Call Centres continuously face new challenges while trying to improve their agent efficiency and enhance customer satisfaction. Having improved agent efficiency and increasing customer satisfaction can feel like conflicting goals. However, by utilising the call centre improvement strategies like improving the technology used, reducing agent workload and improving representatives’ skills, the Call Centres can resolve problems more quickly and can handle huge call volume while satisfying their customers. In this article we are going to discuss how these strategies can be implemented and how it can help the call centres.
Improve the agent skills
Sometimes speaking with a live agent is the last option for a customer when every other communication channel does not work. But once a customer reaches an agent then they shouldn’t have to utilise another channel. Training is very critical to make sure that agents understand the services and products that they offer, the policies and procedures along with having efficient and appropriate communication skills. The training needs to engage agents and represent in an effective form, so the information is observed and well understood. In addition, live call monitoring must be used which can monitor whether an agent can perform their tasks properly, use the systems in an effective manner and offer outstanding customer support. The voice and screen recording along with customer satisfaction score can also be used to analyse an agent’s performance. In the meantime, a strong feedback procedure is also required to communicate to agents in terms of what they need to improve.
Improving Technology being used
A well-implemented Technology can improve Call Centre efficiency and agent utilisation that also can improve customer service. While the number of technological solutions and providers can be overwhelming in the market. There are some basic Call Centre improvement strategies which can be particularly effective.
- Workforce management software: A Workforce management software can analyse historical information and can use particular parameters to project staffing requirements to handle the workload going forward. For Call Centres with more than 50 agents, the workforce management shows financial results because of improved staffing and agent utilisation.
- Text and speech Analytics software: A text and speech analytics software can analyse the written and spoken introductions to make sure that the agents stick to actual policy and procedures. The software can also extract a sample of calls where the callers used a certain keyword or show a certain emotion so that additional analysis can be done to determine the reason for these kinds of Communications.
- Contact routing software: A contact routing software also known as automatic contact distribution assigns particular contact to some specific agents in an automated manner irrespective of channel. This software can also improve agent utilisation because the work is moved to appropriately skilled agents rather than moving agents to different kinds of contacts.
- Knowledge management software: This type of software provides a single source of information which is accessible easily to call centre agents. Historically agents have had to go to several locations both on paper and electronically to find information in order to answer customers queries. An effective knowledge management system provides user-friendly search capabilities and supporting processes to ensure that the information in the system is accurate and current.
Reduce the workload
This strategy is not effective unless the call centre remains customer focused. Providing diverse methods of self-service allows customers to solve their issues through the channel that they prefer. For instance, the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) allows customers to self-serve when they have very simple questions like balance inquiry. With a little fine tuning of speech recognition, the IVR can cater to a wide array of customer requirements. A customer friendly IVR needs to have a restricted layer of menus and clear terminology.
The mobile apps and web self-service have developed greatly over the past few years and they provide callers a personalised service experience. The mobile app needs to have simple navigation, a UI and search tools which are responsive across different types of devices.
When the customer self-service is not a choice it becomes important for Call Centres to use Business Call Recording which is a major driver for customer satisfaction. This strategy can reduce the number of customers calling several times to resolve their problem. And, it also addresses the root cause of customer complaint. Therefore, the customer will not have to reach out about the same problem in the future.
Using these basic and great three strategies call centres can actually improve the efficiency of their agents and can also enhance customer support.
