The Contact Center Blog

Get the Best ROI from Your Call Center – Build a Relationship

In order to ensure that you have the largest ROI possible from your contact center, there are two main things that need to be taken into consideration.  First, ensure that the choice to outsource is not a ‘quick-fix’, but rather a long-term investment and commitment.  The cost of start-up fees, the research done on the outsourced companies, and the trust you are placing in the successful company does not fit well with anything other than a long-term commitment.  Even if your need to outsource is project-based, if you plan on going back to the outsourcer in the future you can build a relationship with the company and get more for your money.

Also, it is important to make sure that the company you outsource to is the right fit for you, your company, and your needs.  Does your culture align with theirs?  What about their approach to customer service, training, quality, values and beliefs?

Do not be afraid to ask questions, ask for references, and an official proposal.  Remember that you are interviewing this company for your business – they should have all the answers ready to give you.

 

New report shows 68% of consumers hang up if they have trouble hearing an agent

Last week I was reading my industry news emails and came across a bulletin from Contact Center World, titled "Call Center Frustrations May Cause Consumers to Shop Elsewhere".  While I automatically thought - "well, yeah!" I still clicked through to see what proof this article contained, and am happy I did.

The first line catches the readers eye - 68% of consumers hang up if they have trouble hearing an agent.  This includes a bad connection, poor voice quality, faulty speech recognition software, an agent mumbling on the phone or having an accent that is thick and difficult to understand.

The report, as pointed out in the Contact Center World article, is based on a survey of 3,925 consumers in the United States, U.K, Germany and France, and makes a good point about the investment a call center needs to make in their services.

Call centers are in business to serve people.  So it astounds me when some companies don't properly invest their time and resources in technology and people that work for them.

When you look to hire an outsourced call center, there are many things to consider to ensure proper fit.  However at the forefront of your questions should be an inquiry into the technology used, and people hired to work on your project.  Does the technology meet industry standards?  Are agents accent-neutral and easy to understand?

Customer call you for help, so don't leave them unsatisfied!  An inbound call center is your opportunity to really impress your customer base with exceptional customer service and quality - so take it!

Instead of Shooting the Messenger, Why Not Allow The Messenger to Help You?

I work in the call center industry – I’ve been on the call center floor and have seen the agents hard at work helping customers, I’ve seen the dedicated team it requires to recruit and train employees, and I realize the vital role call centers play in our corporate world.

My company is inbound.  We’re the people you call when your software isn’t working properly and you need technical support, when you want to make a purchase over the phone, when you want to track an order, and when you register for an event.  We’re also taking your emails and are there for you when you want to use live chat to solve your problem. In other words – we’re here to help you in any way possible.

What really bothers me is when I hear people bragging how they yelled at the person on the other line when they call in for help, or boasting that “oh I’m so rude to call centers”.  The old saying goes “don’t shoot the messenger”, and I think it’s important to step back and remember this.  The agents on the other end of the line are there to help you.  So please be kind and considerate the next time you call in for help over the phone, on email or during chat.  Agents just want to do their job and do it well – why not help them out and ALLOW them to provide you with a pleasant experience?  

Promoting Productivity in the Call Center Environment

How do you promote productivity amongst agents?  As much as we’d like to believe that doing the job, doing it well, and knowing that by doing so you’re helping people is enough incentive, the reality is that agents want more.

In a large contact center, it’s easy for individual agents to get lost in the masses – which is why step number one to ensure agent contentment, continued productivity and retention is creating a boutique atmosphere with a limited number of seats.  For example, having 2 locations with less than 200 seats is better than one location with 400+.

Do you hold contests in your center?  What about community activity days?  These simple things will allow agents to interact with others in the contact center, including floor managers, human resources, marketing and business development.  In short, it will help them see the larger picture that this is a business, it is a business of serving people, and that other employees in the company recognize the hard work agents put in to their jobs in order for the rest of the company to thrive.

