All posts tagged Call

'Tis the Season to Be Jolly…or in Queue…

by Mary Cook on November 30, 2011 in Call Centers, CRM, Industry News, Mary Cook, Retail, Varolii News with 2 Comments
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It’s that special time of year again, the 4th quarter. The quarter all of us call center, customer care and experience professionals live (and die) for. While many of us this past Thanksgiving planned out our shopping trips like the covert PMP multi-media-centric individuals we are (ok, perhaps it was just me…), my beloved and brethren customer service professionals were busy working. Whether they were in their retail stores, calculating their cloud storage to support their digital customers, or re-calculating their 15 minute interval call center staffing plans – the madness of the Holiday season has officially begun. So in honor of this most wonderful time of year (where as a call center professional you are guaranteed to catch bronchitis at least once from over working yourself amongst a set of snotty-nosed CSRs – and I say that with love – I buy Kleenex in bulk), I share with you some of my favorite 4th quarter meltdowns.

My Favorite Holiday Calamity

Once upon a time, years and years ago, I started a new job as a small BPO Call Center Director during the last week of August. Team of 50. Two clients. Two supervisors. Five days after I started my new exciting job, the company signed a deal with a direct mail catalog company.  The majority of their revenues were received during the 4th quarter. Within 24 hours of hearing this news I knew I needed to go from 50 to 250 FTEs by the 2nd week of November. To 315 by the 2nd week of December. And not just agents. We needed technology, networking, processes, support staff, allll the Holiday call center trimming. We accomplished our main goals. I hired an entire team who I still keep in contact with (so they can verify this horror story). We had a Workforce Manager, a Trainer, a Quality Assurance Department, more supervisors, agents, and a Staffing Agency on board.

So…What could possibly go wrong?

  1. The direct mail company forgot to mention the hundreds of thousands of faxed in orders they would also need us to support. No back order office support anywhere in the contract or SOW.
  2. And some of these faxed orders were from large Fortune 500 companies sending Christmas gifts to ALL of their hundreds of clients. Good old green screen data entry from back in the day…
  3. The call forecasts we were provided by our client were off. By over 40%. ABOVE. Calls in queue and upset customers were commonplace. I heard busy line signals in my sleep.
  4. The call center was in the basement. No windows. Heater broke – and it was 90 degrees on and off for days. We all wore shorts and baseball hats to survive the heat (in the dead of winter outside, of course) and to hide our perpetual bad hair days.

I worked a record 321 hours in 21 days straight. I got home every night and ate a pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, apologized to my dogs, and cried. And then got up again and did it all over again. One would ask why, but the BEST memory that made this my FAVORITE 4th quarter story was the fact that I had temporary FTEs and supervisors, that despite the fact they knew at the end of January they wouldn’t have a job with me, worked every single day with me. Side by side. If I worked 16 hours, they worked 17. We laughed, cried, and survived together. And it wasn’t just about their overtime pay. It was about our indomitable spirit that we refused to fail the customer – and our customer was our client, their customers, and each other. It was the 4th quarter where all of my leadership education came to fruition despite the never ending holiday call center nightmare packages we were delivered.

Now I could share other stories…like the time 40% of our 800 volume was pointed to the wrong VDN and my Holiday Orders were going to Sears Appliance Repair. Or the year that we predicted that 20% of our order volume would be ecommerce orders and 80% phone orders.  Well, that year 60% of our orders were internet based. THAT was the year I learned to negotiate with my BPO providers.

But instead of sharing more of mine, I would LOVE to hear some of yours. Don’t be shy – all mistakes are merely stepping stones to successes.

Happy Holidays, and may your queues be managed and your network stable…

Finally! Congress considers updating the TCPA

by Brian Moore on September 26, 2011 in Brian Moore, Varolii News with No comments

Are you worried that your company may be at legal risk when you communicate with customers on their mobile phones, even when they should welcome the call or message because it protects them from fraud, missed flights or late payments?

Well, perhaps you should be.

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) requires you to have the prior consent of your customer to autodial, text or deliver recorded messages to their mobile phone. While the FCC (who enforces the TCPA) has declared if a customer provides their mobile number to you when they apply for credit, they are giving their consent for such communications, that's a pretty small needle to thread. So despite the proven benefits of timely and efficient customer contact on the device where they are most likely to be reached, some companies are limiting their communication attempts to the dwindling number of customers with land line phones.

But relief could be on the way. Thanks to the lobbying efforts of broad coalition of industry associations in financial services, air travel, higher education and utilities, a bi-partisan team of congressional representatives have introduced the "Mobile Informational Call Act of 2011". They propose to modernize the TCPA by exempting informational calls to wireless phones from auto-dialer restrictions, clarifying the “prior express consent” requirement, while continuing the prohibition against the use of assistive technologies to call wireless numbers for telemarketing purposes.

