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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?

Jun15

Green’s error effects telephone answering stats!

Posted in Staffing & Resources | 1 Comment

 

Our contest to beat our call volume predictions has been won by Salisbury based Natallie Davies.

Natallie is a consultant for business cost reduction consultants, Auditel, and her prediction that we would receive 35% of our normal calls was one of the highest that we received. The actual percentage of normal call volumes that we received during the game was 65% – much higher than we anticipated. As England took the lead from Gerrard’s neat finish, call numbers were well down, but after Robert Green’s goalkeeping howler led to the USA’s equaliser our call volumes started to climb and almost reached normal levels towards the end of the game as the country’s optimism started to slide.

Let’s hope that England’s next matches retain the attention of the great British public for the whole match and our call numbers stay low throughout. Thank you to everyone who emailed us with their predictions.

Come on England!!!!

By Martin Blain

Sales Director

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Jun10

Office Response’s World Cup Predictions

Posted in Staffing & Resources | 2 Comments

 

For a long time now our staff  planning managers, Simon Ede and Chantelle Davies, have been pouring over the World Cup fixtures and entering data into our resourcing software. The strange thing is there has been no discussion about who will start in goal or what Capello’s formation will be in the first game. Instead, they have been concentrating on what will happen to incoming call volumes during the key games.

Will South Africa’s match with Mexico on Friday afternoon have an impact and will lots of people choose to wait until half time to report faults with the air conditioning? The important thing for Simon and Chantelle is to ensure that we have the correct number of people available to answer the calls when they come in and we use market leading workforce management software that calculates its accurate predictions through complicated formulas.

Fortunately, this is Simon’s 3rd World Cup at Office Response and he’s already made his prediction of what % of our normal call volumes we expect to receive during England’s first match and the staffing rotas were planned a long time ago.

As a bit of fun we’ll give an England football shirt to the closest prediction for the % of calls we’ll get from 7pm to 10pm compared to our normal call volume on a Saturday. To give you a fair chance, the competition is not open to Office Response employees.

Please send entries to business.support@office-response.co.uk and we’ll announce the winner through the blog.

By Martin Blain

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May04

Who did you call yesterday?

Posted in Staffing & Resources | No Comments

 

Bank Holidays are governed by one main factor – the weather. It’s a very British thing that we all hope and pray for the ever elusive sunshine to make an appearance. In fact, I searched Google when writing this blog to try and ascertain exactly how many sunny Bank Holidays’ we’ve had in the past 5 years. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the answer – but from looking at our historical call statistics I know there hasn’t been many.

So why does a telephone answering company use weather forecasts as part of its business planning?

Well the simple answer is that people will use the phone more when the weather is bad. Consider whether you would have done different things yesterday if the skies were clear blue with glorious sunshine. The chances are that you would have; and that would have influenced what phone calls you made.

Looking at our call statistics today I can see that yesterday we received a 33% increase in calls compared to the early May Bank Holiday last year. This increase in calls will have been influenced by a number of factors:

  • The weather was not fantastic meaning that a large percentage of the population would have stayed at home or ‘inside’. When this happens there are the obvious distractions that we all experience – online shopping, renewing insurance policies, booking holidays, hassling the landlord about the leaking radiator etc, etc. All those jobs that we have been meaning to do for ages loom large and, thankfully, lots of companies are now available on the phone over Bank Holidays.
  • If you think back to the early May Bank Holiday last year we had lovely weather. More people would have been outside enjoying the weather making less phone calls.

Our Operations Manager, Simon Ede, has been with Office response for the past 10 years and has been monitoring and recording our call data throughout. From this information (and some very smart workforce management software) we can accurately forecast how many calls we should expect. It’s not an exact science, but Simon’s instinctive understanding of how our customers’ may attract more or less calls dependant on the weather is priceless and allows us to correctly staff our contact centre.

So think again about what calls you made yesterday and if they were made on instinct. It may shock you that we would have thought about you making those calls at some point last week…

By Steve West

Marketing & Business Development Manager

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Apr19

The effects of Volcanic Ash on Business?

Posted in General Business Comments | 1 Comment

 

I can’t imagine what impact the UK no fly zone will have on the financial health of the airlines and their suppliers. This of course will spill over into related businesses that rely on air freight or tourism for their revenues.

Our customer service team have had a quick call around any travel related customers to check if we should brace ourselves for any unexpected call patterns and we’ve had one or two clients update us about their status as they are marooned somewhere or other but overall we’re noticing no impact at all.

What impacts do you think it will have on the UK economy in general as we move forward?

by Martin Blain

Sales Director

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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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Apr13

UK’s “Best” Economic Barometer?

Posted in Call Centre Industry | 1 Comment

 

Is there a better indicator of the state of the economy than the call volumes of a Telephone Answering Service?

As the fall out from the collapse of the US housing bubble spread through the world’s financial markets, calls received at Office Response started to fall in January 2008 and continued downward as we headed towards Easter of that year. Britain’s economic recession was officially announced a full 12 months later after 2 consecutive quarters of decline in the size of the economy. We spotted the trend a long time earlier and acted to reduce our cost base, unfortunately including making redundancies, months before many other UK business followed. The FTSE 250, often a better UK economic indicator than it’s big brother the FTSE100 that get’s 80% of income from outside the UK, did not bottom out until June 2008.

