|
|
Non-Standard Holidays VoiceLink prides itself on providing world-class service to its clients 24-hours a day. There are some days, though, when the gods seem to conspire against us in this pursuit. "Non-standard" holidays are one of these times. But never fear, we've found a way to manage it and maintain the service levels you've come to expect. Standard holidays, such as Christmas and Thanksgiving never give us any trouble. Everyone is closed and everyone knows that everyone is closed. What is a non-standard holiday? Good Friday is a classic example of this. It's a holiday which is not universally observed. This presents a difficulty for all answering services because although your office may be closed, many others are not -- and they're still calling you, expecting you to be open. If one or two offices closes unexpectedly on a day it is normally open it's no big deal. We can easily handle the influx of calls in most cases, and we're happy to help out our clients on these occasions. However, on a non-standard holiday, literally hundreds of our clients disappear on what many other businesses will consider a normal business day. Some of our customers are large corporations who may themselves have four or five operators normally handling their lines. That's how many we have to handle all our clients on a normal day! Our call-traffic quickly goes off the charts, often tripling or quadrupling our normal levels. We used to staff like crazy for these days, doubling our number of operators, using every available terminal on our network, even getting the owner to help answer the phones -- and we were still overwhelmed. Phones would ring seven or eight times, then get answered and put on hold immediately for six or seven minutes. When we did get an emergency call, it would sometimes take us fifteen or twenty minutes just to get started on relaying it. Our clients expect better service than that, and the stress was taking a toll on the operators as well. The problem was that our operators had to spend 90% of their time informing customers that the office they were calling was closed, but of course they'd be happy to assist them if it was urgent. Most callers didn't realize the office they were calling was closed and just decided to call back the next day. The urgent calls couldn't get through to our operators because all their time was being taken up saying the same thing over and over. Our solution to this uses our voicemail system to provide a customized greeting for each customer. We usually record something to the effect of "Thank you for calling XYZ Corporation. Our office is closed for the holiday today and will return the next business day. If you do have an urgent or emergency call, please press zero for assistance." This allows our computer to take on the repetitive part and frees the operators to handle our clients' urgent calls in a timely manner. As soon as we implemented this, our hold times went back nearly to normal and our response time on emergency calls was returned to normal. Of course, this is an imperfect solution. Our clients pay us for live answering service, not voicemail. However, using the voicemail as a screen to the operators is the only reasonable solution to the flood of calls which cascades over us on these special days. And it allows us to handle the most critical calls quickly and efficiently, as you've come to expect with VoiceLink. We'll do a nice customized recording similar to the one used above when the time comes. Let us know if you'd like to record your own message for usage on non-standard holidays. Or you can provide us with a script and we'll record it for you just the way you like!
John Vaughn is the Sales Manager for VoiceLink and was the Operations Manager for many years. He can be reached at sales@vlchouston.com. |
|
Send mail to sales@vlchouston.com with questions or comments about
this web site.
|