We recently celebrated our 17th anniversary at Callzilla, and what a year it’s been! This year has been all about refocusing on what’s most important: our people. In the customer service industry, people are at the center of everything we do, whether that be our customers, clients, or employees. Let’s take a look back at what we’ve accomplished this year.
Honing Our Efforts
“Celebrating our 17th year is a testament to our team members and clients over the years. While we’re very pleased to celebrate the milestone, truth be told, our current focus is more about Analog transformation: honing our efforts and attention towards cultivating an Employee Centric, Client Centric, and Customer Centric culture (see Annette Franz’s book Built to Win). Many things to be proud of and much more to look forward to celebrating with our clients, team members, and partners.” – Neal Topf
Awards
We were very proud of our customer experience advancements this year, and were honored with a few awards recognizing our efforts.
Callzilla was presented with a Silver Stevie® Award in the Contact Center or Customer Service Outsourcing Provider of the Year category in the 16th annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. Our nomination was based on the work we did this past year improving performance, quality, compliance, and customer experience through speech analytics. Callzilla’s employee and client satisfaction also increased with the addition of internal support tools and the targeted action plans that came out of these.
“Callzilla delivered an outstanding nomination. They highlighted their shift in corporate philosophy. By making the customer the priority, they were able to increase performance. Callzilla also provided the critical KPIs for comparison. This is an excellent nomination.” – 2022 Stevie Awards Judge.
Callzilla was then named the winner of a Bronze Stevie® Award in the Customer Service Team of the Year category in The 20th Annual American Business Awards®. This award was based on our customer experience improvements compared to the previous year (data from Observe.AI speech analytics):
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We were also finalists in the ICMI Awards Best Outsourcing Provider category, and are particularly proud of the Customer Hero award we received. Ana María Ramírez, a Callzilla Supervisor, went above and beyond to support both her customers and client, representing the brand in an exceptional way.
“Ana’s communication skills have been nothing short of excellent. When she needs help, she communicates the problem honestly and absorbs the solution quickly. She effectively relays information to her team and drives the needed results. Because of her willingness to learn and communicate, our customers’ experience has not diminished which is something that is not commonly seen while onboarding a third-party customer service team.” – Callzilla client
Tech Advancements
We updated processes and invested in new tools to support our clients, customers, and employees.
For recruitment, we implemented TalkPush. It’s the leading recruitment platform designed to handle the large pools of candidates generated on social media. Our Human Resources ChatBot is available on our Facebook, Instagram, website, and through WhatsApp for easy access to talent. It gathers all necessary information needed to qualify candidates, so our HR team can focus on the nuanced aspects of recruiting.
Once hired, employees now have access to emmersion.ai for their language assessment. This is a pre-screening platform that certifies the language ability of our team. Emmersion.ai automates the language evaluation process — providing us with reliable, data-driven results regarding the language ability of our agents. This is important to providing your customers with high quality interactions.
We also created a workforce management bot for staffing optimization, and partnered with Magister for productivity monitoring. This tool is especially helpful for our remote team, tracking agent’s productivity in all aspects. In the user-friendly dashboard, we’re able to see the basics of when agents log on and off and take breaks, but also which websites they’re visiting, which applications are open, and we can calculate a custom productivity rate based on those aspects. We also get alerts when agents visit banned sites such as social media or streaming sites.
We moved our reporting over to PowerBI, where our clients can find a more user friendly and customizable dashboard for their data. Our management team also appreciates the vast options for viewing reports, and the quick turn around for new data points.
Book Club
We started a Callzilla book club this year, which has had an unexpected impact on our team. Setting aside an hour per week for our management team to discuss relevant topics brought in from outside sources has been so beneficial.
We started with Heels to Deals by Heidi Solomon-Orlick, which is a compilation of different stories told by women dominating in the sales industry. We found the stories to be inspiring, and even had a special guest appearance by Heidi herself.
We are currently diving into Built to Win by Annette Franz. It’s a guide to creating a more customer-centric culture, which our team has adapted to our new themes: customer-centric, client-centric, and employee-centric. Annette includes thought provoking concepts, and also interactive guides which make our weekly discussions fun and productive.
Team Bonding
As we moved toward a more employee-centric model, activities involving engagement, development, and support were a must.
Engagement Activities
- Holiday Parties
- Valentine’s Month of employee appreciation
- Pet Day (bring in photos of your furry friend)
- Birthday celebrations
- Virtual group activities for our agents working from home
- “Wall of Fame” employee recognition for good performance
- “Share your passion”, sending in photos to share of your hobbies
Development Activities
- New agent experience strategy with skill mapping, new targeted training sessions, and career development sessions.
- E-Learning platform developed
- 40+ employees promoted to new positions internally in 2021.
Support Activities
- Counseling sessions available for mental health, team issues, absenteeism, performance, retention, etc.
- Health & safety month (Talks on healthy habits, yoga class, biking excursion, etc.)
- Digital transformation: implementing systems like Novasoft, Talkpush, Sharepoint, and Online testing to support our agents working from home.
- Pandemic protocol put in place to reduce the spread and put employee safety first.
These are just a few highlights from an amazing year. Year 18 is already off to a great start! Sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date on our monthly activities.