A replay and slides are available from our webinar on Outsourced Operations along with all of Questions and Answers. 

Today’s virtual and global organisations need outsourcing cost advantages, but without loss of flexibility, quality control, customer transparency or service performance accountability, regardless of the contract terms.

While there are dozens of partial solutions for customer experience, service quality, performance analytics and intelligence, only one solution provides revolutionary, time-to-value, scalability and ease-of-integration to support the ‘unified information layer’ for both departmental and enterprise intelligence programs.

You will learn how to easily and affordably create a unified business picture of internal, home-based, in-the-field, and outsourced customer/team contacts, processes and performance with little configuration delay and risk, through a unique and revolutionary solution.

Learn how you can capture and analyse: Any contact.  Any location.  Any organisation.  From: One resource.  One fee.  One person to call.

Agenda:

Click here to view the slides

Click here to view the slides

Click here to view the Whitepaper

Topics to be discussed

 This webinar is provided by Call Centre Helper and is sponsored by CallMiner.  Click here to view the replay

Prolog have supported the Mothercare Born to Care Cycle Ride this summer.

Raising over £12,000 for Mothercare’s charity partner Save the Children, a team of between 11 and 13 cyclists took the journey from Southampton’s Docks through to Prolog’s distribution centre in Annesley, Nottingham.

Prolog’s Commercial Director, Ian Dignum, commented: “The ride was a huge success and this is something that Prolog is very proud to help support, especially for one of our clients.”

“The Prolog Team has done extremely well and we congratulate everyone who has participated in this 220-mile cycle ride, especially with the money they have raised for Save the Children.”

The Call Center School in conjunction with Invision Software are holding two half-day workshops on 4th October 2011 in Stirling, Scotland and 5th October 2011 in Huddersfield to share best practices in workforce optimisation.

Hear about ten different case studies where contact centres have implemented new processes and strategies that have improved service delivery to customers, reduced costs, increased workforce productivity, and improved staff satisfaction and retention.

Specifically, you will learn to:

The workshop will be led by Maggie Klenke, Co-Founder of The Call Center School, and co-author of several textbooks that support the Call Centre Manager curriculum at the University of Phoenix, e.g. Call Center Staffing – The Complete Practical Guide to Workforce Management, Business School Essentials for the Call Center Leader, and Call Center Supervision – The Complete Practical Guide to Managing Frontline Staff.

You will also hear about how contact centres around the world are addressing today’s workforce challenges, and have the opportunity to work in small groups to discuss particular items of concern in your own operation.

Workshop Agenda:

09:00 – 09:30 Introduction and Workshop Overview
09:30 – 11:00 Part 1 – Strategies and Roundtable Workshop
11:00 – 11:15 Morning Coffee/Tea Break
11:15 – 12:30 Part 2 – Strategies and Roundtable Workshops
12:30 – 12:45 Coffee/Tea Break
12:45 – 13:30 WFM Best Practices
13:30 – 14:30 Lunch
14:30 – 15:30 Solutions Roundtable

All attendees will receive:

The participation fee for attending this event is £30.

Please click here to register.

Essex County Cricket club (ECCC) is using Foehn to help the club attract new members and increase revenues through pre-recorded voice messages from the club’s celebrity cricketers, including England captain, Alistair Cook.

It’s hoped the targeted messages sent to existing and lapsed members offering discounted tickets and membership rates will help bridge the upcoming £250,000 deficit incurred by the English and Welsh Cricket Board’s (ECB) decision to reduce the number of Twenty20 matches being held next season.

Foehn had already installed an Asterisk-based telephone system to manage the club’s general communications, but with an annual ticket sales target of over half a million pounds, ECCC enlisted the help of Foehn to upgrade the technology to offer outbound marketing functionality. Foehn adapted the system to enable outbound dialling, which was used to broadcast a series of pre-recorded messages from star names which encouraged members to buy tickets. First a short message was played to announce the celebrity and allow listeners the chance to opt-in by pressing a key on their phone, and then the celebrity message was delivered.

