One of the keys to successful inbound call center work is the development of "overlapping skills." That means the ability to do several things at once, while still listening (or appearing to listen) to the caller online. Without overlapping skills, a rep ends up staring at his computer screen waiting for the customer to finally explain what he wants. Your assignment, as a call center agent with a long-winded or irate caller, is to guess what he wants before he tells you.
The more calls you take, the more your sixth sense becomes developed to read your caller's mind. If you don't pay attention to what you're hearing, if you aren't focused on customer service, you'll miss the patterns.
Once you realize that calls have patterns, it's kind of fun. When I was in telephone tech support, I dealt with a lot of outages and fiber cuts. We would joke that a farmer ran his backhoe through our cable. But I'm not joking when I tell you that often we could guess where the fiber cut was by the accents of the callers. One day the call board lit up with calls, almost every one of them from someone from Little Rock, Arkansas. Another time, a flood in southwest Louisiana knocked out a bridge and the long distance transport of several major long distance phone companies. If you don't know what a southwest Louisiana accent sounds like, you will after taking twenty calls in a row from energetic people with French surnames!
What about your industry? What are the trends in your calls? Does your boss know what they are? Significantly, Colin Taylor lists failure to invest in training as one of the 10 dumb things that smart contact executives do.
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