Saturday, April 28, 2012

Nesting Agents

call-centre-agent-speech(Picture taken from Call Center in the Philippines)

A new wave of agents just came in on our floor -- welcome Wave 26!

It's almost 6 months since I became a newbie agent (a.k.a. nesting agent). I was surprised with the tools and the way the tenured agents (back then) are seamlessly navigating through those tools. I am also very surprised on how the tenured agents are taking calls which are very different from what the trainer taught us. I believe it's true with most accounts. The training environment is very different with the production environment.

The call flow is somehow similar to what was taught in training. This is the first thing that the new nesting agents should focus on. I'm glad our call flow is easy and our opening spiel is simple. It just have to contain a greeting, our department and asking for the caller's information. We have different opening spiels on the floor but mine is:

"Thank you for calling ____ customer care. My name is Elmer. Can I please have your first and last name?"

"How may I help today?"

The next thing that these nesting agents should learn is navigating the tools which serve only one purpose: to document everything that happened on the call. Documentation of the call is very important in every account. It's a make or break in every call center and there are a lot of agents that were terminated because of not documenting the call or incomplete documentation. Typing speed will help in documentation thus lowering the need for After Call Work (ACW), the time between 2 calls.

I love the look on these newbie agents’ faces. They appear to be clueless on the things that are going on with the tenured agent's screen. It's nice to see how I looked like the first time that I barged during my nesting period. Their faces are totally clueless.

After mastering how to document the call, a nesting agent's next task would be to master where to get the troubleshooting steps to resolve a customer's concern. This is usually in the form of a database where in an agent can type in keywords to get the article number for a specific issue. Well, most nesting agents would simply ask the floorwalker

After about a week or two of barging with a tenured agent and taking calls for half day, a nesting agent would face the Quality Assurance (QA) Certification. Once the nesting agent got a go signal from the QA, he'll be thrown to the production floor to take more calls. Then, the journey to become a regular employee begins.

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