The Office Response Telephone Answering Blog

Service Delivery Managers – 3 Top Tips to outsource your telephone calls stress free

For Service Delivery Managers providing your service or product to customer’s expectations is a skill that needs constant tweeking. Add to that a constant pressure to reduce your operational costs and you may start investigating what can be outsourced. The high cost of answering calls in house, especially outside of normal business hours, means that outsourcing them to a trusted partner for financial reasons is a bit of a ‘no brainer’ and is something you should consider.

But a question many Service Delivery Managers ponder is “how painful is this going to be?”

Let’s try to calm your nerves:

“I’ll lose control of service levels” – No you won’t. Make sure your outsource partner provides these as standard and you will keep control:

• Accurate and timely Reporting and Management Information.
• Credible recruitment, training, coaching and quality procedures.
• Scheduled reviews of call scripts / call handling guides.
• Procedures that measure service quality and deliver continuous improvement.

“They’ll never be able to do it as good as we can” – Talk with your outsourcer about what standards you expect from the start and what to work towards. Remember most outsourcers spend all their time managing other people’s procedures and technology so they will have a good idea of what you are trying to achieve. As long as you can provide all the information that a call handler will need to manage the caller’s expectations, and agreed procedures so they can then act upon that information, you will be surprised how well they can represent your business. You might even end up duplicating your outsourcer’s processes within your own business.

“The handover will be a nightmare!” – With all the project management experience in the world there could be something you may have overlooked.  A good outsourcer will look for teething problems in the early days and sort them out quickly. Talk with your outsourcer to share best practises and discuss any concerns you may have. Again, remember that they will have managed many migrations from customers systems and procedures to their own and should have lots of hands on experience to share with you. In short, they can probably help you more than you think.

By Steve West

Marketing & Business Development Manager

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A Telemarketer’s View of Gatekeepers…

Martin Blain, Sales Director of Office Response, recently posted a great blog item here and invited me to respond from a telemarketer’s perspective to give a view from “both sides of the fence”.

In our business, it’s fair to say that one of the biggest challenges is reaching the senior decision makers we need to engage with for our clients. They are usually jealously protected by “gatekeepers” who understandably won’t put through calls that they think might be a waste of time. We carefully choose who we call to make sure that our client’s solutions are being pitched to contacts who are really going to benefit, but there is a real skill in persuading receptionists, PA’s and switchboard operators that you’re worth connecting to a busy senior manger or director.

Unscrupulous and unethical telemarketers will try all kinds of “dirty tricks” to get through, causing real damage to the brand they are calling for. The worst example I’ve personally experienced was a call that was put through to me by someone claiming to be “from the police”, only for me to discover it was a telemarketing call once they got through. Given my profession, I’m especially inclined to take telemarketing calls, but his approach was little short of disgraceful and the feedback I gave him was pretty “direct”.

It goes without saying that we wouldn’t dream of doing anything underhand like this, or our hard won reputation would quickly be in tatters, but we surveyed some of our agents to get their perspective….

What is the best way to persuade a gatekeeper to put you through to a senior decision maker?

“Always be polite and stay calm”

“Using the correct name and job title for the decision maker is really important”

“Be friendly, open and co-operative and try to build a relationship without being smarmy, this usually means you’ll be put through on a second or third call”

“Be direct and up front with a clear purpose, giving enough information up front to give the decision maker a fair idea of what the call is going to be about”

“Be professional and polite – ask for the named contact and try to speak to them conversationally, it’s easy to sound “scripted” when you are calling all day, even though we’re not…”

What are PA’s, receptionists and other gatekeepers usually like?

“Very helpful if you mind your p’s and q’s”

“Some are very helpful indeed, especially high level PA’s”

“It’s 50/50 – about half are really willing and happy to help, provide names and check diary availability”

“Most are actually OK, but it’s the really awkward ones we remember. Some are actually very apologetic about not being able to put you through”

What are the toughest gatekeepers like?

“Difficult – the toughest won’t give you any time at all to explain what the call is about.”

