Call Centre Strategy

What’s our mission?

Ultimately it should be to deliver superior service and value to our customer. 
If we are a sales arm of head office we need to be recruiting some pretty sharp agents.  No run-of-the- mill, university holiday workers.  We need experienced telephone sales people prepared to commit to the role.If we offer a help desk function we need to make sure we have appropriately trained staff.  Staff trained in our product and not the competitor’s.  Tempers flare when a customer cannot gain a satisfactory outcome because our guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Who is the customer?

Realistically, we have multiple customers. 
We have the top of the tree executives who have financed our very existence.  They sit around board tables looking at our every performance measure.  Never underestimate the power of this group. 

Or we might be in a multi-client environment with many masters and a diverse customer base.  Our service ethic must be at a premium in such a call centre.  Our clients must feel our unwavering dedication to their customer or product.  If they get a whiff of another client draining our resources there will be trouble.  We need a structure of account managers and possibly dedicated teams to professionally cater for each client.

Then of course, we have the customer on the end of the phone.  Regardless of whether they called us or we called them – they rule!  We must give them what they want.  Expert knowledge.  The best price.  The best quality.  Agents who sound like they are having a good day.  All of this must be wrapped up into the shortest possible handling time.

The one degree of separation of an outsourced call centre will not protect you from an unhappy customer.  Your agent will get an earful, the client will hear about it too, which means you are next in line to cop it!

What’s the competition like?

Never rest on the laurels of your own marketing.  Bets are, the competition is not nearly as lousy as you infer.  You can only guess at their cost structure and employee morale because you won’t get near their data to find out. 

Keep your ear to the ground.  Anecdotal evidence of competitor behaviour gives you the opportunity to differentiate your service or to capitalise on negative consumer sentiment towards the opposition.

What’s our customer contact strategy?

Do we really need 24/7 accessibility?  Undertake the cost benefit analysis and see if the numbers stack up.  Research and historical data might argue the case for a different model.

We need to make sensible investments in technology.  Workforce management systems may be a huge outlay, but they can save us money in optimal utilisation of our workforce.  Inbound or outbound, we must staff our centre to meet our peaks and troughs.

Put adequate resources into database management.  This feeds back to better customer relationship management, better sales ratios and lower costs per call.

We need to set realistic targets for our agents.  And effective tools for measuring agent performance and customer satisfaction.

It’s worth thrashing out the issues to arrive at an agreed strategy.  Now document it and commit yourself and your staff to achieving your goals.