3 Tips for Gracefully Handling Emergency Calls

In the world of customer service and call centers, every single phone call is different. The person answering the phone must be prepared for a variety of personalities, challenges and temperaments when the call begins. An emergency call can be especially challenging if the call agent is not prepared. For medical practices and hospitals with regular emergency calls, gracefully handling the situation is especially important. 

Here are a few tips to handle emergency calls with grace: 

1. Listen

First and foremost, truly listen to the person on the other end of the receiver. Take note of not only their words, but also how they are speaking. Are they having difficulty speaking English? Do they sound angry or frustrated? Is there panic in their words? Take deep breaths and do your best to remain calm. If you’re calm, your calmness will more than likely affect the caller as well. 

Listen to what the caller is telling you. Allow the caller to vent. Don’t make assumptions nor attempt to correct the caller. Do your best to get a good perspective of what has caused the caller to place an emergency call.

 2. Communicate

After callers vent or voice their concerns, they will be more willing to listen to what you have to say. Do your best to communicate honestly and sincerely, asking questions to verify your understanding of the situation. If the caller attempts to argue or intimidate, remember to stay calm and listen. 

It’s also important to keep in mind that the caller was already upset before the call, so do not react personally. Instead, ask what you can do to help further or offer what options you have to resolve the case. Use an empathetic and caring tone of voice when communicating with the caller. In the caller’s current state, they need to feel as if they are being heard and that their concerns are a priority.

 3. Resolve

As a call handler, you should already have resolution options available for callers. Do you forward the caller to someone on call? Do you take a message? In the case of an emergency call, the best option — if you are unable to resolve it yourself — is to get another person on the phone that can. Do not “pass the buck.” Instead, stay on the line to make sure the caller is working with someone who can truly help them. 

State specifically what it is that you are going to do to resolve the call for the customer or client. Let them know exactly what you can do, what you can’t do and what they should expect. Once the caller understands that they are in your competent hands, they will more than likely relax. Use phrased questions like:

• “Does that work for you?”
• “Am I making sense?”
• “Are you okay with that?”

Listen again and take note if the caller still feels unsettled. Again, make sure you are listening, communicating effectively and offering options to help the caller feel satisfied that you have done all that you can.

Of course, the right call center can ensure your emergency calls are being handled appropriately. Find the right one and you can feel confident that you are providing the best customer service.

Don’t Sweat It: Why HVAC Companies Need an Answering Service

The most important part of an HVAC company’s business is its customers. Specifically, customer acquisition and retention. Customer service is a huge part of that. The smaller the business, the more important each customer is to its survival, so it’s important to ensure your customers are happy after each and every interaction you have with them.

The first line to an HVAC customer is the telephone. If a phone call from a potential or current customer isn’t answered, there’s a chance the customer may call someone else. Competition is fierce and HVAC business owners can’t afford to miss an opportunity. How do you keep up? By hiring an answering service. 

The Benefits of Outsourcing

Outsourcing basic tasks, such as answering the phones, taking appointments, resolving minor problems — and escalating major ones — can help you attract new customers and keep your existing ones coming back when they need help. Not only does this free up your time to focus more on your business, but it also makes those peak periods of high HVAC demand much more manageable. Finally, it makes financial sense when you look at the number of customers you’re able to retain and attract.

HVAC Answering Services

So, what are some specific ways an answering service can help an HVAC company? The ideal one will customize their services to fit your exact needs, but here are some services an answering service typically provides for service industry businesses like HVAC companies:

• Call handling, 24 hours/day, 7 days/week
• Call overflow handling
• Backup when you’re busy or out of the office
• Appointment setting
• Call escalation
• Bilingual call answering

In the end, an HVAC company must continue to provide services to stay in business. This requires excellent customer service to keep your current and prospective customers happy. In order to continue growing an HVAC company, some administrative tasks can be outsourced so that you’re able to focus on doing what you do best. An answering service can be the first step in outsourcing part of the tasks of running an HVAC company.

Call Center Turnover: Why Employees Leave and How to Retain Them

When you hear the words “call center,” does it immediately bring to mind endless rows of people chattering away on headsets? If so, you have a pretty accurate idea of what a call center is like. One thing associated with many call centers is an extremely high turnover rate. As a matter of fact, the average time a U.S. call center representative remains at one job is about three years. 

