Hi all, I am looking for ideas to capture voice of the customer and engage my team in collation of this.

I have been tasked with a work stream which is particularly specific in that it's not about capturing the customers voice through complaints handling ie the customer bringing it to us, but from the perspective of contacting customers for their feedback. 

Currently we have an external company who collates feedback. An additional requirement for us is to task our Team and Assistant team leaders with calling out to our customers and capturing feedback. A process has been provided which is scripted questions, it is non sales based and a database designed to record feedback... Probably wondering why I'm asking for ideas... The TL and ATL group are not engaged, it is time consumely, frustrating when cannot make contact and are finding that other sites are being praised for number generation when I feel actual feedback and what we can do with that is far  more important to make our service better...

Yours thoughts, ideas and suggestions are welcomed on how I can best drive capturing voice of the customer to increase my TL and ATL engagement in its task and outputs
In hope...
Emma

Belinda

There are so many measurements that people can use. The best ones are the ones that look at outcomes.

I have a friend who worked for Shelter a while ago. She said that tend to keep a log of all the people that they helped and what the outcome is.

If you are looking for more information on contact centre measures these links may be useful.

http://www.callcentrehelper.com/the-best-kpis-to-use-in-your-call-centre-10598.htm
http://www.callcentrehelper.com/have-service-level-stats-outlived-their-sell-by-date-8506.htm

We covered an article on this a while ago that may help

http://www.callcentrehelper.com/call-centre-dress-codes-13859.htm

How do you keep your frontline staff stress free?

On Call Centre Helper we are putting together a panel piece about stress and were wondering if anyone had any tips - Please note that we are not looking for a technology angle for this article.

Hi Craig,

Could recommend a couple. Is it large scale out-bound? If your agents are making a large number of calls from a large audience a dialler will be benifical, these come in three types preview, predictive and progressive.

If it is targeted outbound so they expect your call or are at least warm leads and you want to spend a bit of time over each call then preview would be best.

If it is telecommunications and cold calling predictive and progressive would be best as it automatically calls those numbers and just connects them to the agent.

Do you use a CRM (customer relations management system) for your customers?

We introduced a business dress code a couple of years back. Prior to this the only rule was no football shirts. At first there was a lot of negativity, including some people who quite rightly said they had to go out and buy business wear. We only gave a months notice of the change, and some people said they wouldn't have enough money to meet to buy correct clothing within that time.

So give good notice.

Once people got used to it things settled down. The only friction which occasionally still occurs is the rest of the business don't have a business dress code, so when other departments (who are typically seen as more senior) don't have the same rules, this tends to frustrate the agents.

Also it sometimes causes a bit of a male/female split. For men, the only options are basically, a shirt & trousers. As women s wear has much more variety you may find either standards slipping back into casual, or the need for a very comprehensive list of do's and don'ts. This is worst in the summer, when women's wear is at its most casual.

In that case you could try is (depending on team size) have a member of the QA team be the training support for the new hires, that way they can see what the agents are doing and how they get there and can provide short cuts or show them the "right" way of doing things as well as being there to answer any questions they have.

We are currently trailing this now with our new hires, they spend 3 weeks with training and end of week 1 we have one of the team begin evaluating their calls and putting together feedback for the agents. Then during the 2 weeks before they join the team we assess them as if they were on the team to show them how they are performing without the scores going towards promotion or team performance.

Its early days but again we are startign to see the new hires coming out of training more prepared and "ready" to take on the role.

Hey Chantelle

In terms of the dress code peice, part of my companies biggest peices is reflecting a professional demenour by conduct and appearance so I would say that aiming for a more business like dress code could certainly help with getting your agents in the right mindset.

That said it may have a negative effect on morale so if you allow either every friday or the last friday of the month as "Dress Down" then it will feel like a real benefit when they can dress down.

Hope that helps.

Joe

[Post removed. You are not allowed to advertise the company that you work for on this forum.]

Hi Martin, yes, it's outboud, and yes we'd like a cloud solution. Any call center software recommendations?

Thanks and appreciate your time, Craig

Hi Craig,

Are the telemarketers mainly doing out bound work? If they are making large scale out-bound calls then a vendor with a dialler of some sort would be good. If they are doing a mixture of out bound and in bound work then the options would be slightly different.

