OK, this is nice, but irrelevant. We are not talking about solicitors calling us, we are talking about us calling to place an order or some such. Believe me, the telemarketers only get “no thanks, I’m not interested.” and then a dial tone.
When come back, bring grammar. Have a nice day.
Huh. We had company phone lists with “Bomb Threat” printed on the back of them which we were supposed to wave in the air in the event of such a call. No advice for what was supposed to happen if nobody happened to see you waving the paper frantically.
Heh. Presumably, once we pushed the button, corporate security would be listening in while they got someone to rush over to help. My phoned-in-bomb-threat training is a bit rusty (we were a call center, but had an entire class on what to do if someone calls in a bomb threat… do people make bomb threats to call centers?), but as I recall, in the mean time, we were supposed to ask a series of questions. “Where is the bomb? When will it go off? What is your name? What is your address?” etc.
[QUOTE=atomicbadgerrace “Where is the bomb? When will it go off? What is your name? What is your address?” etc.[/QUOTE]
Do you have an email address that you’d like us to send your confirmation number to? Today we have a special offer on towels. These are Egyptian cotton, 100% recycled fibers, with…
<cracking up at the image of a call center wonk trying to keep a mad bomber on the line>
A couple times, I have replied that their recording was okay by me. “And I assume it’s all right with you that I may be recording this call from my end.” Both times, the call center person was totally flummoxed. Though it was routine for them to record, they were nervous about me doing the same.
I wonder why?
Yes, but that’s like telling someone on a message board that you’re going to kill them.
You’d have to find the call center to blow it up - and the facility is probably owned by a 3rd-party vendor anyway.
Probably because they weren’t used to. I managed a technical call center for a while and many folks there would just lock up if they encountered something totally outside what they were expecting.
I had a couple people do that. I always just said “Go for it.”. I also dealt with a bunch of people when I worked insurance claims that would threaten to get an attorney (even though it was obvious they had no intention of doing so) My usual response was, “Wonderful, do you need our mailing address so they can send their letter of representation?”
I love turning it around on people when they try to rattle me. 
Not too terribly difficult to do if you have a good idea of who you’re talking to. I never got a bomb threat, but I did have an upset customer show up at the call center one day when I was working. A fellow I had made unhappy a few days prior by refusing to credit his finance charges. He lived in the same city, and I guess knew of our presence there. Security called up from the lobby to advise me that I had a “visitor.” Turns out, it was the crazy loon who wanted to “discuss this with me one on one in person.”
Huh. V strange- I work in a field where the insurers we represent guard their physical addresses jealously- you have to go through several layers of red tape to find them.
(mostly because people who approve or deny your medical care reaaly do have to worry about getting blown up)
I admit I’m not sure how difficult it would be, exactly, for most call centers. In a few instances, I’ve made small talk with various employees of places I’ve called, asking where they are, how the weather is, etc. I suppose if you really wanted to, you could take “Piedmont, North Dakota” and “XYZ Bank” and ask around if anyone knows where the call center is.
Wasn’t too hard for this guy, in this case, tho. He only lived about 15 minutes from our campus, which was definitely well known and well-signed as belonging to us. How many of our buildings he had to go to before he found mine, though, is anyone’s guess. 
My call-monitoring meeting has been moved from 3-4 tomorrow to 11-12. We Team Leads will huddle around the ol’ speakerphone & listen in shocked horror to what passes between our staff and the outside world. We’ve had the Collections Lead (whose calls are those we’re monitoring) suddenly dash from the room to tell an agent to back down!! Other times, we nod and smile our silent approval as someone handles a situation just right.
When the calls are used in training, can the people being trained usually tell where things went bad? Or is it a mystery to all concerned? Is it usually just a blame the customer thing?
I’m asking because I’ve had a couple of phone calls to call centers that just became disasters. From my perspective, it was because of the employee (I started out cordial/polite/friendly … I didn’t end there). But I’ve always wondered if they ever played back the recording or if they ever said “maybe this could have been handled had you ____________.”
We did have a sort of checklist – we were supposed to keep the person talking and then mark off things like, was there noise in the background, did the person sound like he was disguising his voice, what ethnicity/sex/part of the country did it seem to be, what type of phone connection, etc. I’m sure it would have been of value had there ever been a bona fide threat, but also might have calmed me down a bit to have had a dedicated task to fill out the form rather than totally freaking.
