:TeleSales.co.uk

A couple of years ago, my mother had a constrant  problem with her phone at home. When she received or made a call she could not hear the person on the other end of the line although they could hear her. This was a particular problem because my father had an on going illness and she needed to liase regularly with the doctor’s surgery.

Everytime she called the telecom provider’s call-centre they promised to call back, but very infrequently. When they finally sent an engineer, he could not find the cause of the problem. He said to my mother that she would have to wait untill the phone went down permanently. It was at this point she asked for my help. I should add that this problem had gone on for three months. This is how my C-Level telesales approach solved the problem:

I realised I would need to get hold of a C-level person who was responsible for customer service in order to bypass the call centre. I went to google and typed in “drector of customer services” and the name of the telecom provider. To my surprise a name came up with a powerpoint presentation linked to it. This presentation, was a presentation the customer service director had made to the board of the company. It highlighted the need to improve the level of customer service overall. The two key points which leapt out at me were: 1) The importance of enabling the customer to be able to contact the company 24/7 amd 2)The importance of dealing with “repeatable” problems quickly and efficiently.

I rehearsed the call mentally imagining myself standing in the shoes of the customer service director. I realised very quickly that in this case, If I were her, I would really like to speak to me! ? I called the switch board of the main office of the telecom provider and asked to be put through to the customer service director. The switchboard operator asked me what it was concerning. I responded by saying it was to do with her presentation to the board. She asked who I was and I too said I was a customer of the telecom provider. To my amazement, I got straight through! Being such a large company I least expected to be put through to the PA. The director was absolutely brillian, she listened very carefully to my introduction about her presentation to the board and then I related the particular points to my mothers problem. She apologised profusely and said she would get on to dealing with the problem right away. This was at 12.30pm. By the time I had got back from lunch at 2.30pm, there was a message on my answermachine from one of her senior management team saying that he had gone through the record of my mother’s problem and would have an engineer at the house by 4.00pm. By 5.30pm I got a call from my mum saying that the problem had been resolved. Just to put icing on the cake, the director herself called the following morning to check that I was happy with the speed of resolution and the way it had been handled” Not all Call Centres provide this poor level of service, infact some are excellent in dealing with their customers. However some times you need to go to the top to get an on going problem truly resolved!