Home  Contact Us Sitemap About Us Services Career Opportunities Contact for Quote Testimonials Client Login Monday, July 07, 2008 What Makes for Great Managers? Here are the Secrets If you need to grow your management staff, hiring the wrong personnel will sink your ship quickly. You need management that knows how to hit the ground running and immediately impact agent performance. The hiring decision has lasting ramifications. New hires that aren’t successful today will only lead to more new hires tomorrow. Hire an experienced manager? Promote from within the organization? Facilitate fresh ideas from the outside? These are some of the many options senior executives must consider. But the science of understanding how to hire management isn’t complicated; you simply must analyze the level of a candidate’s desire in order to identify who will work best in the organization. Desire is the one trait that separates world-class from mediocre management. A manager’s desire to meet goals, take the extra steps on behalf of agents, and think out of the box and create special training programs to increase productivity are what leads to success. The differences between candidates A and B may be very slim, but deep down one candidate has the extra motivation to treat the contact center as much more than just a place to work. This is the person you need to hire. There are five traits that executives should consider when reviewing management candidates: The manager must see the contact center as a place of creativity. If your candidate considers the contact center just another department within the organization, he may not be the right candidate. The contact center thrives on people and emotions to achieve its objectives. A leader who doesn’t understand this will fail to move the center to the next level. The manager must want to accept responsibility for the team’s performance. Recruiters, trainers, team leaders, agents — there are any number of people in the contact center that can take responsibility for lack of performance. But only one person has true responsibility. If a manager fails to recognize that “the buck stops here,” then an “It’s not my fault!” mentality will affect your contact center’s performance and growth. The manager must understand how valuable communication and feedback are to the operating culture. The right manager will recognize the strengths of open communication. Permanent channels with which agents are comfortable — and creative channels that encourage open feedback — build a powerful environment. The simple gesture of arranging a town hall-style meeting, for example, will introduce a culture of feedback that employees will cherish. The manager must view his or her agents as participatory elements. Employees come first; peers, outside departments and extracurricular activities come second. Managers that forget how valuable their employees are to the big picture fail to create a smooth operating department. The way in which a prospective senior manager prioritizes his or her goals reveals what type of manager that candidate will be. The manager must search for answers. Talented call center managers understand that growth comes from out-of-the-box ideas. Doing the same thing the same way every time will breed the same results. Your contact center’s leader must not be afraid to obtain assistance from other departments to assist in the creation of culture. Hundreds of critical decisions are made each day in the contact center. Each decision begins with management. Your first objective in hiring a senior manager should be to recruit someone who exudes desire, values creativity, promotes communication, and has the passion and willingness to build a phenomenal culture. Once those traits have been discovered, the rest falls into place. Monday, July 07, 2008 Building Agent and Supervisor Relationships One Question At A Time Call Center managers world-wide require techniques to help them build relationships with agents. A call center is about performance and technology. But it is also first and foremost a relationship-oriented entity. In part, agents build tenure and perform consistently because they get a sense of satisfaction from their relationships at work. Managers elicit superior performance and results from their agents when they create terrific relationships with them. When things are good, this is easy. When things are challenging, it is oftentimes the relationships between manager and agent that pull a call center through the crisis. World-Class call center managers should always question their questioning process, and the questioning processes of their supervisors. Asking questions is a key relationship technique-utilized universally. Telephone sales representatives and customer service representatives ask questions in order to confirm the direction of a telephone call, gain information, and establish a relationship with the customer. In like manner and for similar reasons, supervisors and managers ask questions of their sales and service representatives. The technique of asking questions works for all types of professionals in a myriad of industries. Questions begin the relationship-building process. They demonstrate a level of interest between individuals. In a typical call center, agents question supervisors. That is the norm reinforced by conditioning. Agents question supervisors on product issues, computer dilemmas, observations and disagreements with policies. Agents want answers because they feel they are not involved in the decision-making process. So they ask questions. But how often do supervisors use questions to build relationships and to learn from their agents? My guess is not often enough. Managers don't ask questions because they are the one's making the decisions, and therefore feel no need to ascertain the thoughts of their agents. Yet management needs to be cognizant of the fact that asking questions of the agents serves several purposes, the most important of which entails building a relationship for the future. Asking questions