1 Million Pages

Be sure to make it easy to order. Make sure you SAY exactly how you want prospects to place their order. Don’t just simply put an “Add to cart” button on your site. Spell it out. Say, click on “Add to cart” below to order or call our toll-free number anytime.

If you want people to order online, make sure you have an easy, secure online ordering system in place. PayPal is an excellent option. Many consumers prefer to use PayPal - it is a safe, convenient way to pay for purchases online. In fact, PayPal boasts they are the number 1 choice for making payments online.

Opening a PayPal account won’t cost you a dime. It’s also a snap for your prospects to open their own account if they choose to pay through PayPal. I’m not sure why a business wouldn’t include PayPal as one of their payment options. There is a benefit to having more than one choice for a payment. People buy with different methods. Some people absolutely love charging on their credit card. So be sure to give these types a convenient method for doing so…

You may accept credit cards on your site by investing in a merchant account with Authorize Net or another reputable provider. A merchant account will enable you to accept credit cards online and to type in a credit card number from a customer given to you by mail. It will cost to set-up a merchant account, but the cost will most certainly pay-off in the long run.

You can also set-up an account to allow people to pay via electronic check through a company like ElectraCash. In addition, I’d suggest allowing people to pay by mail (checks or credit card). This is especially important if you offer a high-priced item or service. What reason would you ever have to refuse a bona-fide payment method? Heck, let them come give you cash if they want. Money is money.

Now let’s move on to fulfilling your orders.

You can set-up a simple system where digital products are sent out immediately. It’s quite simple to do using an autoresponder or shopping cart system. For tangible purchases, you can use a fulfillment company or do it yourself. I usually ship purchases made by credit card the next day, regardless of whether the money has been deposited, unless there is reason to be suspect of the order.

Here are a few reasons to be suspect of an order…

The shipping and billing address are different. In these cases, you may want to give the customer a ring. Simply call them to confirm the order. They will greatly appreciate this.

The order is a high volume order. In these instances you may also want to call the customer to confirm that they really meant “10″ and not just “1″ (of course you don’t want to say it quite like that).

Your customers will value all of this effort.

Here’s another important point. Be careful of orders placed from certain countries.

It might not seem fair, but after I personally had a $2,000 fraudulent order placed from Nigeria, I watch out. A chargeback like that can cost you your merchant account, so just be careful. Remember, always make sure the address matches the card holder’s address before shipping anything out or call to verify it if it doesn’t.

Put your interests in the equation
Also remember to watch out for your interests by making sure you have a Fraud prevention system in place if you plan to accept credit cards. Merchant accounts through Authorize Net will automatically reject cards when the address, name and number do not match. If you use Authorize Net, you can customize your account to provide you with the level of security you want (I’d suggest setting it to high).

If ever a customer is having problems placing their order online because their card is rejected, you will naturally want to help them. After all, you want to help them purchase from you. But chances are good that there may be a valid reason why the credit card was declined. It is also possible that the customer may simply need to update their address with the credit card company. Offer PayPal as an option in these instances.

Secure and professional
If you offer online ordering make sure the webpage you expect customers to enter their credit card number into is secure. People recognize the yellow lock symbol at the bottom of secure pages and trust VeriSign or other security enabled pages. Many people simply refuse to type their credit card info into a page without these features.

A simple, easy way to get this type of security is to use 1ShoppingCart.com. They will provide you with a very professional order form that you simply link your web pages to. Customers may pay via PayPal, your merchant account (if you have one), or by check online (again, if you have an account) if you have a 1ShoppingCart account. It’s easy and reliable. They have a variety of plans to choose from.

Copyright ? 2005 by L A Parmley. All rights reserved.

Today’s call center is not something about phone calls, it’s a separate business that can… no it MUST generate revenue. It must provide company with fresh ideas, must help company to get new customers and archive business goals, it must work 24 hours a day, live response must be accessible within few seconds. Finally, the operator’s response must solve customer problems immediately, must save customers that wished to cancel service and must generate revenue.

