If you’ve worked in a call center for any length of time you know that trying to coordinate any form of a meeting is a bit like herding cats. It is not uncommon to have to do the same training session three times to accommodate all of the schedules, lunches and vacations, let alone keep the call queue from blowing up.
We recently planned a special day of team building and training that included lunch and hip hop dancing lessons with Darren, one of our awesome customer service representatives. Five minutes before lunch arrived, Darren received a call that lasted an hour. While not preferable, we ate without him and filled him in on what we talked about afterward.
At the end of the day and ten minutes before hip hop dancing lessons were to commence, Darren took a call that ended up lasting another hour! The good news is that while we started late, the dance lessons were amazing. It was definite confirmation that I along with several of my colleagues, have no business hip hop dancing.
As a reward to Darren for handling these customers with amazing patience and professionalism, he is now going to be immortalized with a new term called “Darren’s Law.”
Darren’s law simply refers to the fact that the longest call of the day always occurs right before a meeting, lunch or time to leave for the day.
Speaking from experience, the best response to these calls is exactly what Darren modeled. Any attempts to accelerate the call only serves to aggravate the customer and make the call longer. Remember that patience is a virtue and these are opportunities to WOW customers. Supervisors and managers, be sensitive to Darren’s law and WOW your agents once in a while by allowing them to transfer the customer call to you so they can clock out.
