Surely by describing ourselves as a telephone answering service we should guarantee to answer 100% of our clients’ calls? Well actually we don’t and we never will, a number of our competitors do but we question their wisdom. We plan our staffing to the nth degree and pride ourselves in how fast we answer calls but you can never plan for Icelandic volcanoes.
Pity then the poor call centre manager at P&O Ferries. According to BBC Radio 5 a normal day for them sees them answer 3000 calls in an orderly fashion but then UK airspace is shutdown because of the small inconvenience of a cloud of volcanic dust and an extra 27000 people decide to call to enquire about a ferry across the channel. One can only imagine the chaos inside their call centre.
On January 29th, 2007 we too had our own “Icelandic Volcano” moment. One of our clients, a firm of solicitors, was involved in giving legal advice to an unfortunate group of people who had suffered side effects as a result of using Seroxat, an antidepressant drug marketed by SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline). On the date in question the BBC broadcast a documentary about Seroxat and at the end of the programme , and to our client’s surprise, they published a telephone number with the instructions “For legal advice about any issues covered in tonight’s programme call…….”. Within a matter of moments a tidal wave of telephone calls crashed over Office Response and continued for several days afterwards.
And that is why we don’t guarantee, and nor do we think any of our competitors should guarantee, that any call centre will never miss a phone call. Our customers will be comforted to know that our procedure for Icelandic volcano moments is to divert the calls to a restricted ringing group of a small number of lines. Isolating the calls in this way protects the service standards for our clients whilst we allocate as many spare staff as we have available to deal with the “volcanic ash”.
by Martin Blain
Sales Director
