivering better than average service to customers. My mantra: The caller’s voice is the sound of their salary cheque speaking. Help them recognise from a voice stress or irritation pattern when that call needs to be escalated or handed over to someone else.
If you wonder why your research is showing a fall-off in customer satisfaction, perhaps look no further than your call centre if you have one. And let the corporate healing start there!
Posted by Clive Simpkins http://www.imbizo.com
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