Answering Service Blog | American Inbound

If anyone has looked at American Inbound’s main site, you can see that we are currently hiring for remote agents in the Bloomington, Indiana area. Well, I put up a job application online and we have been swamped with submissions. Honestly, our HR department has so much on their hands, they’ve asked for help from some of our other employees.

I run across all kinds of operator hiring guides online, so I wanted to post up listings I found for a few of them. Hopefully, it helps them out!

1. How To Hire Better Call Center Agents - Every Time!
2. The Science of Agent Selection: Assessment Tools Help Centers Find the Right Fit
3. New Call Center Hiring Tips from FurstPerson
4. Hiring Customer Service Oriented Employees

Ben Wurthen has written a piece for the Wall Street Journal stating that data centers are fast becoming one of our biggest polluters. Studies have shown that data centers are responsible almost half the amount of emissions as the airline industry. As data centers become more and more common, this number will only increase.

No Jitter has given us a couple of energy-saving tips to help, and I encourage you to try some out! They name unoptimized cooling systems and server underutilization as key energy-wasting culprits.

What is Erlang you ask? A.K. Erlang was a Danish mathematician born in 1878. He laid the foundation of traffic engineering and queuing theory. For call centers, he devised the formula to determine the number of operators required to handle different call volumes.

Most if not all call centers aid their staffing concerns using an Erlang calculator. cc-Modeler was kind enough to offer a free download of one of these. Enjoy!

Top 10 lists on the internet? You don’t say. People love these lists online. They make issues seem very simple, even if the topic is not. With that being said, I found a couple of pretty good ones in the last few days.

Listening is one of the most important skills an operator can possess. Here are ten ways you can improve your listening skills and help your company keep customers!

Call center operators can be hard to manage. At times, I’m sure managers wish they could employ whips. Well, whips did not make Call Center Cafe’s list. Sorry!

Newsfactor.com posted an interesting story today about Indiana becoming a hotspot for call centers.  Eight of the 13 largest job deals last year are call center related, and many companies that outsourced their customer service overseas are deciding that Indiana (not Indian!) call centers can better serve their customers.

There are several reasons for this.  Time zones in states like Indiana allow them to manage calls from both coasts easily.  There is also the idea of the Mid-West disposition.

“The perception is that Midwest states have a more friendly base of people and a common-sense way of dealing with the world.”

Come to think of it, I know of a great answering service in Indiana.

It seems you don’t have to have perfect eye-sight to work in an answering service, and Drishti’, a call center in India, is proving that on a daily basis!

Drishti’ is the Hindi word for vision, and they have formed an employee base made of only visually-impaired operators.  Their system is setup in such a way that it removes all the barriers sightless people have answering phones.  They are, in a sense, giving their employees a new found vision by giving them a freedom they have never experienced. 

Aruna Shinde, an employee of Drishti’ comments, “It is a challenging work but we can work independently, without taking help from anyone else, So, we are feeling good while working here.”

Another employee, Mangesh Indulkar says, “This is my first job and I really like it. I thought it would be tough working in call centers but it took me eight days during the training. Initially I faced some problems but now it’s fine.”

TMCnet has another report about what to expect this year in the call center industry. It will be hardest for the many large contact centers who are updating their equipment. However, they stress that this may be the what is needed to reduce overall operating costs. They also point out a trend of specification and the need to corner your market.