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Dec02

….and the winner is Richard Cheek!

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Recognising staff for great work is something I always try to do within my department, however being awarded for outstanding work in front of industry representatives and competitors is even better and is something our Technical Specialist, Richard Cheek has recently experienced.

The annual CallScripter Awards were held on Thursday 18th November 2010 at The Shakespeare’s Globe in London and were attended by a range of companies who use CallScripter to create call handling scripts.

We were delighted to be invited to the awards and to be given the chance to nominate Richard in the “Most Innovative use of CallScripter” category.

Richard has been with Office Response for a number of years and during that time his technical abilities have developed to be an important asset for the Customer Services team and to the company as a whole.

We were confident that Richard would be a worthy winner for the work he has done and so we were delighted when the judges agreed and Richard was awarded the title.

It was fantastic for such a valued member of the team to be recognised in front of our industry peers and we are very proud to have an award winner in our ranks!

Well done Richard!

Felicity Clack

Customer Services Manager.

P.S. Sorry the picture’s not great, Richard is the good looking one on the left.

Dec01

Charity begins in Business.

Posted in General Business Comments | 2 Comments

 

The title ‘Entrepreneur of the year’ is usually associated with businesses rather than charities however it is this award that Office Response and 17 other Bristol based teams are competing for in the Sue Ryder Care, Big Wigs Challenge.

Sue Ryder Care is a charity that provides end of life care for people with long-term conditions such as Cancer, Huntingdon’s Disease, Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s Disease and Dementia to name a few.

The Big Wigs Challenge is a Sue Ryder Care fundraising event and the aim is to enlist teams of local businesses and entrepreneurs to compete in a money making challenge!

Each team is presented with a £50 note with the aim of raising as much as possible by using their initiative to come up with fundraising ideas. After 4 months each team must return all profits, along with the £50, to the charity.

The Office Response team consists of 9 people from different areas of the business, including the Managing Director, and we are using the diverse skill sets and joint determination to raise as much money for Sue Ryder Care as we can.

So far we have sold cooked breakfasts to Office Response Staff, with members of the Big Wigs team being volunteer chefs, wrapped up warm and braved the recent cold weather to fundraise in a local Sainsbury’s, acquired generous gifts from local and national companies to be sold in our Christmas auction and we have created the ‘Call Centre Cup’ which will see Office Response and 4 of our friendly competitors carry out a sponsored 24 hour bike ride.

The ride will take place in the week before Christmas on a stationary bike and the company who clocks up the most miles in the 24 hours will be crowned winners of the Call Centre Cup 2010!

While the overall aim of this challenge is to raise as much money for Charity as possible it has served as a great team building exercise and also offered personal development for the individuals involved. The competition element of the challenge has meant everyone involved has stayed really motivated to get the best return on our £50 and to be crowned ‘Charity Entrepreneur of the Year’.

If you would like to support us in our challenge please visit our Just Giving page;

www.justgiving.com/officeresponse and check out our team blog for more information on our events www.mOReforcharity.wordpress.com

Felicity Clack

Customer Services Manager

Nov29

Call Volumes are up as Temperatures plummet.

Posted in General Business Comments | 3 Comments

 

Our business is all about forward planning and this early cold snap is creating challenges for us and other call centres around the country.

At 17.30 today the AA had received just under 20,000 calls for assistance with calls currently coming in at more than 1,200 every hour. On a normal Monday in November, the AA would typically attend around 10,500 call-outs for the whole day. It’s not only cars that don’t like the cold weather this Sunday our call volumes were up by 64% compared to the previous Sunday and most of the increase was down to calls about broken down heating systems.

According to the Met Office there’s no let up in sight for the cold snap. Simon Ede, our Operations Manager, takes it all in his stride and he’ll rota in extra people to cover the uplift in calls but I’m not sure what he’s going to do about the faulty heating on the third floor.

Come on Simon get it sorted there’s calls to answer and a heating system to fix. Brrr.

Martin Blain

Nov24

Royal Wedding’s a kick in the teeth for business.

Posted in General Business Comments | 10 Comments

 


As employees, and who can blame them, rejoice in the idea of an extra paid holiday on the day that Prince William and Kate Middleton get married, as an employer and business owner, I am not at all happy at the idea.

I wonder how long our sycophantic politicians spent considering the cost to the economy, and particularly the cost to our hard pressed private business sector whilst making the “generous gesture” of declaring an extra holiday for the nation (at no cost to themselves). I suspect their minds were rather more on wondering if they would personally get to go to the reception, whether to buy a new outfit for the day and on how popular it would make them with the electorate. Yes I’m being cynical. I know.

For Office Response we now have to pay an extra days wages to all of our staff, with no compensation whatsoever, and we must deal with a series of short weeks in April 2010 when I suspect it will be difficult to conduct “business as usual”. Our contact centre will be open on the great day but call volumes and financial revenues will be down, whilst costs will be up. Lucky us.

