June 20, 2014 - Relying on a third party call center services provider to handle that most valuable of business interactions – talking, emailing and chatting with customers – requires a leap of faith that many customer services, sales, marketing and operations managers find difficult to make.
June 2, 2014 – When it comes to call center outsourced services companies, their product is their people. The kind of inbound call center customer services representatives you, the client, want and need depends on your product and your markets.
May 27, 2014 - At outsourced call center services companies, maximizing revenue through effective upselling and cross-selling techniques is a baseline skill that should be continually refined and improved.
May 23, 2014 - The foundation of successful call center services programs is agent training. The outsourced call center provider must be highly skilled at preparing customer service representatives for the client’s unique product or service offering, order processing procedures and customer support requirements.
May 22, 2014
For companies outsourcing their call center services function to a third-party vendor, it’s essential to have an open window into the program and service quality being delivered.
Outbound call center services providers spend their days “pounding the phones” and “dialing for dollars.” It’s not easy to deliver great results. It takes hard work, resilience and talent. It also requires the right perspective.
This means viewing appointment setting not so much as cold calling or even, generally speaking, as sales. It means viewing it as table setting.
What’s the significance? Because too many cold callers at outbound call center services organizations mistakenly take their initial phone call too far down the sales cycle. The goal of the first phone call isn’t to close the deal; it’s merely to start a process that will, we hope, result in a close.
With this perspective in mind, the cold caller takes the pressure off him or herself, it reduces the element of desperation that is a sales killer, it enables the first phone call to proceed at something approximating normal human interaction – that is, within a social environment where the sale process is most likely to thrive.
We’re not talking here about selling kitchen floor mops, pet odor eliminators or windshield ice scrapers. This applies to the sale of more complex products and services, such as a software application or a business service, that requires a more involved sales cycle.
Looked at this way, the appointment setting representative can focus merely on setting an appointment, not selling a product. The initial pitch can be a blend of extolling the benefits of the product along with a low-key pitch that asks for 15 minutes of the prospect’s time.
Taking a low-key approach also reduces the intrusiveness of the call. The caller can sound and behave in a normal way, as in….
“Hi, my name is Bob. I’m sorry to interrupt your day but I’m hoping you have 30 seconds you can share with me.”
An approach like this, which conveys respect for the prospect’s time, is a good way to establish rapport, and many prospects are willing to risk the 30 seconds.
The next statement is critical for moving the phone call along the right path:
“I believe you manage widget manufacturing at your company, is that the case? Then I’d like to see if you have time for a 10-minute call next week to look at a new manufacturing software technology that saves companies between 25 and 40 percent on their production costs. Is that something you might be interested in?”
Again, this is a relatively soft approach and one that shows understanding and insight into the prospect’s professional challenges and business need.
If the initial statement receives a positive response, the next step is to ask for a convenient time to schedule the appointment the following week. After that has been completed, ask one, at most two, questions regarding the issues (or “pain points”) that the prospect experiences.
It’s important to not carry on the conversation too long because you don’t want to jeopardize the sales appointment that has been scheduled and because you don’t want to break your initial promise to respect the prospect’s time. That’s known as “selling after the sell,” and the sales goal of the first call has already been accomplished: Getting the sales appointment.
Email response and live chat produced by call center services providers is a valuable capability because customers have a variety of customer service media preferences. "Go where the customer is" is an old marketing maxim. But email and chat is a different breed of customer service from conventional telephone based services. It’s important to understand that difference.
Sure, the information imparted is the same. But there are many significant differences between the effective delivery of written and verbal customer support.
Here’s the main difference: When call center services representatives talk with a customer they get multiple “do-overs.” They can amplify, reiterate, clarify and expand upon their answer. “I hope I’m making myself clear, please feel free to ask me any questions, let me go through this again step by step.”
When talking to a customer, a good call center services representative can sense customer confusion or lack of understanding and will review and repeat customer service input until the customer has grasped the feedback.
But with written communications – particularly email – you get one opportunity to make yourself clear and to comprehensively provide information the customer needs. It is common in the call center services business to answer customer email questions in batch mode, often during non-business hours, so there is no opportunity to ask the customer for clarification on their question or for the representatives to sense whether they are being understood.
Another challenge with written communications: grammatical and spelling errors permanently remain on the page or the computer screen for all the world to see, and they leave an indelible, bad impression.
