Devoted to the call center industry, the agents on the phones, and their managers

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. It got my juices flowing, but other CSRs didn't mind at all telling customers, in essence, "Maybe somebody around here can help you, but I can't."

It's true, phone companies have computer systems by which someone with telnet access can log in and add, change or delete your telephone number in real time. An agent with access to such a system can fix a problem (or cause a problem) before the customer has time to hang up. In the days before I was hired, every customer service agent had to use such a system. And if they typed something wrong, the results would be instaneous and hard to correct.

That's why the company created database systems that would check an agent's work for accuracy before it actually affected the customer's service. That was why we were originally taught that everything we did for a customer's telephone number would take two to four hours to take effect.

But as I said yesterday, somehow the four got changed to twenty-four. That little slip made life easier for the agents. I've heard some arguing with customers for twenty minutes while playing Minesweeper, "You need to wait twenty-four hours. There's nothing I can do to help you."

If the customer demanded to speak with a supervisor, the supervisor would ask me to check on the problem. Quite otfen, the first agent twenty-three and a half hours ago, hadn't even done what they said they would do. And the customer was waiting in vain for a whole day without proper phone service.

So I tried to trained the agents to look for telltale signs in the account that the problem had been corrected or not. We got many of them access to computer systems that would show that for sure if it had, in almost real time. One of the technicians, a grouchy middle-aged guy with one to three kidneys depending on his transplant status, even gave us his password to a real-time call tracing system, just so we would stop asking him about it.

The result: call center agents had the tools and the training to make a difference with customers.

Further reading:  Call Center Spotlight: Virgin Mobile Canada