“The ECB’s decision to reduce the number of Twenty20 home matches from eight to five has had a massive impact on the income of most cricket clubs,” explains Danny Macklin, commercial manager at Essex County Cricket Club,. “For our club in particular, unlike the test grounds of Yorkshire, Middlesex and Lancashire, we rely heavily on Twenty20 matches to draw in the big crowds – they make up almost 80% of our income.”

“We wanted to generate additional revenue opportunities but also make it fun and entertaining for everyone involved” continues Macklin. “There aren’t many brands out there which are lucky enough to have ambassadors like Alistair Cook so it made sense to utilise the name and build on it.”

While the outbound dialling project required some custom scripting – no expensive modules or new technology were required, it was all available within the existing open-source toolkit. The technology guaranteed success by ensuring that the messages were received. If the dialler came across a voicemail system it would end the call and reschedule a call at a later time until the call was connected. Of those who heard the initial message, almost 60% opted to listen to the full message from the cricket celebrity.

Members’ focus groups held regularly by the club reported that the messages were well received. “It’s a great way of reaching out to our members and we couldn’t have done this without Foehn,” Danny explained. “Not only was our SMS database not big enough for text-based campaigns, but the ease and speed of the implementation meant that pilot messages and testing were all fairly simple to do and ensured better results. As a form of marketing, it’s much more cost effective than direct mail and it’s a good way to make the most of our celebrity players.”

Despite many changes that have happened to the internet, support forums seem to have remained essentially unchanged since their inception as bulletin boards back in the early 1970s

Orhan Ertughrul explores 5 areas where support forums are no longer up to the mark.

Support forums have hardly changed since their inception as bulletin boards back in the early 1970s. The first true web forum was developed by the W3 consortium back in 1994 – ancient web history. It was called WWW Interactive Talk (WIT) and it was thrown together in three days by a student at CERN.

Since then, internet forums have become the mainstay of community support initiatives at literally millions of organisations and clubs around the world. In recent years Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have got in on the act but they essentially provide the same type of bulletin board functionality where someone can initiate a thread and others can comment on it.

Why has the technology become so universal? Most organisations can see that if they have an expert user base then engaging them to answer questions from the community can be an effective way of preventing calls to the call centre and lowering costs.

The problem is that forums were never designed to provide support. In fact, they provide a fairly poor medium for support, and little has been done over the years to improve this. The reasons are multi-fold but let’s look at each in turn.

1.     Distinguishing between discussions and problems

In any forum there tend to be two types of post, discussions and problems. Each of these should really be treated in a different way. Often a search for relevant material on a certain problem will result in a number of search results in order of community rating. However, when you want an answer to a problem then highly rated community discussions are less likely to be of use to you. One or two solution providers are now realising that they should make this distinction but they’re still not actually treating the two types of post differently.

2.     Collecting the right data for problem solving

In any phone support call you can pretty much guarantee that the service engineer will walk you through a set of data-gathering questions designed to help them narrow down the problem. The same thing can happen in a forum thread but it tends to be a tortuous process with many posts required before enough information is available to answer the question. This process could be made so much easier.

Collecting the correct data for solving a problem is also important for building effective meta-data around an issue. This is partly a classical knowledge management problem: how do you ensure that you return the right solution to a customer from a search query? With classical forum implementations this is difficult, because most of the time you’re relying on community ratings and keywords harvested from the title and text of the issue.

What features should support forum software contain?

3.     Helping newcomers

Anyone who has used a support forum has come across that post from the board newbie where he makes the capital forum offence of asking a question that has been asked before. The unfortunate soul is then pounced upon by the denizens of the board who, often in less than polite tones, ask him if he has ever learned to use search functionality. Not only is this a humiliating and frustrating experience for the poor newbie, it’s also unnecessary if the right technology is in place.

