Invest in Your Call Center Staff to Best Serve Your Patients Call center agents are often the first contact someone has with your organization. If they conduct themselves well, this establishes a positive first step for a long-term successful relationship. But if they fall short, it may be your last interaction with the caller. Given […]
Don’t Let the Day-to-Day Pressures of Running Your TAS Push Aside What Matters More Running a telephone answering service is a challenging proposition. It seems there’s always too much to do and not enough time to do it. Therefore, it’s understandable when the day ends before you complete your to-do-list. But that’s not justification for […]
Care for Your Staff and They’re More Likely to Care for You and Your Callers Staffing a call center is hard. Keeping it staffed is getting harder. With finding new staff becoming increasingly challenging, retaining existing staff is even more critical. Here are five tips to create a positive call center work environment and boost […]
Master the Art of Effective Call Center Communication Some people think working in a call center is easy because they like to talk. But that doesn’t guarantee agent customer service success. Instead, successful agents need to work at it. Yes, this is easier for some than others, but no one is born with the ability […]
Pursue Agent Cross Training to Produce Better Outcomes and Improve Efficacy In my post “Integrate Your Call Center” I discussed various integration strategies to pursue. Now I’ll dive into each one of them with more intentionality. First up is to integrate call center staff. The key requirement to staffing integration is cross training. Cross training […]
Consider the Optimum Strategy for Your Contact Center Staff At one time call centers handled calls and nothing else. They had one channel. That was it. Now most call centers handle more than just telephone calls. They’ve become multichannel. Contact center is a better name for them. Along with phone calls—which is still the predominant […]
My wife and I recently moved. There were the typical myriad of details to attend to, including arranging for utilities. I had three calls to make: one for natural gas, one for electricity, and one for water. I called the electric company first, as I assumed this would be the easiest. They had provided us […]
The success rate of agents transferring calls is not good. In fact, based on my experience, successful call transfers actually occur less than half the time. The most common result is being disconnected. When a disconnected caller calls back, the happy caller has likely become irritated, the irritated caller has become irate, and the irate […]
At one time all call centers used a free-form philosophy of recording caller provided information and communication, be it an order, a message, or an information submission. Free-form documentation is analogous to a paper phone message pad, with the agent filling in whatever blanks deemed appropriate, in any order preferred. As such, there is great […]
How often have you called someplace and wondered if you reached the right number? All too often, calls are answered hurriedly, haphazardly, or incompletely. Or perhaps the agent seems out of breath by the time they complete a lengthy, tongue-twisting answer. It is vital that all calls be consistently answered in the same way, regardless […]