Company Core Values: Company values are not a politically correct luxury.  Their purpose should be to serve as the guide that all of your employees use to determine the right course of action when they are representing your company.  You can’t be everywhere at once and you cannot possibly create a policy, rule or script for every situation they will encounter.  Some of those situations could make or break your entire company.

Keep It Real: Company core values should not be a list of things you aspire to.  The bottom line is that they should catalog the criteria you have actually used to made good decisions in the past.  I also found it helpful to ask myself the following questions:

• What employees have you liked, but fired anyway?  What were the “deal-breakers?”
• What employees have you not been particularly fond of, but were so valuable that you chose to keep them with the company?  What were they contributing?

Those questions helped me come up with what I really value.  Those are the same values I want my employees to use when they are making critical decisions.

Be Simple and Clear: If it is not easy for your employees to be able to quote your values word for word, you have too many and they are too complicated.  If they can’t remember them, how can they possibly act on them?  Here are some examples of my own company values:

Focus on results.
How: I am willing to go the extra mile to get the best outcome.
Why: Our company can only exist if we are providing real value.

Show people you care.
How: I project a patient and caring attitude.
Why: We are in the business of customer service.

Maintain open and honest communications.
How: I give and receive honest feedback.
Why: We need accurate information to steer our company successfully.

None of our value statements are more than five words long and I underline the most important word.  I also include one sentence that illustrates the behavior that exemplifies each value and one sentence about why it is important for the company.  I want my employees to truly understand what they need to do and why.

The Horse’s Mouth: It is one thing to see a list of company values in your handbook and quite another to hear them from the leader of the company.  Every new hire has a Company Values Meeting with me.  For each value I tell a real story about an employee “hero” who did something that exemplified one of our values.  One of those heroes was an employee who showed me that I had made a serious mistake.  I need all of my employees to really believe that honest communications are something I truly value even if it means they need to correct me.

Fish Begin to Stink from the Head Down: Employees are going to emulate your behavior, not your rhetoric. You are dreaming if you think you have been successful at keeping much from them.  These people depend on you for their livelihood so they focus on your every move with laser-like attention.  You have to walk the talk.

One Decision Away from Disaster: On more than one occasion my customer service reps have made decisions that prevented me from losing money, protected me from legal exposure, preserved our reputation and once even saved someone’s life.  Good decisions guided by clear company values really matter!

What could you start doing to communicate clear company values that employees can use as guide posts?

This blog was written by Laurie Leonard, the President of SUITE 1000, a U.S. based national telephone answering service and call center. Her company has specialized in handling sales leads, appointment scheduling, customer service and help desk calls for over 20 years.

Copyright ©2012 SUITE 1000. All rights reserved.

Types of Inquiries: Determine what kinds of calls you are receiving and what is generating them.  Understanding the problem thoroughly is the first step towards tackling it.

Patterns: How accurately can you anticipate your call volume?  This will determine how well you can create an employee schedule to handle it.  Examples of variables you need to anticipate are:

• Time of day
• Day of the week
• Monthly billing cycles
• Weather
• Season
• Marketing campaigns

Is there going to be a price change, a new billing system, or an end-of-quarter sale?  If any of your company’s departments plan on making a big change that will impact customers or plan to offer a special promotion, you need to know about it as far in advance as possible. You should be part of every department’s internal and external communication process.

Brainstorming: Once you understand what types of calls you are getting, why you’re getting them and when to expect them, it is time to brainstorm with other departments.  Are there changes they could make to their processes that could reduce or even eliminate some calls entirely?  Are they communicating accurate expectations to new customers?  Could more helpful information be posted on your website?  Could an instructional video be included as part of a client on-boarding process or included in orders that are delivered?  Are invoices confusing?  Go down your list of call types and ask, “What could we have done in advance that would have eliminated the need for this inquiry?”

Funneling:  The faster you can determine what a customer really needs, the faster you can help them.  The bonus is that you also reduce your average call length.  Whether your employees are IT professionals, service technicians or customer service reps, they need to have a question funnel for each type of call they receive.  The initial query should help them categorize (ex. are you calling for sales or service).  Then, each subsequent question should help them narrow down the issue.

