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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

Dec16

Are you thinking of offshoring your calls?

Posted in General Business Comments | 1 Comment

 

We get regular visits from prospective customers and at the end of their visits they often state that they “Just wanted to check that you weren’t trading from a mud hut in Bombay”.

On seeing this picture of an “International Call Centre” I can see why they want to check us out.

Thanks to our Contact Centre Manager, Heather Dawes who took the picture during her annual trip to Argentina following the international Polo circuit.

Martin Blain

Aug20

How to handle Call Centre Overflow calls.

Posted in Call Centre Industry | 2 Comments

 

Introduction

Whilst our marketing team spend many hours hunting for organisations that are struggling to handle their calls the most effective way to deal with inbound call traffic peaks can often be to treat the causes and not just the symptoms.

Here’s some solutions that may help you to take the “axe out of your head” and there’s also some ideas to dull the pain whilst the wound heals.

Why are people calling you?

When you map the reason that most people are calling you certain patterns appear. Callers always either ask to speak to somebody or they ask about “something”. What are the “somethings”? Can you group them as predictable “call types”?

Now you know why they’re calling can you help without talking to them?

If the caller can’t get an answer to their issue they’ll keep calling. And calling. And calling…….

Can you reduce the number of repeat callers by assisting them in ways other than a “one to one” telephone conversation?

Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

If you know the most common “call types” can you use Interactive Voice Response (IVR) before the call is presented to an agent to deal with the callers reason for calling? My bank, HSBC, do this very well. Call their customer service number and a number of options are offered to reduce the calls going to their call centres, press 1 to obtain your balance etc.

IVR can also be used to give callers updates about ongoing and known issues. A broken lift in a residential apartment block can be reported many times whilst an up to date announcement on an IVR about the incident’s status can be a sensible option.

Can you do anything to reduce the call volumes?

Look at ways to reduce the variability and unpredictability of the demands made on you to answer calls. Some of the solutions to this are not just  to be found within the contact centre management team but will involve other departments.

Simple solutions like controlling how you do promotions and marketing for example. We helped a passenger transport authority to handle a tidal wave of calls that they created by sending out 2 million letters in one go about renewing bus passes. If only the letters has gone out in stages.

Mail order companies who’s customer service departments are being swamped with calls tend to look at customer self help options to reduce call volumes. Putting information inside orders about returns policies and how to deal with faulty products reduces calls? Another mail order client of ours reduced calls by spending money on upgrading the packaging the used. Less damaged products equaled less calls. And happier customers too.

Can you give more information via your website, via email or via text messages to mobile phones?

What days of the week are busiest?

If you deal with the public and choose to close your call centre on weekends then is Monday a particularly busy day? Or Friday?

Closing on Saturdays and Sundays can build up demand to deal with customer service issues leading to manic Mondays. Another shameless plug here but if you don’t have the call volumes to justify opening over the weekend an outsourcer could do it for you in a more cost effective way. You’d find that you’d get reduced call volumes during the work week which you may find easier to deal with.

Call Back “systems” to even the workload over the day.

Setting up  some sort of call back system to allow callers to leave a message and to be called back later rather than sit in a queue or repeatedly call back can help you to even out your workflow. If you are overrun with calls early in the morning but have quiet periods after lunch then you can get back to people then.

Their are a number of automated call back systems on the market or you could send these calls to an outsourcer. If your outsourcer cannot fully deal with the caller’s issue then at the very least they can gather information to allow you to prioritise the calls you want to deal with first. There’s efficiencies to be had in prioritisation.

This spreads out the demand and it gives you some control over it too – so is a pretty good solution.

What times of the days are you struggling with calls?

We spend hours pouring over our call handling performance data looking at individual 15 minute slots. It’s very revealing and we’d advise anybody missing calls to do the same exercise.

Call centre managers don’t need to be mathematical geniuses to know that larger teams of agents are more efficient at call handling. 10 agents will handle many more than twice as many calls in the same period as 5 agents. What this means is that you are more likely to be missing a greater % of calls during your quieter times, when you have less staff in the office, than you are during the busiest periods. The evenings and early mornings are especially vulnerable. This is where outsourcing can give you extra call handling capacity in a more cost effective way than scheduling extra people to man your own centre.