4.     Ensuring that critical information is available

Most support managers will tell you that 60%–80% of their call volume can be addressed by around 20–40 critical solutions. It can often be difficult to find this information on a support forum and it’s really the information that you want presented foremost to your community for any newcomers. In some support communities this information is wisely introduced in a separate forum category entitled “common solutions” or posted as “stickies” in a main forum, but much of the time it is simply omitted entirely. Typically these issues, even when they are answered, are of varying quality and mostly textual.

5.     Understanding when an issue is resolved

The KPIs that are readily available from most community solutions are unique threads, reads, replies, post ratings and customer satisfaction stats. These are all interesting from the perspective of watching how your community is developing but unfortunately they tell you relatively little regarding how effective your community is at solving problems. In order to achieve this you really need some way of closing an issue when it has been resolved in much the same way that you would in a CRM system. This gives you the ability to report on resolved issues and here we are getting far closer to metrics that management feel comfortable with. Microsoft have realised this and now build the ability to determine if a post has answered a question into their forum http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_install.

Determining value

Ultimately the benefit of a support community in all but the most enlightened organisations comes down to the bottom line. Is your support community deflecting calls and therefore lowering costs? Answering this question requires you to be able to correlate resolved issues of certain types with the corresponding call codes in the call centre CRM system. The Holy Grail is to actually be able to define a ratio of community resolutions to prevented calls. If the next-generation support community solution provides answers to the problems outlined above, then defining such ratios becomes an achievable goal.

To make this calculation there are four questions that it’s useful to be able to answer:

How you use this information to determine a call prevention rate is a topic in itself.

Summary

Community support applications need to evolve to solve these support problems. They should also integrate social media functionality such as sharing solutions and discussion posts with other social media like Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

The support communities of the future will need to seamlessly integrate this content.

This should all help companies to create more effective and more assessable communities.

Carolyn Blunt looks back at her career and identifies how we can all become better leaders.

It was 1998.  A typical day for me in my role as team leader.  I leave the office every night, my head in a spin after a day of heavy fire-fighting but without any feeling of real accomplishment.  I try to think back to why I became a manager in the first place.

I thought managing people would be at least a little bit enjoyable and certainly a little bit strategic, but lately all I feel like I am is a glorified babysitter.

My last great boss

I try to think back to the last great boss I had.  He was down to earth, approachable but also business-like and professional.

He commanded respect.

People wouldn’t dream of taking the quibbles and gripes to him that they bring to me!

And then it dawned on me.  I was allowing that.

Somehow I had sent out a message that it was OK to bring issues and squabbles to me when really they should be capable of resolving them amongst themselves.  Somehow, in my eagerness to please as a new manager I had taken some of the mantras of leadership, such as being genuinely interested, listening and being approachable, too far and was allowing my team to steal my time and effectively walk all over me.

I thought again about my last great boss.  He was firm but fair with everyone. He did not have an ego problem, power or control issues – he put the organisation and the team before himself, but not at the expense of getting the job done.  He was open and honest; if the answer to a request or idea was no, he explained why.  He showed respect, both for himself and everyone else.  He treated everyone equally –regardless of ‘status’ or role.  He coached me through questioning, not telling.  He was sociable but always ultimately professional.

Since that light-bulb moment in 1998 I have done plenty of reading and research on the topic of leadership.  I have trained thousands of leaders.  They have all noted similar qualities when talking about their experiences of great bosses.

Employee engagement

It is interesting to note that the qualities shared about great bosses are similar to those identified by Avolio and Bass in their ‘Transformational Leadership’ model and by Alimo-Metcalfe in her model of what is needed for true ‘employee engagement’.

The concepts are both robust and have the same purpose – to develop leaders who will motivate and inspire employees to give their discretionary effort.  Towers Perrin Research (2004) found that organisations that achieved employee engagement showed a 17% improvement on operating profit.  We know that each of us have in us approximately 20% discretionary effort each day.  On a good day we may choose to give that effort.  On a bad day we hold it back – we just cruise the through the day on survival mode.

