(Promo) Promotion marketers often rely on call center reps to get samples or product information into consumers’ hands. And loyalty and incentive programs are grounded in a rep’s ability to clearly convey the benefits of the programs and redeem rewards. A knowledgeable, courteous and helpful person at the other end of the line becomes the voice of your brand.

These are seven key components in hiring and training staff to ensure a smooth connection.

1. CHECK THE WORDS IN YOUR GREETING, AND IF YOU’RE USING THE WORD “SPEAKING,” ELIMINATE IT. In other words, you don’t need to say, “This is Chris speaking.” The caller can hear that you’re speaking, and adding this word at the end of your greeting takes away from the thing you most want them to remember — which is your first name.

2. WHEN HIRING FOR THE FRONT LINE, MAKE SURE YOU HIRE FOR PERSONALITY FIT AS WELL AS KNOWLEDGE AND SKILL MATCH. Predicting the likelihood that a person will not only stay with the job but also be happy doing it is more a function of the applicant’s personality type than of his specific knowledge or skills. While many centers focus on requisite skills in the hiring process, those that do psychometric testing for motivational factors have a higher retention rate and better employee satisfaction and performance.

3. CALL CENTER SUPERVISORS SHOULD MEET REGULARLY WITH TEAM MEMBERS TO FIND OUT WHAT THEY LIKE ABOUT THE JOB, WHAT THE PROBLEMS ARE AND WHAT TYPE OF REWARDS WOULD BEST MOTIVATE THEM TO PERFORM WELL. It’s important for each supervisor to know what makes each person happy and to review that criteria on a regular basis to determine what’s been done recently to meet each employee’s needs.

4. WHEN CREATING YOUR CUSTOMER ACCESS STRATEGY, MAKE SURE THAT YOU LINK IT TO YOUR COMPANY’S MISSION AND VISION. If your company has established itself as the low-cost provider in the marketplace, the contact center will probably look for automation and self-service options. On the other hand, if your company wants to focus on customization of its products to meet each customer’s unique desires and needs, every call may need to be handled by a live agent.

5. IF YOU MUST PLACE A CALLER ON HOLD, MAKE SURE YOU USE ALL FOUR STEPS IN THE HOLD PROCESS. The recommended steps of putting a caller on hold are a) ask the caller’s permission to be placed on hold; b) thank the caller and then place him on hold; c) when you’re back, ensure that the caller is still there by using his name; and d) thank him for holding, then resume the conversation. By the way, if the wait time is long, check back in during the hold to let the caller know you haven’t forgotten about him.

6. THE BEST WAY TO SCREEN STAFF FOR THE CALL CENTER IS GENERALLY WITH AN INITIAL SHORT PHONE INTERVIEW. While a resume may be needed eventually, what better way to immediately screen out candidates on the front end than with a telephone interview? You’ll be able to assess voice quality and basic communications skills upfront. If you don’t have time to do this live, you can accomplish it to some degree with a voice mailbox where candidates are asked to leave pertinent information.

7. BEWARE OF SAYING THE WORDS “YOU MUST” OR “YOU HAVE TO” WHEN PROVIDING INSTRUCTIONS. You want to sound like you’re providing help, not homework, for your customers. Try replacing the words “you must” with “you’ll want to” or “the best option would be to.”

Penny Reynolds is a founding partner of Lebanon, TN-based The Call Center School, a consulting and education company.

Promotion marketers often rely on call center reps to get samples or product information into consumers’ hands. And loyalty and incentive programs are grounded in a rep’s ability to clearly convey the benefits of the programs and redeem rewards. A knowledgeable, courteous and helpful person at the other end of the line becomes the voice of your brand.

These are seven key components in hiring and training staff to ensure a smooth connection.

1. CHECK THE WORDS IN YOUR GREETING, AND IF YOU’RE USING THE WORD “SPEAKING,” ELIMINATE IT. In other words, you don’t need to say, “This is Chris speaking.” The caller can hear that you’re speaking, and adding this word at the end of your greeting takes away from the thing you most want them to remember — which is your first name.

