OnStar Maintains Service Quality Through Outsourced Call Centers

April 10, 2012 - PRLog -- When customers call most service centers, they expect useful responses in a reasonable amount of time. However, when they call OnStar they want immediate solutions.

Based on the potential life-or-death needs of OnStar callers, you might expect that all of their calls are handled in house. Not so, says Joanne Finnorn, OnStar's vice president of subscriber services. OnStar is able to provide the level of service that customers demand through close relationships with outsourced service providers.

In the April issue of "Customer Service Newsletter," Finnorn explains. "I would say that we are probably unique in terms of the level of engagement that we have with our call center vendors."

"Our approach is that if something is good for our vendors, then it is good for us. And if it is not good for them, it is not good for us. Everything is based on that, and it makes for a healthy relationship where we are really on the same page in terms of our focus," she says.

The relationship works like this: "The vendors are running their own businesses. We receive quality scores on a daily basis and we are sharing those scores with them," Finnorn says.

"And whenever something either doesn't look right, or we have a troubling verbatim from a customer, we are talking with the vendor and they are investigating. That's the kind of active, daily oversight that is going on repeatedly with the vendors."

In addition, OnStar has management staff on-site at the vendors' call center locations. Both OnStar and the vendors regularly monitor calls, says Finnorn, "it's part of our normal practice to come together on the calls we have each monitored to calibrate and say, 'What did you hear?' And that way we make sure that we are looking for the same quality in the calls."

More insights into ensuring quality call handling appears in the April issue of "Customer Service Newsletter."

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