Don’t assume that all of your personnel do this equally well.  Creating good, consistent call handling processes can have a huge impact on overall service levels.  For example, if one of your customer service representatives takes an average of 150 calls a day, and shaves only one minute off of each one, they will gain 2.5 hours of additional time each day!  Make sure that you are stressing improvements through better questioning and listening skills, not by rushing and strong-arming clients.  Your employees can be a great resource for improving performance if you schedule time for them to share their best practices with each other. 

Cooperation: Two important tips to share with reps to make them sound more helpful and inspire customers to be more cooperative are:

1. Tell callers what you can do rather than what you can’t do
2. Help defuse upset clients by using the phrase “I want to help you.”

Set Accurate Expectations: If you don’t set accurate expectations, you are simply setting yourself up for a subsequent call.  Whether the issue is a delivery time or a time when your customer can expect some type of follow-up action, be conservative and truthful when you tell clients what to expect next.  This is true even if the news isn’t good.  It is better to deal with the facts now and simply disappoint them rather than having to handle someone who becomes irate in the future.

Outsource Selectively: Outsourcing your calls doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing proposition.  Consider being selective by:

• Time: when it may not be cost effective to staff yourself (ex. after business hours)
• Type: to maximize revenue (ex. sales opportunities)
• Volume: to reduce spikes and the need for additional staffing during peak times.

How do you deal with high customer service call volume?  What actions could you take today to reduce the volume and length of your inquiries?  

This blog was written by Laurie Leonard, the President of SUITE 1000, a U.S. based national telephone answering service and call center. Her company has specialized in handling sales leads, appointment scheduling, customer service and help desk calls for over 20 years.

Copyright ©2012 SUITE 1000. All rights reserved.

I own an outsourced call center and over the last twenty years I have seen a tremendous evolution in technology. The Internet, e-mail, websites, interactive voice response systems, smart phones, etc. With each new innovation I heard predictions of the demise of the call center. It didn’t happen and in some instances, it actually increased the volume of calls that were generated. This was true for a number of reasons.

Reach: Internet marketing (search, websites, pay-per-click, etc.) has vastly increased the size of the audience that companies interact with. For this reason alone the numbers of telephone calls that are generated has risen.

Trust: People trust people. When a lot is at stake – time, money, safety, etc., you naturally want the reassurance of talking with a live human being.

Complexity: Voice recognition software isn’t intelligent enough yet to deal with complexity. If your question doesn’t fit the predefined menu on an interactive voice response system, you need human assistance. For example, if you have questions about a special application, you have an emergency, you have an unusual request, etc. you need the complex interaction that only a person can provide.

Sales: Automated systems can’t “sell” a prospect. Yes, purchases are made all of the time through websites. But the more emotional or complicated a sale is, the more likely it is that the intervention of a sales support person is required.

Complaints: Automation is never going to calm down an irate customer. We are very emotional creatures. If you really want to ensure that a customer leaves you, create an automated system that can’t acknowledge those feelings.

Technology can absolutely augment your sales and customer service processes. But it needs to be thought through carefully and tested. It should support your sales and customer service goals, not hinder them. Don’t ignore the need to identify situations where “live” intervention is vital and provide your audience with that option.

Two types of calls that you should definitely focus on are first-time sales calls and calls that carry any type of legal risk.  In both of these situations, losing or mishandling a call has a high cost.  For a first-time sales call the cost of an abandoned call is the value of a sale.  Calls that involve a legal risk could be situations where a contract has stipulated a guaranteed response time, there is a safety issue, you must meet a regulatory requirement or there is a problem with your product or service has put your client’s business at risk, etc.

What are your “human critical” situations?

This blog was written by Laurie Leonard, the President of SUITE 1000, a U.S. based national telephone answering service and call center. Her company has specialized in handling sales leads, appointment scheduling, customer service and help desk calls for over 20 years.

Copyright ©2012 SUITE 1000. All rights reserved.

• If every prospect is handled differently, it is impossible to institute best practices or measure the effects of improvements.
• Salespeople’s time is precious. It is best spent in front of qualified prospects. It can also be far less expensive to have other personnel or a lead call center do the initial screening, information gathering, and, if a prospect qualifies, appointment scheduling.
• You need to be able to track and compare your salespeople’s performance. You can only do that if you know how many “qualified” leads each one actually had.

The first step in creating a qualifying process is somewhat counter-intuitive. Think about all of the circumstances under which a prospect simply can’t buy from you. For example, consider the following sales qualifying questions:

• Are they located in a place where you cannot provide service?
• Do they need work done in a residential setting and you can only provide commercial service?
• Do they need industry specific products that you don’t carry?