Cloud seems like it would be the best option as if they are home-based employees along as they have a phone/mobile device they can be connected anywhere. This would also allow call recording and will be available for supervisors to listen to and review.

Hope this helps?

If there are any more questions do not hesitate to ask

Martin

Could look into cloud vendors who only price on the number of agents per month you have. This gives scalability and flexibility during busy and quite times of the year.

If you would like me to suggest a website or two could do this.

Thanks for the idea their. We currently run a short 30 - 40 min presentation surrounding QA which sets out our expectations and we have training sign off documents as well but even still with that i dont think that it's sticking.

i guess both. i'm hunting for options. we are looking into magic jacks and Bria. any suggestions? :)

I am new to the forum but hoping somebody can shed some light on suitable solutions to our current challenge.

We want to consider using an outsourced solution to help manage inbound calls in various European languages including German, Spanish and Portuguese.

Does any body have any recommendations? We have no idea of potential volume and need a scalable option. We have some in-house language resource but not enough to cope. My concern is finding the right people locally with language skills may prove too much of a challenge.

Any advice would be welcomed.

Hi All,
I have recently taken over the position of supervisor for a small call centre (10 agents)and it is now my job to boost productivity in the call centre. At the moment there is no dress code in here but I am considering bringing in a business dress code. Does anyone have any experience with this or have any tips and hints for me?
Thanks, Chantelle

Hey QALoz

One of the peices my team has done is to give a presentation to the new hires right before they go on the phones on our expectation on call handling/etiqutte as well as some of the forms of monitoring we do (call evaluations, mystery shopping etc) so that right from the start they know what we are asking of them.

The presentation lasts about an hour with all the questions and tips etc. Seems to be working we have done this since June of last year and our scores are improving and we are keeping more staff.

Hope that helps

Jeremy, are you looking for low cost minutes or a complete system to support a contact centre?

I am looking at introducting our Quality Assurance Department into induction training a little bit more, to give it a stronger presence on the sales floor. We have a short training window (5 days), so i need some ideas of effective/time friendly ways to do this. Many Thanks

Hi All!

My name is Karen and I work for ADP GlobalView in Nova Scotia, Canada. I am the sole Quality Analyst for my group which handles employee level calls/contacts for multi-national companies and their payrolls. Before this role, I spent five years working as worked as a Payroll Specialist and Implementation Specialist for ADP Canada. Prior to ADP, I worked as a contact center quality coach...so it has been fun to put payroll and quality together in my current role.

I stumbled upon this site by accident, just wanted to have a look at some of the forums and guides to see what others in the industry are saying. Nice to meet you all!

Hi Top Boy,

I was just wondering - is tone of voice a key component in your call quality monitoring form? I ask because I sometimes experience this same issue within my role, and tone/professional speaking voice is a very important part of our model.

If it is included in your call model, how is it outlined? Do you have any specific guidelines as to what is required, that is specifically communicated to your agents?

I do agree with rboynton that this could be a motivation/boredom issue. Though two items we have added to our quality program are Stellar Service incentives (gift cards and recognition), and group calibration sessions. In these sessions, myself and a group of agents listen to a few calls and score them together...with emphasis on tone and professionalism. Not sure if that would work for your group, but it certainly does open their eyes and engages them in conversation about how tone impacts the calls overall.

The calibration sessions would be my first suggestion, but good luck, I hope you end up seeing the results you are looking for.

Hey Team

A quick question on a subject I am not familiar with at all so bear with me.

Is there any regulation for using an outbound dialler to call other businesses we call on a regular basis but spend a lot of time on hold with? Does an outbound dialler even have that functionality?

Sorry if I am being a bit vague but any help would really be appreciated.

Thank You

Joe

Hi Top Boy,
I would suggest reading a few of our articles on the importance of tone and body language while on the phone;

http://www.callcentrehelper.com/does-body-language-really-matter-when-talking-on-the-telephone-1711.htm
http://www.callcentrehelper.com/how-to-use-vocal-pitch-and-pace-on-the-phone-2644.htm

although I would say it sounds like a lack of motivation so maybe try our tips;

http://www.callcentrehelper.com/25-tips-for-motivating-staff-10974.htm

some great suggestions and games included to create incentive schemes and reward a positive workforce

Hi S Penny,
A few old articles but they might point you in the right direction;
http://www.callcentrehelper.com/how-to-introduce-professional-qualifications-in-to-your-contact-centre-182.htm
http://www.callcentrehelper.com/staff-qualifications-knowing-your-nvqs-from-your-mbas-170.htm
http://www.callcentrehelper.com/new-university-degree-in-contact-centre-management-773.htm

Rachael

Does anyone know what standards or kpis helpline uses to monitor and measure performance?

