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

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

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

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.

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

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

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,

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.

This is the place on the forum where you can come and introduce yourself and say hello to others.

Your job role
Who you work for
What your company does
Any hobbies or interests.

I currently have a number of agents the continually answer and speak during a call with a DULL and BORED tone of voice, also they don't seem to engage or show empathy to the caller.... sounding like a old BBC news reader for example Moira Stuart

I have suggested a number of different ways to answer the call for example a smile on your face, also I explain to the agents talk how you are talking to me (how you speak to a friend or colleague face 2 face) but this fall on deaf ears.

I even sit side by side listening to the calls setting a small objective for the next call as above this falls on deaf ears.

Also I have notice the caller starts of upbeat but mirrors the agent in tone of voice and often becomes negative or frustrated during the call.

Can any help or suggest what to do next?

Hope to hear from you all soon

TOP BOY

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

I have been working in call / contact centres for the last 14 years and managing one for the last 4. I would really like to have a qualification to recognise the skills and knowledge I have, and also to challenge me. Looking online there does not appear to be many in the UK???

The only one I did find (Diploma in Contact Centre Management) has not had all of the course content completed and may not be ready for some time.

As I am full time in work, the course would need to be work based. Does any one know of any courses?

Thanks

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

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

We keep the rules fairly simple and straight forward.

Do - share your experience, knowledge, hints and tips
Do - answer people's questions
Do - remain anonymous if you want

Don't - promote your products and services (or those you have a financial interest in.)
Don't - use your logo as your profile picture
Don't - use your company name as your user name
Don't - use your e-mail address as your user name
Don't - ask people to contact you
Don't - leave your phone number or email address
Don't - worry too much about spelling - it's the message that counts

There is freedom of speech but please do not harass people – everyone has a right to give their own opinions

We have three active moderators keeping an eye on the forum and have a no tolerance policy to commercial messages.

I hope that you enjoy the community

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 ?

Hello Callcentre Helpers!

I'm keen to learn from all you experts out there.....

What, in your view, are the absolutely essential performance measures and stats needed in call centres to ensure continuous service improvement is embedded and an accurate reflection of the customer experience is given?

Any examples of how you have used these to turn your service around would be really appreciated!!

Thanks in advance

Hi,

-I'm new here so i just wanted to know if anyone from you had experience with targets!
-I have been appointed to make targets for 2012 for a team that has 30 members!
-We are telecommunication company, and main activities are surveys, new offers, new promotions etc...
-The problem is that we don't have proper plan, but we receive work from time to time, and i found it hard to set targets for my team!
-They work 4 hours a day and have only 30 minutes brake!

-Any one has any idea ?

Thank you in advance
Blake

Good day,

I am looking to create a new complaints process and implement this into my office. Could I kindly ask if anyone has a robust process in place that they dont mind sharing or any tips/links you could share.

We are currently working from a spreadsheet were we log complaints and update with resolutions however this is not measurable and I am looking for something in which we can measure and manage performance, introduce stratagies for improvement etc.

Here's hoping you can help.

Hello,

We are looking to introduce a new performance framework in our contact centre (Local Authority) We have set up a task and finish group to work on this. We have recently gone through a huge transformation in the way our operatives work, partly due to the roll out of a new CRM system. The focus is very much about adding value and our customer strategy is focused around helping customers to help themselves. We have previously used AHT for individual services and more recently calls per hour. Does anybody have experience of removing numeric figures and/or a framework in place that is centered around the customer experience? It would be useful to know how staff are measured.

Just a quick question to find out the number of call centres in the UK, and how many of these contact centres are in-house or outsourced.

Any feedback would be benifical on this.

Hi Guys,

I'm just looking for a team leader job performance appraisal can you help me please to find a good form and guidelines for how to evaluate them.

Best Regards
Maghraby

Hi,

Just trying to find out the best practice for creating menu tones in our business.

I understand the IVR (in voice routing) but is it best to have less options or to have complex menus.

Any advice on this would be helpful.

Thanks,

Martin

Hi, does anybody know the calcuation eWFM uses to determine staff requirement?

Many Thanks

Good Morning All

I have created a project for myself to come up with an alternative customer experiance within my existing company.

There are many ways to begin the process and I have started an initial review of current proces to see what is essential and what can be stripped out.

This is however my first attempt at anything like this and just wanted to know if anyone had implemented something similar and could pass on any words of wisdom,

Thank you in advance

Joe

I work for a web based lighting retailer. We have an excellent search rank, so much so that we often get calls mistaking us for the manufacturers of the lines we sell. Today these calls are mostly "throw aways". On the surface we are getting calls from people who would otherwise never call us.

I am trying to see if anyone has advice on how we might monetize this opportunity.

Any ideas would be helpful.

