Customer Services colleagues upskilled to help improve our repair line performance
We’ve been upskilling colleagues in our Contact Centre in Rushden to help tackle waiting times on our phone lines.
Our Rushden Contact Centre handles our general enquiries calls, with colleagues working in Boston dealing with repairs enquiries.
However, upon noticing an increase in call volumes and that our Boston Contact Centre would benefit from some extra support, seven colleagues from Rushden have now been upskilled and are able to help with repairs related calls.
Kieran Gibbons, Contact Centre Team Leader in Rushden, said: “We’ve seen the increase in call volumes, but due to recruitment mainly in Rushden, we’ve seen our performance increasing more rapidly than that on the repairs lines.
As a result of that, we’ve started to get a few advisors upskilled so that they can handle new repairs calls too.
“As well as training our new starters on new repairs call handling, we’ve also put a plan in place to get more general enquiries advisors trained up over the next few weeks.
“It’s certainly been a fantastic start to this initiative, and everyone has enjoyed it. It adds a little bit of variety to their calls, and everyone has seen the end goal of helping to improve performance across the board, but also support our colleagues in Boston where we can.
“Everyone has jumped at the opportunity and those we’ve not managed to train yet have been asking when they’ll be getting their turn which, from my perspective as a Team Leader, is a great thing!”
Kieran added that, despite this being a new initiative, it was already having a positive impact on performance.
He said: “From a productivity side of things, we’re increasing that as we’re now able to support multiple lines at once and won’t have those quiet times on our side while calls are queuing for repairs.
By providing additional support to Boston for new repairs, they can then move colleagues to existing repairs calls if needed and ultimately this helps to reduce queue lengths and wait times and improve the customer journey, which is what we all want.
“Our answer rate at the end of November was about 69 percent across all of our lines.
“Since then, at the end of January, it had gone up by nine percent overall. We’re on target to achieve a further two percent for this month, which might only seem a small number but in the grand scheme of things and with the volume of calls we handle is a massive impact across the board.”