Does your customer service team work well when they’re being hammered with hundreds or thousands of calls per hour? Just thinking about handling that many calls stresses me out. The past couple of days, I have written about improving First Call Resolution and not sacrificing the quality of your calls. Now that you’re customer service reps have mastered that, what about during your peak call times? If they aren’t fully prepared for peak seasons or peak calling times, they aren’t ready. In my call center experience, the advice that could have helped me (and my managers) the most are the following:
Keep Your CSR’s in Check. If your rep is doing something wrong… tell them. However, if you are standing next to them listening to everything, that could make them nervous. Wait until they’re done with the call (unless it’s a crisis or unless they ask for help) and let them know what they did right and what they need to work on. Balancing the good with the bad makes it less stressful on everyone and keeps them motivated to do good work.
Stay Positive. I’m a fairly optimistic person. I don’t like being around negative people because they can affect the moods of everyone around. The same applies to business. You need to stay positive to keep your employees positive. If you have a negative attitude and criticize everything they do, that’s going to poorly affect their mood, attitude and the quality of their work. If you’re positive, the customer service is more likely to stay positive.
Customer Service Reps are Not Robots. Let’s be honest, no one can sit at a desk all day and keep performing well. Yes, lunch breaks are helpful, but so are short, 30 second breaks to stretch or a 3 minute walk. At the call center I used to work in, I got yelled at for standing up to stretch. IF there’s a break in phone calls, or just a tiny bit of down time, have everyone stand-up, touch their toes… anything to get their blood pumping again!
These three tips would have helped me when I worked in customer service/call centers and would have increased my productivity immensely.
What do you think? Would this help your customer service department stay productive?