Client Login

Blog / Archive / Customer Support

Posts Tagged ‘Customer Support’

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

May17

The Great British Testimonial

Posted in Guest Blogs | No Comments

 

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/

Click here to comment on this post..

May14

The benefits of SMS and Answering Services

Posted in Guest Blogs | 1 Comment

 

Love ‘em or loathe ‘em, the mobile phone has become the personal communication medium of choice. We all have a mobile phone, and it’s never far away from our clutches. Whether it’s making or taking calls, sending or receiving texts, or surfing the Net, the mobile phone enables us to stay in touch with the rest of the world, wherever we happen to be. And whatever we do, we’re doing more of it. From the first text message sent by a Vodafone engineer in 1992, the good old SMS text message has become ubiquitous, with barely a day going by without most of us sending or receiving a message.

A few interesting SMS facts:

  • There are more registered handsets in the UK than people
  • Twice as many people have a mobile phone than have email
  • 97 billion text messages were sent in the UK in 2009
  • 441 million messages were sent on Christmas Day 2009

At Office Response we handle over 1 million calls per year and for the majority of these calls a message or information is passed onto our customers. Although most messages are relayed by email or call transfer we also use SMS to ensure customers receive information wherever they are. During the past year we have sent over 200,000 SMS messages as the demand for instant notification becomes an increasing priority for businesses.

One of the main changes in the use of text messaging is by organisations wishing to stay in touch with those that are important to them: hospitals contacting patients, businesses contacting customers, and councils contacting residents to name but a few.

This is the growth area of SMS. Businesses and public sector bodies are recognising the value of contacting their audience by text. Why?

  • You can get a message in to the palm of a recipient’s hand
  • And you can get it there in a few seconds
  • As we all have a phone, anyone can be contacted
  • It’s a low cost communication means
  • It’s a two-way medium, enabling organisations to receive texts too

Who can benefit from using text messaging within their organisation? Well, pretty much everyone in some shape or form. Our customers that use SMS for message delivery and wider customer communications report:

  • Increased revenue
  • Reduce cost
  • Improved service
  • Improved Customer Satisfaction

A long standing customer of Office Responses telephone answering services is Text Anywhere Ltd. If you are thinking of sending messages to individuals or groups from an online service, create bulk SMS marketing campaigns, or send SMS messages from any email system, TextAnywhere has the business solution for you. You can visit them at www.textanywhere.net

Click here to comment on this post…

May10

Top 10 Telephone Answering Tips

Posted in Tips, Knowledge and Experience | No Comments

 

The telephone is still most business’s primary point of contact with customers and the way you answer your company’s phone will form your customer’s first impression of you. These telephone answering tips will ensure that callers know they’re dealing with a winning business – of course, if you don’t want to do it yourself, Office Response can handle all your calls for you:

1) If possible, answer all incoming phone calls before the third ring – this shows whoever is calling that you really do value their call.

2) When you answer the phone be warm and enthusiastic. Your voice at the end of the telephone line is sometimes the only impression of your company a caller will get.

3) When answering the phone welcome callers courteously and identify yourself and your organisation. You could say “Good morning. ABC Construction’, Andrew speaking, how may I help you?” No one should ever have to ask if they’ve reached such and such a business.

4) Control your language. Don’t use slang or jargon. Instead of saying, “OK”, or “No problem”, for instance, say “Certainly”, or “Alright”. If you’re a person who uses fillers (known as vias) when you speak, such as “basically” or “um” or phrases such as “like” or “you know”, train yourself carefully not to use these when you speak on the phone.

5) Train your voice and vocabulary to be positive when phone answering – even on a “down” day. Rather than saying, “I don’t know”, say “Let me find out about that for you.”

6) Take telephone messages completely and accurately. If there’s something you don’t understand or can’t spell, such as a person’s surname, ask the caller to repeat it or spell it for you. Read it back to the caller to confirm accuracy. Then make sure the message gets to the intended recipient.

7) Respond to all your calls within one business day. The early caller can get the contract, the sale, the problem solved… and reinforce the favourable impression of your business.

8 ) Always ask the caller if it’s alright to put them on hold and don’t leave them on hold for a long time. If you are having trouble locating someone go back to the caller and let them know.  Offer them choices such as “That line is still busy. Do you want to continue to hold or should I have Mr West call you back?”

9) Don’t use a speaker phone unless absolutely necessary. Speaker phones give the caller the impression that you’re not fully concentrating on their call and make them think that the call isn’t private. The only time to use a speaker phone is when you need more than one person to be in on the conversation at your end.

10) Train everyone else who answers the phone to answer the same way; including other family members if you’re running a home-based business. Check on how your business’s phone is being answered by calling in and seeing if the phone is being answered in a professional manner. If they don’t pass the test go over this list with them.

By Steve West

Marketing & Business Development Manager

Click here to comment on this post…

May07

Abusive, Hoax and Prank calls – the consequences

Posted in Tips, Knowledge and Experience | 1 Comment

 

As a 24 hour telephone answering service, Office Response deal with their fair share of abusive, hoax and prank calls.

Although I work within the Customer Services department, each month I spend a few hours in our contact centre taking calls – it keeps me in touch with the expectations of our customers and their callers. This has meant that, along with handling a variety of normal calls, I’ve dealt with a few challenging calls myself. I wonder, though, if these hoax callers ever stop to consider their actions.

