subject: Frustration for Answering Service [print this page] The reputation of the customer care department sometimes decides whether the consumer will buy from your brand. Such is the importance of the answering service team when it comes to telemarketing. Brands have realized often that consumers shy away from purchasing products/services when they have heard bad things about the customer care department. Consumers are aware that they will have their brushes with that department every now and then. They don't want those experiences to be traumatic ones. Once your purchase falters at any level, the only way to contact the company and resolve the issue is through the phone answering department. And if they hear about customers having a harrowing experience when they tried to resolve issues, they become paranoid about associating themselves with such a brand. Let's take a look at what frustrates the callers at the inbound call center desk.
The biggest turn off is probably getting through to the answering service agent! You will be amazed at the number of times you have to call the inbound desk before you can get through. Either the interactive voice response system puts you on an indefinite hold, or you find the lines to be perpetually busy. BPO firms have to address this first. There are call center analysts who can predict the number of calls that come in every day. It depends on the telemarketing project, of course. Hire agents according to the requirement. It's better to have sufficient agents than expect a truncated team to pull it off for you. Lesser agents would mean longer hold times for the callers. That is not what you would want ideally. At the same time, having more agents would mean lesser optimization of your resources. So BPO service managers have to ensure that the HR strikes a mean balance.
The next big turn off is the voice quality. A high percentage of callers hang up because they cannot hear the telemarketing agent from the other end of the phone line. They cannot get the instructions for two reasons. One is the voice clarity and the other is the accent. Call center agents those function out of offshore call centers in India or Sri Lanka have a problem with the American accent. Their attempt at faking the America twang is even worse! Add to it the problem of static noise and you have a phone answering disaster on your hands! The ideal way to get out of this is to get better equipment and rely more on web-enabled answering service. Get voice and speech trainers for your BPO agents to cleanse the problem with the accent.
The third big problem with the phone answering system is the old traditional way of passing the call around! BPO firms have to train agents to check the passing of calls to other agents who know nothing more than the former. Similarly, they have to use an integrated CRM software so that the caller need not repeat his/her personal information each time the call is passed to a new agent.
