Call centers can often find themselves dealing with different departments of the same company. For example, a call center might be handling the sales, customer service and technical support of just one company. Normally, this causes little to no problem. Each of these departments operates independently of one another, after all, and there is little between them that overlap with the others. However, as anyone who has taken calls on the floor will know, sometimes there seems to be a dangerously distinct lack of communication between the call centers that handle different departments, not to mention the rest of the company.
One of the most common cases of this is the “eternal enmity” between sales and the rest of the call center-operated departments. Sales personnel tend to become pushy, particularly if they can smell a closed deal coming. This makes them just slightly less likely to be completely honest – at the worst, though, they’ll spout information that isn’t always entirely accurate. This causes more than a few problems when the customer learns that he didn’t get exactly what the sales agent said he would. The customer cannot be faulted for assuming that the company screwed up somewhere and calls either technical support or customer service, who then face the daunting task of having to correct the misconception planted by the sales team. This rarely turns out well.
Most of these problems stem from a lack of communication between departments. They don’t know a whole lot about what goes on in the other sections, which can be problematic when agents from one give customers misconceptions about what agents from another can do. For example, sales reps have an annoying tendency to inform the customer that customer service can fix most problems, including ones that are related to the shipping company. Customer service tends to think of tech support people as having significantly more authority to issue replacements for electronics or parts, even if they don’t most of the time.
What all this points to is that the various “hands” of the company have no idea what the others are doing, or what they’re capable of. In some instances, the systems and databases used by these divisions are completely incompatible with one another. This can be frustrating when a customer calls the customer service number for a technical issue and gets a reference number, only to find that the number does not work in tech support, the part of the company that is best suited to solve his or her issue.
I notice some of the call center companies are not so strict in terms of accent while others are, as long as the employee knows how to speak English and other mandatory languages. However, I guess it’s more nice if the employees are good in pronunciation and intonation for it reflects to the company as well.