I am amazed at how often companies fail to create this type of “knock-out” process up-front so they don’t waste tons of time with prospects they can’t help. Typically, salespeople don’t think this way. You will need to question your sales team carefully to identify what sales qualifying questions you need to ask prospects to identify these situations. Then, put those questions at the very beginning of your screening process.

The next step is to ask questions that help you prioritize your leads.

• How did they find out about you? If they were a referral, this is the hottest kind of lead. Referrals are far more likely to close than any other type of lead.
• Is your potential customer experiencing a serious or urgent problem? For example, if a production line is down, they will probably be prepared to move like lightning to get it fixed.
• If the problem is not urgent, what is the prospect’s time frame for making a change: a month, a quarter, or a year?
• What other options are they considering: Do nothing, handle it in-house, or inquire with your competitors (who)? If you discover that they have already called 15 other companies in your business, you know that price is very likely to be the deciding factor. If you are not the cheapest, this prospect may be a big waste of your time.

Time is one of your most valuable resources. Guard it fiercely. You only want to spend it on qualified prospects and you need to follow-up with your hottest leads first. You can only do this if you can identify them through a consistent lead qualifying process.

What are the questions you should begin asking every new sales prospect?

This blog was written by Laurie Leonard, the President of SUITE 1000, a U.S. based national telephone answering service and call center. Her company has specialized in handling sales leads, appointment scheduling, customer service and help desk calls for over 20 years.

Copyright ©2012 SUITE 1000. All rights reserved.

To begin strategic sales planning, you need to have specific numbers for items like:

• Where your leads came from
• The industries your prospects were in
• The types of products or services prospects requested and what the value was of a sale
• The geographic location of your prospects
• The total time it took from first contact to actually closing a sale (cycle time)
• If a sale generated repeat business or if it was a one-off
• Your cost per lead for each type of marketing or advertising that you did
• Your cost per sale for each type of marketing or advertising that you did

Next you need to take a look at the raw numbers you collected and do some analysis.  Start looking for revealing patterns by asking questions like:

• Where did your most profitable sales come from (consider the advertising venue, the industry and the location of each sale)?  How could you better target these areas in the future?
• Did some sales have more long-term value than others?  Why?
• What process did you use to close on the leads that made up your sales?  Did it vary depending upon the salesperson?  What should you do consistently from now on and what should you stop doing?
• Some advertising venues may have generated more leads than others, but were they qualified leads that you actually closed on?  Should you stop some forms of advertising altogether and put that money into areas that performed better?
• Who turned out to be a poor customer that either turned-over or were more trouble than they were worth?  How would you recognize a poor fit in the future?

The most important part of your 2012 strategic sales planning is to make sure you are aiming your efforts in the right direction to begin with.  You also need to continue to collect sales data and analyze it on a quarterly basis moving forward.  You want to give yourself every opportunity to make smart course adjustments.  That may mean cutting your losses on old targets that are no longer performing well and aggressively pursuing ones that show the most promise.

How are you going to take aim at the right targets in 2012?

This blog was written by Laurie Leonard, the President of SUITE 1000, a U.S. based national telephone answering service and call center. Her company has specialized in handling sales leads, appointment scheduling, customer service and help desk calls for over 20 years.

Copyright ©2012 SUITE 1000. All rights reserved.

The Nerve Center

By Zenda Douglas

Most business owners and managers have dreamed of having imaginary elves appear on the scene after hours or during critical times to help shoulder the workload, solve problems, take care of the details, clean up a mess or otherwise save the day. Suite 1000 does just that, or rather offers services that essentially can make magic happen.

“Most of our clients prefer that we are completely invisible to their customers,” says Laurie Leonard, president and co-owner of the “live” 24/7, 365-days-a-year business call center. “We join their businesses by telephone and Internet to create seamless transitions—from their staff to ours—for customer service and sales support.”

Seamless and Endless Support

The options and combinations of today’s call center services are seemingly endless. Examples in the sales support arena include capturing and qualifying leads from advertisements, handling requests for information packages and catalogs, setting appointments, making reservations, and taking orders and subscriptions.

Customer service support may include screening service calls and open work orders, dispatching field sales and service personnel or making outbound calls for customer satisfaction surveys, invitations or service reminders. Call center representatives can act as a full-time, part-time or overflow receptionists depending upon a client’s needs.