One person who will be is Mr Barry Doherty from York who was recently jailed for making 50 silent calls to the emergency services in the space of an hour. To reflect the severity of his crime, and in the hope of deterring future incidences, Doherty is now subject to an antisocial behaviour order which forbids him from making false 999 calls or from contacting the emergency services unless it is a genuine emergency. Controversially, the ASBO also forbids him from possessing a mobile phone or SIM card for the next five years.

At Office Response, our call handling agents are trained to deal with hoax, abusive and prank calls as standard. Every call is different and so the process requires a certain amount of sensitivity. If the caller is abusive or rude, our agents are trained to follow a three step system:

  • They let the caller know, politely, that their behaviour is inappropriate and that, if they continue, the agent will terminate the call. For example, “Please do not swear at me like that or I will be required to terminate the call.”
  • If the caller continues, the agent will reiterate that the caller is acting inappropriately in a firm but civil manner, ie. “If you continue to speak to me in that way, Sir/Madam, I will terminate the call.”
  • If the caller persists, the agent will explain that they cannot continue with the call.

Just as every call is different, some hoax calls are easier to shake off than others. They are a nuisance to agents and can easily make the difference between a good and a bad day. Luckily, there’s a certain amount of camaraderie in our Contact Centre and our supervisors are always on hand to offer advice when you need it. The majority of hoax calls are made by children but, alarmingly, we do also receive problem calls from adults.

Please remember that there are consequences to these types of calls so if you are aware of someone that makes them you might want to advise them about of Mr Barry Doherty.

By Sarah Krekorian

Customer Services Representative

Click here to comment on this post…

May05

Top 10 Tips to motivate customer facing staff

Posted in Tips, Knowledge and Experience | 2 Comments

 

Sales and Customer Service personnel are the primary customer contact for most businesses. So what does their attitude say about your company? If some of your team are not communicating the message you want, here are 10 questions to ask yourself to ensure they stay positive, focused on message and deliver an exceptional customer service experience.

1. Are you clear on your values and expectations? This is foundational to ensure that a consistent message is communicated across the organisation. Without clarity from the top, people may be unclear of expectations and rarely surpass them.

2. Are your priorities constantly changing? If you aren’t consistent with priorities and aligning them with activities that customer’s value you are leaving room for confusion. Eliminating confusion will keep your team focused.

3. Are you and your managers leading by example and consistently reinforcing desired behaviours? People copy behaviours and if you do not demonstrate what is expected how can you expect your team to behave otherwise?

4. Are you providing enough information? Providing a centralised location for information on all existing clients, products and services (CRM or Intranet) will give you the confidence to answer any question without having to rely on others for information.

5. Are you providing training for skills that your team may be lacking? If you have hired the right person based on their character and attitude (but they are making mistakes) make sure they have the necessary training to ensure they know how to do it right.

6. Are you providing too much direction? If you try to tell your people how to do everything step-by-step you are limiting them on providing quality customer service. If you free them up to do what they know is necessary — based on agreed expectations — you are providing the freedom to make your customers happy.

7. Do you have enough team members? If you have a team that is spread so thin they can’t provide quality service over the quantity of customers served consider the real cost to your business. Unhappy customers = ex customers! By hiring more team members you may enable your team to make more sales.

8. Do you personally motivate your team? If you reward your team for delivering a great customer service you will almost certainly win new business. Look for ways to provide positive reinforcement on a daily basis in addition to providing performance bonuses, gift cards, or something for your team to earn.

9. Do you provide too much information during training sessions? If you supply too much at once people may take longer to master those new skills. Consider breaking training into smaller sessions to allow time to master a few skills at a time. People who FEEL successful will BE successful.

10. Does the entire organisation understand the critical role they each play in delivering an exceptional customer service experience? Too many companies do not place the same importance on internal customers (i.e. colleagues and peers) resulting in customer facing teams not getting the support they need.

Ask yourself these 10 questions to identify areas for improvement. Then pick one and focus on it. Attacking too many initiatives at once will lead to frustration and probably failure! Once your team has mastered one goal, move on to another. Working together for a shared goal and seeing ongoing improvements will keep the team focused, motivated and positive

By Steve West

Marketing & Business Development Manager

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

Apr15

Acceptable English Language in Call Centres?

Posted in Call Centre Industry | 1 Comment

 

The Labour party includes an interesting proposal in it’s new manifesto, it’s a plan to test migrant workers on their knowledge of the English language before they are able to work in a governmental call centre (or is that center?). Presently teachers, police officers and doctors have to pass a language test and under a new Labour government this would be extended to include other public sector workers such as nurses, social workers and various other roles. But what standards should we expect?

Running a quality telephone answering service we already feel the need to test our call handling agents on their spoken and written English language skills during the recruitment process. Ironically some of the worst candidates are UK educated who have English as their native language! However we have to accept that English is the world’s language and it is a “living” language constantly evolving and inventing new words and phrases that are acceptable to one group and frowned upon by another set of people.

So if public sector workers are to be tested for their language skills who should set the standards and what should those standards be? Should I be “sniffy” when I read color not colour, program not programme , gray not grey? Is the future a English institution (or is that an English institution?) to protect “English” English in the same way as the French have L’Académie Francaise? Is it acceptable for the spelling to be poor if the message is clear?

by Steve West

Marketing & Business Development Manager

Click here to comment on this post…

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

Click here to comment on this post…