Outbound Call Center Featured Article

Do You Have A Hotline For Your Customers?

By David Sims
TMCnet Contributing Editor

On the Call Center Metrics blog, a recentpost noted that these days, “almost all big (and even small) companies have their own call centers or use services of external call centers who handle customers’ calls.”

Indeed, theblog wonders aloud if you would ever buy a product or a service if you knew that there is no phone number of a hotline. Depends what the product is, of course, but if you’re service providers, like web hosting or ISP companies, then “no” would be your answer.

However, as the blog notes, “even companies offering products have hotlines to answer questions coming from their numerous customers. We got used to the fact that if we have certain questions related to products or services we have just purchased we can always call a hotline number and ask questions that will be supposedly answered.”

Now just because you have a hotline, doesn’t mean you’re doing it right. In fact, it could be counterproductive, since if you’re giving out a phone number, the normal expectation is that it will be, well, answered. “It sometimes happens that customers never receive any answers or simply get tired of waiting for a response,” the blog notes, with the predictable result: “They hang up. In such a case a call center does not only fulfill its duties but worsen overall performance of a company.”

The blog mentions a “Balanced Scorecard” approachs, which works in four categories: “financial, customer, internal business processes, learning and growth. A call center BSC is a classical one which mean it does not go beyond these four categories.”

Each category contains key performance indicators which represent success factors for the call center, and which are explained more thoroughly on the blog itself, with diagrams and charts and everything.