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Aug29
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 Call centers ought to hire really ugly people, since their customers can't see them. But they never do. I've never worked with any tragically scarred people. But I've worked with some weird people. Probably the most interesting person in my department, possibly in the entire mega-building, was Lady Margarita, sometimes called the Queen. She was quite short, spoke with great intensity, and worked out every day. She also kept a personal injury attorney on retainer. I suppose that was in case someone injured her personally, which had happened before. She also studied karate in case her legal remedies were exhausted. One time Lady Margarita returned from lunch in great indignation: "I cannot believe it," she reported. "I got a ticket while parking at the gym. As you know, I work out on a daily basis, and there's no reason why I should get a ticket. I'm going to contact my attorney immediately." It turned out she had parked in a handicapped spot.
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Aug28
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John Joseph of Envox Worldwide offers suggestions on how to train virtual call center agents, who work at home: If you go virtual, your organization must make a corporate commitment to modify hiring and training practices accordingly. At-home agents...
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Aug27
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Today's guest writer is John Joseph, vice president of corporate marketing at Envox Worldwide, a voice solutions provider based in Westborough, MA.With VoIP and standards-based CTI software, at-home agents can be a practical technical solution. VoIP puts the voice...
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Aug24
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One example of the effective use of VOIP-based virtual call centers comes from Alta Colleges, which is headquartered in Denver and is the parent of Westwood College, which in turn has eighteen campuses in five states and a significant online...
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Aug23
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In our tech support department, we had to develop some of our expertise simply because we had so little respect on our own. We were just customer service reps, really. So every time we sought help from a bigger...
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Aug22
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My own tech support group's hobby, because nobody else was willing to specialize in it, was working with tiny independent local phone companies who had telephone outages that involved our company. Probably the classic example involved Navajo Communications, a local...
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Aug21
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In an effort to help customers whom no one else would, the staff of our now-defunct call center tried some creative approaches. For example, we learned how to game our own call center's policies. Not allowed to make outbound calls...
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Aug20
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It's so easy for the customer to get caught in the middle. "That's handled by another department." "But they told me to call you." "That's something that the other company needs to solve." "I'm getting the runaround. They insisted it...
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Aug17
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Some call center management philosophies say, in essence, "It's easier to limit an agent's power to help a customer than it is to train the agent how to use that power properly." This was particularly common at our telephone company....
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Aug16
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One of my pet peeves, as a tech support person, was the habit of many agents to make up arbitrary times by which their customer's problem would be repaired. One of their favorites was "two to twenty-four hours." Any problem...
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Aug15
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Yesterday I told you about a time when every call was a call to cancel, every bill was wrong, and the next two bills would also be wrong. What do you do when the system is against you? Under...
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Aug14
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One of our most senior agents, perhaps our most senior (her career with the company dated back two decades and about five mergers), sat next to me during one of our darkest times, when almost every caller was calling to...
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Aug13
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There's a fine line between telling the customer that you don't know the answer to their question and telling them that your company is stupid. It's a line that gets crossed frequently, and only one way. Some reps may as...
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Aug10
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This week we've been talking about VOIP, which uses data lines, not phone lines, to make and receive calls. It's ideal for virtual call centers because it's so cheap, so cheap that some VOIP companies are having trouble making any...
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Aug 9
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John Kim of LeadMarket talks about the importance of headsets for home-based call centers: While true that virtual call centers need little in traditional equipment, the evolution of the USB-based headset for agents has been nothing short of revolutionary. Do...
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Aug 8
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John Kim of LeadMarket gives the third item in his checklist for virtual call center success - feature functionality: While hosted call center technology has been around for several years, premise-based - or traditional - call center technology has been...
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Aug 7
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John Kim of Five9.com talks about the importance of good network uptime for virtual call centers:In the event your system should go down, one needs to know that the virtual call center technology vendor will have a high level of...
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Aug 6
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This week, John Sung Kim gives a 4 Item Success Checklist for virtual call centers. In 2001, John invented the world’s first VoIP Call Center Software-as-a-Service. He is the founder of Five9.com and LeadMarket.com.One of the first questions to...
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Aug 3
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Sometimes the only way to get a customer to understand what you're saying, especially if you use different brands of English, is to spell it out. These stories come from Pinoy Exchange forum's Call Center Bloopers and Boo Boos. You...
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Aug 2
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Outsourcing call centers has been criticized as sometimes leading to worse customer service. Ken Carlon, CEO of Optima, suggests that companies need to have a level head about the subject. Isn't there a danger of losing touch or losing control...
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Aug 1
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Ken Carlon, CEO of Optima, gives his case for outsourcing call centers, something that his company specializes in. How can outsourcing a call center improve a company's bottom line? Assuming we are not discussing offshore, in addition to effective utilization, there...
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