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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?

Apr16

Can a Call Centre Answer 100% of Calls?

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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?

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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

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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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Feb18

Is this unacceptable?

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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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Feb09

It’s Snow Joke

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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?

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Oct14

How to divert calls to a telephone answering service.

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Jul27

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

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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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