2. WHEN HIRING FOR THE FRONT LINE, MAKE SURE YOU HIRE FOR PERSONALITY FIT AS WELL AS KNOWLEDGE AND SKILL MATCH. Predicting the likelihood that a person will not only stay with the job but also be happy doing it is more a function of the applicant’s personality type than of his specific knowledge or skills. While many centers focus on requisite skills in the hiring process, those that do psychometric testing for motivational factors have a higher retention rate and better employee satisfaction and performance.

3. CALL CENTER SUPERVISORS SHOULD MEET REGULARLY WITH TEAM MEMBERS TO FIND OUT WHAT THEY LIKE ABOUT THE JOB, WHAT THE PROBLEMS ARE AND WHAT TYPE OF REWARDS WOULD BEST MOTIVATE THEM TO PERFORM WELL. It’s important for each supervisor to know what makes each person happy and to review that criteria on a regular basis to determine what’s been done recently to meet each employee’s needs.

4. WHEN CREATING YOUR CUSTOMER ACCESS STRATEGY, MAKE SURE THAT YOU LINK IT TO YOUR COMPANY’S MISSION AND VISION. If your company has established itself as the low-cost provider in the marketplace, the contact center will probably look for automation and self-service options. On the other hand, if your company wants to focus on customization of its products to meet each customer’s unique desires and needs, every call may need to be handled by a live agent.

5. IF YOU MUST PLACE A CALLER ON HOLD, MAKE SURE YOU USE ALL FOUR STEPS IN THE HOLD PROCESS. The recommended steps of putting a caller on hold are a) ask the caller’s permission to be placed on hold; b) thank the caller and then place him on hold; c) when you’re back, ensure that the caller is still there by using his name; and d) thank him for holding, then resume the conversation. By the way, if the wait time is long, check back in during the hold to let the caller know you haven’t forgotten about him.

6. THE BEST WAY TO SCREEN STAFF FOR THE CALL CENTER IS GENERALLY WITH AN INITIAL SHORT PHONE INTERVIEW. While a resume may be needed eventually, what better way to immediately screen out candidates on the front end than with a telephone interview? You’ll be able to assess voice quality and basic communications skills upfront. If you don’t have time to do this live, you can accomplish it to some degree with a voice mailbox where candidates are asked to leave pertinent information.

7. BEWARE OF SAYING THE WORDS “YOU MUST” OR “YOU HAVE TO” WHEN PROVIDING INSTRUCTIONS. You want to sound like you’re providing help, not homework, for your customers. Try replacing the words “you must” with “you’ll want to” or “the best option would be to.”

Penny Reynolds is a founding partner of Lebanon, TN-based The Call Center School, a consulting and education company.

A Breed Apart

What makes telephone marketers tick

Not long ago, I read an engaging article by direct marketing consultant Ruth P. Stevens about the DM

Setting Super Standards

Raising the bar to get high-quality calls and solid phone sales

THERE’S A COMMON MYTH that many telephone sales representatives believe: They can meet your quality expectations when you monitor their calls, or they can deliver on your sales production goals

Take It to the Bank

EVERYONE WANTS quality telemarketing calls, but not everyone will invest to make sure all the calls that represent their company are something they can be proud of

It used to be that a good speaking voice topped the list of essentials for a customer service representative. Today, typing skills are equally as vital as more and more reps have to let their fingers do the talking.

The traditional phone-only call center has evolved into a customer interaction center (CIC), where reps answer not only phone but e-mail queries, and participate regularly in text chats with customers online. These facilities are rapidly becoming the nucleus of many companies’ relationship-building strategies, as firms strive to communicate with customers in whatever way is preferable to the customer, at the customer’s convenience.

“The phone has been the dominant form of communication, but the number of alternatives is growing at an exponential rate,” says Joseph Adams, vice president of market communications at Interactive Intelligence Inc., an Indianapolis-based marketing services agency with three customer interaction centers. “Technology is feeding upon itself. In 24 months as much as 50% of all customer transactions will be conducted online.”

That technology is giving marketers a constant deluge of new hardware and software options to choose from, meaning a significant financial investment for companies that want to interact with their customer base. Provident Central Credit Union, for example, spent $1.2 million on systems from Interactive Intelligence to open a new in-house customer interaction center last year in Redwood City, CA.

“Our old center lacked that personal one-to-one feel and we were not using the Web at that time,” says Ryan Nowacki, Provident’s assistant vice president of telecommunications.