Keeping good employees in a potentially monotonous job can be challenging for some businesses. If you’re considering hiring a call center, you may want to understand more about the employees you’ll be hiring to represent your company.

Why Call Center Employees Leave

There are a number of reasons why employees leave their call center jobs. The age of the call center employee seems to be a deciding factor in their tenure with a company, according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. The statistics show that the younger the employee, the shorter their stay:

• Average tenure for ages 20 – 24:1 years
• Average tenure for ages 25 – 34:7 years

Here are some other factors of call center employee turnover:

• Wages and benefits
• Lack of career opportunities
• Poor match for the job
• Training and performance challenges
• Supervisory issues
• Low morale or burnout 

Employee turnover tends to be higher in routine positions, while employees in more specialized trained positions stay with companies longer.

The Cost of Call Center Turnover

There are many costs associated with hiring a new call center employee. If an employee doesn’t stick around for long, these costs can be doubled or sometimes tripled in a single year. Some costs may also cause collateral damage to your business.

The costs associated with hiring and turnover include:

• Recruitment and hiring – advertising, job fairs, human resources time and salary
• Training time – getting paid when the employee isn’t actively taking calls
• Training materials and resources – including the trainer’s time and salary
• Possible poor customer service due to low staffing
• Lower morale for other employees who may be overworked
• Lower productivity
• Risk for more employee turnover

Source: Exploring Call Center Turnover Numbers

Retaining Call Center Staff 

Retention of employees may take more effort on the part of the call center, but will soon pay off when examining the cost of turnover. Let’s consider each step of the process and tweaks that may keep employees around longer:

• Hiring: A well-examined hiring process may go far in correcting the challenges with poor job match. Assessing the personality traits and current skills of an applicant may help determine if the person is a good fit.
• Wages and Benefits: Retaining quality employees means offering a salary that is competitive with other businesses in your market. Benefits can be expensive to offer employees but compared to the cost of employee turnover, they are worth considering.
• Staff Training and Career Opportunities: A documented training plan, legacy employees and opportunities for advancement go a long way in impressing a new employee. If the employee can be ramped up quickly, they are going to feel as if they are valuable, contributing to the company sooner rather than later.
• Employee Morale: Little perks like breaks, snacks and downtime help keep employees from suffering burnout. Creating a great workplace environment allows employees to decrease stress and love their job.

In the end, keeping high quality and trained professional staff in a call center may take extra effort, but those efforts are valuable.

How We Can Help Your Company During The Holiday Rush or Peak Seasons!

It’s no secret that business picks up during the holidays or peak seasons. According to the National Retail Federation, sales in November and December of 2017 are expected to increase 3.6 percent to $655.8 billion. That’s higher than the 10-year average of 2.5 percent and above the seven-year average of 3.4 percent since the economy started to recover in 2009. Furthermore, NRF forecasts non-store sales to increase between seven and 10 percent to as much as $117 billion.

Regardless of the industry you’re in, it’s important to be prepared. You can make a list and check it twice, but if you aren’t ready for the number of customer calls you’ll get this holiday season, it’ll leave you feeling like a Grinch. Fortunately, we can help. 

Here are some of the services an we can provide to help your business handle the rush:

Order Taking and Processing

We can take holiday gift orders from your customers and process them on your website or purchasing system so you can efficiently deliver them to customers. This is great for customers who rely on their phones or aren’t sure about the security of online purchases. 

Help Desk/Trouble Tickets

Handling holiday help desk issues and trouble tickets is second nature to the right answering service. We handle these calls with superior professionalism, efficiency and empathy, letting you focus on promoting your business and handling new customers.

Overflow/After-Hours Support

Don’t have enough time to handle all of your customer calls? Our 24/7 answering service provides telephone support for your overflow and after-hours calls, meaning you can take advantage of every opportunity to make a sale or fix an issue — regardless of the time of day.

Customer Relationship Management

Strong Call also provides web-enabled data entry from incoming calls, meaning they go into your system and log calls, whether it’s a trouble ticket or simply ensuring you don’t have to re-enter it. This is more of a back-end perk for the holidays, but it’s still helpful. 

Ad Campaign Call Management                                 

Running a TV ad, radio ad or some other outbound marketing campaign this holiday season? We can manage calls related to it. That includes answering questions, taking messages and more.