There are various viewpoints on call center - operator view point, customer view point and management viewpoint. Customer wishes the problem to be solved. Operators’ job is to solve the problem, actually operators’ job is to find correct information quickly and provide it with customer in an easy to follow way. What about management? These people always make things working properly. So what is the best thing that call center manager can do? How to manage call center efficiently? The Balanced Scorecard approach is the best answer to these questions. Balanced Scorecard is nothing, but the concept. It’s not a software tool, it is not a database, it is not an ERP system. Think about

Balanced Scorecard as a combination of metrics and the rules of metrics management. The key rule for managing metrics is to put them in proper order. Metrics must represent actual business (calls, operators, expenses and revenues), metrics must be grouped. It’s bad idea to create too many metrics and there must be some golden number of metrics suitable for your business. Let’s think about call center in terms of Balanced Scorecard and in terms of metrics. The Balanced Scorecard concept suggests to use four perspectives to describe any business. Let’s discuss the most important perspectives and metrics associated with these perspectives. Financial perspective. The key idea here is “call center must generate revenue”. It’s a good idea to measure revenue per successful call and the cost of call. Financial perspective will give you an idea about conversion rate.

Making more and more calls is not a good goal. Good goal is: “Make 20% more calls, keeping conversion rate about 4% and keeping our costs flat”. Balanced Scorecard concept is about measuring. So when you have some metrics, describe the way you will measure them, specify the target values you wish to achieve. The next perspective is Internal process perspective. How the phone call is handled inside the call center? Do you segment in some way your incoming customers? What is the average call-handling time? Is your call center service available 24 hours a day? Learning and growth perspective. Coaching is what makes call center working efficiently. Team leader must spend time on coaching, manage must measure and control this time. Team leader must use different coaching methods, such as remote listening, sharing practices with agents, role-playing exercises. It’s good idea to measure these activities.

Today call center management systems provides efficient technical background for a call center, coaching is what makes all this software systems work. Finally, don’t forget about customer. From customer perspective consider measuring response time quality, customer loose rate and first-call resolution rate. It sounds simple, but these key indicators will help to re-think call center and make it performing better. Call-center MUST generate sales, it must save customers and must return investments. The key concept is to measure and control call center performance with call center metrics and Balanced Scorecard concept. What tool to use to manage your metrics? Anything you like,  in this case any spreadsheet software will work better than thousand-dollars business systems.

Computer Forensics

The field of computer forensics was developed primarily by law enforcement personnel for investigating drug and financial crimes. It employs strict protocols to gather information contained on a wide variety of electronic devices, using forensic procedures to locate deleted files and hidden information.

Computer forensics tasks include capturing all the information contained on a specific electronic device by using either a forensic copy technique or by making an image of all or a portion of the device. A forensic copy provides an exact duplicate of the hard drive or storage device. None of the metadata, including the last accessed date,is changed from the original. However, the copy is a liveversion, so accessing the data on the copy, even only to see what is there,can change this sensitive metadata.

By contrast, making a forensic image of the required information puts a protective electronic wrapper around the entire collection. The collection can be viewed with special software, and the documents can be opened, extracted from the collection, and examined without changing the files or their metadata.

Other forensic tasks include locating and accessing deleted files, finding partial files, tracking Internet history, cracking passwords, and detecting information located in the slack or unallocated space. Slack space is the area at the end of a specific cluster on a hard drive that contains no data; unallocated space contains the remnants of files that have been deleted but not erased from the device, as deleting simply removes the pointer to the location of a specific file on a hard drive, not the file itself.

Electronic Discovery

Electronic discovery has its roots in the field of civil litigation support and deals with organizing electronic files using their attached metadata. Because of the large volume encountered, these files are usually incorporated into a litigation retrieval system to allow review and production in an easy methodology. Legal data management principles are used, including redaction rules and production methodologies.

Electronic discovery tasks usually begin after the files are captured. File metadata is used to organize and cull the collections. Documents can be examined in their native file format or converted to TIF or PDF images to allow for redaction and easy production.

Common Capabilities, Different Philosophies

Computer forensics and electronic discovery methodologies share some common capabilities. One is the ability to produce an inventory of the collection, allowing reviewers to quickly see what is present. Another is the ability to determine a common time zone to standardize date and time stamps across a collection. Without this standardization, an e-mail response may appear to have been created before the original e-mail.

Motivating Call Center Employees In 3 Easy Steps
Working as a customer service representative can be a very challenging position for many reasons. In an inbound operation, for example, employees must deal with a relentless stream of difficult customers, while having most of their actions micromanaged and monitored. Under such conditions, it is not rare to encounter low morale and a total lack of enthusiasm for the job at hand. However, dwindling motivation should not be considered as an inevitable attribute that all call center operations must share. It is possible for contact center supervisors and managers to create an environment where a culture of optimism can flourish. This can be accomplished through modeling desired behaviors, enforcing policies and instituting appropriate reward systems.

