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

Contact centers tend to be at the core of this arguement. Quality vs Quantity. What is truly the most important? Does a person’s Average Speed of Answer (ASA) mean more than their customer feedback score? Is the abandon rate the key or does customer satisfaction play a role? In truth, the answer is not a simple one. One thing does hold true regardless of your company’s size, situation, or industry.

Contact Centers are the primary point of contact for your company and have an immense impact on customer loyalty, satisfaction, and retention.

A contact center for a small company may be the only employee, programmer and owner — it is still the place where customers come. Larger companies, more obviously, have call centers that have an impact on the customer. Ranging anywhere from 5 to 500+, these customer support organizations (including billing, customer service, technical support, returns, etc) are crucial.

There is a simple reason that the QvQ quandry is not easily resolved. Both are important; Neither can be sacrificed. If your customer satisfaction rating, of those customers spoken to, is through the roof but 20% of your customers abandon before speaking to them, you’ve alienated 20% of your customers. More than likely, these 20% would also rate your customer satisfaction extremely low — you just can’t easily survey them as they’ve hung up before speaking to someone. At the same time, if you’re able to reach a 1% abandon rate and your customer satisfaction is on the floor, the center is not doing your organization any favors.

It takes a strong team who understands client support and call center management to put together metrics that are appropriate for your organization. This team can be a consultant company or an in house team — its irrelevant, but it is important to make sure that you have someone measuring the right data.

Some crucial scores to look at:

• Average Speed of Answer
• Abandon Rate
• Service Level
• Overall Customer Satisfaction
• Professionalism
• How well was the issue resolved

One pitfall to avoid while looking at these numbers — it ignores the outliers. An average abandon rate of 5% per day (fairly industry standard) when measured over the course of a month may show that 4 days a week has a rate of 2% and one day a week has 20%. This is an extreme example, but all too often, contact center agencies and management tries to expand over a month — days do matter. ]]> http://www.mesritz.us/blog/2009/02/quality-v-quantity/feed/ 0 http://www.mesritz.us/blog/2009/02/bad-excuse-the-system-wont-let-me/ http://www.mesritz.us/blog/2009/02/bad-excuse-the-system-wont-let-me/#comments Thu, 12 Feb 2009 17:50:32 +0000 pmesritz http://www.mesritz.us/blog/?p=51 If you run a customer service organization and you have heard “the system won’t let me” from your agents, think about whether you’ve given your agents enough empowerment and/or whether the systems are what are keeping you down.

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.