Are your staff giving that discretionary effort or is cruising allowed?

Positive feedback

As an effective manager you must give feedback – both positive and adjusting – so that your staff know the standards required.  Positive feedback should be specific, public and genuine.  Look for something to praise a member of your team every day and rotate the team member receiving the praise fairly.  You may have to go looking for things to praise, but it is a good habit to get into.  Ask their internal customers for feedback, earwig into conversations, and ask for ideas, opinions or volunteers.  All of these create opportunities to praise.

Everyone likes to feel they are doing a good job, so don’t hold back – it is the easiest and most cost-effective solution to an immediate feel-good factor for your staff.

It may seem a little strange to be discussing corrective feedback when we want to be motivating and inspiring our staff, but ask yourself this question: if you don’t give corrective feedback what happens?

Team members cruising below standard

You may have a team member who cruises below standard and yet for whatever reason,  you don’t address it.  Your star performers pick up the slack but slowly and surely they become (quite rightly) disgruntled at having to do so.

Other team members start to think ‘if they can get away with it so will I’ and a culture permeates where it is okay to have longer lunches, arrive a little later, leave a little earlier, spend hours on social networking websites and make long personal phone calls.  All of these erode productivity and ultimately the team, department and organisational performance.

If you dislike giving ‘criticism’ think of it as ‘adjusting feedback’.

Giving feedback

The team member has drifted slightly off course and you are going to adjust them back on track.  Giving this feedback now means they have not deviated too far from the norm.  Wait a while and you will have a bigger problem on your hands.

Follow this simple structure:

Think about your team.  Do you set standards of performance or standards of excellence?

Every manager has elements of their role that they like and elements that they like less or even hate!  Think about the three words: people, task and process.  Which are you spending your time on?

If someone has a preference for ‘people’ they will be concerned with ‘helping’ others, would not wish to be seen as ‘cold’ or ‘unfeeling’.  They will empathise and be considerate but may become totally immersed in people issues, leaving the other parts of the triangle (task and process) neglected.

If someone has a preference for ‘task’  they will be focused on achieving results, have a strong sense of urgency and be assertive.  However, others may see them as competitive, controlling and blunt.  They might be so focused on getting things done that the people and process elements might be overlooked.

Those with a preference for ‘process’ need to get things right.  They are focused on correctness, order, logic and have a strong sense of fairness and personal integrity.  However, they would rather be right than be popular!  If they are too task focused they can be seen as unemotional, detailed and cautious.  They will go out of their way to minimise risk and conduct lengthy analysis if needed – even if the task and people elements are suffering.

Are you too focused on your natural preference?  What might you be neglecting?

Follow these steps and it could leave you with less fire-fighting to do and more time to focus on the strategic elements of your role that were the reason you became a manager in the first place.

Remember those?

Netcall has launched a series of one-day events at a number of venues across the country, focusing on four streams – Corporate, Health, Public Sector and QMax Customers.

The events will take place between 27th September and 10th November 2011 at venues in the North East, Scotland, North West, Midlands, South East, South West, East Anglia and London.  Please click here for venue details and locations.

Corporate Stream Agenda:

09.00 – Arrival and registration with refreshments

09.30 – Welcome – Considering commercial challenges in 2012

10.00 – Thought leadership – “The key issues are clear, it is the way each issue is addressed that makes the difference. During this presentation delegates will discover how an organisation can enhance its customer journey and why there are tangible business benefits for improving customer experience that additionally deliver improved efficiencies.” To be followed by round-table discussion

10.40 – Refreshment break

11.00 – Master Class – Eden – Best practice on integrating data while considering the business benefits of single views over multiple systems and digital dashboards

11.45 – Master Class – QueueBuster – Advanced hints & tips including small improvements that make a big difference