Leonard, together with co-owner and partner, Ty Leonard, who also happens to be her mother, acquired Suite 1000 in 1993 when the business was 10 years old. Leonard had become aware of the company’s search for a general manager and referred her mother, who accepted the job. Leonard herself took on some sales consulting for the company.

“Within two years, we made an offer to buy the company,” remembers Leonard. Ty Leonard now serves as its chief financial officer.

“The whole call-center industry has changed dramatically over the years,” says Leonard. “You’ve heard General Motor’s tagline ‘It’s not your father’s Oldsmobile anymore.’ Well; the same thing applies to our industry. It used to be a simple, paper-based business. You were just a glorified message-taker.

“That has completely changed with the rise of the Internet. Now, we can interact with our clients’ own software applications. We can become an actual extension of their company so when our clients close up shop for the day, have emergencies, meetings or utility outages, we can continue with their business as though it had never closed.”

Suite 1000 clients come from all over the United States as well as from the United Kingdom, Canada and France. They represent diverse industries with very individualized service needs but, as a common thread, they usually have experienced a problem in some area of communications.

“Honestly, we tend to get clients after something bad has happened—they’ve lost a big sale, ticked off a major client, or worse,” says Leonard. “One North Carolina company that sells gas-powered equipment came to us after an after-hours service call regarding a gas leak went unaddressed. The leak resulted in an explosion that leveled three buildings and killed seven people. Service calls can be a very big deal.”

Leonard recounts other examples: a heavy equipment rental company lost an after hours service call that would have meant a quarter of a million dollar contract; a law firm missed out on a multi-million dollar case due to a missed call. Companies tend to fumble an important call for one of two reasons. Either no one was available to take the call or there was no process in place to determine how to prioritize and escalate an urgent call.

Communications overload is another challenge companies face, according to Leonard. “They come to me because they are barraged by dozens of phone calls, hundreds of emails and text messages. Trying to handle all of that has made them less and less productive. Some of them are almost at a standstill.” In such situations, Suite 1000 provides a front-end filter to determine the nature of the communication, how urgent it is and who the right person is to receive it.

The Nucleus of the Nerve Center

When a call comes in to the Suite 1000 call center, it is accompanied by a computer screen popup which automatically pulls up an account customized for each client. The account provides the call center reps with information on how to answer the phone; it opens forms and provides the appropriate questions to ask for each type of call. Based on the answers, the software guides representatives in different directions, allowing them to facilitate very elaborate work flow.

“What makes us different from other answering services is that we actually work with software developers to design software that pushes the process and eliminates errors,” says Leonard. “The system can keep up with very complex instructions so our reps can focus on assisting the caller.”

Familiarity with each client’s business and their industry terminology is also important. Suite 1000 spends a lot of time and attention on training and preparation for each new client. “Callers need to feel that they are talking with someone who is professional, knowledgeable and can truly help them with their inquiry.”

Every prospective client is provided with what Leonard calls the Value Interview: “Our job is to map out their processes and determine where we can add genuine value. Where can we help them save more money or make more money? Saving money might include helping them avoid the need to hire additional staff or incur overtime. Making money could mean capturing more sales leads, taking orders or identifying up-selling opportunities.”

Suite 1000 also offers a unique No Surprises Pledge: “We don’t just give prospective clients pricing. We share what they can expect the cost of entire billing to be before they even start working with us. It’s our job to help them track their usage and put them in control of their budget,” explains Leonard, who adds that the pledge is another offering that sets the company apart from their competition.

The Internet has had a spectacular impact on the call center industry, according to Leonard. Suite 1000 has its own proprietary software and access to a whole plethora of hosted software applications that can be used in tandem with a client.

“The Internet gives us a pipeline that lets Suite 1000 and our clients interact with each others’ applications. Now it’s possible to build an enormous amount of complexity into an account that a human being could never remember to do,” says Leonard.

Leonard gives an example of software allowing for very complex interaction with clients: “Suite 1000 works with a materials handling company, with multiple locations throughout the Southeast. When callers need an urgent equipment repair, a number of factors come into play—the location of the equipment, the type of equipment they are having trouble with, the time of day and the day of the week.

“Suite 1000’s software allows our reps to maintain a complex on-call schedule that ensures that the right technician is dispatched through the right type of communication device every time. Customer retention is our client’s number one priority, so we have to get it right every time.”