Oh, absolutely. You can even tell on your own calls, too. Hindsight is 20/20, and it’s most definitely not an “always blame the customer” thing.
By the end of our initial training class, we’d be listening to calls, and a few minutes into it the CSR would make some egregious error. The entire class would let out an audible “uh oh…”
One of the most easily diagnosable points of when a conversation goes downhill is when the agent or operator uses emotionally charged language. Customers don’t like hearing “you’re wrong,” or “that’s not true,” or even a simple “no.” There’s a whole bunch of ways to express these concepts that don’t involve clearly negative language. It may sound like so many “weasel words,” but when you’re trying to keep a conversation on-track and logical, weasel words are often all we have. Tone of voice is important as well. Anyone can say “I’m sorry” to an enraged caller, but it really fans the flames when it’s expressed as “wellsirI’msorryyou’reupsetmayIhaveyourcreditcardnumber?” Also, it’s very, very easy to hear when someone is or isn’t smiling when they answer a call. It’s important for a problem conversation to start off on the right foot.
All these things - and more - come out in training (or re-training) sessions.
It depends on what it is.
Quality assurance generally means a scored checklist. Each individual thing is worth points, or a percentage if you will. So, for example, using the proper opening “Thank you for calling Gizmos and Widgets, this is Sandra Dee, how may I help you today?” might be 2%. Trying to retain a cancelling customer might be more like 30%. Some things were automatic failure as well, such as failure to upsell.
So, there are some things (like, say, the specifics of verifying an account, or saying “I can help you with that” when the customer says what they want) that are not very obvious to an untrained ear, while others, like incorrect transactions or rudeness, are quite obvious.
Now QA for us was generally in the neighborhood of 30% of your total performance. Other parts would be how many customers you could retain on one client’s account, or on another, your customer satisfaction surveys. Another portion would be attendance, another for professionalism. You would also have a significant chunk for adherence (adherence to your schedule - taking your breaks at the right time, taking few ‘unscheduled’ breaks such as to the bathroom, not taking much time between calls). Basically, adherence made sure you were an ‘efficient’ employee, as did average handle time, another part of your score.
Now of course call centers can balance this however they want. I’ve seen cases where QA was marginalized so that retention/upselling, handle time, and adherence - money makers/savers - were focused on. Of course, this creates agents who don’t care if they fix your problem, but want to sell you stuff, and do it fast. This creates situations where the “best” agents are the ones who basically get customers who don’t want to buy anything to get off the phone as quickly as possible. This creates a lot of “well, call back in a week” scenarios.
Usually, when calls are used in training, the trainer will say “ok, listen here – so-and-so should say _____ but says _____” A good trainer would, anyway.
I am pretty sure my call from the psycho I mentioned in my earlier post will be used in training, as I totally kept my cool and handled the woman beautifully, even though she was obviously mentally unstable. I have actually had the training supervisor and a new class listening in on a call while I was on it before. I had some very weird situation and she wanted the class to hear it – so it was actually real-time, not recorded.
As to listening to calls for entertainment, yeh, that happens, too. One of my friends in another department sent me a copy of a call from a woman that was obviously paranoid and delusional – the FBI were stealing her mail is why dhe didn’t have a catalog – it was flippin’ hilarious.
I am sure that these recordings are legitimately used by the caller for training and quality purposes. I am just as sure that they are used to bolster the caller’s position in case of a legal dispute when it benefits the caller. If the recording doesn’t benefit the caller, it will probably cease to exist in short order.
In business, I don’t do anything unless it’s of substantial benefit to me. I certainly don’t do anything that is in the interest of the other party at the expense of mine. This is why, living in a two party consent state, I immediately inform the caller that I do not consent to being recorded, which invariably results in the caller saying goodbye and hanging up. This saves me a lot of sales pitches. I figure that if the call is important enough to an existing, mutually beneficial, bona fide business relationship between the caller and me, the recording will be turned off and the call will proceed. If not, there was most probably no benefit to me from the call anyway, and time is money.
That’s weird. I’ve never head the “this call may be recorded…” shtick on an incoming call, only the ones where I called the business.