I sympathize with the agents who are answering the phone at RC2 Corp right now, while several more Thomas the Tank Engine toys are being recalled for higher-than-acceptable levels of lead paint. I'm sure that right now they could use the Anglican pastoral skills of Thomas's creator Rev. W. V. Awdry to reassure angry parents who want to know how it happened in the first place.
In my experience, inbound call center work is primarily disaster response. Often the disaster is caused by the company. One of the best ways to aggravate a disaster in your call center is not to tell your employees that a disaster is coming. You would think that the "customer-facing" staff should be the first to know about a potential problem. But no. Sometimes when they find out as the queue climbs and the service level drops, management is slow to believe them.
Our friend at Call Center Comics has a great strip that rings true to me, where management doesn't bother to tell the call center about a new product, so they all assume they're getting crank calls, not sales calls. It rings true because I think it's happened to me at least once. Another cartoon basically says, "That product was released a few minutes ago, so the call center agents will be informed about it in a few weeks."
I've worked in public relations as well as call centers, and I've learned that you can't effectively deal with a public relations disaster without speed and honesty. Your company needs to quickly show that it understands the problem and has a good solution. There is no time to wait as the PR department formulates an ideal response. The moment my phone rings with the first of hundreds of angry customers, I am already doing public relations work. I am already speaking to the public. I'd be glad to speak what the company wants, if they would tell me what to say, and if it's effective and honest.
One of my public affairs crises involved a new parent who called our hospital a few weeks later to ask if it mattered that the name on their baby's wristband wasn't theirs. Yes, it did. But instead of immediately admitting that our maternity ward had sent the wrong baby home with the wrong couple and vice versa (and we're very sorry), our official statements were, "We are fully investigating the situation." At least our media relations guru was able to convince Oprah and the National Enquirer that the story wasn't worth reporting on. But it didn't help our credibility.
The RC2 Corporation seems to be doing a good job of admitting the problem, proactively looking for other possible problems, and fixing it completely. Rev. W. V. Awdry would be pleased.
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