Bottom line: You have to get it right the first time. This takes hard work, review and editing. As the saying goes, “writing is re-writing.”
Or, to quote Maya Angelou, “Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it's right, it's easy. It's the other way round, too. If it's slovenly written, then it's hard to read. It doesn't give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.”
So extra measures and training need to be put in place in order for the customer service call center to produce quality emails and chat sessions, and it starts with agent selection. Obviously, agents handling email response and live chat programs must have proven written communication skills. They should be tested on their writing – for both quality and for speed – and only those meeting the highest standards should be put in the role of call center email response and live chat.
In addition, call center services managers must take the time to review all written communications before it goes to the customer until the representative has proven him or herself a consistent producer of quality written communications.
Another important component, one that aids both quality and productivity, is the continual building of an email response template library. This should be organized by subject matter and written in such a way that call center services agents can re-use an existing answer with minimal changes. A comprehensive template library will ensure rapid and high quality response to customers’ needs.
Outsourced call center services providers should provide their clients, via blind copying, with the ability to see all email being sent on their behalf. In turn, agents and program supervisors should be aware that the client reviews their emails. This reassures clients that quality written communications is taking place and it motivates call center staff to write well.
Call center services program supervisors should collect both good and sub-par customer service emails and chat transcripts and hold regular training sessions with agents to review examples of good and bad quality work. Agents who produce lower-quality communications should be given remedial training.
Mark Fichera, CEO
OnBrand24
Call Center Services
Beverly, Massachusetts
Savannah, Georgia
Anger happens. But it’s what we in the call center do in response to customer anger that matters. Handled incorrectly, the anger only worsens and the customer may be lost forever. Handled right, customer loyalty can be preserved and strengthened.
A product delivery is late, a refund is not credited to a credit card, a product is defective, an online business service malfunctions, a customer is treated rudely. The customer grabs the telephone and, in the mindset of one who has been victimized and mistreated, calls customer service.
Most angry customers realize, rationally, that the person at the other end of the telephone is not responsible for the problem. But they also may think that if they create a big enough stir that word will get to those who are responsible. Either way, there definitely is a right way and wrong way for the call center customer service representative to handle the situation.
The first thing the call center services provider should do with an angry customer happens long before the angry phone call happens. It starts with training, including both classroom instruction and role playing. Call center customer support workers need to embrace the concept that the angry customer is not making a personal attack on them. They need to distance themselves from the anger. To do this, the customer service representative must understand the psychology of the angry customer and understanding how to defuse the anger.
This begins with the basic, empathetic act of listening. The customer service specialist should be trained to allow the angry customer to blow off steam, to make his or her case without interruption. Once that’s completed, the first words from the customer service agent’s should be, “I’m sorry to hear about this and I understand how frustrated you must be. I’m going to do everything I can to fix this problem for you.” Or words to that effect.
The next thing: Repeat back to the customer what s/he just said (“So let me state my understanding of the problem here…”). This proves to the customer that the customer service representative has done a good job of listening and truly understands the problem at hand. It also is a very effective way to reduce the customer’s level of anger. It is only after the customer says that the problem is correctly understood that the agent should begin to take action to remedy the situation.
Then comes problem resolution. Smart companies continually build knowledge and expertise about the problems their customers tend to run into – and put in place solutions to those problems. If it’s a technical issue, they train call center customer service personnel to recognize the problem and, if possible, help the customer fix it. If fixing the problem requires greater technical expertise, the call center customer service representative is trained to escalate the call to the technical service desk, which has protocols in place to fix the customer’s problem efficiently. This, in turn, allows the representative to tell the customer that the problem can be expected to be resolved within a given number of days or hours.
If the customer complaint has to do with product delivery then the smart company gives call center agents – both in-house and outsourced – access to live shipping information. This enables the agent to give fresh updates on the status of their delivery.
If the complaint has to do with poor or rude service from someone else at the company then the smart company has policies that the customer service call center can follow: gathering data about the employee in question, incident details, date, time of day and other details. And the call center representative can explain to the angry customer the procedure that will be followed to address the complaint. It’s also a good idea for a manager to follow-up within three days to inform the customer of the steps the company has taken.
Put another way, it takes both empathy and information to pacify an angry customer. Call center services employees need to be trained on exhibiting empathy, and they need to be given the access and the tools to delivery high quality information. Together, the angry customer can be converted into one who is willing to give their vendor another chance.
