In speaking with Mary Ellen this week, we discusses an  issue that arose in a team meeting.

All inbound phone calls are funnelled to a central voice mail. The message asks the caller to leave a detail message that way we can provide the caller with the answer to their inquiry promptly with a return call. This allows us to get the answer before returning the call if need be.
Our office standard is returns all calls the same day or next day even it is just to say got your message and we are looking into it.
This voice mail is checked by a member of our customer service team (a team of 5) on a rotating basis every hour.
We implemented this measure as part of the time blocking work we learned through Stagen as a means to be more effective in our daily work.
Some of the staff have fought us on this.
In Tuesday’s team meeting staff raised the concern about the central voice mail again as there had been some client complaints about not being able to reach people on our team and always getting voicemail.

I just starting asking questions of the team about the complaints until we discovered the real reason for the complaints turned out to be that calls were not returned in a timely manor. I reminded the team of our service standard, that all calls are returned same day or next day. I asked if there was a reason we were not able to meet our service standard. There was not.
I provided examples of other professions were you do not get to speak the professional and generally have to leave a message. Examples I gave were your doctor, dentist, lawyer or school teacher. There was a suggestion that at least those calls are answered by a person.
I agreed with them on that point and suggested that leaving a voice was more effective as the message gets forwarded directly to the best person on the team to reply and there is no error in communicating the message via the third party not recording it correctly, which everyone seemed to agreed with.
Other staff starting acknowledging that they are not being interrupted as often and are accomplishing more as a result.
The staff that are struggling with the central voicemail came to realization that they had caused the issues them selfs by not following company procedures and  agreed that we do not need to revert back to the old ways of every call being answered by team member.
The staff that were resisting these measures the most,  felt like their voice was herd and agreed that we indeed have made the system more efficient and effective if we just follow the procedures.

What’s the purpose in sharing this, it illustrates the negative results that can happen when we do not walk our talk or follow our valves. Which in this case would have been to return clients calls the same day or next day.
It demonstrates the power of moving into the creator roll while resolving differences of opinion and not the rescuer or victim.

Thank you Mary Ellen for pointing that out to me. Some of the learnings must be sinking in as I had even realized I had gone there!
See you all next week

Best Regards

Neal Owen
President
BlueRock Wealth Management Inc.
Suite 201
115 Hurontario St.,
Box 185
Collingwood, Ontario
L9Y 3Z5
705-443-5599 ext 1241