With the increasing emphasis placed on a customer-oriented business approach nowadays, top-notch customer service is the main goal of every contact center. Unfortunately, with the unbelievably high volume of calls coming in every day, providing excellent customer service by call centers can be a legitimate challenge. By focusing on a few important issues, any call center can boost workforce efficiency and productivity, as well as enhance customer experience.
1. Engage the Agent
Contrary to what many people think, taking hundreds of calls and assisting upset customers day in and day out can cause call center agents to feel disinterested and demoralized. To prevent higher attrition rates brought about by disengaged agents, businesses and contact center managers should implement a skills-based call routing system, so that agents feel more valuable and fulfilled.
2. First-Contact Resolution
First-contact resolution, or FCR, is a well-known maxim in determining the efficiency with which call center agents are able to resolve customer issues. When a customer finds him or herself speaking with multiple agents to discuss the same issue, their satisfaction level goes down. A reputable contact center will prevent this by following a system that tracks each of the customers’ inquiries and issues, which will reduce the number of callbacks.
3. Diverse Performance Metrics
Call centers set standard goals such as average handling time and answer speed through which a customer service agent’s performance is evaluated. These targets provide agents with a competitive and motivating atmosphere for a short while, but once they plateau, they might feel like there is no room for growth and improvement. Call center and customer service managers should incorporate more qualitative metrics, such as real-time customer feedback, to provide agents with an opportunity to improve in areas where they fall short.
4. Employee Involvement
Like most organizations, employees are the lifeblood of a contact center. To boost the morale of agents and make them feel like they are more than just a voice on the phone, companies should practice measures that directly involve the employees’ comments and feedback. Team-building activities and regular meetings can be used to implement a calibrated system of measuring call center agent satisfaction.
5. Technology Integration
The advancement of software and phone technology in the call center industry has developed a lot in the past decade or so. Nowadays, contact center agents are dealing with more types of software in a single call than ever, and failure to integrate these great technologies can result in confusion and other negative consequences. A reliable company like Today’s Telecommunications Industries, or TTI, has the expertise to integrate new software seamlessly with a center’s existing ones.
By avoiding typical customer aggravations and fostering a creative work environment that is conducive to personal growth, any contact center has a great chance of providing genuine satisfaction to both agents and customers. The purpose of customer service calls is to provide valuable assistance and impact the customer positively; that’s why it’s unfortunate that people often associate these calls with stress and frustration. By boosting agent engagement and morale, companies can also increase customer loyalty.
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