subject: Reviewing Answering Service [print this page] Every business is run on reports and the reporting structure must reflect all the salient aspects of the business. For a call center, merely finding out how many calls were made or received will not give you the total idea of how a BPO firm is faring. You need other reports as well. These reports will tell you about certain aspects of the business that hard facts cannot tell you. For example, the answering service department cannot say how well they are performing if they go by only the number of calls that the phone answering team has received. The satisfaction of the customers is the aim of these agents and the number of calls that they receive does not reflect how much they have attained. For such performance appraisals, you have to look at the available data with fresh eyes.
The number of calls received by the answering service team tells you only one side of the story. It could be that the inbound call center agent is pushing through things. It could be that in an effort to hit the designated target, the BPO agent is cutting down customers and keeping the conversation short. Such measures do not add any value to the client or the business. It makes customers dissatisfied with what they have experienced. It's also something that the call center does not endorse. The way out is to make these phone answering agents feel that their performance is being measured on all counts. It's not just how many calls they handle: it's how they handle those calls that happen to be more important in this aspect of the call center services.
A way to do this would be to monitor the answering service calls. Check for yourself by listening in. Call center supervisors can listen in randomly to how the agents are dealing with customers. Find out how many times the brand that you are trying to sell is being mentioned. Keep a tab on the hold time that the customers are being subjected to. If the managers feel that something is not going right, they can whisper some advice to the agent on the call. If they find that the BPO service agent is not being able to solve the problem or the issue is beyond the jurisdiction of the agent, they can step in and save the day. Transferring calls to other agents/supervisors delays the customers unnecessarily. These aspects must be made a part of the reporting structure.
It's true that soft skills cannot be mentioned in numbers of figures, but answering service has a lot to do with that. Whether the customer stays on or doesn't is entirely dependent on how the inbound call center team handles them. Telemarketing agents must have that charm and the calming influence to reason with an aggressive customer. All of these aspects must be considered when you are reviewing the inbound call center team. If you are not taking all these into account, agents will get the wrong idea that these soft skills are not important. That would be bad for your BPO service.
