Another blog for class - Call Center Management

 

Call Center Mangement: 

 Avoid Customer Service FAIL!

I am to create another blog based on the survey of items that would interest folks. Only three replied to the survey and two of the topics are almost the same. I am going to cover Customer Service Management. I am using the ICMI (International Customer Management Institute) as a material source (www.icmi.com). I joined them after I was laid off from First Data hoping to keep my skills up.

With the holidays upon us and in full force most customer service phone centers are now at the busy season. How do you manage and prepare for this onslaught?

1. Plan
2. Communicate
3. Do
4. Learn

Planning is most important with some key points being:

• When do we expect the calls to arrive (especially the most busy times)
• Best and worst case scenario

Knowing when the calls will arrive is the only way to plan to have coverage. A call center can only call balance so much and if the volume is too great calls will be dropped, customers will be frustrated, and that will lead to escalated calls. Best and worst case scenarios are helpful in planning. Staffing for somewhere in between would be good, but over-staffing with the possibility of letting people go early due to low volume is a possibility.

Communication about the plan to the agents is important and getting feedback from themEdit HTML about the plan is as well. Often their will be ideas or questions about the plan that wasn't thought of that would benefit the call center. It's important to have the buy in from everyone and allow everyone to feel they have a stake in the outcome.

Do - once everyone knows the plan, has bought into how everything will work it's time to set it to work.

Learn about what went well and what can be improved after the event. Some things to consider afterwards are:

• Was the call volume estimate close? (Why or why not?)
• What worked and what didn't work
• Were there any surprises (good or bad?)
• Was staff prepared properly?

Once this information is ascertained it should be put into writing. This information will be valuable for the planning of the next call center event and should be utilized. It should also be considered a living document because once the next event is over, the new information should be compared and merged with the old so even better planning can occur.