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Blue_monday posted:What blows my mind is third party centres do not have near the latitudes first party does. If I ever do anything with telecom in Canada I'm gonna make drat sure I'm talking to someone in a corporate call centre. That's because when you outsource you agree a very specific contract with SLAs, handling times and exactly what the agents can and can't do. You generally outsource for quantity rather than quality - not to say you can't get both but you usually have to choose if you want it to be worth doing over just employing more agents in house.
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Mar 10, 2015 22:22
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Chicken Doodle posted:Don't you just love it when someone gets angry that you have access to their information when they called you to ask about their information? It's funnier when you have to make outbound calls to people and put them through data protection questions. "Hello, it's Fil5000 from <their bank>, is it a good time to talk?" "Yes." "Ok, great, could I just confirm your date of birth and your postcode?" It's amazing how many people actually give that stuff out over the phone when they're not actively expecting a call.
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Mar 11, 2015 16:04
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RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:Yeah I got a call like that and then they were asking for my social security and I was like "uhhhhh I don't think so." Yeah, I was always surprised I didn't get more people pushing back. The few that I did I told to go to the bank's website and get the phone number and call in if they didn't believe me, which actually convinced about half of them that I was actually on the level.
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Mar 13, 2015 14:39
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GiveUpNed posted:What's workforce/queue/scheduling management and/or analysts and what do they do? Workforce planning/analysis is all about properly scheduling staff to meet expected demand. It may or may not involve some forecasting elements as well. Edit: I do forecasting and capacity planning for a fairly big multichannel contact centre, so can go into more detail if you want. Fil5000 fucked around with this message at 15:29 on Apr 11, 2015 |
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Apr 11, 2015 15:06
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GiveUpNed posted:Please do. My new position is just below it. I'm no longer taking calls. Well I'm in the UK for starters so I'm not sure that my salary range would do much for you. So the way the process works where I am is that forecasting produce a long term and a short term forecast based on whatever metric we know have an influence on call volume. That can be sales forecasts, expected customer base numbers, etc - anything that has a demonstrable statistical relationship to the number of contacts we expect to get. They also come up with an AHT forecast that is based on trends and recent data, but the operation itself decides what they want AHT they want to use for planning purposes (just because you're running at 800 seconds AHT for the last two months doesn't mean that's what you budgeted for or what you WANT to be running at). The short term forecast takes that long term one and breaks it all the way down to half hourly or 15 minute slots, comes up with a call volume and an AHT for each, then uses an Erlang calculation to turn that into a number of required people on the phones for each interval. Sometimes this is done in Excel, more commonly through a workforce planning tool. At this point your workforce planning guys take over and schedule staff to best meet the demand that forecasting have come up with, and also to meet any off phone demands that need to happen (team meetings, training, etc). They then pass that plan on to the next stage in the chain which is ideally a real time management function that's part of the wider workforce planning team but is frequently just part of the operation itself. At that point it's down to dealing with things as they happen on the day, pulling people off the phones if it's quiet to do other tasks, coordinating support to other departments if need be, watching for people not being on the phones when they're supposed to be and for people on the phones when they're NOT supposed to be, etc etc etc. Does that help at all?
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Apr 11, 2015 16:40
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GiveUpNed posted:Thanks for the info. How did you get into your position, what should I be doing to get into the position, and what's the career growth/job outlook like? In my case, fell into it. I was on phones, then I was a team leader, then someone noticed I had an aptitude for excel and they needed a forecaster. Getting into workforce planning at entry level is pretty much just having technical aptitude and understanding how the overall process works. Look out for "resource analyst", "forecast analyst" and "realtime analyst" positions and look at what they're after. If you're in a call centre already (which I guess you are) maybe talk to the person that runs the workforce planning function and find out what they'd look for when recruiting. Try and get your head around how Erlang works too, that's pretty key to forecasting and planning for telephony. Career prospects... Where I am now an entry level position is a step up from being on phones, there's senior positions that are a step up from that and then there's supervisory and management positions that are further up than that. If you're good at it then there tends to be a lot of visibility with the higher ups (forecasts go towards budget planning, recruitment, etc, workforce planning directly impacts daily service level) so it's good if you want to get your face seen. One guy I used to work with went from being on phones to a scheduling analyst to running all of workforce planning in another company, so it's doable.
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Apr 12, 2015 08:33
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GiveUpNed posted:I work for a large company that happens to have a call center. My promotion means I do some forecasting and auditing, but I'm auditing accounts, not doing forecasting. I figure my new role progresses to Workforce Management. Possibly - depends what the forecasting side of the role is. Like, there's people at my place that do sales forecasts that have nothing to do with workforce planning. Forecasting and auditing seems an odd combo to be honest.