establishes a positive environment in which the agent-supervisor relationship is able to flourish. Take a step back and look at your supervisory team. How often do they actively pose positive, non-threatening questions to their agents? How often do they use artful questions to facilitate performance? How often do they use questions to establish an open communication forum with the people who work for them? How often are your supervisors making an effort to reach out to their teams? A whole new agent-supervisor relationship begins when supervisors ask questions of their agents. Here are some ways to do this: 1. Ask Agents Questions To Which You Already Know The Answers Use your latest technology and CRM packages to track your agents' progress. For instance, perhaps your call center measures talk time, pause time, total dials completed sales or total sales made. Find some excellent performers who are performing above the norm and deserve recognition. Go to them and say "Hey, how is your day going today?" Depending on the response, you might say "I see you did XYZ today. Way to go." The key is to present encouragement. Show interest. Have them talk to you about themselves. 2. Ask Open-Ended Questions To Discover What Agents Need Open-Ended questions are general questions designed to elicit information. The questioner doesn't know what the response is going to be. Yet simple, unexpected, open-ended questions can be a relief to agents. This is especially true when they clearly need an outlet away from their telephones and computers. The least complicated questions sometimes elicit the best conversations, and facilitate a tremendous call-center culture. Questions such as the following make a difference: "How are you today? What is new with the customers and prospects today? How did you do so well yesterday? Did you get the XYZ issue resolved? Is there anything I can do to help?" These questions, while simple and logical, are rarely communicated from manager to agent. It is imperative that managers demonstrate their interest in the agents' day-to-day challenges. 3. Ask Questions To Establish Value Imagine working in an environment where your boss really doesn't care about what you do or what you think. Sad, but it happens. By simply questioning agents, management is able to demonstrate that the agents are a valued part of the organization. All agents want to believe that their supervisor values them. By asking questions, supervisors provide agents with the opportunity to comment, create, propose, strategize, and communicate issues important to them. Your questions provide your agents with an outlet and a culture they value. Monday, July 07, 2008 Winning Ways To Greet Your Agents And Get Them Off To A TERRIFIC Start To The Day Do you feel that your call center lacks an introductory game plan each day? If you or your supervisors don’t have a solid plan to keep your agents motivated and focused, then you are probably failing to do all you can do to affect performance and retention. The call center game begins when the supervisor starts the process correctly. When supervisors fail to start day right, agents fail to respond. The first 30 minutes of any call center shift should be controlled entirely by the supervisor, not the agents. The good news is that it really doesn’t matter how large your call center is. The communication presented to agents in the first 30 minutes sets the stage for the rest of the day. If you as the supervisor feel good about what the agents are doing, they’ll feel good about it too. Here are five winning ways to make the first 30 minutes work for you and your team: 1. Condition your agents to expect something when they come in – Let your agents know that every morning you will present a message in one part of your call center. Each morning have your supervisors guide the agents to that main spot to display a valuable message that your employees either want to read every shift, or need to read every shift. By doing so, you condition your agents to gather at the beginning of their shift at one location. This gets everyone in the right frame of mind to tackle the day. 2. Train agents to accept your objectives - Your agents will believe everything you say when they see that what you say matters and is valuable. Therefore, when you forget to put up a message one day, you set a precedent that will endanger other decisions. When you present a message every day and you put up valuable messages that inform and educate, anything you do from then on will be looked at more closely. 3. Consistently penalize agents who fail to meet initial company objectives (carefully) – I once worked at a boiler room that made me control agents this way: at 7:15am, the doors were closed and locked. If the agent wasn’t there, the agent went home. If was worse on Fridays – the latecomer was taken to a dark room for 30 minutes, and allowed back to work so everyone could gawk. These Draconian measures repulsed all of us, BUT, there was a lesson buried that I learned, and so should you. Consequences count. 4. Make it a point of communicating with each agent in the same way each time - No matter how large a call center you supervise, you still many communicate with each agent every day. Note: Agents want to have an opportunity to communicate with management in non-telephone communication! Agents need to see and communicate in settings that don’t involve penalty. Some ideas include: a) say, “Hello” to each agent and ask how he/she is doing, b) send a voice mail, c) send an email, d) leave a message on the chair, e) leave a personal note on the workstation. Remember a little non-essential communication is always welcome and it will payoff! 