May 18 2012

A Comparison of Answering Service Operational Models

Category: Answering Service Lifestyle, Call Centers, Outsourcing
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The telephone answering service industry has undergone a lot of structural changes in the past few decades, especially in the area of service delivery. As competitiveness in the industry increased over time, firms started transforming themselves in an attempt to deliver value to the clients while still protecting their bottom lines. Following are the 4 main operational models plus a brief description of each. We approach this post as a type of evolution but keep in mind that each of these models are still in existence and their implementation depends on the type of call center or what the managers feel will be the best model – i.e. some are better than others for certain applications.

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May 16 2012

Do Agents Prefer to Work for a Small Call Center?

Category: Answering Service Lifestyle, Call Centers
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Great question! I’m glad we are asking it. Although the popular perception about call centers is a large organization with hundreds of agents, a typical call center actually is much smaller in size. In fact, statistics show that nearly 90% of call centers employ less than 75 agents of which 75% of them have less than 20 agents. The 90% of call centers employ nearly 50% of total call center agents. I know those are a lot of stats to absorb but it’s to accent the point that most call centers are small. Though attrition is a common problem of the call center industry, the impact of an employee leaving the organization is felt more in a smaller call center than in a larger one. Imagine if one out 20 employees leaves, that is a churn of 5% of your workforce (yikes!). This brings us to the pertinent question of do agents actually prefer to work for a small call center or are they keen on working for a larger organization. Understanding what motivates a call center agent in a small call center would help in designing retention strategies which are specific to the small call center environment.

Off of the top of my head, I would bet that the two main disadvantages prospective employees would attribute to a smaller call center are limited opportunities for growth and possibly lower pay when compared to larger organizations.

However, there are several advantages of being a small call center that can be utilized and portrayed in the right manner to retain employees and improve productivity.

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May 10 2012

Getting the Most Out of Your Call Recording

Category: Running Your Call Center, Technology

In the early days of call recording, it was used only in large call centers or in answering services which dealt with niche industries such as financial services or legal services. Today however, even small answering services which employ 10-15 agents consider call recording an integral part of their architecture. If you are a small call center, then you have to make sure that the benefits of deploying a voice recorder and related software outweighs the associated costs. Here are some to keep in mind (5 to be exact) to make sure that the voice recording pays you rich dividends, or at least keeps customers happy so they don’t jump ship and move onto a provider that does offer this service. Read the full blog post

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May 8 2012

Specialty’s “My Phone & Me” Photo Contest

Category: Free Stuff & Contests
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To celebrate our love for telephones, Specialty Answering Service is holding a "My Phone & Me" photo contest! The winner of the contest will receive a $100 Amazon Gift Card and their work will be published on our blog! Money + visibility - what could be better! The contest starts TODAY and the DEADLINE is the end of May (the 31st) so you only have 24 DAYS to submit your photos! There are just a handful of rules to follow so keep reading.

Submission Guidelines & Juicy Details

The following guidelines need to be followed to be eligible for the contest. Don't worry, you don't have to register or be one of our telephone answering service clients. You just need to love to take pictures and have a phone! We want everyone including professionals and amateurs to be able to participate so get out your high tech thousand dollar camera + lens or your Android or iPhone device and get to picture taking.

  • Each photo will need to follow a "My Phone & Me" format. What does that mean? It's entirely up to you! You can create a Photoshop collage of you using your phone; you can take a picture of you trying to have a conversation with SIRI; you can take a picture yelling at your phone, you can take a picture where your head is the base of a phone and the handset is resting on top, etc. You also need to come up with a caption or a name for your photo. If you can't think of anything, don't worry. We are just looking for you to introduce your photo and help us classify it.
  • Keep your work G rated.
  • Submit your file as a .JPG or .JPEG with nothing over 2MB. Any other file formats or larger files won't be accepted.
  • The pictures need to be your own work.
  • On June 1, we will poll our employees and choose a winner who will receive a $100 Amazon Gift Card via email. The 4 runner up's will have their pictures posted on our blog with a link back to their website & any other details they want us to list. No money though :(

Just complete the form below to get started. Good luck!

Photographer Personal Information

  • First Name: *
  • Last Name: *
  • City:
  • State:
  • Personal Email: *
  • Web Address:
  • Phone Number:

Photographer Professional Information

  • Level of Expertise: Professional Amateur Hobbyist
  • A Brief Bio: *
  • Caption:
  • Upload Your Picture (.jpg only): *

Submit Your Stuff!