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Apr 12, 2015 12:48
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For every fun collections call where someone is a wrong idiot who is trying to get away without paying you will get one call where the person's life is utterly hosed and ruined and they're trying to pay their debts but have no loving chance whatsoever. If you can cope with the emotional whiplash of going from someone who borrowed money for a car that they totaled while high to someone who's fiance left them at the altar and disappeared off the face of the earth leaving them with a joint loan agreement that they can't possibly service, collections may be for you!
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Sep 13, 2015 22:35
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It'll also depend on how they're targeted - if they're working on an autodialler then a "wrong party connect" will not count against their stats but they'll be expected to get through them really quickly. It takes longer to remove the offending number and annotate the account than it does to mash the wrong party connect button and move on to the next call. It's poo poo but it's the sort of thing that can get driven by lazy people who struggle to hit targets and/or stupidly high targets.
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Sep 19, 2015 18:32
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Depending on the industry the centre is for half the metrics could be for regulatory compliance and half for pushing sales/reducing cosrs and the two are generally conpletely opposed to each other. READ THIS TWO MINUTE LONG SCRIPT ON EVERY CALL WHERE THE CUSTOMER SAYS THEY HAVE A MORTGAGE. KEEP CALLS BELOW THREE MINUTES. THE ID PROCESS TAKES 90 SECONDS. OFFER THESE SIX PRODUCTS ON EVERY CALL. gently caress YOU YOU FAILED
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Nov 22, 2015 07:32
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DariusLikewise posted:Call Centres are a statsnerd literal wet dream. Almost the entire job can be quantified in numbers and stacked up against other numbers to see who has the best numbers. The only problem is most places use that as a crutch and don't actually pay attention to customer service. Or they only look at the customer service scores and run the most inefficient centre in the world.
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Dec 15, 2015 18:51
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DariusLikewise posted:The thing is you can't really measure customer service by putting a number to it, nor can you figure out the root of a customer service issue by looking at a number and that's what way too many places try and do. Net promoter score isn't a bad way of measuring it but yeah, realistically you need a balanced scorecard of metrics if you really want to do it properly. Call centre stats are like squeezing a partially deflated balloon. Yeah, you can squeeze THAT bit, but this bit over here is going to expand out and you don't have enough hands to push it back in.
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Dec 17, 2015 17:36
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jassi007 posted:Even better, at our company at least, they do call QA where someone pulls and listens to 4 calls a month at random. But a good QA score isn't really based on "did you do a good job helping the customer with whatever they called about." It is scored based off of things like "did you say the greeting properly. did you say please and thank you. did you empathize with the customer (ie say "i'm sorry to hear that") did you verify ssn/cpni if needed? did you do the closing properly. I can basically recite a greeting and closing script, hit all the verification things, and get a perfect qa score, in the middle I can say sorry don't know how to fix that, i'll research it and call you back." and never actually do anything to help users. It is insane. And that's because qa are in a constant battle with the team managers over how they should mark the calls. Qa wants to be really strict, managers want to earn bonus, everything subjective gets stripped out until all that's left is the poo poo you listed.
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Dec 17, 2015 18:03
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Too Poetic posted:I just don't understand how it makes financial sense to have me sitting on my rear end for 3 1/2 hours before I get a call. How many people you got on that line with you? Also do you know if the client has agreed a specific service level target? It might be that the penalty for failing to hit the agreed service level outweighs the cost of having you on the phone with ten percent occupancy.
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Feb 16, 2016 18:36
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I'm going to guess that they don't have as many agents as the client is paying for and they're trying to make it look like they do. Edit vvvvv Yeah, it's a combo of that and trying to make sure there's enough bums on seats so if they do a quick headcount it's not too far away from the paid number. Fil5000 fucked around with this message at 23:05 on Jun 10, 2016 |
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Jun 10, 2016 16:58
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Holyshoot posted:Speaking of queue, that was one thing that always baffled me. Were the employees that cared about if the queue was high or not and felt bad taking breaks or tried to be quicker about their job to help bring it down. Like normal "taking phone" call employees. Why do you give a gently caress unless your management. Yeah, if you're on the phones you absolutely shouldn't give a toss about what's happening with the queue. If it's bad enough that you've got back to back calls you're going to be abandoning calls anyway, regardless of how fast you work and whether you take two minutes or five minutes to go to the toilet. If it's a one off then ok, maybe managing handling time and breaks is going to help but if it's a constant state of affairs then the only thing that'll fix it is more staff.