I don’t expect any sympathy as I suspect that the majority of people, and probably my employees too, will think I’m in a great position and “what’s he got to moan about anyway?” However it’s interesting how people’s views change when their position changes.

18 months ago, when he was employed in our new business team, Simon Worden would have been the first to look forward to his extra day of leisure. Now as owner of his own fledgling telemarketing company, outbound-solutions.co.uk, he spent most of yesterday wondering how he’ll pay his bills in April next year. And he’s right to worry as next April gaining commitment from businesses for sales proposals is going to be challenging as we’re going to have to deal with those three short weeks in a row.

William and Kate I sincerely wish you a long and happy time together but answer this for me, why do I have to pay for your marriage day?

Martin Blain

Grumpy Old Man and Director of Office Response.

Nov16

Making an asset out of your 24-hour telephone service provision.

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Simply saying that you provide a 24-hour service to your customers is a simple statement to make but before this can become a benefit to your organisation three further commitments are needed – and these apply regardless of the time and effort you’ve put into perfecting your operations.

1. Be more organised than your customers.

Your out-of-hours callers won’t be prepared for the issue they’re facing – which makes it twice as important for them to know that you are. This means you have to know, in detail and in advance:

• What they are likely to ask for.

• What you’re prepared to do for them.

• What information you’ll need to do it.

Outside of working hours, your callers need to be confident that they can let go of their problem. They can’t do that until they’re confident that you’ve picked up the burden – which means more than just picking up the phone. To many businesses an inflexible pile of procedure can seem completely counter-productive. At four in the morning, the exact opposite is true, because as well as helping you to ‘deliver the goods’, a rigid structure goes a long way to reassuring your customer.

2. Get senior management to deal with the unexpected.

No matter how organised you are, there will always be exceptions, and with no decision-maker available, these can rapidly get you into trouble. Senior managers should not have to work nights – but having a last-resort contact to deal with the unexpected will keep you ahead of that round-the-clock promise. And if the unexpected disturbs one of your managers in the middle of the night, you can be assured that they’ll improve your procedures before it happens again.


3. Requests take time, but acknowledgement is immediate.

No emergency call is resolved until your caller is confident that you’ve taken ownership. As soon as they’ve explained the problem, callers will expect to know the following:

• What you can do for them.

• Who’s going to do it.

• When they can expect a response.

• What they can expect if they call for an update.

• If it’s going to cost them, and how much.

If you can take the time to be ready for all of this before that phone starts ringing, then your customers’ critical emergencies become your ‘business as usual’ – and their trust in your service becomes dependence.

By Mike Warren

Office Response Customer Services

Nov04

Are “Rocket Ansercall” the latest recession causalities?

Posted in General Business Comments | 5 Comments

 

Rumours are circulating that call centre outsourcer and telephone equipment supplier, RocketUK.Com Ltd have been hit by financial problems and may be about to close their doors to customers.

Calls to their advertised number, 01252 670699, where met today by an engaged tone whilst a call to their freephone number at 4.50pm was answered as “Narango”. The lady who answered explained that nobody was available who could answer questions about the financial status of the company and the receptionist was unable to help with our enquiries.

Web research for the term “Narango” comes up with no information but a search of the companies house records finds a brand new company Norango Limited registered at the same address as Rocket ;

NORANGO LIMITED
9 ST GEORGE’S YARD
CASTLE STREET
FARNHAM
SURREY
UNITED KINGDOM
GU9 7LW
Company No. 07428552

Date of Incorporation: 03/11/2010

Rocket have been trading since 1997 and developed a sound reputation as a provider of telephone answering services before expanding into the business telephone equipment supply business. Have they become another casuality of the contracted UK economy?

We’ll post again as more information becomes available.

Martin Blain

Oct29

Take That ticket sales bring the network down!

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Take That are accustomed to bringing the house down at their concerts but as fans stampeded to buy tickets for their reunification tour they not only caused internet problems but parts of the telephone network also failed.

Tickets for the reformed group’s UK stadium dates went on sale at 0900 BST and Ticket agencies have struggled to cope with demand to see Take That and Robbie Williams tour together for the first time in 16 years.

But website sites including Ticketmaster, Gigs and Tours, Ticketline and The Ticket Factory all buckled under the strain and we received our first reports of problems with calls routing over parts of the non-geographic 08 telephone network early this morning.

Our investigations quickly established the blame lay with Robbie and his minstrel mates. Apparently parts of the BT and Opal telecom networks simply did not have the capacity to cope with the flood of telephone calls pouring into the Take That ticket lines. Fortunately the problems seem to have now eased as demand has slackened off.

At Office Response our policy is to only invest in the most resilient communications technology however this morning even we were affected. We apologise to any of our customers who have been involved and we will be doing a “post mortem” to see if there are lessons to be learnt to ensure we don’t get a recurrence.

Sorry.

Martin Blain
Director

Oct15

Will the Police’s tweeting reduce their call volumes?