Hi,

We're a starting-up call center with 25 seats. I'm just wondering what is the alternative system we can use to replace our subscription with Skype. We use Skype for our outbound calls but unfortunately, it only has a limit of 50 numbers to dial a day and 10,000 minutes to use in a month per account hence its promo name Unlimited calls to the U.S. and Canada.

Please help me out here. Thank you.

Hello,

This is my first post and so I hope I am not violating any kind of rules.

We are currently in the process of setting up a call center in Munich and are looking to get pointed in the right direction of someone who can recommend a good call center software we can use there.

I am not necessarily asking for a specific vendor recommendation as much as a point in the right direction.

We've had loads of developers tell us they'll be happy to customize software for us, but then you're paying for their tuition with no guarantee. Not to mention, I am SURE three are off the shelf (or 80% off the shelf) products / cloud solutions that are already available.

We're working with home-based telemarketers and need to record/listen in on calls, etc.

Sincere thanks in advance for your time and again, I hope I have not violated any forum rules with this post.

Craig

Hey Clair

Welcome to the forums first thing I would recommend is a two pronged attack.

Ask your staff what drives them, what kind of incentive do they want, then using that information provide incentives tailored to their needs.

This is really effective especially if you have a diverse team (ages, gender, race) the incentive will be different for each of them. Some its monetary gain, others its time off, others it could be as simple as some form of recognition (certificate, thank you email with upper management included),

Hope that helps

Joe

Hi Clair,

We run an incentive scheme in each department. For example on friday in the sales team whoever qualifies the most leads wins a bottle of champagne or some other prize. We also have team targets, for example, then need to create a certain number of opportunities a month. If the team reach the target the company pay for a night out.

For the in-bound team we have incentives for how many calls they are taking and call duration.

Sometimes we do longer term incentives such as performance over 6 months. The highest performer will get an extra day's leave or something like that.

What do you currently have in place?

Hope this helps,

Martin

Hi there,

I have just become a member of this forum and was looking for some help.

What do you think is the best incentive for staff?
Do you currently run incentive schemes? If so, how many staff do you have, what gifts do you use etc.

Thanks in advance for all your helpful ideas!

Clair

Dear Todd,

Good way to keep record of all your new and existing leads is to get Customer Relations Manager in place. Many companies provide this one that comes to mind for me is Salesforce as that is a big name and we use it personally.

There are companies that will be able to provide you will relevant leads if your willing to pay for it. For example here in the UK you can buy data for 10 dollars a led with the company name the person's name, there title in the organisation and a phone number. If you want to attach an email to this and see if they respond you can also do this. These companies are SIFT and KINGPIN and there could be others.

Not sure if this was what you were looking fo so hope it helps.

Any more questions just post and will try to respond the best I can.

Best Wishes,

Martin

Hi,

We have recently launched our company in Canada. We are a broker between Canadian companies and call centres in the Philippines. To start up we used our local contact to generate a couple of campaigns but want to expand our company.

We are working on a proposal to be able to present to potential clients. We'd love any advice on what you feel would be important to include in a proposal or maybe what not to as it becomes too bulky.

Also, we'd love any advice on how others prospect for business for their call centres. Is it mostly cold calling the companies? Would you send a proposal in the mail and follow up with a call? What business sectors tend to be the most open to approaching? Really any pointers to add to what we have would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Todd

Good day!Just wanna say thank you so much for the tips. It will serves as an additional information and knowledge for the posted messages about the topics and articles.

Best regards,

Good day! I would like to introduce myself, by the way I'm Richard Fisher from New York City.It's an honor to become one of the members of this website.Hoping to know more all of you in this forum

Keep in touch!

Best regards,

Hi all

About 3 weeks ago i started as a new call centre manager with several team managers as direct reports my initial first impressions on a couple haven't been great, in fact one of them came across as slightly rude and not interested in either me or what I had to say and these were only the introductions !! They did not go for this role and therefore I don't believe it was because they were unsuccessful in promotion but I'm wondering how to tackle this going forward ?