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Jun 13, 2016 10:43
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Seriously, an individual agent has bugger all influence on average speed of answer, service level or abandon rate. The only influence they DO have is in terms of schedule adherence, and anyone yelling at people for taking their scheduled break at the scheduled time is a loving idiot that needs to shut up.
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Jun 24, 2016 10:29
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If people are dodging calls so they can go to lunch dead on time, and that's causing calls to abandon then those people are bad. Those people will probably not like you for pointing that out, but the other people who are actually sticking to their schedule will be pissing and moaning to each other about the fuckers that take the piss and those people will like what you've done in pointing them out. Hooray for analytics and reporting, some people like it and some don't.
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Jun 30, 2016 16:55
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We had a woman that owed a significant amount on an overdraft. Every month or so she would call in, tell us she would pay it off during that month and then browbeat the agent into giving her a refund on the overdraft charges. One of my team got the call one month and had me take a look at the account. I denied a refund and refused any further extension of the agreement to pay the overdraft off and she hung up, called back, got someone else, complained, got the refund and the extension. I cancelled both the extension and the refund, called the customer back (she hung up on me) then wrote a letter detailing all the times she had promised to pay, all the times she had failed to pay and all the refunds she'd had. I worked out she'd actually had more refunds than she'd had charges because she was so unerringly aggressive that people just caved rather than deal with her poo poo. The account got plastered with notes to say not to refund her or accept anything other than immediate and full repayment and I checked it daily for a while (because I was a stubborn fucker). In the remaining five years that I worked there she never paid a penny.
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Sep 3, 2016 10:29
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Pretty much every call centre kit records everything the agent does. Whether or not your team leads have the training or permissions to get at that detail is another matter entirely.
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Sep 25, 2016 07:53
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I honestly couldn't give a poo poo what people wear when they're not customer facing, although I will say that at my last employer we had actual definite evidence that performance and productivity was notably worse on days when staff were allowed to dress down.
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Mar 11, 2017 15:11
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Guni posted:Hola goons, If she can learn to go on autopilot and tune out, it's fine. What department is she going into? Customer service is generally lower effort and lower stress than, say, collections, but as long as she can hit all the bits on each call that the compliance people want her to, it's basically fine. It's not interesting or fulfilling, but it's fine.
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Mar 15, 2017 09:55
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Are you in the UK? If so then if your metrics aren't TOTAL garbage and you show up on time and aren't an rear end in a top hat to your coworkers, there's a good chance they'll keep you on anyway. Finding someone who can adhere to a schedule and doesn't act like a tit is about 95% of call centre recruitment. The fact your team lead is trying to arrange help for you rather than finding an excuse to start disciplinary proceedings to shove you out the door is a really good sign too.
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Mar 18, 2017 14:57
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There's usPenguinKnight posted:for the past 3 weeks, i've been unable to leave on time. they think that 6 people are enough to close, but that's not the case. every new person they bring on is promptly placed at the opening shift, meaning that after 3:30, it's always busy as hell as half our drat work force just leaves for the day, so everyone that works till closing has been stuck with leaving like half an hour afterward due to the queue not being finished. Are they paying you for this extra half hour?
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Mar 30, 2017 12:43
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Time_pants posted:As much as he honestly deserved it, confrontation is my absolute least favorite part of a job I completely and thoroughly hate. Eh, it's not worth it. You know they'll just escalate and escalate until they get what they want anyway. If it's within your gift then gently caress it, give them the refund. It's not worth the stress.
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Jul 25, 2017 07:32
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moonsour posted:Getting moved off the phones! I'm still on the call center floor but I'm basically auditing applications so no phone calls. Someone messed up? Undo it, notate, and send it back! Hey, moonsour, we're getting a big spike in calls, can you just jump on for a while? Also make sure you still get all that paperwork done.
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Aug 24, 2017 22:28
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therobit posted:Ask him what kind of a human being knows which names are gay and not. This kind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMdPj3HXMgQ
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Nov 15, 2017 13:11
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Ibexaz posted:I've spent three of the last four years in contact centers, both over the phone and through email correspondence, and I'm currently doing social media for a music streaming service. The work is fine enough, but I'm needing a change. That being said, as someone who doesn't have a degree, I'm not sure where I can really go from here. I went phones, team manager, ops manager (sort of, weird hybrid role), volunteered to help open a new call centre, project management, resource planning. I basically just worked up and sideways within the same organisation, trying to find roles that fit me. A supervisor role gets you people management experience which can help you in a bunch of other places and is probably a good thing to be aiming for. If you want to get out immediately I don't know what options you have other than a different contact centre.
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Dec 27, 2017 18:15
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