Last week’s issue of Contact Center Insider from ICMI featured Callzilla in the lead story, “Secrets of Award-Winning Outsourced Service: Interview with the 2017 ICMI Global Contact Center Awards Winner for Best Outsourcing Provider”.
What is Callzilla’s approach to training frontline agents to support multiple brands? How does Callzilla gain trust with clients? What should contact center leaders ask in RFPs? The answers appear in an interview with Neal Topf that ran last week in a publication of the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI).
Last week’s issue of Contact Center Insider from ICMI featured Callzilla in the lead story, “Secrets of Award-Winning Outsourced Service: Interview with the 2017 ICMI Global Contact Center Awards Winner for Best Outsourcing Provider”. In it ICMI Community Strategist Erica Marois notes the context for Callzilla’s May 2017 win:
“In today’s economy, customer experience is a key competitive differentiator. Customer service is at the crux of that experience, which makes relinquishing control of customer interactions risky…. The key: finding the right partner.
“The ICMI Global Contact Center Awards recognizes one outstanding outsourcing provider each year. This year’s award recipient was Callzilla.”
For the profile, Erica asked Callzilla president Neal Topf how Callzilla trains frontline agents to support multiple brands in diverse industries. Neal shared that Callzilla focuses on the autonomy and empowerment of our team. “Our work environment helps employees achieve optimal productivity. We encourage questioning and reflection, new ideas, innovation, and participation at every level, which enables us to consistently perform with integrity, honesty, respect for others, and empathy,” he said.
Often times, there’s no substitute for experiencing the products and programs first hand. It takes extra investment to provide it, but having a shared experience means representatives can authentically relate to customers.
Creating shared experiences is often key to effective training — which means providing Callzilla representatives with more than talking points, product facts and figures, return/refund/exchange policy details, and the like. (Case studies and posts at this site provide numerous examples. See, for example, “Wireless Giant Improves Saves, First Contact Resolution” and “Software Firm Improves Call Conversions from 2% to 16%“.)
Making sure incentives line up with goals is another piece of the puzzle. It’s easy to reward agents for answering more calls or keeping time per call low. It’s harder to reward them for hitting specific Customer Satisfaction targets. But that’s the approach that works.
“Ask providers to discuss failures and what they’ve learned from them. We all have them, but only the good ones know how to turn the failure in to valuable learning experiences.”
Erica also asked whether Neal had tips for executives formulating a request for proposals from BPOs. His advice: ask “providers to discuss failures and what they’ve learned from them. We all have them, but only the good ones know how to turn the failure in to valuable learning experiences.”
“I think scenarios are also very good questions to ask i.e. present some data and a description of a real life situation and ask the BPO to describe solutions and prescriptions, much like a business school case study. I believe this demonstrates the BPO’s ability to act like a true solution provider, not just an order-taker,” he added.
Neal also looked ahead in the interview, emphasizing that Callzilla is always learning from its peers and contributing expertise where possible. Find us in #ICMIchat, at ICMI conferences, and posting articles on LinkedIn. If you’d like updates, please follow us on LinkedIn, follow @Callzilla, and subscribe to Callzilla News.
About Callzilla
The Quality-First Contact Center™
At Callzilla, ensuring high quality customer experiences is top prioritycomes first. And through work with over 100 top brands, our proprietary systems have helped our clients gain a competitive edge… and enabled us to win international recognition for consistent quality and results.
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