“Stern, short in their responses and sometimes impolite; they will always pick up on the weakest point in your explanation and positioning”

“Horrible….”

How do Gatekeepers typically respond when they understand that you are making a telemarketing call?

“Most are positive – generally a good introduction earns a good response”

“Some will block the call outright and will ask for email to be sent first, either to themselves or the contact directly – when we do so this often opens things up on successive calls”

“It depends, some are fine and some will put an absolute block on the call – it’s generally not worthwhile trying to persuade them to put you through if this is the case”

By Niall Habba

Managing Director

The Telemarketing Company

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A Gatekeeper’s view of Telesales Calls

Ask a salesperson what’s tough about telesales and you’ll likely be told “dealing with gatekeepers”. At Office Response we like salespeople and we have set procedures to help them. We know anybody who calls us could one day become a customer so we like to make a good impression. We’re not obstructive to sales callers and do our best to help them but some could do a little more to help themselves. Our gatekeepers are Kat and Michaela and they know a lot about answering the phone so I asked them a few questions.

What % of calls on our reception number are sales calls?

Approx 60%, which is 40-60 sales calls a day.

What manner do callers adopt that lets you know they are selling?

It’s easy to recognise sales callers as they are either ‘over friendly’ or just rude.

The rude ones will say ““Iain please” without using any introduction and it’s not said in a polite way.

The creepy ones say things like, “Hi how are you? How is the weather? Looking forward to the weekend?” They think it will make us want to help them. Actually we hate it.

Do they ever tell lies?

Yes. Often they say that they’ve spoken to the relevant person before, even though they haven’t. They sometimes advise that the call is expected and the relevant person will know the nature of the call. They will try any way to get through to the relevant person – even if it involves bending the truth.

What else winds you up about sales calls?

We really don’t like it when we get called Love, Darling, Sweetheart etc.

Sometimes the callers try and bully us when they won’t take no for an answer.

Repetitiveness – some people will call a number of times a day even though they get the same answer every time.

What do the good ones do?

Listen. We have a clear set of instructions of how to assist sales callers and the good ones let us help them. It’s also good when the caller doesn’t appear scripted, and has a personality without being over confident or too friendly.

What are their most common opening lines?

‘’Hi it’s …. calling from…..can I speak to the person that deals with …?”

“Can I speak to the Managing Director?”

“Hi, can I speak to …, he/she’ll know what it’s regarding / he/she is expecting my call / it’s just a follow up call”

What advice would you give a telesales caller?

Don’t be over friendly – it’s annoying. Don’t lie – it’s also annoying. Be polite and clear why you are calling and treat us with respect.

Thanks to Kat and Michaela for their thoughts. For all of you sales callers we’d like to think seeing sales calls from the “gatekeeper’s” point of view is useful.

Niall Habba, MD of The Telemarketing Company www.ttmc.co.uk will be giving the view from the other side of the fence in the next few days.

Martin Blain

Sales Director

How should you prioritise your incoming telephone calls?

It might seem a bit harsh, but the importance of a telephone call is often greater to the person making the call than to the organisation taking the call. Answering calls costs money so you should consider what return you are going to make from different types of calls and then target your resources accordingly.

You can prioritise different types of calls in a number of different ways:

• Consider using some sort of a IVR call platform before calls are answered e.g. press 1 for sales, press 2 for customer services etc.

• Use unique telephone numbers for different types of calls e.g. for sales, customer service and reception.

• If your telephone system allows it, set up ringing groups for each call type to present certain calls ahead of others.

• You could also use the routing facilities of “intelligent” telephone numbers to ensure your most important calls get picked up quickest.

But how should you rank your call types? Let’s look at some examples:

New Business Enquiries – Spending money on advertising and marketing without answering your calls is like trying to fill a bath up with water but forgetting to put the plug in. The leads will go down the plug hole – quite literally ‘money down the drain’. You can recognise companies that maybe haven’t considered this if you pick up a Sunday newspaper and telephone some of the advertisements. Those that don’t answer have forgotten to put the plug in the bath! It makes sense to answer new enquiry calls but ignore existing customers at your peril.