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Yesterday Manchester Police experimented by “tweeting” about every call they received into their 999 call centre. Was it a cynical attempt to influence the Government not to cut Police budgets, as many commentators suggested, or an exercise in “challenging demand” organised by their Call Centre Manager?

Many of our clients use us to handle overflow calls from their own centres and we always suggest to them to analyse the calls they are getting to see if it is possible to service their callers in ways that don’t involve a phone call.

Yesterdays tweets highlighted that the 999 service is being used for many purposes other than true emergency calls, as Chief Constable Peter Fahy said “We do get calls that are not directly related to our police work such as calls from people with relationship breakdowns, confused people, or sometimes we have callers who just can’t deal with the problems life throws at them.”

Manchester Police’s twitter feeds spurned a number of amusing spoof sites. Some of the spoofs got me chuckling for example, MP24_0′s reports included;

Call 009 – Reported missing child turned up at school. Parents “didn’t think to look there”. Fair enough. #gmp24

Call 002 – Reports of an ice cream vendor dead; found to have been covered in chocolate sauce and nuts. We reckon he’s topped himself #gmp24

Some of the strangest calls seemed to be some of the real ones;

Call 912 Information regarding an annoying letter #gmp24

Call 849 – Attempted theft of a caravan, could have happened anytime in the past two weeks, Rochdale #gmp24

I wonder if yesterday’s publicity will have the desired effect of making people think twice before dialling 999 today. Or was the whole episode simply to do with making sure the government don’t cut Police budgets too hard?

Oct02

3 Great Reasons not to use a Telephone Answering Service.

Posted in General Business Comments | 1 Comment

 


Much to my bitter disappointment not every organisation needs us. You could be missing zillions of calls and you should still keep your money in your pocket and not spend it with us. So why not?

Well it’s because, as I spend much time explaining to our new staff, nobody wants telephones answering they want the benefits it brings and you might not want the benefits we’ll give you.

So let’s look together at some of the reasons not to buy our call answering services;

1. “I don’t want any more business”

I’m constantly pushing our business forward but there are business owners out there missing calls, chucking new sales opportunities away and they are completely happy with the situation. They know about the unanswered calls and they’re just not bothered. And it’s because they don’t want the hassle and stress involved with expansion.

Lee our web developer is a bit like that. He’s often difficult to track down by phone but he’s now worked for himself (and on his own) for 6 years. He strikes me that he’s very happy with his lot. He’s got no staff, no pressure and no hassle.

So if you don’t want to expand, don’t contact us.

2. “All of my new clients are recommended to me”

Lots of our competitors spin the old yarn that “such and such” a % of callers won’t leave messages on answerphones. It’s a load of rubbish, rhubarb and they’re downright wrong.

As we’ve blogged about before lots of people leave messages on voicemail and the callers most likely to leave messages are the people who already know you and the potential new clients who have been told all about your wonderful products and services by your existing customers. The other side of the story is that the people most unlikely to leave a message are the people responding to your marketing who have no relationship with you.

These referred enquirers however will jump through a lot of hoops to get to you so you don’t need us to capture your calls.

3. “If they can’t get through they’ll ring back”

In lots of situations this is the case. If you’re number 45 in the call queue at the Tax Office or you need to make a claim on your motor insurance then you’ll wait. You might not be happy about it but if you absolutely have to talk to them you’ll keep calling.

Likewise if you are the only supplier of diamond encrusted garden gnomes and there’s a big demand then you don’t need to spend money with us improving your call handling efficiency.

However if you are in a competitive market like the rest of us then maybe you’ll want to give the best service you can.

I’ll be posting about some other good reasons not to use an outsourced call handling company later in the week but feel free to add your own ideas.

Martin Blain
Sales Director

Sep21

The All-Japan Telephone Answering Contest.

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Could this catch on in the UK? Um…..I’m not sure. It’s  the Annual All-Japan Telephone Answering Contest which is held in November every year.

According to the contest’s official website, “The purpose of the Telephone Answering Contest is to preserve correct, eloquent Japanese, as well as measuring the improvement in the service-level and words of each firm’s response to telephone calls.” It is held annually by the Nihon Denwa/Denshin Yu-za Kyoukai (Japan Telephone and Telegraph User’s Association).” The contest has been held since 1962, and at last year’s contest in Tokyo, there were 10,510 entrants.

This seems to be a really big event, rather  bizarrely, the entrants are given the caller’s lines beforehand, and are allowed to plan out their responses. They are judged on first impression (15 points), basic answering ability (20 points), communication skill (20 points), sales ability (30 points), and final impression (15 points).

Last year’s winner was a receptionist from Yasukuni-jinja named Hitomi Tanino. She practiced her three-minute conversation for two hours a day over a period of four months.

We have won awards for our staff training but even we don’t go to these lengths and as you can see from the Youtube video it’s serious stuff in Japan;

Martin Blain

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