!Oy <---- we need an !oy smilie, like !ugh
Preach it, sister.
FWIW, sitting on the other side of the issue with a call center/inside sales department to run, it 'taint easy. There are a lot of stupid people who interview well.
There are a number of key factors that go into producing someone who can talk knowledgeably to a customer on the other end of the phone, and the first one is training. Not just training classes, which are of a limited benefit, but day-in day-out exposure to other people who know what they are talking about, so that the person who will be on the phones gets a chance to
absorb not just
memorize .... build the knowledge base before they ever get on the phone with anyone.
We've got two new hires right now. Bright man, bright woman. They are chomping at the bit to get on the phone and stop doing the relatively boring tasks we have them doing now. We're like, hello, it's another
three months before we let you even touch a phone. Do your boring tasks, sit and listen to other people,
absorb, absorb. Even though the boring tasks
are boring, there's a lot of product knowledge to be gleaned from them...and you have to know the product before you talk to your first customer, period.
No matter how much product knowledge you give someone, if they don't have what I call "fake it ability", they can be a disaster when you unleash them on the phones. "Fake it ability" can't be taught; it's an instinct. Even if you don't know what French Doors are, there's a way of not letting the customer know that you don't know, while you put them on hold and find out what the #$&^$$ French Doors are. (The highest compliment I can pay a new hire is to walk past them on the phone, listen for a minute, and then walk over to Keith who runs inside sales and say "That one, that one's got fake-it-ability". :thumbs: )
So much of this comes down to
We redid the entire infastructure of our call operations the last year...putting the finishing touches on the construction this Spring. We thought we could have tiers of reps, with the best and the brightest making more
, dealing with the most profitible and complicated customers, and we could fill in with lower level folks to work with the smaller, less complicated clients. (I mean how hard is it to take a 1000 piece pencil order with a straight line imprint? )
Didn't work. Gave it up. We're only hiring and retaining the best and the brightest. Renamed the entire operation "inside sales" to give a status lift from "customer service", had to come up with a lot more
in the budget for compensation, let the weakest links go or shifted them to clerical, etc. It's my job to figure out how to make the orders profitable enough to pay the
that's necessary to get the job done right.
So, all the way back to French Doors -- do you think there is anybody at Sears who actually
cares enough to plan their call center so that an intelligent person can talk intelligently about French Doors? I don't. There are so many companies like that where the people who make the strategy are so far removed from the customer experience, they have no idea what's necessary to actually
execute the plan efficiently. It's easy to come up with product line ideas and budgets and shift numbers around on paper and plan marketing campaigns.
Executing day to day is hard.
Andrea
who apparently had a lot to say on the subject
Note to managers: hire phone people with brains that work! 
doors) and proceeded to tell my husband that they are non-standard size and they'd have to enlarge the opening by a foot. Their idiot boss told him the same thing.
And then it went downhill from there. I got transferred over to the specific department I needed to talk to:
Linear Mode