Thanks to the new system, Provident’s 80,000 customers no longer have to endure on-hold waiting times of between five and 10 minutes before being routed to an agent. “We had problems with too many abandoned calls and limited personal service,” says Nowacki, noting customer complaints have dropped nearly 50%.

Provident has also begun profiling customers, giving phone reps data to upsell products such as money market accounts to people calling its 800-number with inquiries.

By using recorded phone messages asking customers to enter account numbers, Provident has virtually eliminated the need to transfer inbound calls. Its database uses the numbers to look up customer records; via a phone tree, customers route their own calls to an appropriate agent.

IDENTIFY AND CONQUER

The new automated system generates online announcements that pop up on the screen of customer service agents whenever the database identifies prospects for one of about dozen financial products available through Provident.

“If information on a screen says a customer has over $10,000, a tele-agent might say, `Why don’t you move it into a money market account,'” explains Nowacki.

To date its database has identified and generated 1,739 cross-selling prospects for its agents to make product pitches to inbound callers. “We didn’t do any of that before,” he notes.

Upselling is only one benefit of the ever-advancing technology present at many CICs, where automated systems run databases, track purchasing histories and generate targeted offers sent to customers via e-mail or Web pages “pushed” to a customer’s screen by a rep.

Automation also gives computers the power to “talk” to customers, asking them for account numbers and giving estimates of how long it will take to respond to their inquiry based on the volume of e-mails, requests for text chats, phone calls, etc. being queued for live agents to answer.

Customer records are accessed by cross-referencing account numbers, phone numbers or other data to activate a database search. Responses to frequently asked questions typically are automated and delivered through e-mail or other media. If it’s not done automatically, a customer service agent does it.

Text chat is rapidly gaining popularity as a way for customers and companies to interact online in real time. CIC agents at Flowersandgifts.com co-browse with visitors who click text chat buttons on its site, says Lauren Christiansen, director of consumer and client services.

Online sales agents are responsible for answering questions and offering product suggestions at the Minnetonka, MN-based company. They encourage customers to fill out product preference forms and follow-up by sending selected Web pages to the shopper’s screen.

After sending a page to a customer, the agent will ask if help is needed to complete an order or if the customer wants to keep shopping on their own. “We stay co-browsing with the customer for as long as they want,” says Christiansen.

Agents handle up to 54 customer interactions per 7.5-hour work shift. Canned responses to commonly asked questions about products are used whenever possible.

And because there are typically long pauses during text chats, each agent typically co-browses with five or six customers at a time.

“We love text chat because we get an online alert whenever a customer types something,” says Christiansen. “We like customers to think they’re shopping one-to-one with an agent.”

Clickstream analysis – which relies on data captured by monitoring a customer’s movements on a site with “cookies” and online registration and order forms – is another way companies are strengthening the online one-to-one bond. For customizing offers, this is a much less expensive alternative to traditional focus groups and snail mail surveys, notes Shawn Riley, a research associate at Giga Information Group, based in Cambridge, MA.

(People nervous about cookies tracking their behavior online won’t be happy at all about the “emotion mouse” technology currently in research and development. This could make it possible to monitor changes in a customer’s heart beat or blood pressure to determine which marketing offers evoke an emotional response.)

More advanced database marketing applications are being developed for interactive voice response (IVR) systems so customers can route their own calls. “Speech recognition technology is going to replace IVR systems,” says Riley.

While all this new technology does mean hefty investments, the opportunity to integrate all channels of communication with a customer through a single computer platform will eventually mean significant savings as well as increased productivity.

At present, it’s not unusual for one company to have separate computer hardware and software for switching inbound and outbound phone traffic, fax-on-demand, voice mail, predictive dialers generating live phone contacts, automatic call distributors routing calls to customer service agents, etc.

PATCHWORK SYSTEMS

Marketers and service bureaus contracted to manage campaigns and process orders collectively spend an estimated $2.5 billion annually on teleservices hardware and software. The cumulative affect of new technologies introduced year after year has led to a patchwork of semi-compatible computer hardware and software systems.

“Basically, it’s been gluing five, six, seven or eight boxes together,” says Adams. “We don’t need all these separate systems if it doesn’t work well. It can now done using one computer platform that integrates everything.”

Time will tell if the traditional telephone call center disappears completely. But the influence of the Internet on CICs is a thing of the present.