Call center managers must be tired of living in a world of complaints. They must dream about complaints or is it as you suspect, that they don’t actually review any of the complaints prepared and presented by customers? You might remember the days when the customer was always right. These days the customer can’t possibly be right when the call centers find every way of avoiding the main issues of customer complaints.

There are three areas where call center managers can learn from general complaints and to make the customer’s lives easier: location, employees and software.

Location of the call center

Even if the call center is offering deals for customers, location is vital to both the call center employees and for the customer.

So often call centers are located alongside a number of other high profile call centers with management believing that the state or town must be experts at answering (or avoiding) call center questions.

Unfortunately, to make call centers cost productive, management consultants may choose areas in a low salary neighborhood so expectations do not rise too high. Government incentives may direct a company to a certain area or maybe the low cost of real estate proves to be the deciding incentive. Whether anyone thinks about quality employees being available for work, you never know.

So many companies have moved their call centers across to India or other nations and easy access to cheap labor, at the customer’s expense, appears to be the priority.

With so many consultants choosing to locate call centers in the same area, a number of companies are making the same decision and therefore, defeating their very aim; to have sufficient employees available in the area. When so many call centers locate to the same part of town, employee availability disappears.

Finding dependable and professional employees

There are too many supervisors in call centers. They put so much pressure on their employees to perform and achieve impossible results that the negative reaction reaches the customer.

While students filling the traditional call center role may require supervision, many quality people who can’t find other work end up taking a job at a call center. These people probably run homes and a family so supervision is not the main requirement. If people are assessed fairly on their real results, the need for training will become apparent, rather than total time supervision.

Giving call center employees the initiative may help them form an interest in their job, and helping customers may become second nature.

Finding the right employees is not the main problem for call centers; it’s keeping them that’s the toughest part of the management role. So often the job is seen as a way to earn money between jobs, often because of the low pay.

Always blame the software

Call centers live and die by their software. If it doesn’t perform, the future of the business is at risk.

It should be the company that tells the software designers what software they need, having spent countless hours finding out what they do require. Unfortunately, many call centers complain of poor software. This attitude is then passed to the software people for not listening and understanding the requirements of their working models. The software people will always want to pass the blame back to the company for not providing the right brief.

With the high numbers of constant leavers, it must be difficult for managers to train their new employees in overall software use. You know when you get your own home software; it takes hours if not days to learn how to use a new email program properly. Now think about the stress levels at performing the same task in the office with supervisors hounding the employee and the job at risk.

Software provides reports that show that call times are monitored. Employees taking too long on a call are effectively at risk. The other half of the report that management loves to devour is the time employees take between calls. Can they take and end more calls per hour? Management believes this makes employees more efficient when the opposite may become true.

If call center management understood what customers really wanted, they could provide employees with better working conditions. That in would turn help customers, preventing them from telling all their friends about dreadful service and losing that company many more sales. 

By, Rosie Ferris