Our topic for our newsletters and blogs this month is “Will outsourcing to a call center improve customer service?” Increasingly, today, companies are looking to call centers as an alternative to in-house customer service. The question is, will outsourcing improve your customer service? The answer: only if you guide it there.
Part of this guiding process is establishing standards, as we talked about in the first blog this month. Once those standards are established, it becomes a matter of constant calibration of call center agents to those standards.
In general use, the term “calibration" means to determine or check the accuracy of an instrument against one that is known to be accurate, or against a specific measurement. An example would be calibration of thermometers in incubators holding premature babies—making sure the correct temperature remains constant. In this case, it simply means listening to calls and correcting and adjusting an agent to the standards you have already set, if required.
In the case of our client, who hired us to train the call center agents at the outside call centers they contracted, we listened to the agent calls every week. We then were able to correct the agents against the standards we had established. In such a way, we were able to maintain a consistent set of standards.
The practice of calibration is vitally important because it means that both the company and the call center are on the same page—they’re both looking at the same data. It allows for continuous improvement of both the call center and the overall process they are using to receive your calls.
A great example of a beneficial result in working with our client and calibrating their contracted call centers was that, after a couple of months, we discovered by listening to call, that callers were actually ready to order when they called. They didn’t need to go through a lengthy process. We eliminated a longer opening set of questions that had previously been used. Instead, we simply assumed callers were calling to order. We had the agent thank the person for calling, take their name and number, and immediately start taking the order.
As soon as we started operating on the assumption that callers were ready to purchase, our conversion increased by 15 to 20 percent. Instead of overcomplicating the process, we simplified it for the call center agents. This could be a lesson to others using call centers—there might be a temptation to overcomplicate things. Keep it simple, as the majority of callers might be ready to purchase and not require a lengthy “runway.”
We then added in a step of asking the caller a thought-provoking question. At the appropriate time, we would have the agent ask what inspired them to call, which would provide us with more information for our future sales and marketing efforts.
Who performs the calibration of call center agents to standards? With most companies, it would be the sales manager for that company, making sure that call center standards are adhered to when answering calls. In our case, it was SELLability, as we were providing that service (and do provide that service) for our clients.
To learn more, sign up at SELLability.com.
