“When’s the right time to centralize different divisions or receptionists into a centralized center?”

This is a question that a lot of companies struggle with and mirrors the simple question of

“Should I start a contact center?”

The easy answer is: It depends.

I know. It’s a co-out. It is, however, true as well. The fact of the matter is that businesses have different expectations, requirements and designs. Some companies manage their personell through different budgets and are not interested in consolidating the numbers. Others would prefer to have centralized costs that can be evaluated for actual talk costs and values.  Some organizations have a large, matrixed management structure where the agents or administrative professionals handling calls are best managed by the small groups. Others take a different approach and want a singular management section that handles the service fashion.

Not only that, the question becomes what are your goals? Would it make a difference? Are there cost benefit savings? Is there a customer satisfaction improvement aspect? Are you trying to reduce headcount? Improve efficiency?

There are hundreds of reasons for putting a contact center together — and there are probably just as many not to.  You need to evaluate your process goals, your cross training potential, and your concepts.  In my opinion, if you have multiple locations taking calls and any of the groups have downtime where others don’t? You have a very obvious area of efficiency that can be gained.  If you have multiple locations regardless, you should consider looking at a centralized option.

Hire someone to come look at your numbers.  Ask a friend that has experience with this sort of thing if you need to.  It’s worth looking at.

Her question was:

I am wondering if you might have some experience with this….It hasn’t been much of an issue for us, but staff that is making outbound calls have had some problems with sound blasts when calls connect. There is concern that this could actually do damage to their ears. Are you familiar with Sound Shield or any other types of systems or headsets that somehow filter or block noises over a certain decibel?

She was able to get some information that may be of help to people reading here.  What she’s found is below — I don’t endorse any of it as I haven’t actually had any experience with selecting headsets:

I have now been told that acoustic shock protection is now standard in many headsets, so we’ll look into that.  Just as an FYI, I did find a few articles with some information about this.

This article highlights a particular type of headset. and another about the dangers of hearing damage to headset wearers…

This one is about some type of software…

This article specifically mentions a product called Sound Shield.

Four more articles about Sound Shield..
http://www.headsets-australia.com/soundshield-acoustic-devices.html
http://www.polaris.com.au/SoundShield.asp
http://www.stretchnow.com.au/products/clearheadsets/soundshield.html
http://www.acousticshock.org/?id=statements

Service Untitled » The system won’t let me. – customer service and customer service experience blog

The writer of the Service Untitled blog pointed out some of the pitfalls of that particular word. It’s quite true. Consider what your customers hear when someone says “the system won’t let me”. I know what I think. The first two things that come to my mind are:

1. They’re lying. The policy is just that they don’t want to help people and so this is a good, easy excuse.
2. Their system team needs to do better. A system should NOT be what causes the customer service agent to not be able to help the customer.

If your policies are what’s dictating that the customer can’t do it, don’t tell the customer it’s the system. If it’s the system that’s causing the problem, don’t have your agents tell the customer’s that. Have your agents say “Let me find out what can be done and I’ll get back to you by XXX date/time”. And then find out.