Staff Letter for April 2012:
What’s a CSR?  YOU ARE!
 
According to Turban et al. (2002), "Customer service is a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction – that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation."
 

…And why Connections Call Center is your perfect pick!

It’s common knowledge in our industry that every missed call is a missed opportunity. Missed opportunities might be missed sales, missed invites to special events or even missed introductions to business relationships and networking ties. If your company phone is not answered, there’s no telling what you’re missing out on. We’re all clear on the importance of answering a company’s phone calls… so why not just get an answering machine or a voicemail system? To that question, I counter with a few questions of my own:

End of March Letter to Staff

March 30, 2012 was Connections Call Center’s 22nd year anniversary. In 22 years we have grown in all aspects of our business and today we are a far cry from the manual telephone answering service (TAS) we were when we started. This company has grown since I’ve been here and quite possibly since you’ve been here too – and most-likely you’ve been a part of the reason for that growth. Changes have been dramatic and in so many recognizable ways, the growth is often the chatter among staff members lips.

When we answer a phone, we are the 1st point of contact between our client and their clients. In essence, we are the face of both companies. A bad attitude over the phone reflects poorly on an entire organization and in our case, two organizations.

1. Listen. Angry callers want to be heard. Whether their anger is justified or it is not is totally irrelevant to the situation.
In their minds, they are completely justified and they need to be heard. Talking over an angry person, cutting them off,
ignoring what they are saying or not hearing them fully can only irritate and inflate the situation. Give the angry person
your full attention, the attention you expect when you are angry, and listen to what they are saying.

At the end of each month, we hand out a letter to our staff with their pay cheques. The letters include information we
want to share with our staff, policy changes, office updates, anything we want all our staff members to be aware of. For
February’s end, the topic was not giving up on our ‘Perfect Thirty Club’. The idea of the Perfect Thirty Club was initially
shared with us by our friends at Medcom. Thank you!

At the start of each new month, I’ll be sharing those letters with you all in this blog. Here is the first:

A busy week now over, I find myself looking for a topic to discuss in this weeks blog entry. I step out of the office to ask the early-bird operators, on before 7:30am today, for their thoughts on what we should discuss & share.

“I really think we should highlight, celebrate and share the team aspect of our office environment. It’s something we do really well and people should know this and learn from it,” pipes up our Sophie.

So you’re thinking about a career in the call centre industry?

Before I start with this entry I do need to make clear that Connections Call Center is currently only hiring French & English speaking bilingual agents for positions in our Squamish, BC Canada location. We seem to get a lot of job applicants through our website from the U.S., despite not having a physical hiring office there.

We asked our staff what advice they’d offer new employees or prospect employees looking at a call centre career. The

We recently asked our staff members what lessons they feel they have learned working with us that they apply to their
everyday life outside of working hours. The results were enlightening, appreciated and appreciative. I wasn’t shocked
to read more than half the answers included a ‘thank you for the opportunity to learn these lessons and to answer this
question’.

We often ask our staff for feedback and manners are something we encourage every step of our teams’ way. We
pride ourselves on being polite. We pride ourselves on keeping open lines of communication, which of course includes

Welcome to Connection’s blog! My name is Chrystal and I am the creator of this website, the Assistant Operations Manager at Connections Call Center and I will be one of the reoccurring authors here.

At Connections Call Center we are a team of forever-growing, ever-learning super-absorbent people who believe we have a lot to share and be proud of. The concept of this blog is to let you all in on what we’re doing, what we’ve learned and how we cope with the day-to-day hustle and bustle of life in an answering service; though if we’re honest, at Connections we’re much more than an answering service. We are an award winning team of remote personal assistants, order entry & logistics clerks, and emergency dispatch operators, and that’s all in addition to being one of North America’s best answering service teams!