Vacation Services 

Worried about your incoming calls while you’re on Christmas vacation? Let us take care of your telephone calls and other services while you’re on vacation. Talk about “Peace on Earth!”

Don’t let the holiday rush or peak season take you by surprise. Make sure your customers are happy and give yourself the gift of less stress by hiring an answering service this season. 

P.S. You can use us for just the holiday period or season. No long-term contract required! 

5 Things We Offer Every Legal Office That Every Legal Office Needs in an Answering Service!

Law practices can be demanding and complex. On account of this, many are hesitant to outsource customer service because of a fear that they won’t be represented properly to current and prospective clients. Fortunately, the right answering service can serve as an extension of your brand and reinforce the same qualities your staff embodies on a daily basis.

The only question is, what qualities do you want your answering service to represent? Professionalism? Trust? An experienced answering service can serve as an extension of your brand and reinforce the same qualities your staff embodies on a daily basis. Plus, hiring an answering service allows you to focus on your core business of handling your clients’ legal matters.

Here are five things every legal office needs in an answering service:

1. Specialization

Your legal office specializes in a particular area of the law and your answering service should know that area. The call center representatives should be well versed in what you do and the needs of your clients. You should also feel secure in knowing that the right calls will be escalated to the right person in your office, if needed. The right answering service will be a seamless extension of your office.

2. Flexibility

When dealing with a legal matter, there are times when clients are calling with a sense of urgency and desperation. You need the security of knowing that your calls will be answered promptly by call representatives 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

3. Understanding

Your clients should feel valued and understood by the person who answers your phone. An answering service should have a customized script or call handling procedure for assisting those who are calling your office for a legal matter. Your clients should hang up the phone confident that their message will get through and that the person who answered your phone is representative of the trust they feel with your office.

4. Bilingual Capability

A frightened prospective or existing client can become easily frustrated if the person on the other end of the line isn’t speaking their language. The right call center will have representatives that are able to help with bilingual campaigns for your legal office. This is especially helpful for businesses in the Southwest.

5. Promptness 

When someone is calling your office, you want his or her call to be answered promptly and courteously, right? The right answering service will answer your calls within one or two rings, will have a less than one-minute average hold time and will have a less than one percent average abandoned call rate.

If you’re considering hiring an answering service for your legal office, make sure they have the five characteristics mentioned above by choosing Strong Call United, Inc.

How Chargeback Mitigation Can Reduce Risk and Increase Revenue

For many merchants, chargebacks become a major liability. When chargeback rates start to increase, merchants have two options:

1. They can accept the financial loss as a cost of doing business.

2. They can create a strategy to reduce risk and recover lost revenue.

The only way to ensure longevity and sustainability is the second option—chargeback mitigation.

What is Chargeback Mitigation?

Chargeback mitigation is the process of preventing chargebacks and challenging illegitimate transaction disputes.

Chargeback mitigation might include the following:

• Increasing the acceptance of valid transactions and decreasing false positives
• Decreasing the acceptance of unauthorized transactions
• Identifying the source of each chargeback
• Eradicating preventable chargeback triggers (such as merchant error)
• Challenging illegitimate chargebacks
• Improving industry relationships
• 
  

Each merchant suffers from different and unique challenges; therefore, chargeback mitigation efforts will need to be customized to address applicable threats. However, when executed effectively, the outcome of chargeback mitigation should include some or all of the following:

• Increased profits
• Recovered revenue
• Decreased costs
• Greater sales conversions
• Decreased declines
• Improved customer retention and loyalty
• Enhanced brand reputation
• Stronger industry relations
• Reeducated consumers
• Sustainable growth
• Sufficient payment processing capabilities
• Longevity
• 
  

The Two Sides of Mitigation: Prevention & Representment

There are two key components to chargeback mitigation: prevention and representment. Each plays a vital role in the process, and each calls for different technologies and bodies of expertise.

Prevention

Effective chargeback prevention is dependent on one simple responsibility: identifying the source of each chargeback. Solving the problem, rather than just treating the symptoms, yields unparalleled results.

If merchants don’t identify the source of the chargeback, they’ll implement inefficient strategies that target the wrong problem.

