It’s the end of another busy work week and time to take a look at some of the top stories we’ve been covering in the world of call center services.
Working in a call center can be a stressful job, and burnout is a common problem in call centers. Some businesses are trying to change that. Legacy-Stream, in Muntinlupa City in the Philippines had a month-long sports event that included basketball, foot races and volleyball to encourage its employees to be active and let off stress. The event drew more than 1,000 employees, and other companies will no doubt follow suit.
InTouch is opening up new call center in Largo, Fla., that will bring more than 300 jobs to the Tampa Bay region. The 200,000-square foot facility will be complete by the end of the summer and will handle customer service for Netflix and other entertainment services. The company will even throw in a Netflix subscription for employees as one of the benefits.
Emergency Call Works (ECW) announced that it had added two new network operations centers in Alabama and Texas. The company provides call taking, mapping, incident management and decision support for small 911 call centers and multi-site operations. The new centers will reduce costs and add redundancy, especially in the severe weather season in the South.
Call centers want to standardize their operations as much as possible, and that often includes employees following scripts. Casey Houser pointed us to a blog post in Business 2 Community that showed one of the major pitfalls of scripts: many times customers have problems that aren’t covered by scripts and go away frustrated. Call center workers get frustrated as well because they can’t really help their customers. This ends up hurting sales rather than improving businesses.
Finally, Mae Kowalke reminded us that call centers are not just part of the cost of doing business, but can actually be a profit center by building relationships with clients. These include upsell opportunities, access to customer databases and prompting employees on other potential sales opportunities.
Be sure to check out Call Center Services for the latest news and to catch up on all the stories you might have missed.