Many, many moons ago– before I started my company, I had a host of different jobs. One of them was a call center agent, working as directory assistance for mobile carriers. Totally aging myself, I’ll tell you this was before the advent of Google, where you could look up the number, press it and your phone would dial it for you.
After training, each week, I consistently had the lowest DCP which made me one of the top agents. DCP is Direct Call-Processing (DCP) Time. It’s basically how long it took for you to successfully dispatch the caller to their proper destination. In our instance, the shorter, the better.
I was always a very fast typist. The system only required that we type in part of a name or listing and even had little tricks when the caller (or agent) didn’t know the proper spelling. What was great was that my recorded greeting would play (I always sounded fresh and cheerful when callers encountered me for the first time, which set the tone for the call.) they would say what they needed and by the time they finished speaking, I usually had the listing up and ready to connect them.
In addition to directory assistance, we were also real time navigation agents. Sometimes, it wasn’t always that easy to find what they were looking for. The name or street was wrong, pronunciation was off, it was a new business or simply unlisted. These calls took longer, which meant we would have to mute our mics while we continued the search or enlisted the help of a fellow agent.
During this point, we would have to keep watch of the call timer, where a portion of the screen would flash to direct us to check in with our caller. We would have to unmute and say something to the effect of “Still searching”, “One moment”, “Thank you for your patience” and then go back to searching. Later, the company would have us record these interrupts and the system would play them automatically on a timer.
No one likes being left hanging.
Sometimes in the course of our business, we have stillness or lapses in communications with clients in between waiting on information from other vendors, research or milestones. A client that is supported and checked on is a more trusting and secure client in the process and wedding day.
Major ?s:
- You can record your own check in prompts— schedule auto responses to check in with clients. This could be for clients that book you but have events that are still a few months off, for example.
- Have your lights flash— Set reminders within your workflow or your admin days for the week to check in with clients you are presently working with that are waiting on information you don’t have.
Implementing these two steps will help you elevate your client experience– wiht something so simple and easy, your clients will love being attended to and will tank you for it!
Leave a Reply