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Cultivating Call Center Excellence: A Manager’s Guide

December 19, 2016 by teleconsult

The efficiency and user-friendliness of a call center can directly impact a business’s customer acquisition and retention, especially in the age of social media where a company’s perceived approachability is a key part of its brand. Managers in call centers need to ensure that their employees are operating as well as they can. Following are five strategies for cultivating excellent customer service.

1. Make data available to call center employees.

Without good data, neither employees nor managers know where to focus their efforts for the greatest impact. If data is only accessible to employees through their managers, it limits that data’s actionability. Call centers need to do more than define and track key metrics; those metrics need to be visualized and made available to employees on-demand.

Some call centers may elect to publish visuals such as leaderboards, whereas others find that a more confidential approach – such as individual dashboards – work best in their office environments. Whichever way data accessibility is implemented, employees need to be trained on how to interpret their own performance, and empowered to do what’s necessary to improve it.

2. Keep interventions private.

Whether or not performance data is public, communication between employees and managers aimed toward improving performance should be confidential – unless that communication has broad applicability, and is anonymized. Call center employment is a high-stress job, and employees may frequently deal with criticism from the customer side. Public criticism can damage employee morale and trust.

3. Use anecdotes.

Data is a powerful tool, but anecdotes have mental and emotional sticking power. When evaluating employees, refer to specific incidents where the employee’s performance was poor – or was especially good. Use these anecdotes to illustrate larger data trends, or trends for which there is no appropriate metric to reference.

4. Recognize the good.

There are two strategies to improve performance: strengthen weak skills, and refine strong skills. Both strategies should be leveraged in order to create employees who are not only well-rounded but are also outstanding in their respective skills. Managers should bring up an employee’s exemplary skills during reviews, and not just focus on areas of improvement.

Depending on the call center’s workflow, it may also be possible to use outstanding skills to improve the center’s overall effectiveness. For example, if some employees are recognized for their skill in dealing with difficult customers, other employees may be empowered to transfer customers to them. Other employees may display exceptional skills in areas such as solving difficult technical challenges, completing sales, or retaining customer loyalty, and could be assigned calls accordingly.

5. Empower employees to self-assess.

Employees who feel some ownership over their own performance are likely to be more engaged in improving it. Self-assessment can also highlight an employee’s own concerns, and open up a path for collaboration between employees and call center managers. Managers should be prepared to validate an employee’s feedback, and work with them to resolve any concerns.

Call centers can be a powerful asset for businesses, but only if employees know how to deal with calls effectively. When managers and employees are both empowered to use performance interventions that work, the end result is a smoother relationship between business and consumer – and that’s worth working toward.

Teamwork and Collaboration: What Has Changed and What Has Not

December 5, 2016 by teleconsult

Modern enterprises are more team-focused and collaborative in nature than ever before. This is in part thanks to the development of tools that enable immediate, robust, and effective communication and sharing of resources. The level of teamwork common in most businesses today simply wouldn’t be possible without these tools. What the discussion of the shift in the importance of teams often fails to account for, however, is the idea that the very nature of teams has changed just as much.

The vast majority of executives in mid-sized and larger enterprises know that effective communication is, without question, the most important element in enabling team collaboration. But the ease and comprehensive nature of that communication has altered what most people consider to be a team.

The New Teams

Once upon a time, a team within an organization would have been exactly that: inside the organization. This is no longer necessarily the norm.

Teams today make use of collaboration solutions that enable real-time sharing of almost any resource. They provide audio and video communication over data networks and, perhaps most importantly, user-based data access. This means that individuals with a stake in the operation of a business but who are not actually employed by that business can be given access to very specific data elements and can therefore be included in teams where collaboration would have been historically impossible.

Modern teams often include suppliers, partners, outside specialists, experts, and occasionally even customers.

Some Things Never Change

Teams may have a different makeup these days, and the ways in which they work might have changed, but many of the things businesses need to do to enable effective teamwork have not. It is still important to:

Look for methods that are:

complimentary to existing processes,
as easy to use and efficient as possible, and
designed to allow for true mobile functionality.

Identify signs of problems, such as

employees not using or even bypassing the tools they have,
poor integration with other business processes, and
collaboration tools that force users to work in ways they dislike, or that don’t allow for flexibility.

One of the elements here that remains absolutely unchanged over the past several years is the importance of robust mobile capabilities. As much as possible, users should have the same experience using their collaboration tools on a mobile device as they do at their desk. Employees should never feel limited by their use of a mobile device.

Many aspects of corporate teamwork have changed, while some have not. It is the businesses that know which are which that are able to provide their teams with the collaboration tools they need to work at peak efficiency.