Suite 1000 also works with a home renovation company that generates a lot of calls from advertising. The client’s challenge was that their employees were always at job sites, not in the office. The solution was to have Suite 1000 handle all of their initial sales calls and use an Internet-based calendar to book appointments for estimates.

“The client can log in and see their schedule in real time. Now, our customer can focus exclusively on spending time with new sales prospects and supervising projects,” says Leonard.

“Sometimes we do things that are really cool and rewarding,” says Leonard. “We had an opportunity to work with an orthopedic surgeon on a groundbreaking new surgical procedure. His practice sponsored a series of TV commercials to educate the public on the new treatment that would restore people completely disabled to normal function.

“Together with the surgeon, we created a telephone patient screening process to identify who might be good candidates and then to schedule exams. It was very gratifying to be part of the team able to make those connections that so significantly contributed to the quality of those people’s lives.”

Synaptic Synergies

Strategic partnerships and vendor relationships have become increasingly important, according to Leonard. “Industries are changing really quickly and my clients need tools to cope with that. My success and the success of my customers are very dependent upon how well I surround myself with smart innovative partners.”

When clients need a communication and process solution, they need it ASAP. “Now, we can partner with experts in specific areas of concern and develop something in a flash,” says Leonard. “In the next five years, the speed at which you will need to respond to business demands will be unprecedented. We’ll have to have more and more of these strategic partnerships to package the solutions that our clients will need.”

Suite 1000 often partners with consultants and vendors in specific industries to solve client’s problems. One example is Internet marketing firms. Says Leonard “They often get frustrated because they can do a great job for a client but if the client doesn’t have a support system in place to capture leads, qualify them, track them and schedule appointments, it can make a good campaign fail. That’s where we come in,” says Leonard.

Inevitably, with thousands of calls coming in each day, representatives will encounter the occasional irate customer. “Telephone reps need specific training in the proper techniques required to satisfy upset callers,” according to Leonard. “You also need to give your reps the authority to step outside of normal instructions when the situation requires it. Protecting our clients and their relationships with their customers is our number one priority. We have had to deal with many unusual situations and even emergencies as serious a chemical spill, a fallen elevator and a four-alarm fire.”

Leonard welcomes the great diversity among her clients: “There is a lot of cross-pollination and we learn a lot. What is normal operating practice in one industry can be a revelation in another. Plus, there are issues with ebb and flow. Different industries have different needs at various times of the day and night. If we didn’t have multiple industries, it would be extremely difficult for us to staff shifts efficiently. Having clients that operate in different time zones also helps to even out the load.”

Leonard comes from a family of entrepreneurs including her mother, father and grandfather. Suite 1000 is her second company. She grew up in Rock Hill, S.C., and graduated from Winthrop University in 1984 with a degree in business. A job in the printing business led her to Florida where she later ran her own printing brokerage business.

With a special fondness and empathy for entrepreneurs, Leonard spends considerable time supporting them. As a member and former president of The Entrepreneurs Organization, she networks with and counsels entrepreneurs. She has also served on the Mayor’s Small Business Task Forces and participates in several industry groups.

She sums up her business succinctly: “The first thing that I have to sell is trust. You’re asking people to turn their business over to you for a period of time. We’re best suited to clients that want a real partnership. The more they are willing to share about their strategic goals, the more helpful we can be.”

Originally published in Greater Charlotte Biz magazine’s December 2011 issue. View original article.

This blog was written by Laurie Leonard, the President of SUITE 1000, a U.S. based national telephone answering service and call center. Her company has specialized in handling sales leads, appointment scheduling, customer service and help desk calls for over 20 years.

Copyright ©2012 SUITE 1000. All rights reserved.

If you want to get the most from the information they can provide, it is very important to prepare them properly for a strategic planning meeting.

STEP 1: INTRODUCTION
Your reps need an agenda in advance of the meeting that explains:

• The purpose of the meeting
• How the meeting will work
• What their part will be
• What the company’s goals are for the coming year

This meeting can be a wonderful opportunity to help your customer service reps have a broader understanding of how work flows through all of the departments of your company and the role they play in that process.  Assign a meeting moderator and someone to capture the information that is shared on a flip chart for everyone to see.

STEP 2: LOOKING BACK
Have participants share what they feel were your company’s successes over the past year.  Then, have them share what they felt the challenges were and how they met them.