Hi

We are looking to run a recruitment day for a new CS advisor and are considering a telephone interview to screen as a first stage. Anyone else use this method and if so what typeof questions do you use to ensure you're not missing out on a really good candidate

Thanks

Hi

We have a charity who is new to the game of Telemarketing and completely in the dark as to how they should process the payment data we supply them and are assuming it gets all done during the call. Or if not by the us after the call. Keeping aside PCI constraints which we will adhere to I have to admit that I'm stumped as up to now the clients I've dealt with have facilities in place to process the required transactions. So I turn to you all for advice

The scenario: We will be calling donors asking them to become regular givers. If they agree to this we will then take down the relevant debit information (Bank Details or CC) and the amount they wish to donate monthly/quarterly

All good up to now but then do call centres in the UK have some software or gateway service that enable you to enter this information in real time and set up the direct debit? What do you have or what do you do to set up a paperless direct dbit facility?

Otherwise if you supply this data back to the client how do they set up the regular payments?

We don't tend to own the relationship with payment gateway providers here but do integrate them regularly into our call flows as per the client's brief. In my experience they have only been for Credit Cards though and primarily one off donations or payments. For all banking information that is provided back to us we hand this to the client to process. What happens then??

I suppose what I'm looking for is a contact or somesuch so I can advise of the different solutions to the client. They are even more in the dark than I am and think money comes to them magically!

Help!

Hi,

I would like to get an idea of how many quality outbound calls your, in a general sense, agents are expected to make in a normal working day, say 08:30-5:00pm.
Naturally we are looking to up date the data held on the profile and speak to the correct person.
Would 160 calls a day in order to generate 4-6 leads a day be a sensible option. this would include typing up notes, up dating data and emailing the company email should this be requested.

Hi-

I'd like to see if anyone in the group is willing to share their call center service level goals? I would like to use the numbers only to benchmark my organizations goals.

I am looking to see if anyone knows of any Contact Centre Awards there are in Glasgow or in Scotland in General. We do so many great things within More Than and would like to celebrate, share and advocate this within the COntact centre world.

Morning All

We are playing around with an idea to involve our management team with all of our different agents.

To this end we were thinking of having our managers rotate which team they look after every 6 months. This will hopefully enrich our agents because they are exposed to different management styles, encourage development as our managers will want to show they can be successful with any agent and reduce the chance of agent vs supervisor clash as it will be temporary.

Has any one done this before or has any words of wisdom to watch for?

Joe

I am currently reviewing the yearly performance plans for my real time and planning teams and was hoping you could share with me the kind of performance metrics you set for your teams e.g 8% daily forecast accuracy.

Thanks in advance,
Catherine

Hi guys,

Hope someone can help.

We will be getting a new phone system, that does all sorts of trendy call routing. Traditionally we have had a straight queue with no IVR's or any other sort of call management (the only management it did was out of hours messages.

We plan to have skill based routing, priority based routing and a few other things.

I was wondering if anyone known of some free software that we can use to draw up a routing plan?

My main concern is that we could well end up with a routing plan that causes problems (like pushing low priority calls to far back in the queue, unreasonable reduction in handling capacity). What would be great is if there was some way to simulate a routing plan to see the sort of outcome that might occur, along with getting a better feel for how different functionality might conflict.

Obviously I want to be sure we are getting what we need (before we buy it), and also want to have a smooth transition onto some intelligent routing without our customers becoming Guinea pigs.

Has anyone got any recommendations, or faced this problem before?

Thanks

In our contact centre we have been using Quality Monitoring forms that have a scale from 1 - 5 for each thing that is being marked. The problem is that what someone sees as a 3, someone else might mark as a 5. This meant that scoring was not consistant.

I made up a new form and it seems to be working a bit better although it is not perfect by any means.

I am interested to hear how other people Quality Monitor their calls and if possible it would be great to see some examples.

I am putting together a new form that will be scored as yes/no, a work in progress.

Looking forward to hearing how everyone else does it.

Hi all, I've searched and searched but not found what I am looking for so hope someone can help me!
At present we use an Excel based tool with simple yes, no's etc to assess the quality of an interaction with a customer (interactions in our case being calls, emails and web based communications). Excel isn't the best tool for this and I am trying to find out if anyone has ever used some other type of system/software to do QM.
A system where assessments can be recorded, the assessment form be customised and results displayed in various formats (data only, charts etc) would be ideal - does this exist as a stand alone product?

Thanks all.

In the process of a National Schedule Review within the business. One of the principles we set out was to provide advisors a choice in shifts patterns.
We have come across a issue in the selection criteria, how do we assign 1 shift pattern to 2 different advisors who have selected this as their 1st choice (for example).
There have been numerous discussions around performance, length of service, behavioural issues, however with each criteria highlights problems. Length of service - ageism, Behavioural - somebody’s discretion.
Is there a fair way we can allocate shift no based on the above?
Thanks

Hi all

Im trying to get some info on exactly how to use this software to manage real time inbound call volume effectively. I have minimal knowledge limited to using "simple control" function. Can anyone provide a link or any hints/tips?

