John Linton
..........continues to be knowledge and the ability to apply it to a huge range of customer questions.
We continue to make progress in developing the residential sales, provisioning and support operations in Sri Lanka and are coming tantalisingly close to meeting the first of three major goals of answering 50% of all telephone calls within 'five rings' and averaging less than one minute to answer all telephone calls as can be seen from the telephone statistics published here:
http://forum.exetel.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=324&t=27043&start=15
With the average support call being answered in one minute and ten seconds, provisioning calls in an average of 45 seconds and sales calls in 90 seconds the telephone response times are better than any other Australian communications company by a very long way - in these terms there is Exetel and daylight based on the checks we do on the 'top ten' Australian communications companies telephone answering services.The results for February are as close as we have yet come to the targets set for the Sri Lankan operation and there are still four months to go to meet those targets so we are hopeful they will be met and then sustained. Any customer can check what likely wait times there might be for any type of service by checking the 'wait time' listing that's updated every 30 seconds on the Exetel web site:
http://www.exetel.com.au/contact.php
On most occasions this will show "no wait" in all three queues.
Targets for 'picking up the phone' are obviously only one, first, standard to be met in providing such services and, of themselves, do not mean that much - other than it is important not to make callers wait to obtain the information they are seeking. The knowledge the person answering the telephone brings to bear on the questions the caller needs answers to is, in almost all respects, the key attribute of any customer oriented telephone answering service. I have never run a call centre personally but I have had overall responsibility for providing such services as part of a range of responsibilities on two occasions in the past and have been in a position to closely observe the operation of a call centre on one other occasion - of course, like everyone else, I have been a user of other companies call centre services on many occasions. My personal experiences of using other companies call centres has generally (and with only one stand out exception - Hewlett Packard in Manila) been disappointing with several calls being a complete disaster.
Irrespective of the location of the call centres I have contacted or been associated with the overwhelming problem of call centres appears to be the knowledge of the person answering the telephone. Therefore the challenge in operating a call centre is always 'deploying' people who answer telephone questions who have extensive knowledge and the ability to use that knowledge effectively in the context of a wide variety of customer scenarios - a statement of the bleeding obvious......but nevertheless the crux of operating an effective help line facility. Since it started offering residential services Exetel has continuously updated FAQ lists for each of its different services and processes and over the past three years has added a wiki that expands on the FAQs as well as incorporating them in toto. This was done to provide our customers with the same level of 'knowledge' as our employees and has been more or less effective in ensuring that our knowledge of commonly asked questions was accumulated in one place and constantly refined. Like all such processes - it is an endless take to update, refine and correct such a resource and those processes have not always been done as effectively as they should.
Our major task, which we began some 5 months ago, is to bring the FAQs/wiki completely up to date and to involve all of the SL personnel in the process of adding to it and refining it with the goal of having at least 1,000 absolutely correct entries in it by mid 2010. Starting from March of this year we will run a 'knowledge test' for all SL personnel (from the very top down to the newest employees across all 'disciplines' based on a computer random generated question list of 50 rising to 100 questions at the the end of each month. We will rank all employees from 1 to 50 on that test and take remedial action to increase the knowledge acquisition of those personnel who fall below some defined 'pass mark' with the objective of all personnel reaching a 90% plus achievement by some yet to be defined time.
Given that we only employ university/technical college graduates and that we now use a better mentoring system in Sri Lanka we have high hopes that, over a relatively short time, this process will accelerate the in depth knowledge acquisition of the people who answer telephone calls from Exetel customers.....additional months in the position will, obviously, also add the required knowledge on an ongoing basis. While such a process remains the most difficult thing to do in providing call centre services we believe that it will allow us to achieve the second of the three major requirements of running a world best practice operation well before the end of 2010.
If we can do that, and I'm very sure we can, we only have one step more to provide the best telephone support operation that has ever been achieved in Australia and probably many other places.