Supervisor Snacks

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression”! This is a story that is repeated in answering services all over the country. It’s about all of us. Our sales rep made a great first impression on a potential client. (Let’s call him, Joe.) Joe’s current service could not keep their simple weekly on-call schedule straight and worse, they weren’t dispatching the calls quickly enough for Joe to keep his response commitment! Joe trusted our sales rep and came with us.  ----------  THEN -------- Everything that could go wrong did go wrong! We set up the account and Joe and his staff began test calls.  He didn’t receive e-mail notification for two of the calls.  When Joe called our Customer Service rep, she was out on a family emergency. When she returned, our programmer was unavailable. After a   week’s delay, corrections were made to the account and testing resumed. On the next test call, they noticed there was a 15-minute gap between whe...

In the Telephone Answering Industry, we frequently make quick decisions under pressure.   We’re rushed, there is another call to answer, and then another.   We’re the shift supervisor, questions coming at us from agents, clients and other supervisors AND OUR OWN supervisor.   “How do I do this?”, “What should I say to…”, “Why did this happen?”   How can we NOT make a mistake now and then?   Here is our philosophy, “We are human – we will make mistakes.”  We don’t scream and we don’t threaten people’s jobs.  A mistake was made.  We try to figure out why so we can keep it from happening again.  If you have even an inkling of what caused it – share it so we can see if we can find a better way to do something.  If it was just “I hit the wrong key” or “I didn’t read the next step correctly” it’s OK.  A mistake was made, you did it, OWN IT, try to learn from it and then MOVE ON. Please don’t be defensive about mistakes – we have ALL...