Your Call Centre
is it gaining or loosing you clients?

Call Centre Noise & Your Values?

Call Centres are like nuclear weapons, everyone has them and when used they mess everything up. Let us start with a simple question, do you operate a Call Centre for your business? What is that experience like for the client or potential client?

I’m sure you’re familiar with Basket Co., they operate Call Centres in various locations around the world, making sure Call Centre staff are working to full capacity during their day, ensuring maximum alertness and freshness. How else can they guarantee the effective and efficient service they promise on the website and in their brochure.

Call Centre Setup

All the operators sit at identical workstations, with computers, headsets and a keen eager desire to resolve your issue or query in the most helpful and expedient manner.

Management look over the Call Centre stats daily, making sure the graphs are either trending upward or at least flat. Proving to themselves that everything is going smoothly, clients and potential clients are happy, dealing with all the queries and issues efficiently. It is vital as bonuses depend upon it. So, the system is working well, better than the industry average according to the numbers. A bonus is definitely coming.

This is where the problem lays. The Call Centre is working really well, the numbers prove it, but what about the experience from the client’s perspective or the potential client for that matter. How do they feel, what was their experience like?

Helping Solve Problems

The whole point of contacting Basket Co. is to have your query answered, but the first thing you have to do, is fight over the sound of everyone else in the Call Centre. Those 100’s of operators, who are no longer standing by because they are shouting over all the other 100’s of operators, who are also no longer standing by, but shouting etc., it’s now turned into a nightmare nightclub, but without the music or libations.

• Do you feel special?
• Do you feel valued?
• Do you want to engage with the operator on the other end of the phone?
• Are you wanting to build that long-term relationship?
• Does it seem like this is the customer care promised on the website or in the glossy brochure? I suspect not, it feels more like being an item in a cattle market!

The question to Basket Co.’s management now becomes:

• Have you ever phoned your own Call Centre?
• Did you ever go through the experience of waiting on hold, subjected to hold music?
• Did you feel important when the voice says, “Your call is important to us,” but not so important as to employ enough people to answer the phone?
• Do you think this reflects well on Basket Co.?
• Are your clients loyal or just tied into a contract they are looking to ditch at the first opportunity, because the website and brochure were overly optimistic?

This situation is easy to remedy, all that Basket Co. need to do, is approach this from their client or potential client’s perspective. In that case, the client wants to feel special, to know their business is important. They want a quiet background to the call. They want the phone answered promptly. They want the auto-answer greeting to be accurate and helpful. They want to be and feel important, after all they are spending their money with Basket Co.

Call Centre Solution

Management only need to allocate a small amount of additional capital to provide a quiet calling environment, knowledgeable staff who can answer questions and settle the issues quickly to the satisfaction of the client. This transformational approach and attitude, contrasts with the penny-pinching attitude that says treating clients like cattle is good enough.

After all, management doesn’t need to use the Call Centre themselves, they don’t have to wait. Basically, all management wants is to answer as many queries as possible, in the shortest possible time, to maximize their targets, without considering how the client perceives them, but all they have to do is change their approach. If only all of Basket Co.’s clients and potential clients were so lucky!

• Do you interact with any businesses such as Basket Co?
• Do you work for them?