Good Call Bad Call

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Article published in: Ultimate Sales Professional Date: October 2003

Good Call Bad Call

Annalize Cuthill explains the importance of personal interaction skills to the selling success of

call centre staff.

There are call centres that do a

fantastic job. Their agents excel in

personal interaction, their front-end

systems support treating callers as

people and their managers provide

an infrastructure of ongoing

improvement and first-class

coaching. Ultimately, they deliver a

positive customer experience and

revenue growth.

Bad Press

These call centres do exist, but have

you heard of any recently?

National, business and trade press

are far more often crammed with the

latest woeful tales of appalling

service, unresolved problems and

high tumover of inadequately trained

staff.

From survey results on what

callers hate most about call centres

to controversy over outsourcing

services to India, the call centre

industry receives a bad press. And,

despite those rare few with

outstanding performance, this

reputation is entirely justified. More

worrying is that most believe they

are doing much better than they

really are.

Hence, there is great scope for

improvement in enhancing brand,

empowering staff, uncovering and

meeting real customer needs and, of

course, increasing sales.

Cutting edge computing or

cutting off customers?

The lure of the latest technology has

all too often proved the biggest draw

for call centre managers seeking

a quick-fix foundation for their

operations. While it might help them

execute a greater volume of calls,

the quality of personal interaction

tends to suffer neglect as a result.

Increases in efficiency are usually

superficial and the effects are

unlikely to reach or be perceived by

the customer.

Many systems simply guide

operators through a process of

steps which must be completed up

to the point-of-sale and allow little

scope for variation in personal

needs. Once established, they are

unavoidable, yet the skilled operator

knows how to ask the right

questions around the system to