Customer Service Calls – Deciding what impact your handling of customer service calls will make on your business profitability is another complicated issue. How unique is your product or service? If you are the TV licensing authority then you can get away with answering 50% of your calls confident that people will call back but for most commercial organisations this level of poor service would be suicidal. Commercial realities play a part in deciding how much you should invest in telephone customer support. If you are in a very price sensitive market you may not be able to invest in post-sale support and even if you did would it encourage buyers to pay you 20% more when they are next in the market? It’s not for no reason that many PC manufacturers base telephone customer support offshore to reduce costs. The point to remember here is ‘how are my existing customers going to react if I don’t meet their customer service expectations?’

By Steve West

Marketing & Business Development Manager

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Small Business Owners – Should you tell your customers that you use a telephone answering service?

Most small business owners face the challenge of deciding when to start letting go of certain tasks to enable their business to reach its potential. When the business is in its infancy you will be protective of your ‘baby’ and feel that you need to do everything for it. However, your business stands a greater chance of becoming a larger, more profitable enterprise by benefitting from the skills and experience of other people.

Letting go of answering your telephone calls can bring huge benefits to a growing business so it’s important that your customers recognise is at a positive change rather than a negative one. Remember that your customers may have got used to speaking with you in person, so what happens when, unexpectedly, there is a new voice on the phone asking them to spell their name?

Unsurprisingly, the customer can be put out by this. Thoughts like ‘why don’t you want to speak to me anymore?’ and ‘I don’t want to feel like just another customer – I want to feel valued’ could start to crop up. Negative moments of truth like this may lead to your valued customer feeling undervalued.

To overcome this there are a number of things you can do to help your customers appreciate why you are using a telephone answering service:

1 – Telling them beforehand – You may want to directly communicate to your customers the positive change you are making by outsourcing your calls. If they can see you are making improvements to your business through a desire to be more successful they should understand and share in the benefits the telephone answering service will bring.

2 – Telling them at the start of each call – Many of our customers choose to have their calls answered with their company name followed by “answering service” or “out-of-hours helpline” to let the caller know that they are not speaking directly with the business. This helps the caller to understand that, although they may not be able to speak directly with the person they require, their needs will still be addressed.

3 – Telling them during the call – Managing the expectations of the caller is something your telephone answering service can do on your behalf. If during a call something crops up that can’t be answered or resolved the call handler can advise the caller they are working on your behalf of your business.

If you use a different technique why not share it here?

By Steve West

Marketing & Business Development Manager

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Jobcentre Plus Awards

Following our recent success at the South West Contact Centre Awards, Office Response have again been recognised for our work with young people by Jobcentre Plus. The Jobcentre Plus Awards showcase the achievements of companies, partnerships and individuals who’ve worked with Jobcentre Plus over the past year. At the South West region awards yesterday we picked up the Skills Development Award and came runners-up in the Youth Employment Award. Seeing as RBS, Royal Mail, Wilkinsons, Waitrose and Comet were also shortlisted we’re quite chuffed at this achievement.

Our Head of Contact Centre, Heather Dawes, and Recruitment Manager, Alan Bell, (the picture above shows him basking in glory) attended the awards and were encouraged to see lots of well known companies supporting people back into work.

Alan and Heather commented, “The contact centre industry thrives on young people. We have created an apprenticeship  scheme to give 16-18 year olds the important skills needed to work in the contact centre environment. It’s good to share this success with the members of staff that have benefited most and we plan to continue developing our relationship with Jobcentre Plus in the future. ”

By Steve West

Marketing & Business Development Manager

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How to set up an RSS Reader

A quick scan of our office has revealed that, while everyone has a knowledge of blogs and blogging, there is some debate about how best to stay up-to-date with your favourite blogs.  Some blogs have the ability to email you whenever new content is added (a service we will be adding shortly) but more and more people are turning to RSS Readers. So what is an RSS Reader how do you go about setting one up?