5. Be prepared to motivate early. It pays dividends - Have you ever been motivated by the boss when you’re about to leave the company? It never works. You have to become the kind of boss who motivates agents when they are pleased with the company! That always works. Motivate constantly and simplistically, right from the beginning. If agents know you have a vested interest in them you will have a partnership not a dictatorship. And in that partnership anything can happen! Monday, July 07, 2008 5 Mistakes To Avoid In Training Customer Care Representatives—Part Two 1) Train Representatives On What and How They Will Be Judged Management is so focused on getting the job done well that they sometimes forget to tell their representatives exactly what they will be judged on. Then, they forget to show them. Representatives emerge from training with general ideas on what their objectives are, but less of an idea of what will earn them praise, awards, raises and a promotion. Training sessions fail to define what allows a representative success within the corporate structure. Management also often forgets to show the representatives exactly how judging occurs. In the customer care venue, monitoring of phone calls or auditing of records may involve the use of forms. What are those forms? What requirements are listed on those forms? When do those forms get issued to the representative? In a vast majority of instances, representatives work to improve themselves and their standing at work. Therefore, representatives need to understand what they will be judged upon, when they will be judged, and how the judging will affect them. 2) Ensure That Residual Training Is Implemented After New Hire Training A common perception is that training begins and ends once the new hire training period is completed. This is where management loses their representatives. By not receiving consistent and detailed residual training sessions, representatives gain neither the skill sets nor the confidence to improve at any level other than the practical day-to-day work level. Management should institute classroom training followed by on-the-floor training, followed by residual classroom and residual on-the-floor training, for an endless period of time for each employee regardless of experience. It is important to recognize that training does not stop after the new hire leaves the classroom. That is when training begins. 3) Don’t Train Representatives On Everything In The Beginning Training customer care representatives can become a balancing act. Do the representatives need to know everything about what they do, or just enough to get the job done? Quality training begins with the understanding that too much information clutters. By cluttering, the valuable information fails to take precedence. Therefore, management should train their customer care representatives on the most important ten to thirty percent of the information first. Focus on training representatives on everything they need to know to get the job done, not everything they might want to know. The “want” can be presented later during critical residual training sessions. For instance, perhaps initial customer care training can be divided between the most important and less important topics regarding product knowledge, customer communications and product information. After the customer care representatives have gone through this initial training and worked as part of the customer care team, they can then receive less important yet valuable training on product knowledge, customer communications and product information. What management will find is that after giving representatives the most important ten to thirty percent, representatives will work on their own through their daily applications to discover much of the remaining seventy to ninety percent. 4) Teach Representatives How To Communicate With Customers Customer Care representatives are the first and most powerful communications channel with customers. Therefore, management must be careful to design a training program that introduces the basic and advanced elements of telephone and customer communications. Many times management designs a training platform that presents the facts, questions and answers, without introducing the communications training necessary to teach representatives how to articulate these facts, questions and answers to the customer. Failure to train representatives on the “how” leaves a big gap in training. 5) Dedicate A Training Person To Lead The Process Would you be stunned to learn that many customer care departments don’t have one dedicated trainer that conducts or oversees training? Instead, they delegate training to a supervisor who has other duties, a manager who may not be prepared to conduct training and therefore delivers a poor class, or a part-time trainer who also serves as a customer care representative or team-lead. An organization that takes pride in its customer care must ensure they have the budget for a training organization. The key mistake many organizations make is treating training as the low-rung and least important part of the organization. This is because management doesn’t see immediate revenue payoff from the training department. The irony is that training is predominately responsible for facilitating the success of customer care representatives. The organization's success is based on the strengths of customer care. How representatives view their company, their brand, their corporate goals and the value they place in their customers defines the success and failure of a company. Training must be a key priority for the company to achieve success in the long run. Monday, July 07, 2008 5 Mistakes To Avoid In Training Customer Care Representatives—Part One The training process is the beginning of a relationship between management and its customer care representatives. Management must understand the power of quality training. New customer care representatives base their first impressions of their jobs, and decide whether they can succeed, on the basis of expectations set within new hire training. Long-Term representatives predicate their continued success and future prospects primarily on the residual training provided. Training is the support to a quality customer care department. What starts out as management training given to representatives becomes management training received by representatives. In