12.30 – Master Class – Intelligent call handling – Best practice on call routing including using real-time caller data to deliver an effective end-to-end experience that reduces costs while improving customer satisfaction

13.00 – Lunch

14.00 – Optional hands-on personalised product clinic for customers with our technical support team – bookable in advance

16.00 – Event close

To register for this event, please click here

—

Health Stream Agenda:

09.00 – Arrival and registration with refreshments

09.30 – Welcome – Considering NHS challenges in 2012

10.00 – Thought leadership – “The demand on Health Trusts to maximise patient throughput with effective clinic utilisation is considerable. Managing DNAs is an important part of the solution, as is preventing wasted appointments, managing partial bookings, making internal efficiencies and creating detailed reports.”
A guest speaker from a local Trust will talk about their experience, share lessons learned and best practice from their Trust in their journey to deliver reduced costs, while providing increased patient access and satisfaction.” To be followed by round-table discussion.

10.40 – Refreshment break

11.00 – Appointment Management Cycle presentation and demonstration

13.00 – Lunch

14.00 – Optional hands-on personalised product clinic for customers with our technical support team – bookable in advance

16.00 – Event close

Public Sector Stream Agenda:

09.00 – Arrival and registration with refreshments

09.30 – Welcome – Considering access, shared services and customer service in 2012

10.00 – Thought leadership – “Managing customer expectations and delivering service while making internal efficiencies is challenging. Local authorities are hard at work to implement alternatives to deliver savings. These include channel shift, self-service and partnership working.”
A local expert will share their experience, lessons learned and best practice from their organisation in the journey to deliver reduced costs while providing increased customer access and satisfaction. To be followed by round-table discussion

10.40 – Refreshment break

11.00 – A presentation complemented with customer case studies to showcase ‘Joined-up Customer Service’, appropriate self-service automation and how to maximise workforce management while providing flexible working

13.00 – Lunch

14.00 – Optional hands-on personalised product clinic for customers with our technical support team – bookable in advance

16.00 – Event close

QMax Customer Stream Agenda:

09.00 – Arrival and registration with refreshments

09.30 – Welcome – Presenting QMax 6.4 – even more closely supporting your processes

10.00 – Thought leadership – “How the process of workforce management makes a business contribution. A local call centre expert shares their WFM implementation journey, identifying the drivers for change, mapping the business process, the key success areas, and lessons learned. Any additional business benefits realised within the business will also be highlighted.” To be followed by round-table discussion

10.40 – Refreshment break

11.00 – QMax Master Class – Advanced Hints & Tips including Practices and Principles, with free top tips guide to take away

13.00 – Lunch

14.00 – Optional hands-on personalised product clinic for customers with our technical support team – bookable in advance

16.00 – Event close

For more details please call 0330 333 6100 and ask for “marketing” who will be happy to discuss your specific requirements and recommend the most appropriate stream.

The industry seems to be vibrant with stories of good news, award wins and contract wins.

This month we give a mention to Sutton Council, Indigo Lighthouse, myPAlive! Ltd, Prolog, Novacroft, 2Touch and Spark Response.

Sutton scores customer service hat trick

Sutton Council has scooped a third major award for having the best customer service in London.

Sutton’s Revenues and Benefits contact centre, which deals with an average of 12,000 calls per month, came top out of 33 London boroughs in a mystery shopping exercise carried out by Customer Services for London Group.

The team was judged the winner after a series of telephone calls were made posing various scenarios around housing and council tax benefit.

Judges praised them for their call handling, knowledge, customer satisfaction and professionalism.

Cllr Ruth Dombey, Deputy Leader on Sutton Council, said: “This accomplishment reflects the quality of service Sutton Revenues and Benefits contact centre delivers and I would like to thank the team for their consistent professionalism and hard work.”

