Thank goodness June is over!

I work with a group of very talented people in a Contact Centre for Superannuation.

With the recent legislative changes to Super and the extreme media attention to it all in the past few months, we knew we would be in for a very challenging end of financial year.

In the lead up to June, we interviewed about 60 people, took on approximatley 15 new staff and put them through the intense training required to handle our customers calls. Most made it, some we lost along the way, but coming into June we felt we were ready for the onslaught.

June however proved to be bigger than Ben Hur!

With headsets ready, we began the month with some small afternoon peaks in queues. Customers were enthusiastic about providing their TFN's and wanting to know more about this government co-contribution. My staff put in good days with little unplanned leave and we were comfortably making the high service levels required by the client. We didn't know what was ahead of us...

Week 2 and disaster hit!

In all my time working in this position, the required 96% of calls being answered has just about become the god we work by. If one day we saw a 89% we made dam sure the next was 100% to even out our week.

Week 2 of June however saw up to 45 calls still queueing at 5pm with a GOS of around 28%!!!

OH-MY-GOD!!!

Suddenly we had calls in the queue ALL DAY, overtime up to our eyebrows, we all worked 8:00am to after 6:00pm at night and really did not want to talk to people once we got home. If we made 50% GOS one day, that was a good day!

A normal week for us is about 8000 calls for my team. We speak with a smile and provide excellent service to all.

In the last week of June however, we took over 17500 calls into my team. We emailed nearly 2000 procedures on how to make a last minute payment into the bank account and millions of dollars of $1000 cheques came pouring into the business!

At the end of it all? Well the smiles were still there, if not somewhat forced, but customers all received an excellent experience - if only they wouldn't all leave it to the last week next year!