Many call centers fail to help agents understand the overall functioning of a call center and this is a mistake. Unless agents understand the “big picture” of call center operations, they don’t really have a context in which to be fully productive and effective at their jobs.  At a minimum, a basic training program should include a look at the operational functions that support their daily call handling.

Help them understand the technologies at work in the center so they know what the customer has encountered and what technologies support them in the handling of the call. Educate them on the forecasting and scheduling process that created their work schedule and why it’s so important the schedule is followed.  Show them how the call center measures  overall performance and how that translates into individual performance you’ll want to see  from them.

It’s also important for agents to see their call center role as something more than a dead-end job or one that is purely an entry-level position that they should be figuring out how to exit as soon as possible.  Giving them an industry overview may help them see that this call center job can turn into a lifelong profession for some of them.

Join us for The World of Call Centers: An Operational Overview for an overall introduction to call centers. You may want your staff to join us on a regular basis for this training, or you may wish to license our training content for delivery by your own trainers on an ongoing basis. To learn more about The World of Call Centers and how to educate your frontline staff on these important concepts, join us for an online class or call us at 615-812-8400 for more information.

We look forward to seeing you back in class in 2012!

Join us for our Fall 2011 classes in one of four areas:

Frontline Fundamentals  (9 classes beginning Sept 1)

Call Center Supervision (11 classes beginning Sept 1)

Workforce Management (11 classes beginning Sept 2)

Quality Assurance (9 classes beginning Sept 2)

Join us for any web seminar and bring an unlimited number of students to class around a single web/audio connection.  You’ll participate with students from other call center organizations and will benefit from both our expert faculty as well as interaction with other students.  And just in case someone misses a class or wants to go back and review important concepts, you’ll have a license for e-learning access to that class until the end of 2011.   It’s a great way to make sure the learning needs of all your students are covered.

You can order any class from our web site and we’ll activate your e-learning license automatically.  It’s just that easy! If you have any questions, give us a call at 615-812-8400.

We look forward to seeing you in class this fall!

1. The center needs to respond to 80% of calls within 20 seconds.
2. Overtime is expensive and should be avoided.
3. Additional pay will motivate staff to work undesirable schedules.

This kind of call center logic may be costing you money as well as preventing you from creating the most adaptable, effective staffing plan.

On Thursday, August 18,  workforce experts at The Call Center School and Core Practice will present a thought-provoking worksop to review new ways to think about these important staffing decisions.  Join us to review speed of answer goals and how to quantify the financial impact of these service decisions. See how overtime might be the cheapest way to get the staff coverage you need.  And finally, hear about shift and schedule designs that not only provide a more effective match between workforce and workload, but make staff happier too.

If you are responsible for staff planning and budgeting for 2012, you can’t afford to miss this session.

Who are the speakers?

The one-hour workshop will be lead by two industry thought leaders, Penny Reynolds from The Call Center School and John Freshe from Core Practice.  Penny, author of Call Center Staffing – The Complete, Practical Guide to Workforce Management,  is a popular speaker at industry conferences and is known for her common-sense approach to workforce planning issues.  John is the Chief Strategist at Core Practice, a company called upon for strategic labor consulting by some of the best known manufacturing organizations as well as the call centers that support them.

Who should attend?

• Call center executive team
• Workforce planners
• Anyone responsible for call center budget and financial decisions

Join us on Thursday, August 18 at 1pm EDT for this important discussion. Click Here to learn more about the program and how you can register for the Free Web Seminar.

One reason for selling reluctance may be that the agent doesn’t want to be seen as “pushy” or too aggressive. Common comments here are, ‘If the customer had wanted the product, he would have asked for it” or “I don’t want to push a product the customer may not want or need.”  It’s common to think that the customer will know exactly what he wants and that there’s no need to offer anything additional.

However, if we approach this scenario with a true customer service focus, there’s the real possibility that we’re doing the customers a dis-service by not offering them a product that fits their needs. They may not know that an accompanying product is available and would appreciate being told about it. Or they may be aware of it, but forget to place the order. Once again, bringing the product to their attention could be viewed as a welcome offer of service and not a pushy sales attempt.

The key here is to listen carefully to what the customer is saying and to ask question to best define customer needs.  If that has been done, then the best-fitting product up-sell or cross-sell can be offered as a genuine extension of service and not just an attempt to sell more products.  The customer will probably not be turned off at all by the offer if it is viewed as an offer specific to their needs, and chances are better than average that the up-sell will be successful.

Learn more about overcoming sales fear and reluctance with our seminar,  Selling Through Service: Increasing Revenues with Customer-Focused Selling .  Visit our web site to learn more about this class and our entire Frontline Fundamentals and Telephone selling programs.

The following outlines some simple tips for more personalized emails:

1. Greet the customer by name, just as you would on a phone call.  Introduce yourself and your role in the process if applicable.  You will also want to use an opening that sets the tone for the email (showing empathy for a customer problem, excitement over a new purchase, etc.)

2. Restate the customer’s problem or request using some of their words.  Even though your response is perhaps a “cut and paste” response from your email templates, editing in a few words or phrases that the customer has used will show you’re giving it individual care and attention.