Another favorite way to promote productivity is to recognize a job well done.  What does your contact center do when it receives a thank-you for a job well done by an agent, from either the customer who called in, or the client who was represented on the call?  Hopefully, you forward that message on to the entire team!  “Hey everyone, look at the amazing job Sue did today and the thanks we received.  Well done Sue – keep up the good work!”  Wouldn’t you like it if every time your boss thought you did something well, he/she emailed the entire company telling them of your achievement?   Thought so. 

These are just a few of my favorite ways of promoting agent productivity.  If you have any others, I’d love to hear them! 

What Makes a Contact Center Agent Unique

Would your hiring requirements be the same for an agent in a sales queue, versus a customer care queue?  No, and it doesn’t make sense to have the same criteria for an agent who will be in a call center answering phones, as one that will be engaging customers in online chat.  

Beyond the obvious requirements of a contact center (chat) agent to have a certain typing speed and superior knowledge of the written word.  There is a need for these agents to have a particular acumen for reading between the lines in a chat conversation in order to determine the tone, demeanor, and current disposition of the person being engaged in the chat.

For example, the ever-prominent ellipsis in online conversations... what does it mean?  As I just used it, the ellipsis is a textual means into a further point or question. But more often than not in an online chat, it means an uncertainty by the person using it.  If a customer, for example says “okay….” It most likely means he/she requires a little more reassurance or guidance in making their purchase or trouble-shooting their problem, and it is the agent’s responsibility to recognize this in order to meet that customer’s needs.

Then there’s endless short-forms used in chat, and while an agent shouldn’t be employing the use of these short forms, he/she must possess a secure knowledge of their meanings, at risk of otherwise being unable to understand the customer’s meaning. IDK why so many ppl need short forms, but FYI many do use them, AKA as acronyms.  B4 you LOL at me for pointing this out, plz visit any chat room for proof and an “OIC” moment.  Did you get that? 

These are just a couple things that new chat agents should be trained for before going live.  What are others that are trained in your contact center?  What do you train your contact center agents for?

Technology To Uninvent

A few weeks ago, MSN.ca published the satirical article 12 bits of technology we would uninvent to outline the technologies they could simply do without.

One of them was Automated Phone Systems and that couldn’t be truer! There is nothing worse than calling a company, hoping to speak to someone as quickly as possible and then having to go through the touch-tone motions of pressing numbers to finally get the answer you want. And, even then, don’t you find yourself just jabbing at the “0” to get to customer service quickly? That’s definitely something we all do.

A human voice can go a long way in making the customer experience easier and contact centers are there for that very reason. Helping a customer get their issue sorted out is their number one priority and they do it all without the help of an automated system!

The 3 Minute Rule

Sometimes the most brilliant, transformative ideas are the simplest. Take, for example, the ‘Three-Minute Rule’ that Anthony Tjan at the Harvard Business Review talks about: engage customers to find out their actions 3 minutes before and 3 minutes after they use your product or service. The three-minute rule is a great way to find out what you can do to improve your customer service, and in the contact center world, this is crucial for growth and sustainability.

Using Live Chat, we can talk to our customers while they are in the midst of product or service usage. We can find out what brought them to a particular site, or what drove them away from it. As Tjan points out,

The three-minute rule reminds us that rearranging the context of a shopping experience to better meet customer patterns can be extremely effective. Customers seek solutions, but it is likely that your offering is only part of one. The three-minute rule is a forcing mechanism to see the bigger picture and adjacent opportunities.

There are opportunities on both sides here - For the customer, a better experience and for your business, a better chance at a sale. For example, if your customer is having trouble finding something on your website and a contact center agent manages to engage them in a live chat, they should ask the customer what made it so hard for them to find that product in those minutes before help arrived. Then, the agent should find out what their next step will be with the desired response being that they will finalize the sale and checkout online. It is the hope that this attention to detail and level of customer care will make the customer realize just how worth it the business is to invest in.

So, taking a moment to chat with customers and finding out how to make their experience a more satisfactory one all-around will benefit everyone in the long run and make for a much more satisfactory experience.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday Sales Up - Are You Supporting These Sales?

The results are in, and online sales from Black Friday and Cyber Monday are up compared to one year ago. 