Whereas we have specialities in some market sectors, our client base is taken from many diverse business types and the depression in calls was directly related to the falls in activities of the general economy. Telephoned enquiries come many months before the flow of funds that follow the actual placing of orders hence the unique position we have as an economic indicator.

And what’s happening now at Office Response? Well, taking into account seasonal factors, we have just recorded call numbers for March 2010 at 8.7% above our predictions; it’s a bit early to be announcing a new trend of economic activity but it’s interesting none the less.

What might be going on? Is it increased business profits? Our financial year end is March and we are back to a healthy profit position principally as a result of our lower cost base. I’m sure that many businesses may be similarly profitable and could be releasing their purse strings as a result of the confidence that the profits bring -  perhaps consumers are going on a pre-election splurge prior to a possible VAT rise? We would preach caution until we see the effects of the inevitable slashing in government spending and the expected hike in taxes that will be needed to tackle the country’s budget deficit but the upturn we’re experiencing is pleasant none the less.

We’d be interested in your feedback about the state of your organisation’s finances and outlook. We will keep you posted about our call volumes. For the brave, is now the time to invest in some of the UK’s smaller stocks?

by Martin Blain

Sales Director

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Mar31

Contact Centre industry confident for 2010

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It’s been a strange start to 2010 at Office Response. Lots of snow, the threat of more swine flu and further increases to call volumes outside of normal business hours have all posed challenges and opportunities for us.

The good news on the commercial front is that we have had a good March with regards to new business coming on board. And we warmly welcome more of it! We are all optimistic of a returning growth in the economy and, it seems, the call centre industry is ahead of the game when it comes to being positive.

A recent survey by Noble Systems of 1200 independent contact centres shows that 97% are expecting their businesses to grow or remain stable this year.

We didn’t contribute to the survey  but we certainly share the positive outlook for the near future.

by Steve West

Marketing & Business Development Manager

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Mar30

How to avoid arguments over Easter…

Posted in Tips, Knowledge and Experience | No Comments

 

During the Easter break most of our customers divert all their calls to our telephone answering service to ensure they can spend time with their families. However, no matter how much you look forward to the holiday, there are no guarantees that everything will go smoothly.

Relate, the relationship counsellors,  experienced a 30 per cent increase in calls last year following the Easter holidays. So this year, to help avoid those holiday arguments, you might want to check out these tips on reducing family rows.

Lin Griffiths, relationship counsellor for relateforparents.org.uk, explains. “Sometimes it feels like you can’t win! We encourage our children to have opinions and express themselves and then find ourselves in conflict with their opinions or demands. Likewise, parents know that in theory it is probably best not to argue in front of the children. In practice though, this isn’t always possible. While no one needs to be perfect there are simple things parents can try to do to make life easier”.

  • One of the best things you can do as a parent is to make sure you acknowledge every demand a child has. For example if your child asks “can we go to the park?” just saying no is likely to get a repeat of the question or a sulk but saying “I’m glad you like going to the park, but I am not sure if we can go today because …” demonstrates you have listened and valued their feelings.
  • Sometimes when you want to have a quiet talk with your partner there can always seem to be children around and often parents find themselves giving short sharp exchanges to each other. Also just the different language men and women use can create misunderstandings. For example if a woman says “I need to talk to you” to her male partner, he may get worried, so always be sure to give a clue about what you need to talk about, and then agree when you can have that chat. Men tend to be more intimidated by conflict, so try bringing-up issues in a casual conversation and giving your partner time to think about it, rather than expecting an answer/solution straight away. Whereas when a man says “I want a quiet word”, women can see it as a criticism so similarly, make sure your partner knows what it is about and when you can have that word.
  • Try to find a code word that either of you (or the children) can say out loud when an argument is getting out of hand. This often diffuses the tension, and sends the message that whatever the argument is about, it will not be resolved in that moment. Each family could have a code word that is only known to them.
  • Squabbling children can test the best of us. It can help to consider whether the argument is caused by boredom. Energy that has no outlet, or not enough, often erupts into meaningless fights in children. Sending them to their rooms isn’t quite the punishment it used to be so before the squabbling gets bad try to make sure that the children have plenty to do and plenty of ideas about how to spend their time. The ideas don’t have to come from you – a bit like planning your day and your time, children (depending on their age) are often capable of planning their own time given the chance.
  • Make sure that any family member gets space when they need it. When pursued or coerced into doing things they don’t want to, every family member needs the opportunity to opt out – as long as they understand there will be an effect on others.
  • Remember, not all arguments are unavoidable and not all arguments are bad. In fact, it is good for children to see that disagreements can be resolved and discussed calmly, so don’t give yourself too much of a hard time if sometimes tempers get frayed.

And lastly, there is always the option to have a chocolate free Easter – at least this may mean that the children are less hyper!

by Steve West

Marketing & Business Development Manager

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Feb18

Is this unacceptable?

Posted in Call Centre Industry | No Comments

 

So the BBC has reported that HM Revenue and Customs Call Centre ‘missed’ 44 million calls last year according to Whitehall’s spending watchdog. Despite employing the equivalent of 10,500 full-time staff at a cost of £233m, it still failed to pick up 43% of the 103 million calls received. During the busiest periods of the year – such as the tax credit renewals peak in July – just one in three calls was actually answered! I don’t know about you but, as a tax payer, I find this both infuriating and unacceptable.

If a telephone answering service provided this level of service they would very quickly lose customers, lose credibility and lose profit.

So why are they getting away with it?

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