other words, management always designs training based on what they want to accomplish and when they want to deliver information to their representatives. Management often fails to recognize that training is all about the representatives and what they see and hear and perceive throughout the training. Planning the training class before it begins is a small first step toward alleviating the mistakes so often made. Recognizing that representatives gain knowledge is the key objective. Trainers must view their training from their students' perspective rather than from their own perspective. Customer Care training may be segmented into various stages. New Hire Training is the most important training program, because representatives who don’t understand the product, corporate objectives, or key aspects of communicating to customers fail to do their jobs well. New Hire Training is the time where management has the opportunity to gain their representatives' trust, or to lose that trust. Residual Training is essentially a downplayed aspect of customer care training. Many supervisors believe that once they have trained representatives, those employees can sink or swim on their own. They forget that residual training sharpens skills. Small one-on-one sessions, group workshops and e-learning seminars should be mixed together to foster a clear training methodology. Training is also segmented within a customer care operation. There is computer training, product training, residual training and competitor training. Each piece is critical to performance. The following is a primer for the 10 mistakes management should avoid when training customer care representatives: 1) Don’t Assume Your Representatives Understand What You Understand Don’t assume your representatives understand the relationship between telephone, product, customer and company. These four segments bring success or failure to customer care organizations. The telephone is a channel of communication between the company and the caller. The product is the area around which telephone conversation revolves. The customer is the central point---customers initiate calls and require assistance. The company is the backbone that provides the representatives with credibility. You know this. Your representatives may or may not know this. Explain it to them. 2) Ensure Representatives Understand They Represent Your Brand Management makes a critical training mistake when they fail to see their representatives as the communicators of their corporate brand. Who has more interaction with customers, the CEO or the plethora of customer care representatives that receive E-mails and telephone calls from customers on a daily basis? Customer Care representatives present the corporate brand to an audience of customers, and this is the audience that matters most. Training must impart to representatives what the corporate brand is, how it was developed, why it exists and where the company is going because of it. Most importantly, the corporate brand must express to customers why it benefits them most. When customer care representatives can’t articulate their corporate brand, the corporate brand becomes meaningless. 3) Instill A Sense Of Company Culture Into Training If customer care representatives successfully believe in the corporate brand, then they also need to believe in the company’s corporate culture. Culture provides the motivation and desire. Representatives will work an extra hour, stay on the telephone an extra minute, and help their peers complete projects all because the corporate culture encourages them to do so. When customer care representatives believe in the company culture they express that belief to customers. They do just a little more because leadership has trained them to do so. It makes all the difference. 4) Involve Representatives In All Facets Of The Company Because customer care representatives embody a critical channel between company and customer, it is important that they understand the full breadth of the corporation. Many times representatives feel they have a sense of the company, but they don’t understand the sales, marketing, business development and internal departments that form the backbone of the business. Make no mistake about it: only customer care representatives who understand the company as a whole can help set the expectations of their customers. The actions of sales and marketing oftentimes form customer perceptions, and it is the job of customer care representatives to handle these customer perceptions. In a vacuum, representatives may find this challenging. Yet, when they understand what each level of the company does, they will not only find their jobs challenging but will achieve greater success. 5) Be Certain To Teach Representatives How To Use Technology In the old days, training customer care representatives involved training them with regard to the product. Within the past 15 years, technology has become an equally prevalent training challenge. Oftentimes management fails to recognize how representatives are impacted by the technology they are required to use. Technology has become the “hidden dragon” for customer care representatives. Representatives are many times so afraid of computers, dialing systems and technology as a whole that they spend all their time either avoiding it entirely, or worrying about it too much. Management will make a gigantic blunder if they fail to provide a thorough training program to their representatives. Representatives that gain insight about technology can move on to more relevant topics such as product knowledge and communication techniques. But until representatives are comfortable with technology, it will always be a harbinger hanging over their head. Monday, July 07, 2008 Save the Sale as a Customer Care Application A “Save the Sale” campaign is an innovative approach to the traditional Customer Care application. As the name implies, the focus is to induce callers to keep the products they previously purchased, continue to receive additional products via