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May 7 2012

Best Practices in Hiring for Call Centers

Category: Answering Service Lifestyle, Call Centers
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When it comes to hiring and staffing for call centers what immediately comes to mind to most people is the high attrition rates in the industry. It’s sad but true! This is a blog about the call center industry s we aren’t going to pad it with inaccurate representations of the industry. Very often, factors such as the mundane nature of the job and the absence of fast career growth are cited as reasons for the high turnover of employees and most call center recruiters accept that as a way of life. However, there are several things that a call center can keep in mind to ensure that they hire the right candidate for the job.

The first thing to keep in mind is that it is far easier to match the employee to the job profile than change the organization to suit the employee. Therefore, hiring efforts should start with a clear analysis of what actually works.

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Apr 30 2012

Key Metrics to Measure Effectiveness of Your Third Party Call Center Relationship

Category: Advice & Information, Outsourcing
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Metrics for measuring call center performance have received a lot of attention over the years, with most metrics focusing on how an answering service can generate maximum ROI for its investment. However, the ways in which an organization can measure the effectiveness of its third party call center relationship is an equally important and often neglected area. In this post we will look at some of the key metrics to measure the effectiveness of your third party call center relationship.

Today, call centers have evolved into customer contact centers with most organizations preferring to outsource multiple channels of service delivery such as email, fax, live-chat and phone to a single vendor. While keeping operational costs low is primarily the concern of the call center, the organization is often more interested in maximizing customer service, and rightly so. The measurement metrics from the perspective of an organization can be broadly classified into two buckets – operational and strategic.

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Apr 27 2012

Call Center Agent Skills: Depth or Breadth?

Category: Running Your Call Center
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With contact centers evolving as one stop shops for customer service, the focus on multi-skilled agents have increased more than ever. With the recent recessionary fears in the US and globally, one of the key cost optimization measures taken by call centers is to have multi-skilled agents. However, in large call centers with high attrition rates and multiple clients, one wonders about the practical issues related to multi-skilling of agents. This post is an attempt to look at whether it is better to have agents who have deep skills in a narrow area or a broad set of skills in multiple areas.

Often the key advantage that is touted in favor of multi-skilling of agents is better agent utilization as they are able to answer calls pertaining to a wide variety of areas. Multi-skilling of agents is also found to improve agent motivation levels as it takes away the monotony of handling a single type of calls. Imagine handling calls about every day guiding people through steps to reset their modem or handling angry inbound calls for the customer service department of a ringtone company. I used ringtone company here because I don’t know about you, but those commercials on MTV advertising ringtones for $10+ per month are insane. I can imagine the anger level of callers after they receive their first bill and demand refunds. At any rate, imagine managing those calls 40+ hours a week.

However, if your attrition rates are very high, then the administrative hassle of training your agents may prove to be not worth the effort. For an agent to be proficient in multiple aspects, it requires a certain amount of time in both formal training and informal ”learn by experience” training. If the average length of employment in your call center is low, then it may not make sense to focus on multi-skilling. After all, you do not want your agents to use your telephone answering service as a free training ground and then look for better employment elsewhere. It would be like grooming Carlos Ruiz on your minor league team and losing him each week to the Phillies. Please insert your own favorite baseball player & team in that last analogy. One way to overcome this is to use training as something the agent earns over time. Thus, you could select agents for specialized training based on the length of employment and their performance on the job. This will not only motivate your agents, but also reduce your risks and improve efficiencies. You could also look at hiring multi-skilled agents directly rather than training them in-house.

The decision to multi-skill or not should depend on a variety of parameters such as how complex your products/services are (which translates as the time taken for an agent to be effectively trained in each product line), the profile of your callers (should your agents be multi-lingual and handle a single product or trained on multiple products in a single language), the profile of agents available for hire (are multi-skilled or multi-skillable agents several times more expensive than single skill agents), your training costs, as well as the level of technology available in the call center (such as the presence of a well-configured skill based routing ACD system).

Agent skilling needs to be performed in a planned manner with clearly defined training calendars and ongoing monitoring of training effectiveness measurement parameters.