3. Write in active, not passive voice and talk directly to the customer using “you” statements. Rather than saying “The membership card provides access to many airport clubs,” you might say “You can use the card for access to many airport clubs.”

Just a few wording changes can make a big difference in how the reader perceives your email message. To learn more about how to give your messages a more personalized touch, as well as how to identify the most common writing, grammar, and punctuation problems, join us for Email Essentials for Frontline Staff, a web seminar devoted to fine-tuning written communications skills.

Penny Reynolds from The Call Center School will be delivering the keynote address called Five Essential Ingredients for Quality Monitoring and Speech Analytics Success.   While much of the conference will focus on the inticacies of quality monitoring and speech analytics, this session will outline what needs to happen before you ever listen to or analyze that first call. In this keynote address, you will learn what you can do to ensure your quality program is a success from the very beginning.

In this keynote session you will hear about what you must have in place in terms of quality standards and how those standards will dictate the design of your quality forms and what you’ll look for in the analytics process. Learn what to do early in agent training to set the stage for future monitoring and coaching. See what other centers have done to get staff buy-in to the quality process and what you can do to create a reinforcement program that ensures your monitoring and analytics program generates incremental improvement with every single call.

In addition to this session, Penny will also be speaking about Email Quality Monitoring.  In this workshop, you’ll hear about how to take the same principles used in voice call monitoring and apply to written communications.  Learn what should be included in an email monitoring policy and what to look for in a well-written email, as well as what to look for as the most common writing mistakes.

In addition to these sessions from The Call Center School, you’ll find another dozen seminars.  Can’t make a date or time for one you really want to see? No problem – all the sessions will be recorded and available for access following the Virtual Conference June 8 – 10.

Be sure to join us online June 8-10.  To register or to see the detailed agenda, simply Click Here.  See you in class!

Whether it’s over the telephone, via an email, or even in person, when giving someone instructions, we want to sound like helpful assistants rather than bossy parents dictating what to do next.  A simple change of a word or two can go a long way into making us sound friendly and helpful rather than pushy or bossy.

Let’s take the phrase “You must send in the signed application so we can process your order.”  By telling someone they “must” or “have to” send in the application, it automatically sounds like something they may not want to do.  By simply changing our words to “You’ll want to send us the signed application so we can process the order right away” or “Be sure and send in the signed application,” you’ve made it sound much less like a chore to do so.

Replacing “have to” or “must” or “should” (the bossy words) with other phrases like these will make you sound more friendly and helpful:

You’ll want to…

Be sure to…

Simply…

The best choice would be to…

A few simple wording changes can change the perception of the interaction from neutral or negative to a positive, helpful one.

If you’d like to learn more about choosing the best words and phrases to maximize customer interactions, join us for our series of Frontline Fundamentals training courses, First Class Phone Manners, Power Phrasing, and Tyrant Turnaround.  Attend just one, or join us for all three programs at a special 3-pack price.   We can also bring these programs to your call center as on-site classroom training or you can license the programs as a train-the-trainer corporate license for ongoing delivery to your call center staff.  Call us at 615-812-8400 to learn more.

Scheduling to a volatile call demand is challenging and call centers struggle to get the “just right” match of schedules to fit in order to minimize understaffing and overstaffing. This problem is multiplied when a call center is stuck with many staff working traditional full-time 8-hour per day schedules. There are just not a lot of ways to be creative with five 8-hour days.

However, call centers that have re-thought the make-up of a 40-hour week find themselves with a whole new world of schedule possibilities.  For example, since many centers have a “slant” demand with many more calls on Monday, followed by the next highest day on Tuesday, and so on through the week with Friday being the slowest day, it would only make sense to have the schedules “slant” as well. Some centers adjust schedules so that there are more staff hours scheduled on Mondays and fewest on Fridays. This schedule might consist of some people working 10 hours on Monday, 9 on Tuesday, 8 on Wednesday, 7 on Thursday, and 6 on Friday.  This schedule may fit the schedule curve much better, and might actually be a schedule someone would prefer to work in order to get in some shorter days on some days of week, even if it means working longer on others.

The key is to look at your percentages of call volume by week and then think about creative ways you can move some hours around just for a few people to give your center a better fit of workforce to workload.  For more scheduling ideas, join us for Scheduling Principles and Problems and hear about creative solutions to your toughest scheduling problems.

When looking at the trade-offs between Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings versus premise-based options, you’ll want to perform a financial analysis that includes the time value of money when comparing the two financial options.  Your calculation should include Net Present Value as part of the formula to look not just at initial outlay of the capital investment, but also to consider the true “value” of that money compared to a “pay as you go” type of service. Without it in the calculation, you will not get a valid financial comparison of the two alternatives.

To learn more about incorporating NPV into a comparison of traditional purchase versus subscription-based fees (as well as how to calculate payback period and return on investment), join us for Dollars and Sense, a seminar in our Operations and Business Management curriculum, available as either a web seminar or as a self-paced e-learning program.