Do you understand the frustration a customer feels when you say “I need to put you on hold and check with my manager"?
This episode promises to unravel why this all-too-common practice is holding back the potential of call centres everywhere. We confront the lack of agent empowerment head-on, striving to identify the bottlenecks that stall service and erode customer trust. Giving you actionable strategies, we set the course for a revolution in autonomy that can lead to swifter service, thrilled customers, and a healthier bottom line.
We dissect the 'talk to the manager' routine that's crippling the integrity of any sales teams. Unlock the power of employee decision-making as we champion autonomy to not only speed up the sales process but to significantly enhance the overall customer experience. Say farewell to unnecessary managerial check-ins and hello to a workforce imbued with trust and authority.
Tune in, empower yourself, and witness the transformation in service quality that follows!
Find more useful and essential contact centre development from realitytraining.com
Do you understand the frustration a customer feels when you say “I need to put you on hold and check with my manager"?
This episode promises to unravel why this all-too-common practice is holding back the potential of call centres everywhere. We confront the lack of agent empowerment head-on, striving to identify the bottlenecks that stall service and erode customer trust. Giving you actionable strategies, we set the course for a revolution in autonomy that can lead to swifter service, thrilled customers, and a healthier bottom line.
We dissect the 'talk to the manager' routine that's crippling the integrity of any sales teams. Unlock the power of employee decision-making as we champion autonomy to not only speed up the sales process but to significantly enhance the overall customer experience. Say farewell to unnecessary managerial check-ins and hello to a workforce imbued with trust and authority.
Tune in, empower yourself, and witness the transformation in service quality that follows!
Find more useful and essential contact centre development from realitytraining.com
Speaker 1:
Contact Center Focus the reality training podcast.
Speaker 2:
You're listening to Contact Center Focus and I'm going to check with Bob, but I'm not going to check with my manager. This episode is about this topic, bob. What are we going to discuss?
Speaker 1:
Well, before we do that, I just need to check with my manager. Can you just hold for a moment?
Speaker 2:
Oh right, Check what we're going to do.
Speaker 1:
I'm just going to put you on hold for a minute. Just wait, just bear with me. Bear with me, and I'm going to check with my manager. Okay, I'm just going to put you on hold, okay, right, I've got this customer and he wants me to Now. This is a thing that we hear a lot in Contact Centers, and where does it come from? It is a habit. So the customer presents themselves. They say this is my problem, this is my issue, this is my reason for calling, and our brains go into a kind of meltdown and we think I don't have the empowerment to make a choice, a decision or choose the correct action for this customer. And in order to make sure I get this right, I must check with a more senior person who will either confirm or deny that I am able to do what the customer wants. And it's extremely common. How often do we hear this, jay?
Speaker 2:
All the time and, just as Bob said, it's either because they're not confident enough, not empowered enough I can't think of any other reason or just pretending and then deciding to give a discount perhaps Some team leaders will hold a number of offers they sometimes call them in the drawer offers, closing offers that they're able to give a number of those per week or per month.
Speaker 1:
And so the individual says, oh, I'm just going to check with my manager to see if I can get you one of these special offers, but at the same time, what you have there is an individual retaining power which then the rest of the team have to interact with, and it delays the delivery of service, it delays the delivery of sales and it is actually quite demotivating, I think, to have to keep on constantly deferring to a more senior person.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, and why you shouldn't do? It is your customer thinks. Why can't they make the decision? The customer is delayed, the customer goes what kind of an organization don't they have trust? So it's erosion of trust. So this is really a short tip episode to say stop doing this. But let's give you a couple of ideas on what you can do to stop doing this.
Speaker 1:
The first thing is what are the most frequent asks? Okay, so if you have thousands of calls a week with similar requests, can we do this, can we do this, can we have this, can we have this? If the answer to these requests 90% of the time is yes, then empower your people to make that decision, because if you've got all that frequent demand coming in, you're constantly referring that to a manager to go, yes, you can do that. You're just wasting time and also it doesn't make that individual look very good in the eyes of the customer. If the answer is mostly yes, they say anybody who calls in, you can decide whether it's yes or not, and we know a number of organizations who've done this and it takes a lot of the pressure off. So that's the first thing. Anything that's a frequent high demand question to which the answer is usually yes, empower your people to make that choice and just get on with it, and I think that would really really help in terms of time management as well.
Speaker 2:
The only other thing I'd add to that really is your boundaries, your parameters, your how far can you go, how low can you go? Whether it's this customer wants it in two weeks, I'll have to check my manager if they can have it in two, because it's normally three. This customer wants to only give me this much money on a deposit we normally take 20. Can they give 10? This customer wants a discount. Can I give up to 2%?
Speaker 2:
Whatever it is, if enough of you had conversations with your managers, who may in turn have to have conversations with their managers, you might have a whole level of empowerment that ceases all these ridiculous extra checks. Imagine if, for example, using Bob's, what he's kicked off with you started with the high frequency stuff proved you were capable. You'd then push your luck a bit more and say, right, I'm having these now, instead of me coming to you to get a discount, what can I go to? Where can't I go? Because I think we live in a time now where as we've just actually been talking about customer service this morning on our other podcast where this is a thing that gets in the way of it when I check where my manager gets in the way of it and sometimes it's become such a hangover of double glazing. I'll ring my manager and just check. I think we need to resign this to the past, but I'm afraid you're not going to have your organisations and your managers taking this away from you because it, as we've said, gives them a sense of power. You're going to have to collectively unite to take it away from them.
Speaker 2:
Contact Centre agents make sure you're sharing CCF with your colleagues. These short podcasts from Reality Training are perfect for huddles, buzz sessions, learning sessions and group coaching. For more info on how Reality Training transforms contact centres, visit realitytrainingcom and get in touch.
Speaker 1:
Now I know organisations who have done this. They realised that not only was it not very empowering, it was also causing massive bottlenecks in service delivery. So if you know that you're going to get a load of calls on a Monday morning about a certain subject and that by referring those to managers it's going to take double the time to deal with those calls, then you don't need to be Einstein to think okay, if we can deal with those calls in half the time, we're going to get them through them more quickly. It's going to cost us less. So there's a cost benefit to doing this as well. And I think that's the other side of it. As a manager, you should be thinking okay, the more empowerment I can give to my individuals, then the less time it's going to take and it's actually going to be a lower cost operation. So there are huge benefits to empowering individuals as well.
Speaker 2:
So don't check with your manager, that you no longer need to check with your manager.
Speaker 1:
Go and see your manager present your case of why you should both stop this charade and it is a charade and I think the more we move away from it, the more we also take away some of that thing that the customers get. Because, as a customer, if you say to me I'm just going to go and check with my manager, I'm going to be thinking, great, I'm going to get this, because you wouldn't be checking with your manager if I wasn't going to get it. So I think that is another point that we are showing our customers that we are, in terms of integrity, a bit weak. And I think if the individual is empowered to make the choice, make the decision to talk about the value to do things in a certain way, then actually I think that's going to be better overall.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, imagine when somebody next says to you can I please talk to the manager? No, no, we don't have that system here. We're all empowered to make our own decisions, and my decision is this Brilliant, okay, thanks for tuning in See you next time. Bye.