Indigo Lighthouse is looking to fight off competition from Barclays Wealth, Nationwide and Prudential at the Customer Contact Association (CCA) awards after making the finalist line-up for ‘Most Effective Training Programme’ and ‘Great Places to Work’ categories.

The eCommerce provider is already established in many areas of business process outsourcing with its multi-lingual contact centre already enjoying industry recognition – this success continues as the contact centre is nominated for ‘Small Contact Centre of the Year’ at the European Call Centre and Customer Service Awards in recognition of its outstanding commitment to customer service excellence.

Alan Cox, Indigo Lighthouse’s CEO, said: “Appearing alongside some of the most recognised brands in the world on the shortlist is a huge achievement for us in itself and a reflection of the emphasis and focus of our business on customer service excellence.

“Our people are the key to our success and we are extremely proud to be recognised for our commitment and investment in staff training. Not only is it fundamental to our business but it also allows us to continue operating at the forefront of the industry.”

myPAlive! Ltd has been awarded the gold standard ISO9001 accreditation.

The company delivers professional call handling and telephone answering services to organisations across the UK, with clients including Vodafone, Save the Children and Whitbread Group.

Dellah Pollock, myPAlive!’s client services manager, said: ”Gold standard ISO9001 is the ultimate in state-of-the-art external recognition and we are delighted to have achieved this status. In a time of recession our clients are focused on creating an unrivalled customer experience to retain business and working with ISO accredited service providers is most often the preferred way of doing this.”

Novacroft has been awarded the contract to manage Transport for London’s concessionary Oyster photocard schemes for three years from 1st July 2011, with a possible two-year extension. The contract award comes following a competitive re-tender process.

Having managed TfL’s concessionary Oyster photocard schemes since 2001, Novacroft has a proven track record of success in the TfL environment, and offers a fully integrated end-to-end solution including card production, card management, contact centre services and software design and implementation.

Debra Charles, Novacroft’s Managing Director, commented: “To win this contract is a testament to Novacroft’s quality of service delivery and to the efforts of the team. Novacroft’s service to Transport for London meets the challenge of combining quality, innovation and capacity for improvement with value for money. Novacroft looks forward to continuing to work with Transport for London.”

Staff at 2Touch have raised £350 for Macmillan Cancer Support following a raffle for sweet-toothed employees.  To date, the firm has raised over £4,000 for the charity and has a target of reaching £5,000 by the end of the year.

Lynn Kane, facilities office services manager at 2Touch, successfully rallied staff to raise money for the charity through a series of successful fundraising initiatives.

Lynn said: “Macmillan is very close to my heart, as a cancer patient myself I cannot praise the charity enough for the great help and assistance it has given to me.

“It relies heavily on donations from large organisations such as ourselves to provide funding for numerous initiatives such as support groups, the upkeep of facilities as well as funding Macmillan nurses who provide much needed practical and emotional support to patients and their families across the region.”

To raise the £350 Lynn raffled off tickets to sweet-toothed colleagues. The lucky winner, Sue Butler, a sales adviser, received a 4.5kg chocolate bar.

Lynn added: “I would like to thank everyone at 2Touch for their support in helping me raise the money, they have put their hands in their pockets and generously donated to the cause.”

Staff at Spark Response have now raised £2,700 for Barnardo’s through a series of events including a family fun day, which was held at its site in Follingsby Park.

The Gateshead-based contact centre and fulfilment specialist has been raising funds for the charity throughout 2011 and the latest event to be staged was a circus-themed family fun day, with staff, including Managing Director, Peter Slee, dressed as clowns and overseen by a ringmaster.

Attractions on the day included a human wrecking ball, bungee run, stilt walkers and a magician and fire-eater.  Despite the torrential rain, the fun day was well attended by Spark staff and their family and friends who took shelter under the 100ft marquee.

Speaking of the event, Spark’s Managing Director, Peter Slee, said: “Once again the Spark fun day has been a great success and not only is it a great way to say thank you to the whole team for their hard work, we have also managed to raise much-needed funds for Barnardo’s North East.”