According to comScore, a company that monitors online consumer behavior, Black Friday experienced an 11% increase in sales to $595 million compared to the same day in 2008.  Meanwhile, Cyber Monday rose 5% from the same day in 2008, reaching $887 million and matching December 9, 2008 for online spend, which is the heaviest in record.

These statistics speak great for a recovering economy, and definitely shed an optimistic light on the upcoming holiday season.  But, before we get ahead of ourselves we need to explore the full scenario and ask ourselves – how are these sales going to be supported into the New  Year?

See, the sale doesn’t end when the credit card is processed online.  After this is complete, retailers must shift focus to the after-sale experience in which the customer uses the product and seeks help setting it up, trouble-shooting, exchanging for an upgrade, or simply making a return.  Each of these can have a further positive or negative impact on the customer’s experience.

Many businesses today rely on repeat customer purchases, and therefore building a good rapport and reputation for beyond-the-sale service amongst customers is critical.  This is where contact center services – done in-house or outsourced – will have a huge benefit to any company.  A 24 hour help line to trouble-shoot on Boxing Day can mean the difference between a happy child, and therefore happy customer, or a disgruntled individual who will go elsewhere for a purchase in the future. 

So, while the numbers stand to be beneficial to retailers right now, will you follow-through and support these sales in 2010?

Managing Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is important. Collecting this information, analyzing and responding where necessary is equally important to ensure the demanding needs of today's consumers are met.

The traditional channels still exist, but add to it the social media networks and we now have a wealth of useful information to help us make strategic decisions. The challenge is making a conscious effort of managing these well. An article in the E-Commerce Times outlines some best practices for companies to  manage customer feedback:

1. Create clear objectives and garner company support. Objectives for the management of customer feedback should be aligned with the company's overall goals.

2. Actively encourage and promote customer feedback. The more feedback companies receive from customers, the more insights they will have about their business.

3. Offer customers multiple feedback channels. People vary greatly in the way they prefer to communicate, so be sure to give your customers several options in communicating with you.

4. Centrally collect, store, manage and analyze customer feedback. By consolidating all feedback and survey data into a single centralized system and using that system across the organization, feedback managers are able to gain valuable insights into what customers need, want and value most, as well as identify important trends and patterns in the data.

5. Use and take action on customer feedback. Many organizations collect customer feedback, but tend to fall short when it comes to actually using and acting on that data..

6. Resolve outstanding customer issues promptly. Nearly all businesses have some customers who complain about something at one point or another. What's most important is how your organization handles those complaints.

7. Close the feedback loop with customers. Inform your customers whenever your company initiates change as a result of their suggestions or feedback, and let them know what changes you made.

8. Create a company culture that is committed to using customer feedback. To maximize awareness, build an employee rewards program around the positive feedback that your company receives from customers.

As Twitter’s dominance continues, how will retailers and contact centers react?

Twitter has emerged as a dominant form of communication online.  It connects with your Facebook status, it can be updated by various different platforms on a cell phone, desktop or through a good-old web browser.

I was reading the paper this morning and was somewhat surprised to see that even the Berlin Wall has made it onto Twitter – quite literally.  The Berlin Twitter Wall went online Tuesday, inviting anyone to share their memories of the wall and its collapse on November 9, 1989.  This struck me as interesting – and really hit home how significantly Twitter and other social media impact our every day lives.

In reality though, this shouldn’t come as a surprise.  We are no longer in a world where we must seek out the news – with RSS feeds, following specific people on Twitter, Facebook Communities and the like – the news is coming to us.

So how are businesses using it?  How has Twitter changed the way we do business?  Businesses have begun to adopt live chat as a means of communicating with customers, however this cuts out the IVR greeting used to welcome  customers when they call for help – the automatic greeting that could,  for example, inform customers of new promotions or current problems with service.  I think that there is great potential for Twitter to pick up the slack here, and work simultaneously with live chat and email customer service.

The question is, have businesses really caught on to this idea yet?  And since it is in the realm of good customer service – how is this going to affect the contact center industry?