Category: Jobs

This is a beautiful advice by DONNA FLUSS - Principal, DMG Consulting LLC. She is the founder and President of DMG Consulting LLC, a firm specializing in customer-focused business strategy, operations and technology services. Here’s an expert advice from her article: Ask the CRM Expert.  Here is the question and the answer to the query on night shift difficulties.

I recently started as a trainee in a call center, and it’s my first customer service position. I am working the night shift in the call center and have found this schedule to be difficult. Do you have any tips for call center agents who work the night shift?

CRM Expert’s Advice:

We actually asked this question to call center agents who worked our 12 a.m. to 8 a.m. shift — and they said that the trick was to get into a routine, just as if it were a normal day. This involved establishing working hours, sleeping hours and “everything else” hours. At the end of their shift, quite a number of our 12 a.m. to 8 a.m.’ers (or 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.’ers) went home and made breakfast for their families, then went to sleep. While it took some time when they started working those hours to “flip” their internal clock, they were fine as long as they maintained their structured schedule. When they switched back to a “normal” schedule, they took a few weeks to adjust again before becoming accustomed to the daytime hours.

Another trick to working a late shift is to keep busy. Our call center agents always asked us for extra work or training to fill off-peak hours, when it got quiet. Variations on this approach have become a “best practice” in many call centers.

Hope you learned something here. Be back for more tips soon!

*CRM - Customer Relationship Management (Wikipedia)

FarmOut Training Center has now raised the bar for call center candidate training! In its pursuit of producing high quality and exceptionally competent customer service agents, FOCI-TC is introducing a new system of skills assessment.

This new Skills Assessment Technique shall have a great way of ensuring that the people who pass our training are more than aptly qualified for call center work. This new system also guarantees that the best people get to have their right for student employment placement priority.

The new assessment method starts out with a first draft screening wherein a student gets to be evaluated on all call center skills with emphasis on listening comprehension and conversational skills. Once a student passes the call center evaluation’s first draft, he shall be given priority for endorsement into the various call center partners we have including our own FarmOut Contact Center.

If a trainee does not pass the first draft, then a thorough review and training on call center skills shall be required of him/her. After this, the trainee shall have a another chance with the second draft. Once passed, this trainee shall be included on the next option of recruitment with various BPOs. This process continues on up to a third draft. If by any chance, a trainee could not pass the last required assessment procedure, then he shall be required to undergo career counselling and see if customer service work is really his/her field. This could also give him the opportunity for other trainings that he could be cut out for such as Transcription training.

This assessment method shall ensure that the contact centers we are in partner with are only receiving the highest quality of employees that only FOCI-TC can produce. This shall guarantee a long lasting relationship with our BPO partners which means more job opportunities for our fellow Pangasinenses.

We aim to produce only the best, and give these best graduates the best option for work!

Five9.com has a new feature that was a big boon to our center. Previously, we had to asked an agent to log in to the five9 interface to be able to retrieve any new voice mail that was left by callers during our after office hours operations.

Now, five9 allows an administrator to assign an email with which the system could send out, via email, the details of the missed call, together with the voicemail, if any, as an attachment to the email.

Our agents can now access and process missed calls without having to login to the five9.com interface. Way to go five9!  Randy, now, how about the long awaited multipartitioned domain features that was promised 3 years ago?

According to research from Rostrvm Solutions, customers are beginning to demand multimedia contact but most call centers are far from ready to meet expectations.

Farmout according to the definition raised in the research study is almost ready. We have our website, email and multimedia contact solutions on hand and ready to be used for our campaigns. What we now need is to have our own “call me” button. Where under 15% of call centers have a ‘Call Me’ presence on the web site growing to less than 25% over 3 years.