Why Mobility Management Software Justifies BYOD

November 22, 2016 by teleconsult

Bring your own device (BYOD) is a trend sweeping businesses that want their employees to be able to work from any location. It opens the door to spending less on equipment and maintenance while expanding the workforce and driving more sales. Allowing staff members to use their personal communication devices presents a mix of advantages and concerns that can be addressed with the right mobility management software.

How BYOD Provides Flexibility

Whether a firm has under ten or over thousands of employees, BYOD policies save companies huge expenses on hardware. More cautious organizations, however, take the approach of giving employees a list of acceptable devices to use for both compatibility and security reasons. Other companies purchase a variety of devices from which employees can select. Employees often feel more empowered when they are allowed to choose the device with which they are most familiar or comfortable.

Countering Security Risks with Mobility Management

Management must be aware that unmonitored mobility can lead to security breaches that increase the risk of data loss or damaged files. BYOD also opens the door to issues of not meeting government regulations or industry standards. These concerns can be resolved by using a mobility management solution, which comprises the strategy, platform, and processes that merge enterprise software with mobile devices.

Regardless of whether the devices are supplied by the company or by employees, this integration offers the enterprise and its workforce more control and protection against security breaches. Supervisors are able to monitor and manage user access with the use of encryption and identity certificates. They can also decide on security, malware, and antivirus software.

Flexible Management Software Features

High quality mobility management platforms are flexible enough to provide a variety of deployment methods, making them useful for either local or cloud-based infrastructures. Businesses more concerned about future growth and scalability can benefit from cloud-based systems. Cloud providers also handle the more tedious tasks such as data backup and recovery.

Mobility management offers cross-platform options for controlling any type of device, operating system, or machine model. This capability is important since it eliminates the time and cost associated with employees being forced to use one brand when they are more productive with another. Furthermore, this platform allows administrators to manage all devices on a network at once, which is a simpler alternative to managing company-enforced equipment. It’s merely a matter of denying access to all devices except those that the company approves.

Why BYOD Is Worth Considering

One of the biggest advantages to BYOD is that it frees employees from their desktops. This ability is powerful for sales representatives who can communicate with the office while meeting with clients in the field. It’s also useful for connecting physicians and nurses on different floors of a hospital. It can also free up office space or even justify moving to a smaller physical location, which further cuts costs.

BYOD does, however, raise the risk of exposure to malware and other forms of cyber crime. Another concern is that sensitive information can get leaked if it ends up on unsecured mobile devices. Fortunately, administrators can use automation to set mobility management policies that protect company data. It’s important for decision makers to weigh the pros and cons to determine if BYOD makes economic and practical sense.

Data Breach Preparedness: Practice Your Plan

November 8, 2016 by teleconsult

Each year it becomes more and more likely that a given company will experience some form of data breach. Most companies now have plans in place to deal with these events, but many of them do little beyond that. It is still relatively rare for a company to drill or practice putting their plan into effect, but having a plan and being prepared are not always the same thing.

It is a sad fact that many companies develop their data breach plans and then stop, as though their data protection is now taken care of. Rather than thinking of being prepared as a single action to be taken, it is much more beneficial to view it as a process – one that includes regularly reviewing the plan and practicing putting it into effect.

Increased Spending

This year’s Ponemon Institute study on data protection preparedness had some interesting results with regard to how much attention companies are paying to the subject.

61% of those surveyed indicated that they already have data protection training in place.
58% have increased their investment in security to better detect and more quickly respond to data breaches.
More than 70% of respondents understand that it is necessary to take action after a data breach in order to minimize the effects to their finances and reputation. The top three methods preferred were complimentary credit monitoring and identity protection, gift cards, and discounts, respectively.

The Need for Time

The same study also points out that, though most companies are spending more on cyber security, they still aren’t putting the necessary time and attention into it. They found that:

29% have never reviewed their data breach plan,
38% have not specified a time to perform review,
27% felt confident in their ability to deal with the aftermath of a data breach, and
31% felt inadequate to dealing with an international breach.

Perhaps most alarming of all is that, while incidents of ransomware attacks in 2015 had increased by 35%, 56% of businesses feel unprepared to deal with this type of attack.

When Disaster Strikes

Preparing for a data breach is very much like preparing for a natural disaster. It is important to have a good response plan, and to make sure that everyone knows what to do should the plan need to be executed. It is just as important, however, that employees have the chance to practice the plan. The ability to effectively put a plan into action can be the difference between a very serious situation that the company can work through and a very serious situation that spells the end of the company.

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