It is very common to run into business lessons in the form of anecdotes as I skim through my LinkedIn feed. Recently, one of these posts caught my eye and has stuck with me. The post illustrates a conversation between a CFO and a CEO. At a board meeting, the CFO tells the CEO “What happens if we train our team, and they leave?” to which the CEO replied, “What happens if we don’t train them, and they stay?”
The topic of capacity building is a recurrent one in the Virtual Receptionist industry. If you want to become the best live answering service solution, you must constantly train your operators to keep up with changes in all the industries you may service.
A typical call center may have hundreds of people focused on a single task. For example, there may be a call center dedicated to selling home services, or another one dedicated to support on a particular cellphone model. Unlike this set up, an answering service has a smaller number of operators that need to be prepared to handle a myriad of situations that may arise in each call. For this reason, the quality of a virtual receptionist improves over time as they experience and train on more and more scenarios.
At Easybee, we strive to be the best live answering service solution. From our early stages, we understood this, and we acted, often against our bottom line, to tackle this phenomenon and improve our quality. There is no secret sauce, just hard work. To prepare our operators for success, we focus on three things: building affinity groups, continuous specialized training, and lowering employee rotation.
Affinity Groups
The strength of the team will always surpass the strength of the individual. Though we train all our operators across all the industries we service, we understand some operators are more adept at certain industries and some operators are more adept at others. Part of our job is to understand which operators are more proficient in which industries and develop affinity groups. Operators with a particular proficiency in a certain industry are prioritized so, more often than not, calls related to that industry are handled by an operator that performs better with those calls.
Continuous Specialized Training
Your industry changes. You probably train yourself to adapt to your industry changes. If we are answering your calls, why shouldn’t we also train ourselves to keep up with your industry needs? As a virtual receptionist solution, we have a very robust training team that not only focuses their course work on operator errors but also on client script updates and industry specific terminology. It is not our goal to qualify our operators to do your job, but it is certainly helpful for operators to understand industry specific terminology as that greatly improves the flow of a call, the quality of the messages they relay, and the overall caller experience.
Lowering Employee Rotation
Going back to the conversation between the CFO and the CEO, training and employee rotation are two key features to generating the best interdisciplinary team. Yes, having an operator leave after continuous training is a possibility. However, creating the appropriate environment for that operator to want to stay is also part of the job. In the virtual receptionist industry, experience matters greatly. To become the best live answering service, having a team with considerable experience is key.
We do not cut corners at Easybee. We have been in the industry for almost a decade, and we feel like we are just getting started. Years of hard work are allowing us to materialize exciting plans for operator capacity building that were not possible before when we were much smaller.
I hope our story helps you build your interdisciplinary team. As you do, consider Easybee to be part of your team to handle your incoming calls. Having a live answering service can help you streamline your operation so the rest of your team can focus on more meaningful tasks. Test our service through our two-week free trial. We are excited to help.
