Call centre logic, never sacrifice training and quality control

I’m a firm subscriber to the statement that ‘history repeats itself’ and its cousin quotation ‘we can learn everything from history’. Both apply in equal measure whether you are looking at civilizations, politics, cultural fads or indeed economics. With such fabled truths to rely upon why do many companies fail to learn from the past and return to strategies that aren’t going to meet the needs of their business?

When margins grow lean and customers are harder to find all businesses are faced with looking at their operations to determine where spending can be reduced. How can your business still provide the promised services or goods but lower their spending, what formula will allow your business to weather a downturn in the economy but not sacrifice your reputation and customer satisfaction? In the call centre industry as with essentially all business there will be downturns due to seasonal variations, economic downturns, changes in competition and cost competition. When faced with the need to cut costs where would you first bring out the scalpel to reduce overhead? If you follow the trend of many businesses you may well cut costs in entirely the wrong area – training and quality control.

Training cuts are often first, but should be last

So often when departmental costs are assessed the first question decision makers ask themselves is “Where can we can cut costs immediately that will still allow us to operate at normal capacity?” The question that should be asked is “Where can we cut costs that won’t result in less efficient service or unhappy customers?” If the second question was asked would training be sacrificed before travel expenses, software upgrades or even employee bonuses? Cutting training and quality measures are often chosen as they seem to be easy targets that aren’t ‘revenue’ drivers. However nothing could be further from the truth. Looking at our business, which is providing exceptional call centre services for both inbound and outbound campaigns, we pride ourselves in the quality, commitment and cost-effectiveness of our processes. Thus our training and internal system of checks and quality control are integral pieces in the success of our clients projects that we manage. A reduction in training or quality will result in less satisfied customers, repeat calls as the initial information was incomplete or incorrect and added inefficiencies of rework and problem resolution. Not only does each of these add to your operational costs it also reduces client satisfaction – the cost of that can be beyond quantifying of course.

When you scale back training and quality systems people will improvise, processes will be revert to trial and error practices or just plain assumption. Frustrated customers will be receiving different information from different employees and the ratio of escalated issues that need research or management intervention will spike accordingly. Forecasting and planning will also suffer as the efficiencies gained from benchmarking previous campaigns will be of less value, call to transaction ratios will change, customer call backs due to incomplete information will increase and managing call volumes will be left more to chance than effective forecasting.

Training is the backbone of the support we provide for our clients, reducing training would not only lower preparedness it would lead to frustrations for both our customers and employees. What sets two businesses apart when they offer competing services will often be customer service, reductions in training and quality will compromise customer service leaving you with simply a less expensive and less effective product. If you are looking to cut costs the last thing you should cut is customer satisfaction which is the lifeblood of our business, reducing training would accomplish exactly that.

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