However, just because the bill has been introduced, it’s a long way from law. This is where you come in.

Please email your representatives and senators to urge their support of the bill. Tell them efficient communications improves service to your customers while lowering your company's costs, allowing you to grow the business and boost our economy.

That's what I am doing as soon as I post this blog.

Call Centers and Personality Mapping

by Mary Cook on July 14, 2011 in Call Centers, Mary Cook with 2 Comments

personality mapping1 Call Centers and Personality Mapping

One of the keys to success in delivering great customer service in the call center is matching a customer to the right agent. This is why skill based routing was born. In today’s digital world companies realize they can no longer take the approach of treating every customer the same. They want to provide personalized service to each customer as much as possible in an effort to build customer loyalty. There is much to say about the rapport between a customer and an agent. There is that something “special” that occurs during a conversation that goes beyond traditionally trained soft skills, and it has to do with personality types “clicking”. This chemistry is what many organizations are looking to utilize in an attempt to enhance their customer experience.

So how can companies match customers to agents based on skill as well as personality? Not surprisingly, it is all about the data. You need to have access to detailed data on your customers including their personality traits, which can then be used to route calls to the correct agent. Think of it as another layer of customer information that includes details about behaviors, habits, and traits, and details that go beyond just demographical information, preferred method of contact, or last item purchased. These personality details are then used to match a customer with the most suitable agent through enhanced intelligent call routing.

Personality mapping is facilitated by technology that matches your customers to your agents based on personality. It uses information that you understand about your customers and your call center agents and matches people who are more likely to have an optimal result. What an “optimal result” means to your organization should be determined while building your business requirements when you are considering personality routing. For example, an optimal result for a call center could be increased revenues. If this is the case, customers would be routed to agents who are more likely to get sales.

Optimally aligning agent and caller personalities can make a difference in your call center performance. In your call center, you most likely have a group of agents who always do well, another group that is in the middle, and another group that performs below standards. As customer service professionals, we know agents matters in transactions. If a customer calls and speaks to an agent and has a poor contact outcome, if they had arrived at a different agent, the call may have resulted differently.

I do recommend personality mapping be used in call centers with 100 agents or more. As a general rule bigger is better than smaller when executing personality mapping. More agents create more transactions and it is transactions that develop your model faster. If you have a hundred agents dispositioning 10 calls an hour, then you have thousands of transactions in a day and your system will learn faster.

Personality mapping puts the right people together. You can use personality mapping in an effort to increase the buying opportunity, reduce miscommunications, reduce callbacks, and improve levels of customer and agent satisfaction. And nothing pleases me more knowing that when my retired father who hates call center (yes, really…) reaches out to his providers there is the potential that he may get routed to an agent who fears no difficult customer and can speak “cranky” with ease…

How To Avoid Becoming an Overwhelmed Call Center Professional

by Mary Cook on May 30, 2011 in Call Centers, Consumer Svcs, Mary Cook with 2 Comments

Communication Madness

After speaking to my peers the past few months, I have come to the conclusion that we are all suffering from the same affliction– it’s the “OMG! How do I keep UP?” disease.

Many of us call center and customer experience professionals are overwhelmed. Aside from trying to manage day-to-day operations, we are consistently being flooded with new processes and communications that we need to support from Continue reading →

Losing track of your customers?

by Brian Moore on March 31, 2011 in Banks/Finance, Brian Moore with No comments
Endless Labyrinth

Stop throwing their phone numbers away!

When the economy sours, creditors see the impact in a variety of ways. Delinquency and bad debt goes up; average payment size and frequency goes down. And when things get really bad, as they have for the past three years, customers go in to hiding.

Our clients tell us that throughout the recession and the current slow recovery, they have seen significantly higher numbers of “skip” accounts. This does not necessarily mean these customers have skipped town (hence the term), just that they can no longer be reached at the phone numbers they provided on their original credit application. In some cases, their home phone gets disconnected for non-payment; in others they change it to a non-published listing. Given the high unemployment rate, it’s also more likely they have Continue reading →

Keeping Pace with Changing Expectations – The Ingredient for a Positive Customer Experience

by Mary Cook on March 17, 2011 in Call Centers, Consumer Svcs, Mary Cook with No comments
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Providing a positive experience for customers while also managing costs is one of the most vital, yet biggest challenges for any company. However, driving positive customer interactions and reducing costs do not have to be mutually exclusive goals. It just means communicating with consumers the right way at the right time. By creating a customer experience strategy that leverages consumer preferences, multi-channel communications and automation technologies, you can keep costs down while delivering results to your customers – the ultimate ingredient for a better ROI. Continue reading →

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