How You Can Identify A Successful Call Center Without Listening To A Call
by Glenn Pasch, President, Improved Performance Solutions -
July 11, 2011
How You Can Identify A Successful Call Center Without Listening To A Call by Glenn Pasch, President, Improved Performance Solutions
Our industry is very competitive. Every company who has employees working on the phones, either inbound or outbound is always looking for ways to make their team more successful. Many companies focus on how their callers execute their calls as the sole way to deliver results, but in doing so miss out on other factors that impact their company’s ultimate success.
In my many years of working in the industry, as soon as I arrived at a center, it was very easy to see, within minutes, if the center was successful or not, even before hearing a single call from a sales representative. I looked and listened to what was going on around the callers, because the visual look and organizational structure of the call center itself ultimately will create the environment callers need to be successful.
Here are eight vital questions you need to ask yourself about your center.
- When you walk into a call center, do you hear and feel a real buzz in the room, or is it more akin to a library? Your business is sales, after all, and sales means energy.
- Do people greet you or make you feel they’re happy to have you there? Being positive can be contagious, and in sales there is enough rejection on the other end of the phone that you don’t need any more negativity in the center.
- Is the office clean and orderly or are there piles of things lying around, papers on the floor, etc? From the time someone comes through your front door, into the lobby, and onto the sales floor, they should feel this is a workplace that will demand them to be at their best and not have to ask themselves, “Why am I working here?”
- Are the sales people focused and enjoying their jobs, or are they wandering around complaining to their neighbors? Negativity in any form will come across the phones to your customers, so be aware of what your workers are doing between calls.
- What are your supervisors doing? Are they working side by side training their sales people, helping them to improve, or are they just “walking the floor”, acting as if their job is to just answer questions as they comes up. Your center will never reach it’s potential unless your supervisors are required to impact production through their training efforts every day.
- Where does your call center manager spend most of their day? Are they on the sales floor or behind a desk? Running a successful call center from behind a desk is impossible. A desk-bound manager tends to make decisions based on numbers alone without any idea of what is happening on the front lines. On the other hand, managers who are out on the sales floor are more effective at remedying problems and impacting performance.
- Does the call center manager continually train their supervisors, helping them improve, or do they just demand results? If your answer is the latter, you run the risk of your supervisors emulating this behavior when dealing with the front line sales people, which negatively impacts retention of good employees.
- How are you motivating your sales team? Are you using generic store-bought motivational posters, or are you utilizing tools you created on your own? Whether you post the names of your top sales people, your new employees, or results of ongoing sales contests on a dry erase board, or hang employee-of-the-week plaques on the call center’s walls, take the time to let your team know you appreciate their hard work in a more personal way.
How did your center do? Did you score well or are some of these things out of place or lack consistency. We have seen great leaps in technology that can make an office more efficient and productive, but we must never forget that people really drive a center’s success. If you focus each day on creating a positive, clean, and orderly place for your employees, where they feel that management is there to help them improve and feel appreciated, your call center will be far ahead of your competition.
Let me know your thoughts.
Glenn Pasch
President
Improved Performance Solutions
732-261-5472
Coaching@ipsforyou.com
www.ipsforyou.com
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