STEP 3: RESPONSIBILITIES
Have each participant talk about the following.

• What am I responsible for?
• Who do I depend on for information or for work?
• Whose work depends on me?

STEP 4: WORK FLOW
Have your reps go through an exercise where they use the information they have shared to create a list on your flip chart of all of the basic steps that are involved in servicing clients – from hiring a customer rep all the way through to collecting billings from clients and producing financial reports.

STEP 5: OPPORTUNITIES
Now you will be in a position to lead a discussion on the following:

• What should we keep doing?
• What should we do differently?
• What should we start doing that we are not doing now?
• What should we stop doing altogether?

STEP 6: LOOKING AHEAD
The final step is to put together a new strategic customer service plan moving forward. Create a chart that includes the following columns:

• Action items
• Success measurement
• Champion
• Participants
• Due date
• Status

This strategic customer service planning process will give you a step-by-step action plan to improve your customer service for 2012 and a way to monitor your progress.  Everyone involved will understand where they are going, why, and the part they play.

What is the date your organization will meet to create your 2012 Strategic Customer Service Plan?

This blog was written by Laurie Leonard, the President of SUITE 1000, a U.S. based national telephone answering service and call center. Her company has specialized in handling sales leads, appointment scheduling, customer service and help desk calls for over 20 years.

Copyright ©2012 SUITE 1000. All rights reserved.

#1 Be clear about what you expect from your employees.
This sounds self-evident, but a shocking percentage of employees don’t have a clear understanding of what their employers really want.

• Purpose: What is the connection between their job and the goals of the company?  They need to know why what they do matters. True job satisfaction requires a sense of purpose.
• Performance Expectations: Clearly define your expectations, in writing, regarding work ethic, attitude, professionalism and teamwork as well as specific work duties.  Tell them how they will be evaluated, how often it will be done and what benchmarks they should aim for (ex. daily quality control checks, weekly call monitoring and call stats, quarterly performance reviews, annual surveys, etc.).  Employees put an extremely high value on predictability.
• Priorities: If employees have conflicting tasks they need to know what should take precedence (ex. Do customer phone calls always have priority over other tasks?).
• Feedback: No one can perform well if they don’t get continuous feedback.  Don’t wait for the end of a quarter or the end of a year to let your people know if they are doing a good job.  The more often you give feedback, the more often they will strive to give you what you want.
• Praise: You can never praise genuinely good work too much.  People need to know what they are doing right if you want them to do it again!

#2 Make sure employees have the information, materials and equipment they need to do a good job.

• Coaching: Initial training is not enough.  Employees need ongoing coaching if you want to strengthen and expand their skills.  This includes call coaching, continuing education and sharing best practices and experiences with their peers and supervisors.
• Reference Materials: Make sure that every employee has the information they need at their finger-tips.  You don’t want to create service delays because employees have to share resources.
• Equipment: Get feedback from employees to confirm that they have the equipment they need to perform their duties efficiently.  Also make sure that their equipment is actually in good working order. Nothing is more aggravating than struggling with defective equipment and having your requests for a repair or replacement go unaddressed.

Unfortunately, most of us have had an experience with a job where no one explained our importance, expectations were unclear or constantly changing, feedback was poor or non-existent, and we didn’t have the right tools for the job.  Remember how frustrating and de-motivating that was?

What processes do you need to put in place to make sure you are not that kind of manager?

This blog was written by Laurie Leonard, the President of SUITE 1000, a U.S. based national telephone answering service and call center. Her company has specialized in handling sales leads, appointment scheduling, customer service and help desk calls for over 20 years.

Copyright ©2012 SUITE 1000. All rights reserved.

People learn differently. Each of your trainees may take in information through a different learning path.  Some people are very visual.  They need to see diagrams, read instructions, etc.  A second category of people are auditory.  They need to hear things being explained.  The third category is kinesthetic.  They need to touch things and learn by doing.  Don’t try to cram a square peg into a round hole or you will lengthen your training time considerably.  Be prepared to adjust your training to your audience.  There are very accurate learning style tests available that you can administer before the training process even begins.  We even ask each trainee “Tell me how you learn the best?” and then we act accordingly.

