Call Center Care Training Program
2020 NACo Achievement Award Winner
Chesterfield County, Va., VA
Best In Category
About the Program
Category: Community and Economic Development (Best in Category)
Year: 2020
In Chesterfield County’s Department of Utilities’ Call Center in the Billing/Customer Service Section, the main goal is to deliver precise and consistent information to our customers. Excellent customer service is embedded in all the customer service representatives that answer the phones every day. The department provides water service to more than 112,000 customers and wastewater service to more than 95,000 customers. The call center has nine full time employees and three part-time employees. Performance measures for the call center are tracked monthly and relayed to each CSR on how well they are doing and what/if any improvements may be needed. The CSR’s are trained in applying best practices in their telephone conversations when speaking to our customers and making this part of their daily routine. The CSR’s telephone conversations with customers become part of their norm. Our goal is to achieve customer service excellence for every customer contact by creating the best practice that leads to greater results and higher levels of customer satisfaction. Part of the goal is to receive a customer service level satisfaction rating of five (five being the highest rating that a customer can give on the customer service survey card and an indication of excellence). The single most important factor that attributes to customer satisfaction is for every employee to understand the strategic direction of the organization and how they contribute to achieving our strategic goals and objectives. In order to deliver service excellence in our call center, we focused on our training process and establishing training criteria in all aspects of communication with our customers and employees. We emphasize our training methods and training program to ensure new employees are properly trained for ten weeks. We also ensure that those that are showing exemplary work are rewarded and recognized by their peers, supervisors, and managers.