Look at your call forecasts

The science of figuring out just the right number and mix of agents to provide adequate service levels without incurring unnecessary personnel costs is crucial yet complicated. It takes sophisticated forecasting tools even to begin to manage such uncertainty, but computer science and new workforce management tools are up to the challenge.

We have call data going back to 1999 to call on and we use Q-Max workforce management tools to assist with call forecasting and staff planning.

Can the calls be handled elsewhere?

Moving the calls elsewhere – whether that is an automated or human service, whether it is in-house/outsourced/hosted can handle immediate peaks without losing the call.

But you need to ask yourself some questions;

Does it actually deliver the service your require?

Does it result in the same level of first call resolution?

Does it essentially just postpone the problem? (by the caller calling back later..)

If you are considering the outsourced option we would suggest that you work with your outsourcer prior to going live to script as many call  types as possible to offer first call resolution. The goal is to be more than a “talking answerphone” that will simply store up the problem for you to deal with later.

Webchat

Web Chat offers you the ability to handle 3 customer enquiries via human resources in the same time it takes to get through one call. This might be a magic solution to handle more customer interactions without increasing your resources.

Can you change the way you work and answer more calls internally?

Can you train non call handling staff with the skills needed to answer calls and to step in when “all hands are needed on deck”?

This is particularly useful if your peaks are concentrated into short time slots.

Can you reduce you average call lengths to answer more calls per hour?

By introduced new skills to better engage the customer and control the call you could achieve reductions in handling time, faster response times and a reduction in repeat calls.

This type of investment in people can have other benefits in employee engagement and staff retention and get the gains you need right across the day not just at the peak.

CONCLUSION

After working through all of my suggestions (and I dare say some of your own that I’ve not mentioned) and you still got overflow calls then unfortunately there is no magic formula – if you have X of calls being presented then you have to have X of resources to handle it.

by

Martin Blain

Sales Director

Aug05

Small Business Owners – Should you tell your customers that you use a telephone answering service?

Posted in Tips, Knowledge and Experience | 15 Comments

 

Most small business owners face the challenge of deciding when to start letting go of certain tasks to enable their business to reach its potential. When the business is in its infancy you will be protective of your ‘baby’ and feel that you need to do everything for it. However, your business stands a greater chance of becoming a larger, more profitable enterprise by benefitting from the skills and experience of other people.

Letting go of answering your telephone calls can bring huge benefits to a growing business so it’s important that your customers recognise is at a positive change rather than a negative one. Remember that your customers may have got used to speaking with you in person, so what happens when, unexpectedly, there is a new voice on the phone asking them to spell their name?

Unsurprisingly, the customer can be put out by this. Thoughts like ‘why don’t you want to speak to me anymore?’ and ‘I don’t want to feel like just another customer – I want to feel valued’ could start to crop up. Negative moments of truth like this may lead to your valued customer feeling undervalued.

To overcome this there are a number of things you can do to help your customers appreciate why you are using a telephone answering service:

1 – Telling them beforehand – You may want to directly communicate to your customers the positive change you are making by outsourcing your calls. If they can see you are making improvements to your business through a desire to be more successful they should understand and share in the benefits the telephone answering service will bring.

2 – Telling them at the start of each call – Many of our customers choose to have their calls answered with their company name followed by “answering service” or “out-of-hours helpline” to let the caller know that they are not speaking directly with the business. This helps the caller to understand that, although they may not be able to speak directly with the person they require, their needs will still be addressed.

3 – Telling them during the call – Managing the expectations of the caller is something your telephone answering service can do on your behalf. If during a call something crops up that can’t be answered or resolved the call handler can advise the caller they are working on your behalf of your business.

If you use a different technique why not share it here?

By Steve West

Marketing & Business Development Manager

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Jun29

88% of people WILL leave a message on voicemail!

Posted in Surveys | 2 Comments

 

Here are the results from an online survey that asked people about how we use voicemail and answering machines in the UK.

Rather than make unfounded and sweeping generalisations like “80% of callers won’t leave a message on voicemail” we decided to survey a wide range of telephone users on their voicemail habits. And guess what? Nearly 90% will leave a message if they know the person they are calling. But most of people said they won’t leave a message if they’re looking to order products, responding to an advert or calling about customer service.

