Page 165 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

center. The call center is one of the places where many employ-
ees have their first job at TMS. All of these people were immedi-
ately called back to the call center to take calls from customers,
no matter where they were at the time or how high they’d risen in
the organization. Even some TMS executives took turns on the
phones responding to customer calls. Over the years, Fein had
also built long-term relationships with three call center staffing
agencies that had trained personnel on hand. By the end of the
first week, all three of the agencies were providing supplementary
staff to the call center. These supplementary staff had already had
training as customer service representatives, but they still under-
went two to three days of training to prepare them to handle calls
according to Toyota’s standards.
Fortunately, Toyota had invested in a new call center com-
puter system during the recession, less than 12 months before the
crisis, to improve the quality of customer interactions by mak-
ing more information more easily available to customer service
representatives (CSRs). That system proved crucial to enabling
the call center to handle 10 to 30 times higher call volume with
only three times as many staff members on the phone, all without
scripts. Fein explained:
We never script our call center people. They handle each
call on a case-by-case basis, and they have to develop a
relationship with their customer. Through the informa-
tion system, we provide them with Q&As for all kinds
of issues. We provide details on whatever the recalls are.
We provide press release information. We provide all of
the data that they might need in real time.
Each CSR has two large computer screens full of information
about the customers, the history of their vehicles, all recalls for

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