Call centre agents on work trips abroad!
March 23, 2010
We have all heard of students coming over to this country from different parts of the world on exchange trips. The idea behind this being as well as studying they get to experience the life and traditions of the host country they are staying in. The question is could this work in the same way for call centre agents? Just think if your company is engaged in a long term contract making outbound calls to America would it be beneficial to send your call centre agents over to the states to gain some experience of life over there. They could use the time seeing how American call centres conduct business and in theory apply this to their work back in the UK. At the same time you could have their counterparts from the USA making the trip over here and observing the way we work.
Charities and the TPS
March 22, 2010
This is a blog that was posted by us last June and is possibly an issue to revisit. I tend to agree with a comment posted about this subject that charities should not be given special status solely because they are a charity. This would open the floodgates for telemarketing or other contact centre based companies using charities to get their services promoted. Would we then see companies saying things like “For every phone contract that is taken out we donate X amount to charity” Now this is only an example but you can see where I am going with this. Charity calls should be treated the same as any other commercial calls and people should have the right to block them if they do not wish to receive them.
Does anybody have a different view?
Keyboards can damage your health – Call centre health scares!
March 18, 2010
Now that I have your attention I thought it would be the ideal opportunity to discuss the transmission of viruses such as colds and flu through our places of work. It is a known fact that viruses spread quicker than anywhere else in offices, contact centres and basically any place where people are congregated for large amounts of time. Now there is a school of thought that says we should all be wiping down out keyboards and telephone equipment and using hand sanitisors to reduce the spread of germs at work. I however have a sneaky suspicion that that this drive for super cleanliness is what now makes us more susceptible to germs. I am not saying we should not wash our hands after going to the toilet or cutting down on personal hygiene I am merely pointing out that a few decades earlier we were a lot more resilient to minor illnesses.
Plasma screens replace call centre whiteboards
March 17, 2010
More and more telemarketing agencies are replacing their old whiteboards with new plasma or LCD displays, reports a popular online call centre magazine. On the face of it, for very little money you can get a relatively inexpensive 42 inch LCD screen, (£600 or less) hook it up to a computer on the office network and with very little effort have a smart new display showing your agents performance.
There is a downside to this however. Careful consideration needs to be put into what you are showing on these screens. If you have too much information you risk losing time as agents keep looking to the screens, waiting for them to update and to generally keep abreast of their performance. Too little information and you might as well have kept the whiteboard. The general consensus seems to be, keep it short and simple displaying only essential data. Anything that takes longer than a couple of seconds to read and you could be frittering away valuable calling time.
Call recordings
March 16, 2010
Call recording when done properly gives you a valuable insight into how the company is really performing when speaking to customers. This shows you not only where your staff are going wrong during calls but also where you staff are going right! All call centres and telemarketing agencies need to remember the latter part when introducing call recordings to the company as it is very important to have staff that are onside when it comes to call monitoring. They need to know that it is not just a way of finding fault with the way they are performing in their roles. Done the right way call recording is good for business.