As all eyes were on South Africa, what can we learn about dealing with the downtime as call volumes drop, asks Anthony Lord.
The silent vuvuzelas can only mean one thing; the World Cup is over for another four years. No more pain inflicted on us by prima donnas that make up the once again underachieving England team. No more dodgy refereeing decisions and resulting technology debates by clueless pundits like Mick McCarthy.
When England did unceremoniously bow out of this years tournament, it seemed the majority of the country switched off their TV sets and threw away their car flags boycotting the rest of the matches.
But a survey for Gaming Supermarket showed that 72 per cent of women in the UK werent giving up on the tournament. So much for it being a mans game.
Further evidence of this is that only 5 per cent of the females surveyed claimed theyd be avoiding the World Cup. Of the men polled in the same survey, 44 per cent said theyd watch the games in a bar or pub. So the rest watched at home, or worse still, at the office. This meant there was a huge surge in Internet activity as people logged to watch games, especially for Englands final group stage game. Easynet Connect saw a whopping 226 per cent boost to the days average data downloads that day.
The World Cup and Wimbledon are now over, but this year of big sporting events will continue to challenge UK businesses and their broadband connections. Whether it be non-work related video streaming of the Commonwealth Games in October or audio streaming of The Ashes in December and January, companies need to ensure it does not interfere with their bandwidth and thus their ability to deliver their core services.
Call centres didnt escape the World Cup standstill when England played either. During the Slovenia game on the Friday afternoon there was a steep decline in call traffic, with Callcredit Marketing Solutions logging a 52 per cent drop in incoming calls. It was estimated that in a 500–seat call centre paying staff an average hourly wage of £6.88, those two idle hours reached a total of £5,800 in wasted resources.
So what should call centre managers do with their staff during this predictable downtime? In outbound centres make sure your agents have access to data that enables them to handpick customers they know will be available. And for those that only handle incoming calls, the tips listed below will help you plan your resources and increase motivation for future sporting events.
The upside of the next World Cup in Brazil is, if England qualifies, with the time difference your call centre shouldnt be that affected.
Top tips on how to deal with downtime in your call centre
Duncan Graham, commercial director with Callcredit Marketing Solutions, which has a 500 strong centre in Bristol, gives us his advice on what to do when there is a big sporting event or other occasion that results in significantly less busy periods for your agents.
- If know about dip in calls in advance, and also are aware that other teams in the call centre might be still be busy, share the love around teams by moving resourcing around to suit the needs of the organisation
- Are there some administrative tasks to be completed perhaps? This is a perfect opportunity to sort things out that would normally get left to the very bottom of the pile on a contact centres to do list
- Could staff benefit from additional training during times when call volumes are likely to be low? This is a great time to boost your workforces skill set, without compromising on taking people off the phone when they are really needed to take calls
- Teams could get together to brainstorm possible ideas to boost the business – including brainstorming and researching new clients and possible new initiatives
- Management should ensure that databases are well segmented and that customer details are accurate, so that during times such as this they can ensure that they can still make efficient/ effective calls to target customers that wont be watching/involved in whatever event is expecting to cause the dip
- Contact centres could use the games as incentives for staff, if they know its coming they could encourage staff to exceed targets and if they do allow them to watch the game with pizza etc, use it as a morale boosting motivational tool. Therefore any revenue lost due to the game could be made up through over performance in previous days!
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