All chargebacks originate from one of three sources:

1. Criminals: Criminal fraud results in unauthorized transactions.

2. Customers: Illegitimate or unwarranted chargebacks are known as friendly fraud.

3. Merchants: Chargebacks are unknowingly instigated by unidentified merchant errors and oversight.

Within each of those three sources, though, there is a multitude of potential chargeback triggers. The problem might be anything from improperly-deployed anti-fraud technologies failing to identify criminal activity to minute policy missteps that have major customer service ramifications.

To address all three sources, merchants need to implement a comprehensive approach to chargeback prevention, with insightful human forensics and specialized analytic tools. By doing so, merchants can determine how threats interact and then assess overall risk exposure.

A comprehensive chargeback mitigation strategy might include the following tools:

• Anti-fraud technologies provided by card networks and processors—such as AVS, CVV, 3D Secure, blacklists, whitelists, velocity checks, and more—can reduce the risk of unauthorized transactions.
• Fraud filters analyze transactions, looking for known characteristics of fraud. Suspected criminal activity is detected and blocked.
• Chargeback Alerts allow merchants to refund transaction disputes before they progress into chargebacks.
• Merchants can accept more valid sales and prevent chargebacks by terminating transactions resulting from false consumer activity with Affiliate Fraud Alerts.
• Identifying the source of each chargeback with Intelligent Source Detection enables targeted prevention tactics.
• Merchant Compliance Review analyzes and rectifies internal errors, procedural shortcomings, and policy missteps that often lead to chargebacks.
• 
  

Representment

While merchants can prevent virtually all chargebacks caused by merchant error or criminal fraud, faulty consumer behavior and insufficient industry regulations have led to a third chargeback source that is much more difficult to avoid—friendly fraud.

For cases of friendly fraud, or illegitimate chargebacks, merchants must be prepared to take advantage of the second phase of chargeback mitigation—representment.

“Representment” refers to the process of re-submitting a transaction to the issuing bank, along with careful research and a body of compelling evidence, to prove the original transaction was valid. Successful representments will recover revenue that would have otherwise been lost while retraining faulty consumer behaviors.

Unfortunately, engaging in representment takes time and an extensive understanding of payment industry regulation. Most merchants do not have the resources or expertise to craft effective representment cases. Professional assistance can ensure greater success while also reallocate valuable resources to revenue-generating departments.

When is Professional Assistance Required?

Professional tools and expertise can increase the effectiveness of any chargeback mitigation efforts. If you are unsure about how and when to solicit assistance, consider the following:

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Industry regulations are updated regularly. A professional will have insight as to when these changes will take place, how internal processes will need to adapt, and the dangers of non-compliance. Your in-house team will need to carefully monitor regulations and implement changes to the best of their abilities, recognizing that outcomes might not be timely or successful.

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Adopting ineffective or incomplete solutions may actually make your chargeback problem worse. For example, if your blacklist is too restrictive, you’ll suffer profit-stealing false positives. However, being too lenient with fraud prevention will cause a sudden spike in chargebacks. A professional would be able to assist you by finetuning rules and processes to optimize success.

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Professional assistance is impartial, but you might not be objective enough to identify unintentional shortcomings or errors. A third-party analysis will reveal issues you might not be able to identify.

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Hiring a chargeback mitigation expert doesn’t need to be an all-or-nothing process. You can fully outsource responsibility, but that isn’t the only option available. If you’d like to retain certain responsibilities, you might consider on-demand services or available management software.

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Adding new chargeback mitigation products and processes doesn’t mean you’ll need to switch vendors or platforms. A true professional should be able to integrate with your existing payment processor, gateway, CRM, and fraud filter.

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It’s important to note that not all chargeback mitigation experts are the same. In fact, some aren’t “experts” at all—they increase challenges instead of mitigate them.

SCU truly is an expert at chargeback mitigation—one of the first vendors on the market and the only service provider with real-world, first-hand experience as a merchant. We are a recognized leader and innovator in the science of chargeback mitigation, having created a host of solutions to address the various threats and their sources.

With our proprietary technologies, research-backed expertise, and unparalleled insights, merchants can trust that their business is in excellent hands.

Contact SCU today to learn more about your chargeback mitigation options.

How Does an Auto Repossession Affect Your Credit?

When you become overwhelmed with bills, you find yourself making a choice between buying food, paying the electric bill or making your car payment.  If your immediate needs indicate that it’s time to choose to spend your money on something else other than your auto payment, the repo man may show up at your door fairly quickly.  What happens to your credit when this happens?

