How effective are your telephone systems?

In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Amanda Wilson, the manager of Aviva’s call centre, announced a radical shake up of the way in which calls were handled. Whilst proud that service standards for number of calls answered were met, Amanda Wilson acknowledged that this target driven culture left overall standards falling way behind expectations.

A review of calls themselves revealed that 60% of calls were directly as a result of previous calls being mis-handled. This resulted in incorrect or missing claim payments, mistakes in correspondence or lack of action. In effect the call answering target had put pressure on employees to skimp work processes and provide unconstructive responses.

The new approach is based around “systems thinking” with call centre staff encouraged to stay on the telephone for longer and try to sort out client queries within the first call. This means that queries are no longer passed around employees, a process which resulted in complaints taking an average of 39 days to solve against a target of 5 days. The success of this new call answering process can be seen in the reduction of 20,000 calls per month as queries are sorted first time around.

Businesses of all sizes can benefit from the lead taken by Aviva. With the advent of internet based switchboards even the smallest business can now benefit from some quite sophisticated call processing procedures. These, for example, can allow calls to be routed to the right department using press button or voice options. This saves employees having to route calls manually and also provides a smoother response for customers.

Before setting up a virtual switchboard, it pays to take time to consider the nature of calls and how they should be processed. Empowering employees to take certain actions in response to a query or complaint will help towards speedy resolution as will training in customer service. Something as simple as having access to a departmental employee schedule can help to speed up call resolutions whilst at other times the availability of computer based help manuals can be required.

With employees being encouraged to treat outside calls as having priority over other tasks, callers won’t have to phone more than once and this will actually free up both employee time and improve customer perceptions. Linking this change of emphasis to an effective telephone system will pay dividends in the form of improved margins and increased sales from satisfied customers.