Modeling desired behaviors

As important as it is for supervisors to make sure that their team members adhere to a standardized set of rules, it is much more important, and effective, for people in charge to consistently model the behaviors they wish to reinforce.

Call center representatives must follow very strict policies regarding attendance, call handle time, and breaks just to name a few. In contrast, people in management roles may have more lax requirements, which permit them to attend to duties such as coaching, meetings and various administrative tasks. The obvious difference between the phone agent’s level of freedom and that of a supervisor can be grounds for discontent if not properly managed.

During periods of heavy queuing, for example, representatives must handle dozens of calls without respite between interactions. If their supervisors can be seen taking extended breaks, or loitering instead of helping with the call volume, morale will suffer. Moreover, the initial resentment that may begin with an isolated incident has the potential of achieving epidemic proportions as other examples of perceived unfairness are observed. That is why it is crucial for supervisors to follow the behavioral standards applicable to all employees.

In terms of attendance, supervisors must set an example by being punctual in all endeavors. Also, they must resist the temptation of breaking inconvenient rules in front of their underlings. Answering a personal call, while putting a customer on hold, would illustrate such a situation.

Above all, supervisors must remain professional in all their interactions with customers. As the leaders of their teams, supervisors are tasked with handling calls where representatives and customers have encountered an impasse. In general, such calls require a great deal of diplomacy, poise and eloquence on the part of supervisors in order to be successful. On the contrary, following in the footsteps of customers who have reached the end of their civility is a recipe for disaster.

Even more grievous than treating a customer poorly is having the interaction witnessed by phone representatives who can lose their jobs for displaying similar behaviors. Such paradoxes are always detrimental to employee motivation because they reinforce the notion that supervisors get paid more, but are held to a lower standard of conduct.

Enforcing Policies

It is difficult to envision a successful call center operation without associating it with stringent requirements for call handle time, attendance, up-sell/cross-sell quotas, quality scores, etc. In addition, it would seem implausible for a call center to reach any level of consistent achievement without the presence of competent management.

A hallmark of proficient supervisors and managers is their consistent enforcement of the policies and guidelines established to ensure the smooth running of their businesses. Without this quality, supervisor’s actions can undermine a key component of employee motivation, clear expectations.

Call center representatives who don’t have a clear understanding of what is expected of them cannot perform to their full potential. To illustrate the point, let’s look at a fictional character we’ll call “John”. Imagine that John is the type of agent that never misses a day of work. Although he has never received any recognition for his attendance record, John feels that being a reliable employee will eventually differentiate him from other representatives who may be in line for promotions. Now imagine what would happen to John’s attendance if he found out that his supervisor only followed the attendance policy when it didn’t affect his best sales people? Given John’s work ethic he may not change his attendance habits, but he may begin working less diligently in order to restore equity.

One reason why supervisors may not enforce current policies is that they may want to be perceived as being on the agent’s side. However, such an approach would probably do more to foster mediocrity and lower morale than to benefit the team. People need to know the repercussions of their actions, positive and negative, if they are to work to the best of their ability. As a call center representative, it would be difficult to remain positive about the daily challenges of the job, while knowing that coworkers who don’t do their part are treated the same as those who do.

The result of not enforcing exiting policies may best be highlighted by the remarks that agents make after being transferred to a new team. When new supervisors inherit what we’ll call “Trained Poor Performers” they often encounter comments like “I know I have 25 occurrences, but that was never a problem before”, or “My old supervisor said that QA scores didn’t matter as long as I met my quota”.

Instituting appropriate reward systems

A final tenet of call center motivation is the implementation of appropriate reward systems. While the definition of what is appropriate can vary from one call center to the next, the basic characteristics of a good reward system remain constant. In order to achieve their objective, rewards must appeal to various motivators, encourage only desired behaviors, and have incentives that are of value to the agents.

Successful reward systems begin by appealing to the various motivators that impel people to action. Employees may be motivated by money, recognition, job flexibility, a sense of accomplishment, and many other intrinsic and extrinsic factors. In addition, things that motivate some people to excel can just as easily discourage others. That is why it is important for call center managers to identify and consider the most prevalent motivators within their groups before finalizing any type of incentive program. Assuming that money is the best, or only, way to motivate call center representatives can prove to be a very expensive and counterproductive proposition.