When Can A Repossession Happen?

The laws that govern repossession vary from state to state.  However, most of them allow immediate repossession once you breach the terms of the contract, in some cases, this happens when you miss the first payment.  Some states spell out the amount of time you have before a payment is considered late, example: West Virginia specifies a 10-day period.  Another term of a contract that you can violate which will set into motion the wheels of repossession is failing to keep up your car insurance. Should the creditors routinely accept late payments, some states say this is a modification of the terms of the contract, as the creditor accepted late payments without complaint.  If your payment schedule is causing you trouble, you can also negotiate new contract terms in the form of a changed repayment schedule and usually this is given to you in writing.

Once a contract is breached, most likely you will need to pay off the entire balance of the loan; most creditors accelerate a loan when a borrower defaults. The acceleration clause in the time of default is typical in an auto loan contract.

If a repo man shows up to repossess your car, they must do the repossession peacefully.  This means that the people sent to collect the property may not use force against you, enter your home or enclosed structure like a garage, threaten force against you or take the car over your protests.

A creditor does not have to go to court in order to repossess your property if the car is out in the open, like your driveway or a public lot.   The repo man would need a court order, though, to get into a garage, home, or enclosed area.

What Happens After A Repossession?

In most cases the creditor will sell the property and apply the sales proceeds towards the debt.  The creditor must notify you of the date and time of the sale and you will be allowed to bid on the car.  Before the sale of the car, you can try and negotiate with the creditor to pay the back payments and possibly retrieve the car.  However, if the loan has been accelerated, you’ll need to pay back the entire amount of the loan.

If the sale of the property does not net enough money to cover the balance of the loan, what is remaining will be called a deficiency balance.  You will be sent a bill for deficiency balance, and if you cannot pay the bill, it will be sent to collections.  If the collectors have no luck collecting from you, you could find yourself being sued over the balance.

A Repossession Will Sink Your Credit Score

There are four ways that a repossession can tank your credit score, and you may have all of them on your credit report by the time you are done:

Late payments. On the road to a repossession, you must have missed a payment.  While some creditors can start proceedings when you are late by even a few days, most banks will allow you to go 60 days or more before they send the repo man out to collect the car.  This means that you will have a 30-day or 60-day late payment on your credit report, something that can damage your credit score by up to 100 points.

The repossession. A repossession will show up on your credit report under “current manner of payment. ”  It can also show up in the form of codes placed next to your account listing, for example a code 08 means repossession, and 8A means a voluntary repossession on a Transunion credit report.  A repossession can tank your credit score by as much as 100 points.

Collections.  If you have a deficiency balance after the sale of your vehicle, as we mentioned, you could wind up with a collections account. A collection on its own can be very negative, but if you already have a repossession on your credit report, having this additional collection will probably not sink your score much lower – though it will drag your score down further.

Judgments.  If you are sued and lose in court over the deficiency balance (which is very likely), you will wind up with a judgment against you.  Judgments are very damaging to your credit, and even with a repossession on your credit report, can be a significant additional hit to your credit score.

How to Avoid a Repossession

No one likes repossessions, not even the bank and they will usually do what they can to help you avoid a repossession.

Ask Them If You Can Skip a Payment.  It’s not as crazy as it sounds – banks will often allow you to skip a car payment if you’re not already late on the loan.  Know that Interest will continue to accrue and you will be paying extra over the original payback total on the loan.  Banks will often allow you to skip up to 2 payments and this could make all the difference in your being able to keep the car and catch up on other bills.

Refinance the Loan.  If your credit is not already bad (meaning you’re current on this and your other loans), you may be able to refinance the car and stretch out the payments so you can lower them.  Refinancing has the added benefit that you may be able to skip a payment on the loan while you’re in between being financed on the loans.

Sell the Car Yourself.  If you have heard stories of cars being sold cheaply at auction, believe them.  Repossessed cars typically get sold at auctions for a fraction of what they’re worth.  If you’re close to being upside down, or if you are upside down and you don’t want to face a big deficiency balance, you can always get more for the car in a private sale.   However, if you are upside down, you will need to come up with the difference in the sales price and loan balance in order to get the bank to release the title on the car so you can give it to the new owner.