It supports what we have always thought – Voicemail is a valuable tool (indeed how did we ever survive without it?) for your close contacts but it is less suited to handling advertising response, supporting product ordering and in customer service situations if you want to build customer loyalty. We asked about the reason for the call, who they were trying to contact and what their relationship was with the person or organisation they were calling. We now hope that the survey will help organisations to decide when and where voicemail works best.

Over 500, both business people and members of the public, completed the  10 questions between April and June 2010.

The survey results are:

  • When calling a business during office hours in response to an advert more than half of people will not leave a message on voicemail

  • 83% of people are comfortable leaving voicemail messages on mobile phones

  • Nearly two thirds of people will not leave a message on voicemail if they are calling to make a complaint

  • The majority of people expect to be called back the same day if they leave a voicemail message

  • 88% of people will leave a message on voicemail if they personally know the individual they are calling

  • More than half of people leave less than 5 voicemail messages per week

  • 79% of people will not leave a message on voicemail if they are calling to place an order for a product or service

  • More than three quarters of people think that voicemail has a place in today’s fast moving business world

There’s no doubt voicemail is useful. But. Think long and hard before you rely on people to leave messages in response to adverts or if you are not giving your customers personal service. When they ring you they want to talk to you.

We will think a little deeper about what the results mean and we’ll use the blog to discuss our points. Because we answer telephone calls for lots of other organisations you may think, correctly as it happens, that we have a vested interest in encouraging people to rely on the telephone. So feel free to give us your comments to put a brake on our enthusiasm.

The full survey results can be obtained by contacting us at marketing@office-response.co.uk

By Steve West

Marketing and Business Development Manager

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Jun29

Businesses burn the midnight oil

Posted in Surveys | 4 Comments

 

When I started working  Tescos (yes, I’m not that old, there were Tescos even then) would slam the door in your face at 5.30pm, they had a half day on Wednesday, begrudgingly opened Saturday and would have been committing an offence if they opened on a Sunday. Today we expect to be able to ring our bank 24/7 and shop 7 days a week.

Are we heading the same way in the business to business (B2B) world?

Maybe.

Simon Milner, one of our new business guys, forwarded me an article about website data from One Business Insurance revealing that the peak time for online enquiries is between 9pm -2am on a weekday closely followed by between 5-7pm on a Sunday.

In one month alone 62 per cent of those enquiring about business insurance did so outside normal working hours

“These figures really do highlight the fact that those running small businesses are never off duty,’’ said One Business Insurance Solutions operations director Darren Box.

He said enquiries ranged from shop owners looking at dedicated retail insurance through to those wanting to know more about van insurance, public liability and business interruption insurance.

Research highlights:
•62 per cent of online requests for insurance were made outside normal working hours
•46 per cent of these out of hours requests were at weekends
•The peak time for out of hours requests was between 9pm and 2am on a weekday

These numbers back up our own in that we take 40% of all of our calls outside of traditional office hours.

So if you are B2B what hours should you be answering your calls?

Martin Blain

Sales Director

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May18

C J Garlands Call Centres and SRCL Ltd. The dangers of expansion.

Posted in Call Centre Industry | No Comments

 

Two events of significance took my attention yesterday, my daughter’s Business Studies exam and the failure of North East based Garlands Call Centres with the sad loss of 1000 jobs.

The AS level exam centred on a case study of a fictitious South East based stonemasons, SRCL Ltd, and the ambitious growth plans of their MD, Joe Kring. Joe’s plans to grow turnover by 50% over 3 years would have involved opening regional offices with the consequent increase in SRCL’s fixed cost base. Within SRCL the other senior managers were uncomfortable about the risks involved and there was a clear signpost to a question about the “dangers of over expansion” particularly expansion based on goals of increasing turnover and not profitability. I’ve an encyclopaedic mind for clichés and “turnover for vanity, profit for sanity, but cash is reality” comes to mind.

As it happened the question did not appear in the exam but it must have been a topic of discussion in Garlands as apparently 3 years ago they employed 3000 and turned over £50million. The decline in business brought about by the credit crunch and the loss of contracts to offshore competitors left Garlands with the fixed costs of an infrastructure that they clearly could not sustain. We had an idea of their desperation some months ago, we had been competing with them for a contract with a price comparison website and due to one of those infamous email errors we were sent the provisional contract between Garlands and the unnamed customer. Our view of Garland’s pricing was that it was so low it was suicidal as indeed thats exactly what it turned out to be.

