Client Login

Blog / Archive / Contingency Planning

Posts Tagged ‘Contingency Planning’

Dec21

Bristol Snow and Service Update

Posted in General Business Comments | No Comments

 

Over the past week planes have been grounded, trains have been delayed and roads have been made hazardous. The snow could not have come at a worst time for people who are planning long journeys to spend Christmas with family and friends but at Office Response it’s business as usual.

As we offer a 24 hour service we know we play an important role in contingency planning for our customers. This has been demonstrated over the past week in the call volume increase from our customers for reasons ranging from callers chasing orders which have not been delivered due to poor road conditions, offices closing early to allow staff to make it home safely and increases in the demand for maintenance services.

Whilst we pride ourselves of being able to support our customers in this way, Bristol, like many parts of the Country, received enough snow to slow public transport and affect the roads resulting in our staffing resources being reduced by half.

However we know the only way we could successfully manage this was to view it as a challenge rather than a problem and look at how we can ensure our service level is maintained.

During bad weather spells in 2010 we have had members of our Sales team, Customer Services team, Senior Managers and even the Managing Director taking calls in the Contact Centre which proved a great opportunity for team building throughout the business!

We have also made sure our customers know what we are doing to ensure they can continue to rely on us to support them.

Over this week we have received really positive feedback from our customers and we are pleased to report that yesterday we answered over 96% of all calls within 20 seconds.

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

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

Click here to comment on this post…

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

Click here to comment on this post…

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

Click here to comment on this post

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?

Click here to comment on this post…

Feb09

It’s Snow Joke

Posted in General Business Comments | No Comments

 

Ok, sorry about the title.

I have been speaking to some of our customers about the effect the recent adverse weather has had on their business. Staff not able to attend work, deliveries waiting in warehouses, meetings cancelled, salespeople stood around idle – it all adds up. How much do you think the snow really cost your business?

And do you think anything could have been done beforehand to alleviate most of the problems?

Click here to comment on this post…