Along the same lines as targeting the right motivators, rewards must be based on behaviors that should be encouraged, while minimizing the possibility of abuse. Unless they are careful in the design of their incentive programs call center managers can find themselves promoting the opposite of what they are trying to accomplish. Let’s take a contest to reduce average handle time as an example of what can go wrong.

In theory, encouraging representatives to reduce their handle time would induce them to work more effectively and efficiently, which in turn would promote faster resolution of customer issues. Unfortunately, the reality of such an undertaking would be very different unless strict controls are put in place. As an agent, the reward would look the same whether the contest is won by disconnecting as many calls as possible, as it would by working conscientiously. Not taking into consideration such obvious pitfalls can turn almost any contest into a true customer satisfaction nightmare.

Even if a reward system is well thought out and managed, it must still offer incentives that are of interest to the agents involved. This characteristic is different than the targeting of relevant motivators. People can be motivated by money, for example, but offering them $20 to do something that will prevent them from making $200 would probably fail as an incentive. Rewards must represent things that cannot be gained by sticking to the status quo, or conflict with more attractive propositions.

The business of inbound telemarketing poses quite a number of challenges. One of the challenges of every inbound telemarketer is dealing with irate customers. Crossing paths over the phone with this group of customers is inevitable. Reasons why they turn ballistic are varied. Some have valid demands, others are just easily angered, some unintentionally lash out their frustrations in life in general.

Inbound versus Outbound
You have two choices on how to operate your telemarketing business. You can go for inbound telemarketing is also known as soft-selling. This is mainly incorporated in the call metrics of the customer service department. The agents are on standby and wait for the calls to come in. Only after that the customer’s concern has been resolved can the agent make a transition to sell a product or service that is fit to the customer’s needs. Also, a maximum of two attempts to sell is required for inbound telemarketers.

Outbound telemarketing, on the other hand, involves the agent making a call TO the customer. Coined as hard-selling, this type of telemarketing has earned a lot of negative perception mainly because they are unsolicited calls whose aim is to sell.

Emotional cycle
But before we lay out the strategies that can be done to ease the tension on irate callers. I deemed fair to dedicate a section on what inbound telemarketers experience when handling irate calls.

On the first day at the floor, an inbound telemarketer has been given points to take by heart on every possible call that’ll be coming in. At the very first irate caller who’ll be cursing and saying all those nasty words and threaten to sue and track the agent down. The calls ends with the caller hanging up and your agent all flustered and they end up crying or disoriented. As time flies, they get used to the angry callers and develop ways on how to handle them without being too emotional and end up frustrated. Some tend to become overly defensive and unintentionally argue with the irate caller, which is a big taboo in inbound telemarketing.

Recommended mechanisms
As a telemarketing merchant, you will agree that to some extent, irate calls eat a large of percentage of the daily calls that come in. So, how do owners of telemarketing merchant accounts who run telemarketing businesses proceed in calming down this irate callers? Below are some of the ways you can take note and teach your agents.

Instill in your agents’ minds that it’s nothing personal. When a caller gets angry and goes on saying nasty things, it’s not because they’re angry at the person they’re talking to, but at the situation. Tell your phone receptionists to not be rude, never hang up on the caller, and remember, it’s not personal. They have to treat it in a business-like way.

Teach them the ASAP technique. This is a way to calm the angry caller’s nerves. Apologize for the inconvenience, Sympathize with the feelings, Accept responsibility for the error, and Prepare to help.

Let them know that they can satisfy most people most of the time. Nobody can please everybody all the time. So, if after every effort has been done and still fails to calm down the angry caller, then that’s it.

Make them use the swear stopper. The situation gets really heated up when the caller is already swearing non-stop. Your agents should not panic nor answer back. Once this ranting begins, teach the agents to interject immediately, calmly reassure the caller, address directly the main concern, and ask follow-up questions immediately.

It’s just a call
This may cold-blooded to some merchants. But, what this means is just for your agents not to take the emotional baggages of that irate call to the next one, which may be a very different scenario, which can be a good call at the most. Make them realize that after the call, it’s over. It technically impossible that they will ever speak to that customer again, except if you have like two inbound telemarketers employed. But then again, tell them to not get too deep for this might jeopardize their handling of the next call.

Inbound telemarketing is serious business. You can get a good amount of profit from inbound sales. More valid sales, the more money will be coming to your offshore merchant account.