Click here for full instructions

By Steve West

Marketing & Business Development Manager

How fast is the world changing?

I’ve got my eldest daughter to thank for showing me this one.

Who 5 years ago would have understood this?

“Google before you Tweet is the new Think before you speak”

Martin Blain

Freephone numbers? Good or bad for business?

“Freephone numbers increase the response to adverts”

Right? Or Wrong?

It seems like the majority of the marketing departments of our great UK companies think that they do. When I look in my Yellow Pages, and turn to insurance or banking, there’s an avalanche of 0800 numbers. They are all over the place. But have all these so called ‘expert marketeers’ got it wrong? I think they might.

My daughter’s 21, bright as a button, wonderful personality (just like her Dad) and studying at Leeds University.  And I would imagine that she’s exactly the type of customer the giant insurers and bankers want to get hold of. If they take a long term view then all of these financial service companies can make a fortune out of her with all of their fancy mortgages and must have insurance policies.

Now she’s not got a landline, in fact I can imagine in her lifetime she’ll never get one, even my 78 year old father is questioning why he’s got one.

So how much does it cost her to call one of these “freephone” numbers? 20p a minute that’s how much. Not free but two quid for 10 minutes.

She can feed herself for a day for about the same money as it costs her to have a 15 minute chat with one of your sales staff.

According to Ofcom, 2010 could be the year that more calls are made on mobiles than from landlines. So if you want my daughter to call you and not your competitors advertise both the freephone number (after all, if the caller’s using a landline the call’s free and that’s got to be good for business) and a geographic number because these are cheaper to call from a mobile than 08 numbers.

We’ll be going through the Office Response website to make sure that we’re not penalising mobile users but if you need to call a freephone with your mobile this service claims to save you money http://bit.ly/TtDwK

by Martin Blain

Sales Director

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88% of people WILL leave a message on voicemail!

Here are the results from an online survey that asked people about how we use voicemail and answering machines in the UK.

Rather than make unfounded and sweeping generalisations like “80% of callers won’t leave a message on voicemail” we decided to survey a wide range of telephone users on their voicemail habits. And guess what? Nearly 90% will leave a message if they know the person they are calling. But most of people said they won’t leave a message if they’re looking to order products, responding to an advert or calling about customer service.

It supports what we have always thought – Voicemail is a valuable tool (indeed how did we ever survive without it?) for your close contacts but it is less suited to handling advertising response, supporting product ordering and in customer service situations if you want to build customer loyalty. We asked about the reason for the call, who they were trying to contact and what their relationship was with the person or organisation they were calling. We now hope that the survey will help organisations to decide when and where voicemail works best.

Over 500, both business people and members of the public, completed the  10 questions between April and June 2010.

The survey results are:

• When calling a business during office hours in response to an advert more than half of people will not leave a message on voicemail

• 83% of people are comfortable leaving voicemail messages on mobile phones

• Nearly two thirds of people will not leave a message on voicemail if they are calling to make a complaint

• The majority of people expect to be called back the same day if they leave a voicemail message

• 88% of people will leave a message on voicemail if they personally know the individual they are calling

• More than half of people leave less than 5 voicemail messages per week

• 79% of people will not leave a message on voicemail if they are calling to place an order for a product or service

• More than three quarters of people think that voicemail has a place in today’s fast moving business world

There’s no doubt voicemail is useful. But. Think long and hard before you rely on people to leave messages in response to adverts or if you are not giving your customers personal service. When they ring you they want to talk to you.

 We will think a little deeper about what the results mean and we’ll use the blog to discuss our points. Because we answer telephone calls for lots of other organisations you may think, correctly as it happens, that we have a vested interest in encouraging people to rely on the telephone. So feel free to give us your comments to put a brake on our enthusiasm.

The full survey results can be obtained by contacting us at marketing@office-response.co.uk

By Steve West

Marketing and Business Development Manager

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