a continuity program, and to prevent them from calling their credit card company to ask for credit. These campaigns are particularly important for Direct Response companies, as well as organizations with on-going continuity programs in place. Not only will a well run “Save the Sale” campaign pay for the cost of the out-sourcing service, the potential upside includes the creation of an additional revenue stream for your company. Here’s how your organization can benefit: Reason # 1 -- Focus on your core competency Carving out a successful niche for your product or service is difficult enough without having to learn another business. It is easy to be lulled into thinking that setting up a “Save the Sale” campaign in-house is like creating another department. The truth is “Save the Sale” applications are actually a different business; requiring new agent skill sets, IT applications, training, management, supervision, and reporting metrics. That’s not to say that companies can’t be in more than one business at the same time. There are a handful of companies that are able to do it well. The overwhelming majority of organizations are less successful. What ends up happening is that a great company ends up creating a mediocre “Save the Sale” campaign. This requires the organization to invest more and more resources to make the needed improvements. The increasing attention on the in-house call center can often unnecessarily drain the focus and resources of an organization. Working with a professional, outside “Save the Sale” organization enables you to focus on your core competencies. A well run call center that specializes in this application will help you define your goals and objectives without taking up the time effort and resources required to replicate the campaign in-house. Reason # 2 – Save time and money The call center industry has claimed for years that the savings of outsourcing can be as high as six to one. The savings associated are significant. Consider all of the on-going expenses associated with a call centers. First there’s the labor. And the liability insurance associated with the labor. And the supervision needed to watch the labor. And the managers needed to watch the supervisors who watch the labor. When all of this is factored in, the hourly cost of labor comes close to what you pay at a competitively priced call center. There are also the on-going costs associated with the switch needed to process calls. And all of the on-going costs associated with maintaining the switch as well as the costs of up-grades and repairs. The same is true for the servers, computers, printers, headsets, and networks required to run a successful “Save the Sale” campaign. Then add in the cost of the real estate dedicated to your in-house call center, the utility costs, and work station costs and maintenance. When all of the above costs are factored in, it’s clear that the overhead associated with running an in-house call center goes way beyond payroll. In fact, a conservative estimate of the savings associated with outsourcing a “Save the Sale” campaign can be between 20-40% over your current costs. Reason # 3 – The psychology of “Saving a Sale” While it’s true you know more than anyone else about your product or service, the key to a successful “Save the Sale” campaign is about understanding the psychology of sales. In the end, buying decisions are emotional decisions. The mark of a good “Save the Sale” campaign is its ability to: 1. Identify the real (read emotional) reason they want to stop the program. 2. Re-ignite the dream that compelled them to make the original buying decision. 3. Design a series of graduated incentives for the caller to continue for another 30 days. 4. Create a balanced commission plan for successful “Save the Sale” agents. Reason # 4 – Knowing what to say when “The play is the thing” Shakespeare reminds us. In the call center world, “the script is the thing.” Success is all about designing a script that is always “on message” while being flexible enough to make room for different personalities. Most importantly, a successful script must be “On message.” This is about being upbeat, friendly, and professional. It is also about being relentlessly determined to save every single sale, every single day. This mindset must be straight-forward and filled with good-natured wonder. Being “On message” has such an infectious, optimistic feeling that up to 40% of customers who are looking to cancel will be saved. Creating this type of script requires more than just product knowledge. A professional “Save the Sale” organization will help research your competitors, develop compelling benefit statements to overcome virtually all objections, and supervise the agents in such a way to insure that they stay “on message.” Reason # 5 – Strategic outsourcing For those companies that are still convinced they simply must keep the “Save the Sale” campaign in-house, the use of strategic out-sourcing is a sensible approach. Here are some examples: Outsourcing after-hours, weekend, holidays Outsourcing Spanish (or other language) calls Outsourcing overflow traffic Outsourcing specific products or services Developing a good relationship with a professional “Save the Sale” call center makes sense. A forward thinking organization should be willing to offer advice. In the best operations, “Save the Sale” Call Centers provide consulting services that can help you over the rough spots and enjoy better performance from your existing organization. What Makes for Great Managers? Here are the Secrets Building Agent and Supervisor Relationships One Question At A Time Winning Ways To Greet Your Agents And Get Them Off To A TERRIFIC Start To The Day 5 Mistakes To Avoid In Training Customer Care Representatives—Part Two 5 Mistakes To Avoid In Training Customer Care Representatives—Part One Save the Sale as a Customer Care Application Home | About Us | Services | Career Opportunities | Contact for Quote | Testimonials | Client Login Copyright © 2008 Ansafone Communications, All Rights Reserved.