One thing to always keep in mind is to never sacrifice depth of skills in an attempt to broad base the skill sets of your agents. If agents are spread too thin and multi-skilled in too many areas, chances are high that your first call resolution rates will drop drastically, though you may improve your average wait time and agent utilization rates. Key metrics of agent performance and customer satisfaction should be monitored regularly to identify skill gaps as well as the basket of skills for each agent. The decision is not an easy one to make as there are multiple factors at play and achieving a fine balance requires you to customize your skilling efforts keeping in mind the often conflicting aspirations of your clients, callers, agents as well as those of your call center.

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Apr 23 2012

Call Center Agents VS. Automation: Which Side Are You On

Category: Call Centers, Technology
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Several studies have been done comparing the pros and cons of having live agents man your call center vs. using automation techniques such as IVR and more recently, speech recognition. Typically, studies sponsored by vendors of automation technologies would highlight the benefits of an automated call handling system, whereas there are other studies that highlight the improved customer service that live agents can offer. This post is an attempt to take an impartial look at this debate.

Often, the decision to go ahead with automation is motivated by cost considerations rather than customer satisfaction. However, if you want your call center to be successful, it is imperative that you use both automation and human agents in the right combination, leveraging the strength of each option. For example, if your speech recognition engine cannot identify what a caller is trying to say after a few attempts, then the rule base should automatically transfer it to a live agent, rather than the speech application trying again and again and ending up frustrating the caller. Also, any unusual requests should be ideally handled by an agent whereas standard transactions such as balance enquiries or address change requests can be handled by IVR and speech recognition.

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Apr 11 2012

The Difference between Lead Generation and Sales

Category: Marketing
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Lead generation and sales are so closely interconnected that it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish where one ends and the other begins. If we are going to define the two, “lead generation” refers to the process used to find potential customers, whereas “sales” refers to the actual hand over of products or services in exchange for money. In some cases, these two functions are performed by the same sales person or sales team. Think of this as a telemarketer who is generating leads & who also has the ability to close sales. Other times, lead generation and sales are delegated as two separate tasks. A real world example here is the car salesman working for Toyota where Toyota Motors are advertising their product and the salesman is closing the deal when the customer enters the showroom. The decision to combine these functions, or separate them, largely depends on the product or service your company offers.

What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation involves identifying potential customers for your company’s product or services and seeking to obtain contact information for these customers. This can be done through various methods, both offline (traditional marketing methods like billboards or print advertising) and online (Internet methods like SEO, PPC, banner advertising, or link exchanges). Some of the most effective methods include face-to-face interactions with the potential target market, such as setting up stalls and trade show displays or going to local business mixers like Rotary Clubs or local chamber of commerce meetings. Face-to-face interactions build the best rapport with potential customers.

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Mar 2 2012

Free Answering Services? Can They Really be Real?

Category: Advice & Information, Cool Stuff

Individuals and businesses alike are always looking for a good deal. And what better deal can someone get than something free? Free soap & shampoo at hotels, free tap water at restaurants, and free answering services! While getting something for free is exciting, you need to determine if it is something positive for your business and you should always be an educated consumer and ask the very poignant “what’s the catch” question. On the surface, a free receptionist answering your calls would be great. But you need to look further and actually see what you are getting. It may be the best thing for your company!

We are all smart consumers & we know that no one gives anything away for free. Even if it is purely free, the product is usually advertisement driven. There are businesses that offer a free voicemail box. Is it completely free? Yes but you need to listen to 1min30sec worth of advertisement spots before you hear your voicemail. If you come across a company which offers a free answering service on a long term basis, there will most likely be a catch or you are in some type of dream state because a long term “free trial” doesn’t exist. As far as I know, there are no answering services which offer long term free trials that are advertisement supported. They may in the future but not today. For the purpose of this blog post, we are discussing “free” as in a trial period. The free period that services will offer you (some 7 days, some 2 weeks, some 30 days) is free but they are hoping that you will use their service after the period. Our company, Specialty Answering Service, is no different. We offer a free period so we can prove our company & in the hopes that you will find a real need for our service. Most people do! Free giveaways like ours exist not out to trick you into signing a contract in order to get money out of you. Rather this we want to prove that the company is perfect for your needs. If, after the trial period, you are unsatisfied with their services, then there is no obligation to continue. Again, true with our service & most any telephone answering service which is offering a test period.

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