Sometimes I interview call centers. Talking to the sales rep is not always enlightening. Knowing your rates does me no good unless I know what type of service I’m getting. I’d like to talk to your agents and see how they are over the phone. I’d like to give them some basic training as well.
If I make arrangements with your company to talk to your reps, would you arrange an appointment where I only met one rep? That would not be an efficient use of my time. If I didn’t like the rep, I’d have to make another appointment to meet another rep. What a headache. I think it would be easier if I could meet three or four reps during the same meeting. I would only need to talk to each one for a few minutes. Yes, you would have to yank them from whatever they were doing, but you might get hired if you made that sacrifice. If I’m the one who has to make the sacrifices of hounding you for four separate appointments, your chances of getting hired are not that great. I pay for quality and convenience, not headaches.
Are you in the business of charging people for headaches? How long do you think that business model will last?
The next hurdle at call centers is training. Do you have a manager who can train reps to do basic functions? If I am a client, it might be easier for me to train the manager and then the manager trains the reps. Call center agents seem to last only a few months and then they quit. I don’t have time to keep training one person after the next. But, training a manager once and leaving the training burden to him makes a lot of sense. He can train everyone himself each time someone quits.