Supervisor Snacks

  It’s inevitable, eventually, you’ll find yourself dealing with someone who is angry. It comes out of the blue, and you are just not ready to have someone begin ranting at you right after you’ve politely asked, “How may I help you?” Take a deep breath; see if you can turn this around. First, empathize in your mind. “POOR GUY, something has happened to make him miserable!” Your job is to help him. Now, listen without judgment until the story is out. There are a lot of things that can cause out-of-control anger, and you must remember the anger isn’t personal. You are just caught in the crosshairs. Never admit fault, when everything is out in the open, it may not have been the fault of the answering service or your client. So, you can’t say, “I’m sorry we did that.” But you can say, “I’m so sorry you had to go through that.” “I’m sorry that happened.” “I would be unhappy too if that happened to me.” Establish that you care how he feels. Anger is an emotion; so, the incident its...

 I ’m late, I’m late for a very important date…   Being punctual is important in most jobs. Whether we work for ourselves or someone else, out in the field or in an office, with clients or alone, most of us work by the clock. And that clock keeps on ticking regardless of lost keys, telephone calls, spilled drinks, traffic jams, and all the other things that cause unexpected delays. Tardiness is difficult in all businesses, but it is especially difficult in the call center industry. We schedule our team members to be available when our client’s call traffic picks up. The calls come in whether an agent is ready to answer, or not. If someone isn’t there, the calls overring or wait on hold too long; and clients become upset. Those clients pay us to answer their phones; it’s their business! We all recognize that; so why are we late? Some people are never late, others are chronically so. How do we break the pattern? If you routinely walk in the door between one and five minu...

  Most answering services acknowledge that their worst, and most frequent mistakes, are the result of improper delivery of a message. Even with all the new technology and automation, we still need to THINK when we are dispatching. It’s SO important! Imagine you are the technician on-call for a small service company. Being on-call rotates every three weeks. No one especially likes being on call; having their days and nights constantly interrupted, middle of the night service calls, unable to make personal plans for the week. It’s all a hassle to begin with, but it’s part of the job so you do it. But you don’t like it. Now, you are on-call, hoping for a quiet night; the baby is cutting teeth, but is finally asleep. You’re ready to crash when the phone rings…it’s the answering service. As you answer the baby starts screaming; the agent begins talking, #%@&%@! THE CALL ISN’T EVEN AN EMERGENCY! The temporary instructions say, “TEXT all ER calls” but the agent automatically cal...