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September 2008 - Vol 1, Issue 2 North American Edition |
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Ten Questions Your
1) How Does your Whether your call
center is in-house or out-sourced you need to ask, what does my company need
the call center to do? The call centers marching orders ought to be clearly
defined in some form of service level agreement. By defining the type of call
you are taking, the tools needed and the people using them, you will create
the type of operation that the company needs. When you understand
what success looks like, you can begin to set some targets for customer
satisfaction, revenue and efficiency. You can only get where you are going if
you know where it is. 2) Why Are People Calling You? If people are
calling for "Billing", drill deep into why that is so. Is the bill
late or incorrect or are the remittance instructions unclear? When you
understand why, create a call handling process to satisfy the customer the
first time they call (first call resolution) or figure out what calls could
have been avoided by improvements in the system. Reasons for calls can be
cyclical and understanding these volume fluctuations can help better
determine staffing requirements. 3) What are You Doing to Deflect Calls?
5) What Does It Cost to Run Your Cost per hour is an important cost-management
tool. When you know the total cost of running your call center for an hour
(consider all the costs, not just direct labour)
you can quickly assess the benefits of a variety of business solutions. Does
the ROI make sense from 9 - 5 but diminish over night or on Weekends? You might compare the cost to IVR to outsourcing all or a
portion of your calls. Have you considered VoIP or a fully hosted call center
solution using your own staff for your next growth phase? 6) What Does the Future Look Like in 12 to 18
Months? Practice short and
long term forecasting and scheduling. Adapting to demand, process or products
requires good planning and failure to plan results in degraded customer
service. The larger the change the greater the impact of being unprepared. It doesn't need to
be difficult .Hold regular meetings with key people such as those who know
about mid term changes. Executives or marketing personnel are a good start
and work with your analysts and schedulers to determine the impact. 7) What New or Existing Legislation Affects
your Call center
management has become an exercise in risk management. There are hefty fines
for violating legislation and ignorance is no excuse. Per incident fines
means large call centers get large fines so don't be smug. Hire a compliance
officer who is responsible for understanding the laws and a good lawyer. Learn about privacy,
telephone sales, labour, and human rights issues. 8) How Does Existing and New Technology Affect
Your Remember that well
trained people and solid processes are necessary for success. Understand that
technology will affect your operational drivers such as call length, cost per
customer, occupancy, conversion rate, and customer satisfaction. Excitement
over unsubstantiated claims can lead to premature purchase and there is a lot
of unused technology gathering in dust in call centers around the world. Finally, don't place
technology in a vacuum. Ensure adoption rates are high. With understanding,
everyone can contribute to implementation and users will come up with unique
solutions in its utilization. 9) What's your Disaster Recovery Plan? How important is it
to remain operational? Will your customers understand if rolling brown outs
temporarily put you both in the dark? Or if you are the international hub of
an international credit granting agency, you'll probably have the light's on.
Begin by planning for temporary outages and progress to planning for
prolonged outages. Similarly, design an escalating series of actions to
execute automatically or with management intervention. 10) What Are Your Three Initiatives for
Improvement? This final question sets apart those that manage and those that lead. A leader will create a culture of continuous improvement and define ongoing initiatives for everyone - creating a sense of excitement around coming improvements. A leader understands that some will work and some won't but it's the ones that do that make you shine. Best regards,
Daniel Willis Corporate Marketing and Sales Transcom North |
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This exclusive offer
only available to recipients of this email |
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Transcom in Brief: Helping you communicate with your customers We
communicate with your customers. via telephone, the Web or automated voice
response system...and more. Pay-per-use
in-bound and out-bound customer care and call center services for businesses
of all sizes Automated
voice service announcements, credit calls, recruiting, surveys,
technical support and more. Quality
Assurance programs based in our Canadian and Hardware,
software, and management support for your 5-200 person contact center-all
remotely hosted from our own secure facility. Comprehensive and affordable
using VoIP technology, all you need is an Internet connection with bandwidth.
Our
operation is driven by statistical quality controls, cutting-edge proprietary
technology in an ISO 9001 : 2000 environment of continuous
improvement environment. The result is exceptional client satisfaction, high
performance and remarkable cost efficiencies. Transcom is among the industry's leading and
creative solutions providers, with o utstanding workforce training;
innovative technology, and unrivalled
reputation for operational excellence, continuous improvement and client
responsiveness. |
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Complementary Downloads 23 Steps to
an Effective Call Center What Makes a
Great Call Center Employee
Performance Management Retention of
Call Center Employees Efficiencies
Of Scale in Call Centers |
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