The Why. Trainees will retain more, and be more compliant with procedures after they graduate, if they understand the reasons for the processes you are asking them to follow.  Telling them “do it this way because I said so” is never as effective as a true explanation of the reasoning behind the things you are asking them to do.  It is very important to tell trainees “There are NO dumb questions and you can never ask too many questions.  We want you to truly understand what you are doing and why you are doing it”.

Alternate Training & Practice. Alternate classroom training with hands-on practice taking specific types of calls.  Allow trainees to interact with the computer applications they will be using.  This will boost information retention significantly.  By allowing them to tackle one subject at a time, then practice it, you will create a frame-of-reference that sticks.  Hosing trainees down with huge amounts of conceptual information without having them actually perform processes in the order they will occur means they will forget a minimum of 30% of their training!  They also need a break at least every 90 minutes or they will simply stop absorbing new information.

Mentoring. We take mentoring so seriously that new employees grade their co-workers on how helpful they have been in answering questions, providing guidance, etc.  We have an explicit company policy that it is everyone’s job to help new employees learn and perform their job well.  Graduates can also request additional training on any subject at any time.

What new support systems could you provide to your trainees to help them learn faster and remember more?

This blog was written by Laurie Leonard, the President of SUITE 1000, a U.S. based national telephone answering service and call center. Her company has specialized in handling sales leads, appointment scheduling, customer service and help desk calls for over 20 years.

Copyright ©2012 SUITE 1000. All rights reserved.

Nine times out of ten the real reason for help desk turnover is not having an effective, consistent hiring process.  That process needs to include:

Job Profiling: You want to identify your minimum requirements but you need to be careful not to set the bar higher than it really needs to be.  Rank your current employees’ performance, take a look at their education and experience, have them take any tests you will use on applicants to determine appropriate scores and use a job profiling tool like DISC or McQuaig.

Advertising: Keep ads simple and factual.  The most import pieces of information are the position, hours, location and pay rate.  If these parameters don’t suit them, you don’t want them to respond.  You can avoid plowing through tons of useless candidates.  Also include a link to the employment page of your website for additional details, requirements and forms.

Website Employment Page: This is where you can give more details on the skills and experience you are looking for.  Be specific and let them know what they will be tested on.  If you are going to do a criminal background check and drug testing, list that too.  This serves as another filter that keeps candidates who can’t pass your testing from applying.

Initial Phone Interview: If a candidate looks good on paper, the next step is a phone interview.  They are applying for a phone job.  If they stink in your first couple of minutes on the phone, you will have saved yourself the time and trouble of an in-person interview.

Skills Testing: Candidates should pass your skills testing before they qualify for an in-person interview.  I also suggest that your trainer spend some time teaching an applicant how to open a basic ticket in the application you use for documenting calls.  Candidates should then handle some test calls made by other employees.  Rate them on how well they follow instructions and learn while they are performing actual job functions.

In-Person Behavioral Interviews: Behavioral interviews should target the values and behaviors you can’t do without.  Ask for specific examples of how they handled actual, not hypothetical, situations (ex. handled a difficult caller, disagreed with a supervisor, etc.).  You are not looking for a perfect response.  You are looking for a response that was appropriate for the situation.

Reference Checking: During an in-person interview you need to ask for both business references (their direct supervisor) and personal references (people who know them well).  This is your opportunity to find out how an applicant actually performed on the job and confirm the information they gave you during their behavioral interview.

Behavioral Surveys: DISC, McQuaig and other testing services can also provide you with behavioral surveys.  This is a questionnaire that will tell you how a candidate prefers to work.  What their natural tendencies are.  You can compare this against the Job Profile to see how well a candidate’s preferred behavior matches your job.  Candidates don’t have to be a perfect fit, but it shows you how much they would have to stretch outside of their comfort zone to perform their duties.

Criminal Background Checks & Drug Testing: If your employees are going to have access to client data and security information, this is a must.  If you ever have a problem, and you can’t show you performed appropriate due diligence, you could have a serious legal issue.  This type of testing will also weed out a lot of potential problems with reliability and appropriate conduct with callers and co-workers.

Do all of these steps take a lot of time and money?  Yes, they do, but nowhere near the costs associated with turnover – overtime to fill holes, more advertising, screening, training, etc.

What could you change about your current hiring process to improve future retention?

This blog was written by Laurie Leonard, the President of SUITE 1000, a U.S. based national telephone answering service and call center. Her company has specialized in handling sales leads, appointment scheduling, customer service and help desk calls for over 20 years.

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