Call centers hints and tips

India enjoys the confidence and trust of global organisations. India has been one of the first nations to step into the call centers outsourcing industry. Global organisations have already outsourced call centers to India and have found India to be an ideal outsourcing provider. Today, some of the world’s global giants have a base in India, from where they provide customer support services to their worldwide customers on a 24x7x365 days basis. These successful call centers outsourcing ventures have encouraged more and more global organisations to outsource call centers services to India and give their organisation a competitive advantage.

1. Treat everyone the same nice
As the boss, you’ll inevitably have to make some difficult decisions and you may not always be the most popular person in the office/call centers! But always treat everyone respectfully and they should do the same.

2. Value people at the call centers
Show your staff their value to your business. This could be through rewards, such as team days out or taking them for lunch, or just little treats for the office like cakes or desk-based massages. If resources are tight, just tell them how much you appreciate them.

3. Eliminate the fear
Inspired leaders recognize the need to remove fear from the work-place and instead of engendering fear they focus their energy on creating a “safe environment”.

4. Don’t just reward top achievers
Don’t just concentrate on rewarding top achievers use incentive and motivation strategies to increase employee engagement and lift performance of everyone within your organisation.

5. Text messages
If you are using text messaging people can be very intolerant of misspellings. Call handling agents are not necessarily good at spelling.

You may need to check with compliance that you have people’s permission to send them text messages.

6. Building communication across your teams at the call centers
Set up a little Facebook-type application on your intranet where people can add in their own profile. People can then see if they have any common interests such as supporting the same football team.

7. Unscheduled breaks
Breaks can be quite contentious and do not take account of problems like “I was stuck on a call” or “I want to go on my break at 3pm with Flossie”.

Some call centers are experimenting with unscheduled breaks. One way of doing this is to ask the agent to take the break at the best time for the business. You could push it down to the team leader level.

8. Preferred working patterns
A number of call centers have been asking people to put together their preferred working shift patterns. Some of them say that it must include one 5pm or one 8pm per month or week. Others insist one Friday evening per month. The employee then has to stick to the shift pattern for at least 12 months.

9. Use back-office staff to help with peak call volumes
You could use back-office staff to answer calls when you get a spike in call volume. If they cannot solve the problem they will at least be able to take a message for a call-back later.

10. Punctuality
Measuring punctuality and reporting back to the team leaders can result in an improvement in lateness over the short term. The challenge that you will have to watch is that it could be viewed as a bit negative. “You penalize me for being 5 minutes late, but did not mention that I left 10 minutes later that day”.

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