week7

How to create effective CALL

There are 6 key components which should be integrated into the call centre operation:    

•     Location, building and facilities

•     Customer

•     Technology

•     Process

•     People

Finend business management

A change in any one of the above components will have a direct or indirect impact on every other part! Let’s look at each of these in turn. Where a centre is located is critical in terms of the cost of the building but more importantly the ability to recruit and retain employees to work in the centre. The ease and cost to get to a centre is important for those employed in the centre but also in the integration with the Head Office functions that the centre needs to work with.

          The facilities and working environment is more critical than for functional line departments because of the intensity with which the Agents have to sit at their desks and the need to manage resource patterns. Visiting a call centre and looking at how it might feel to work in it will be extremely telling as to how good the centres performance is, but also how the organisation view and treat their employees.

          If you walk into a centre would you want your job to be based in that type of facility? If not, then why are you any different from others? Customers can be anyone, and the Agent needs to have the skills to be able to adapt their style and vocabulary to suit different customer types.

          

           The Agent talks to more customers in any one day that any other person in the organisation. If you want to know what is going on with customers, ask the Agents! With average call durations of less than 3 minutes, how do you form a relationship and build loyalty from a customer in that time. That is one of the biggest challenges that the Agents face, especially given many customers do not like the impersonal touch that call centres often provide.

           

            There are significant amounts of technology available and it is very easy to be bamboozled by it all! It very much depends on the size and nature of your business as to what you require. The basic equipment to handle calls is the Automated Call Distributor but these can range from basic to a Rolls Royce! Many centres do not fully utilise the technology that they have.