We, at Ticketmaster, recognise the importance of great customer service. We want all our customers to experience impeccable service be it purchasing their ticket for their favourite band, or calling us for more information about their tickets and to keep this standard up we’ve created ‘Star Search’, a quarterly competition between our UK and US (Manchester, Charleston, and Paharr) call centres, to determine who really is the Star of our Call Centres. It also serves as a calibration exercise, to give areas of our business access to real time customer experiences. With every call monitored and every agent having the opportunity to be chosen during the star search compeition it also helps maintain exemplary standards and feedback provides for continuous improvement.
Star Search occurs each quarter where a panel of three judges from the UK and US choose either a sales or customer service call at random and score each call depending on how well the Call Centre agent manages the call. Judges look for a range of factors such as courtesy, timeliness, accuracy and the overall customer experience. Each call is then scored from unsatisfactory to outstanding and then each judge gets to feedback their thoughts on how the call was handled.
Competition is always very high, and for the latest round we heard some great calls from Liam in our Manchester Call Centre who dealt with a customer who required a change of address for her tickets perfectly to Alicia in Charlestown who demonstrated a delightful and friendly manner which resonated well with the customer. Ultimately, the clincher for the title of Star of the Call Centres was delivered by Mark in Manchester whose customer focused bright and breezy attitude in helping a customer secure tickets to see Billy Elliott was a perfect example of flawless customer service and secured Manchester’s 4th consecutive win of Star Search.
The benefit of running such a competition is two fold, customers are guaranteed the high level of customer service they’ve come to expect from Ticketmaster and our staff enjoy the light hearted spirit of the competition while ensuring the customer comes first.
In addition to the Star Search competitions, we have a very well structured quality evaluation and coaching process. Our coaches and managers are set targets to regularly evaluate the agents on their skills and behaviours. Utilising Verint (our call recording and quality monitoring system) and a robust scoring system recognising positive and negative behaviours the coaches and managers are able to view the agents manoeuvring through the sale via screen capture and listening to the audio of the call. Praise and coaching or training needs are addressed throughout the evaluation process. Evaluators are required to complete 40 hours of classroom training and have to complete 6 evaluations in line with our quality guidelines prior to qualifying to assess in the live environment.
Congratulations to the Manchester team for their continued success – last week they celebrated in style with a summer BBQ!