Many thanks

Hi all,

We introduced a new induction programme last year and have had 3 groups of new staff go through it. 3 weeks classroom based and 2 weeks Grad Bay. Previously there was nor real formal induction in place. We have found that people going through the new induction are performing realy well and are well prepared for the job.

I have been tasked by my manager to do a ROI on the new induction so we can present to the Board of Directors as they are wanting proof that this new induction is giving good value for money.

I am looking for tips on how to do this. It ks a long time since I have completed an ROI.

Any help appreciated.

Hello all,

We are curently looking to source a new CRM for a busy London Call Centre. I was initially following a bespoke route via our outsourced IT team, however i was alerted to the possibility of matching our requirements in an off-the-shelf solution (i.e. Sales Force / Dynamics / ACT!).
The later generally seem to be hosted, and very expensive per licence.

There are 2 main reasons why i am struggling with the bespoke option;

1. The first being the lack of support - there is one main guy who will be writing the application, and i am worried that if the relationship sours or God forbid anything should befall him, then where does that leave me?

2. The second is that i will not be discovering any new ideas with the bespoke solution, it will only do what processes i ask of the programmers. With the existing CRM's i would hope it will do exactly what i want, with the added benefit of offering new things i have not thought of before to help improve the business.

My apologies for the long message - Does anyone have any advice on my available options. If possible, can someone point me to any good CRM packages as i am pretty desperate and confused just now!

Regards, Shameer.

I have been asked to look at the impact adding call back and web chat facility to our website. We are an inbound contact centre handling member service enquiries. We currently receive 500-700 calls and 200 written/fax or e-mail contacts.
There are approx 850 hit to our website daily, and I wondered if anyone has experience of setting these up and understanding the forecasted contact impact.

Many thanks

Brian

Hi,

Im looking for some help - we need a consultant to come in and give us a hand with creating an accurate call prediction formula for our inbound contact centre - we have all the data including % responses from letter types but we need help putting it into a user friendly format thats accurate enough to forecast well into the future. We've never needed anything special in the past but are about to blend inbound and outbound, which is notoriously difficult so we need something accurate.
If anyone knows of anyone out there who can help for a few days I would be eternally grateful!!!!

thanks,
Tracy

Pls tell me common Sales advisor interview questions.
Tks so much!

Just wondered what top five things do you look for when recruiting for a business Call Centre?

Most days I log into Twitter and see a predictable stream of people getting upset with call centres.

After a while we come to accept this criticism.

But is it right and what can we do to change these perceptions?

How can we improve the public perception of contact centres?

I'm so bored with common interview questions. What are some Creative interview questions you know? Is it appropriate to be asked in small companies?

Good Morning

I have been asked to look at new metrics to remove the need to target AHT. I have heard occupancy mentioned so many times but this is not something i have ever looked at. Can any one help with some advsie what this may be and if this could be a good way in which to manage productivity/performance in a small (14 people 500 calls a day) call centre

Hi all, was wondering if any of you know of any good sites for training material on a range of different topics ; call coaching, customer service, sales etc etc I'm happy to pay but need to start from scratch so any pointers would be great like a trainers for trainers for call centre etc

Many thanks in advance

Hello all,

I am new to the call centre business and am trying to understand how I can schedule our agents most effectively.

We have approx 120 agents split between three groups. An IVR directs calls to one of the three groups, however my problem is that not all agents in a group are skilled in the same thing.

To try and explain further - group 1 includes service A, B, C and D. There are 30 agents in group 1. Some can take service A and B, others can only take C and some can take all.

To further complicate we are open 8-6 and full time hours equate to 35 a week so we have three shifts: 8-4, 9-5 and 10-6.

Our IVR allows agents to receive only the calls that they are trained in but our WFS system (prariefyre/Actimax)does not allow for variable skill-sets so at the moment I have 2 excellent staff desperately trying to work it out via spreadsheets and doing as good a job as they possibly can!

We have had high level conference calls with the company who say what we request is not possible but other call centres must have the same issue!!

Any help/suggestions would be most welcome.

Thanks.

Hello-

Please help!! My center is using the Cisco application which I am unfamiliar with. (I am a faithful AVAYA user through and through). I am trying to build a business case to change our service level goals which are currently answering 85% of calls within 35 seconds. I'd like to know if anyone is familiar with a process that I can use, that will allow me to take our current data and find out what our stats would look like if we were to go to say a goal of answering 75% of calls within 60 seconds.

Our IT team's knowledge of the Cisco application is limited and I need some help.