Chey Garland, the owner of the failed company will no doubt have made her millions, but our hearts go out to the Agents, Team Leaders, Trainers and Administrative staff who no doubt gave their all to Garlands and today wake up to the reality of their unemployed situation whilst the senior managers lick their wounds and question the wisdom of those expansion decisions.

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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Mar28

B2B? What hours do you need an answering service?

Posted in Tips, Knowledge and Experience | No Comments

 

Some telephone answering services offer blanket 24 hour cover 7 days a week to all of their customers whilst other telephone answering services only cover business hours. Which telephone answering service package is right for you if you deal mainly with other businesses?

If your clients predominantly work business hours then we would suggest that you only need a business hours service unless your clients are self employed business people (e.g. builders, publicans etc) who may want to be able to contact you in the evenings and weekends. We specialise in providing virtual reception services Monday to Friday from 8am (to catch the early callers) to 6pm. What about cover for public holidays? Our experience is that on these days you might get speculative calls from international callers unaware of our holiday dates but generally if you deal business to business (b2b) then this cover is not needed unless you must be available to overseas contacts irrespective of our holiday dates. Our business hours package includes public holidays.

Let’s say your clients are operating extended hours e.g. you deal with pubs, retailers or cinemas. In this case extending your answering times could help you pick up extra sales enquiries and you should also consider if you are expected to provide customer service to your customers when they are open but you are shut, if these circumstances apply to you then a telephone answering service during extended hours could be a great benefit. We can offer evening and weekend cover to assist you. The hours of cover should be dictated by the hours your clients work.

So who needs a full 24/7 telephone answering service? We feel that there is no need to have full 24 hour telephone answering unless you deal with organisations that are open 24/7 e.g. hospitals and financial service companies and they look to you for service outside of office hours. We rarely get calls to reception numbers outside of normal business hours but we do handle large numbers of what we term “calls outs”. When handling callouts we often take the details form the caller and then alert an on call person to deal with the issue. We ensure our overnight team are kept free to deal with these types of calls which is why we don’t offer blanket 24/7 telephone reception service to our b2b clients.

Let us know what hours you answer your calls.

By Martin Blain

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Mar19

Changes to Social Housing Standards

Posted in Tips, Knowledge and Experience | No Comments

 

The Tenant Services Authority have now published their much anticipated regulatory framework for social housing in England to be met by April 2010.

At its heart are six standards and against each of these are the outcomes landlords should meet and he TSA’s expectations of them.

The six standards cover:

  • Tenant involvement and empowerment – which contains requirements relating to customer service, choice and complaints; involvement and empowerment; and understanding and responding to diverse needs of tenants
  • Home – which contains requirements relating to quality of accommodation; and repairs and maintenance
  • Tenancy – which contains requirements relating to allocations; rent*; and tenure
  • Neighbourhood and community – which contains requirements relating to neighbourhood management; local area co-operation; and anti-social behaviour
  • Value for money
  • Governance and financial viability

The regulatory framework has been developed in collaboration with tenants, local authorities, housing associations and other partners. Its aim is to help improve the services provided for the eight million people who live in social rented and shared ownership homes in England.

Why on earth, you may be asking, is a telephone answering service blogging about the regulatory shenanigans of the social housing market?!?! Well, we answer lots of calls for Housing Associations, Local Authorities and Social Landlords across the UK; mainly during the evening and at weekends.

An example of this is the work we have been doing with Merlin Housing Society, the largest provider of social housing in South Gloucestershire. Apart from handling Merlin’s overflow calls, and calls outside of normal trading hours, we have also developed an Anti Social Behaviour Hotline for their residents.

Service Delivery Manager for Merlin, Sonia Key explains. “We’ve launched this service to give people the chance to report domestic violence, anti-social behaviour and hate crime incidents whenever they want. Although we will not be able to respond there and then, all the details will be passed on the next day to one of our specialist anti-social behaviour officers. If someone feels that they are in immediate danger they should dial 999. This service is about giving residents the support that they need and the knowledge that if they have any concerns they can contact us any time, day or night.”

For further details on Merlin Housing Society, and their positive approach to supporting their tenants, you can visit the press release and their website at http://bit.ly/bcrANe

by Steve West

Marketing & Business Development Manager

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