Call Centre

SMSR has its own in-house telephone call centre with an established team in Hull.  Our interviewing facility operates between 9am and 8.30pm Monday to Friday and 10am and 4pm on a Saturday ensuring that we interview a wide selection of working and non-working citizens.

Empathy

Most areas of the UK now have a significant number of non-English speaking residents or residents whose second language is English and it is therefore important to ensure that an interview can be conducted in their preferred language.  SMSR has always used interviewers that can speak a variety of different languages including Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi, Cyleti, Bengali, Mandarin, Hausa, Yoruba, Efik, Arabic, Albanian, Polish, French and Spanish.  All other interviewers are aware of these in-house skills and would either refer the call to a relevant interviewer with those language skills or arrange a call back at a convenient time if they could not speak the relevant language.

SMSR have always tried to offer a call centre service that gives extra value and we offer a proposition referred to as ‘Empathy’. Our interviewers are trained and organised to empathise with their target group. We have split these into three teams

• The International Team – currently it is made up of East European, Asian and African nationals who speak English and at least one other language.
• The Adult Team – currently made up of a mixture of male and female interviewers up to the age of 60 years. Most with Yorkshire accents that are recognised as a trustworthy and non-threatening voice
• The Young Persons’ Team – currently made up of a mixture of male and female interviewers up to the age of 24 years. Again the majority with Yorkshire accents that are recognised as a trustworthy and non-threatening voice).

The benefit of empathy teams to the customer is the teams are able to probe their own peer group to a far higher level and can relate to their norms and style of language more readily.