Virtual Observations # 1

Virtual Observations - a newsletter featuring call center tips, strategies, and news, brought to you by Coordinated Systems, Inc.

Best Practices - Customer Service
Have your employees listen to themselves on recorded call playbacks. Often, they'll be amazed at what they sound like. "I said whaaaat?"

Call Center Knowledge Share
In this section, we will share tips and techniques used by successful call center managers. This month we look at "Calibration" techniques:
From http://www.answers.com - "Calibration" refers to the adjustment of the correct value of a reading by comparison to a standard. To achieve better calibration among call center agent supervisors, you first need to identify who should be participating in your calibration program. Define all of the critical evaluation components. Calculate your standard deviation and set realistic deviation goals. One basic technique involves having multiple supervisors grade the same recorded sets of calls. Seeing the variation in scoring may lead you to tweak the weight of certain scoring criteria. Watching this over multiple calls will lead you to view some trends. Doing this again in several months will lead you to see how your training programs have affected scoring. You can then adjust the scoring methodology accordingly. You can also compare your scoring criteria with that of an identical industry call center, and share knowledge to make mutual performance gains. If you have any detailed calibration techniques that you would like to share, please submit them here for future publication on our blog.

Tips for Improving customer service performance
Schedule a benchmarking session with other call centers. Share tips, experiences and metrics. Implement any process changes that may be valuable. Track the change in performance. Share the improvements with your partner call center. You can also make a list of performance deficiencies and see if the other call center has addressed them. If not, maybe the two organizations can collaborate on solutions for common problems.

Call issues that occur and the resolutions that solve them
Every call center team desires "first call resolution" - that's a given. First call resolution, as it is defined, means addressing the customer's need during the first call and eliminating the need for a second call. Don't just give the customers an answer that will get them off the phone - try and solve their issues so that they remain a loyal customer - or even better, an evangelist - someone willing to shout the benefits of working with your company - to everyone they know.

Common Acronyms:
ACD: Automatic Call Distribution.
From http://www.wikipedia.com; ACD distributes incoming calls to a specific group of terminals that agents use. It is often part of a computer telephony integration system. ACD systems are quite often found in companies who handle a lot of incoming phone calls and where the caller has no specific need to talk to a certain person, but wants to talk to a person who is able to talk to him at the earliest opportunity. Routing incoming calls is the task of the ACD system. The system consists of hardware for the terminals and switches, phonelines, and software for the routing strategy. The routing strategy is a rule based set of instructions that tells the ACD how calls are handled inside the system. Most of the time this will be a set that determines the best available employee for a certain incoming call. To help make this match, extra variables are taken into account, most often to find out the reason why the customer is calling. Sometimes the caller's caller ID or ANI is used, more often a simple IVR is used to just ask for the reason. ACD servers can cost anywhere between a few thousand dollars to close to the millions of dollars for a very large call center handling thousands of calls per day.