A Customer Friendly Call Center

Most large organisations have call centers that are unfriendly to customers. They require the customer to listen to many announcements and to press many buttons to pass through many gateways, before they can talk to a person.

Many customers find this method to be unfriendly, time consuming and frustrating.

I wish to describe a new strategy to set up a call center that is friendly to customers. It is based on the ten tips below.

Tip 1. Immediate Answer

Answer an incoming call immediately by a person. Do not ask the customer to push buttons to reply to many questions posed by a machine.

Tip 2. Access Number

Have a different access number for each main language and have the calls handled by a different team.

Tip 3. One Team

Have one common team to handles all the different products. The customer service officer can get product and other information from FAQs posted in the website. The officer can retrieve the FAQ easily. The officer can answer the simple questions over the telephone. If necessary, the officer send the FAQ by e-mail or fax to the customer. This will take the time to handle the enquiry. It will also improve the communciation.

Tip 4. Five rings

All incoming calls should be answered within five rings. If there is heavy traffic, each officer should shorten the time to handle a call. For a complicated matter, the officer can refer to the specialist to follow up. This allows the front line officer to handle all calls within a short time and answer all incoming calls within five rings.

Tip 5. Keep the conversation short

Each conversation at the first level should be kept short, say 5 or 10 minutes. If it take more than the allocated time, the issue should be escalated to a specialist to handle.

Tip 6. Complicated Issue

For a complicated issue that cannot be handled by the FAQ, the officer can take down the particulars of the customer (ie name, telephone number and brief description of the issue) and send it to a product specialist to follow up within one day.

Tip 7. SMS notification

The specialist can send a SMS to give advance notification and follow up with a call to the customer. If the customer cannot be reached, the specialist can send a SMS to ask the customer to return the call. (This applies only when the customer has given a mobilephone - which is the preferred option).

Tip 8. Record of Conversation

A brief note of each conversation can be recorded, with the following information: name of customer, telephone number, date, name of officer, typle of conversation, brief not. The conversations can be retrieved according to telehone number.

Tip 9. Special Functions

A separate access number can be given for each special function. For example, when the customer receives a bill and wish to make an enquiry, the customer can call a special number (printed in the bill) to reach the correct team immediately.

Tip 10. Encourage Calls

Encourage customers to call the call center. If the customer has a question, make it easy for the customer to get the answer from the call center. Give the right number to call. This should be the number of the team that handles the specific issue that is faced by the customer, and should be easily located from the letter or webpage.