Call Centre agent competes for record deal

Craig Jones from Message Pad recently entered into a competition called Open Mic UK 2011, which searches for a new un-signed recording artist, giving them the chance of a record deal.

Having gone to the auditions and competed against hundreds of other artists, Craig got through to the regional finals which will be held at Sheffield City Hall on the 25th September 2011, where industry experts and celebrity judges will be judging the performances. The best will be put through to the Grand Final at the London O2 Arena in January to compete with the chance of winning a recording contract.

Craig has been working at Message Pad since the age of 16 where he worked a Saturday shift, before progressing into a full-time shift in 2008. He says: “I have been singing since the age of 9 and it is something I have always loved to do but I never shared it with my family or friends until the age of 15 when I asked to have singing lessons.”

Craig studied Music as an A-Level and took part in all of the productions and performances at school. “I really enjoyed performing in front of an audience and realised it’s something I would love to pursue but never had the confidence to go for it,” continues Craig.

After his A-Levels, Craig pursued the singing as well as working and going to auditions for various shows, performances and talent contests. He likes to perform in local bars and pubs with his guitarist Chris and in September he is planning on starting an Adult Nursing Course at the University of Nottingham. “I want to continue to pursue Nursing as it’s something I am really passionate about doing. But I’ll always strive to do music, I’d hate to reach a certain age in my life and wish I had done things I always wanted to do but never did. I am really excited about the regional finals and cannot wait to perform in such a great venue to try gain my place in the finals at the O2 Arena,” concludes Craig.

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One of the north east’s contact centres is set for another jobs boost thanks to winning new contracts.

Hartlepool-based Respondez is taking on 15 additional agency workers after success  in a number of pitches has led to new business, bringing the total number of staff to over 200.

Sales and marketing director Sue Marshall is confident that the business, which works with some of the world’s leading games publishers and home shopping retailers, is bucking the trend and expanding its workforce.

“Despite the challenges facing the industry and wider business community during the recession, over the last couple of years we have continued to see the company grow with the employment of 100 extra staff.

“Winning new business is always a boost but in this economy it is extra rewarding for everyone in the team.  We have worked very hard and are now delighted to offer these 15 new positions within the company.”

Sue believes that the success is due to a previous order which allowed the company to fully demonstrate its expertise and enabling it to win new business.

“Over the last year and a half, there has been some fantastic progress in terms of business and staff and we anticipate a steady growth and a solid performance in the future,” she added.

Call center outsourcing needs agents who could remain calm and confident even under pressure and possess good communication skills. Here are some tips on how you can explore your most precious treasure for your call center:

1) Interviewing: Test your candidates on the base of their key potential and competencies. Make interview interactive and let the candidate speak. You will be able to judge his communication skills, confidence and calmness level as well. Ask them about issues, challenges and goals they have handled.

2) Recruit Big: Never hire or go for one agent. Try to hire them in small groups. This way it will be easy to manage and train them. Five is an ideal number in this case.

3) Honest still rules: Communicate clearly with candidates. Be transparent about the objectives of the company, working environment they will be working in and pressure they will be dealing with. This will help them to decide about the job offer which will eventually reduce the attrition rate in your call center because they won?t abscond in half way then.

4) Invest in the induction stage: Try to open up with agents at the induction time itself. Let them feel comfortable about your organization and be in sync with its working culture.

5) Add external recruitment consultants: Make your external recruitment company, your long term solution provider because in that case, they will be in a position to understand your business better.

6) Budget: In a minimal budget, you can coordinate with local press to drive your PR campaign or job classified.

7) Multi Channel Approach: Try social networking and social marketing sites to post your job requirement.

An applicant agent should also understands that call center services are about providing excellent customer support and boost the services of client whereas a management should also understand that there is no such fixed criterion to find a good agent. Atmosphere of cal center should be work compliant to hold their agents.