Call Centre Management UK

By call centre management UK, we mean any one who manages an operation where customer contact takes place by telephone.

Information For Doing Business by Telephone

Fact

Some of our clients have depot operations throughout the country, where essential telephone contact with customers takes place at a local level.

Whichever, applies to you, your operation is helping your company do business by telephone.

Our thoughts to help you

For your business

Consistency builds trust. If your customers are dealt with in the same way every time they call, it helps to build comfort and trust with your business.

If customers trust you, they use you more often.

Building consistency doesn’t mean that people have to follow scripts or lose their personality. To build a more consistent approach ask yourself:-

*Are you clear about how you would like people to interact with your customers by telephone?

*Do you have clear best practice for each of the types of calls that they will be involved in?

*Is that best practice based on sound sales, service and communications principles that work for your people and your customers?

*Do your training and coaching team fully understand the reasons behind each element of best practice so that they can communicate the what, how and why to help people develop their skills and performance?

If the answer to these questions is yes, well done!

If the answer is no, consider agreeing and implementing best practice for call handling. This doesn’t have to mean call scripts, there are much more skilful ways of doing this, which allow people to have good conversations with customers.

The good news, if you are thinking about this, is that help is at hand. Request a free consultation with us.

Once these call dialogues have been drawn up, they can be used as a guide for new starters as part of the induction process, for coaches, for call evaluation, for mystery shopping, in short for quality and training purposes.

Still not sure, well we are convinced that great call handling skills make a difference to a business. We’ve found that good call handling

• Builds the relationship with customers

• Builds trust & loyalty

• Builds knowledge of your customer base to use in your marketing and telemarketing activity

• Ensures accuracy therefore reducing call backs, minimising complaints and invoice queries thereby improving cash flow into the business

• Improves the experience of the customer doing business with you

• Increases your average order value

• Contributes to your sales strategy to retain and grow customers

• Gives people the confidence to spot opportunities for other of your products and services

• Make the best of the first enquiry someone makes about your business, products and services, and your sales pipeline starts with a query.

You can see more about how call handling skills contribute to customer retention by clicking here to look at our articles which were published in call centre focus magazine.

For your people

When people feel more confident, they feel happier full stop. And they are more productive.

Confident people make a good impression with customers and critically they reduce call backs because customers trust what they say, when they hear it.

Sadly some training and development can undermine confidence rather than build it. If you undermine confidence, you distract people and performance will drop.

It is essential that your induction and any ongoing training and coaching are geared to building confidence and competence. Assessing people in probation periods and when they are on the floor, can erode confidence, unless it is done well.

Call recording can help hugely to build people’s confidence, but you have to let the agent hear their calls. Often calls are evaluated, a discussion takes place days or weeks later, and feedback is given to the agent. The danger here is that it becomes a one way process. To get real improvement and a commitment to action the agent must engage with the process. So let them hear the call. Ask them what they did well, what they need to improve on, review best practice and agree with them what they will do differently, what they will concentrate on which will build their skills and performance.

If you would like some help developing call evaluation and coaching conversations that really help build confidence and competence, then get in touch or request a free consultation

And last but not least

For your customers

Make calls count.

New for Call Centres check out our information on dealing with angry customers - the intelligent way

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