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Jul12

Outsourced Call Handling Benefits From Recession

Posted in Call Centre Industry,General Business Comments,Uncategorized | No Comments

 

Companies House have revealed that the number of UK registered companies increased by over 7,000 during May this year.

According to The Office for National Statistics, (for the three months to April 2011) the number of employees and self-employed people working part-time, because they could not find a full-time job, increased to the highest figure since comparable records began in 1992. With more than 35,000 people delving into the world of self-employment last year, there are now almost 4 million small-business owners and freelancers in the UK. …continue reading

Jun09

Intranet Award

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Office Response are delighted to be recognised for our innovative use of Intranet technology by winning the ‘Greatest Business Impact’ Award at the SORCE Intranet User Conference.

Delegates from over 50 different organisations including Manchester United PLC, the Youth Hostel Association, Balfour Beatty, Discovery Foods, Thomas Cook and the Royal Horticultural Society voted in recognition of outstanding achievements by an …continue reading

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

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?

Jul22

A Gatekeeper’s view of Telesales Calls

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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

May17

The Great British Testimonial

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If you are in the process of trying to decide whether a telephone answering service will benefit your business you may find this blog article useful. Liz Duvall, Group Marketing Manager of Great British Mobility, outlines how our call handling services support their business objectives…

“I don’t know about you, but one of my pet hates is automated phone answering services.  You know the sort of thing……press 1 for sales, press 2 for accounts etc… and then you get another set of options, followed by a “all our operators are busy, please leave a message…etc” aaargh!!  I just want to talk to a human being!!

At Great British Mobility we offer a range of rise and recline chairs, adjustable beds, scooters and bathing aids.  Our customers are predominantly elderly or have mobility problems and we want them to feel that they are important right from the very first point of contact.  Therefore having the right people answering our phones is crucial to the success of our business. At Office Response not only are the staff human but they always sound like they have answered the phone with a smile on their face.

When a customer calls one of our freephone numbers, and enquires about our products, we want to talk to them.  However, if all our staff are already taking calls, how do we deal with the overflow?  Its very simple really; our phones ring for 4 rings and if they are not answered they then route to Office Response. A polite person will then capture their details and nature of their call.  This information is immediately emailed to the relevant department at Great British Mobility.

When I initially contacted Office Response I found the staff incredibly efficient and willing to help.  We had a portfolio of 126 freephone numbers and I assumed it would a complete headache to transfer everything over to Office Response destination numbers.  I couldn’t have been more wrong and the whole process was managed professionally and efficiently. This now equates to over 1000 calls a week that Office Response handle for us now and the service is exemplary.

We have had a few little teething troubles along the way such as the odd call script that needed a tweak, or a particular 0800 number that required the calls to be handled slightly differently and when queries have been raised they have always been dealt with promptly.

All in all, the move to Office Response has been made easy and dealing with the staff has been an absolute pleasure – from management and customer services to the agents answering the phones.  We know our customers are in safe hands and in a very competitive market its reassuring to know that Office Response value our customers as much as we do.

For more information on Great British Mobility’s full range of products you can visit them at http://www.greatbritishmobility.com/

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Apr16

Can a Call Centre Answer 100% of Calls?

Posted in Tips, Knowledge and Experience | 1 Comment

 

Surely by describing ourselves as a telephone answering service we should guarantee to answer 100% of our clients’ calls? Well actually we don’t and we never will, a number of our competitors do but we question their wisdom. We plan our staffing to the nth degree and pride ourselves in how fast we answer calls but you can never plan for Icelandic volcanoes.

Pity then the poor call centre manager at P&O Ferries. According to BBC Radio 5 a normal day for them sees them answer 3000 calls in an orderly fashion but then UK airspace is shutdown because of the small inconvenience of a cloud of volcanic dust and an extra 27000 people decide to call to enquire about a ferry across the channel. One can only imagine the chaos inside their call centre.

On January 29th, 2007 we too had our own “Icelandic Volcano” moment. One of our clients, a firm of solicitors, was involved in giving legal advice to an unfortunate group of people who had  suffered side effects as a result of using Seroxat, an antidepressant drug marketed by SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline). On the date in question the BBC broadcast a documentary about Seroxat and at the end of the programme , and to our client’s surprise, they published a telephone number with the instructions “For legal advice about any issues covered in tonight’s programme call…….”. Within a matter of moments a tidal wave of telephone calls crashed over Office Response and continued for several days afterwards.

And that is why we don’t guarantee, and nor do we think any of our competitors should guarantee, that any call centre will never miss a phone call. Our customers will be comforted to know that our procedure for Icelandic volcano  moments is to divert the calls to a restricted ringing group of a small number of lines. Isolating the calls in this way protects the service standards for our clients whilst we allocate as many spare staff as we have available to deal with the “volcanic ash”.

by Martin Blain

Sales Director

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Jul27

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

Posted in Tips, Knowledge and Experience | 2 Comments

 


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:

“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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