How to enhance your contact center operations
If you’re managing a contact center, you probably need to deal with lots of unhappy customers.
Typically, the issues in a contact center are process-related, and a one-off isn’t common. However, if you improve your contact center operations, you can significantly boost customer satisfaction and get more loyal customers through strengthening the way your agents serve customers and streamlining operations.
There are many ways to enhance your contact center operations and these include the following:
Review your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
Check your call center metrics. One of the first things you should do is to review your KPIs, such as the AHT (Average Handling Time), FCR (First Contact Resolution), and CSAT (Customer Satisfaction). All of these are necessary to achieve your goals and may help you avoid putting time and extra effort into measures or policies that are unnecessary.
Have a call monitoring program
If your contact center is poorly managed, the resulting substandard service may damage your reputation. Having a call monitoring program where some calls are listened to, graded, and evaluated monthly for every representative is important to maintain uniformity and quality. It’ll help you enforce scripting of the calls, and help in coaching and training. However, it requires investment in staffing and equipment.
Encourage your team leaders to put forward new ideas
There’s a tendency among floor managers and team leaders to do things the way they’ve been always done as no one likes to rock the boat. Unfortunately, a safe mindset is an enemy to growth and progress.
You may help change this by involving your senior staff members during brainstorming exercises for some new ideas. You can even host a meeting to ask your team leaders to pitch solutions to recurring problems. With new ideas, you can help ensure your contact center will be at the top of its game.
Incorporate your multi-channel offerings
When incorporating multi-channel offerings, the goal is to let your customers switch back and forth easily between channels. This approach is the key to caller satisfaction, and brings benefits to the contact center as well.
As many multi-channel interactions generate data, there will be more catered resolutions. Customers may choose to submit information through email and only call for a more detailed information of their bill. The more interactions you receive, the more you’ll understand the purpose of every channel. The skill levels of agents are likely to improve as a result.
Request agent feedback
If there’s any concern on how your contact center operates, it’s your frontline agents who’ll see it first. To measure the adaptability of your business, you should know how often you can implement your agent’s intelligent suggestions. If possible, promote a receptive and open culture where opinions and thoughts are encouraged. You may create an employee forum on your staff intranet where suggestions can be submitted for review.
Getting agent feedback is a good way to know how your workers want to work and how they’d alter your contact center’s culture.
Consider experimenting with A/B testing
Adaptability isn’t all about being able to respond to changes. It’s also crucial to anticipate changes. Testing processes may show you where there’s the most room for improvement. If you’re considering huge changes in your contact center operations, A/B testing or testing theories are critical.
A/B testing routes your customers through one or more options and compares the outcomes, which may reduce a call abandonment rate and improve your operations over time.
Empower your agents
Micromanaging agents will just lead to inefficient supervisors and stressed employees. In addition to that, if you let your agents focus on the scripts too much, it can sap their enthusiasm for the work and may affect your customer’s satisfaction level.
To resolve your customer problems effectively, you should empower your agents. If it’ll require more training, don’t hesitate to invest in that. Remember, there’s only one boss in contact centers and that is your customers. If you don’t want to lose more customers, you should organize or develop some training sessions to improve your contact center performance.
Also, by empowering your agents, you can boost your first call resolution rate, which is a sought-after key performance indicator to enhance. But, take note that it’s about more than just training your agents. It should also revolve around holding the agents accountable. After all, more power comes with more responsibility.
Conclusion
Enhancing your contact center operations requires a deeper and thorough look at your company, your agents, and your goals. Determine what drives your agents and learn better ways to encourage them. Through this, you can discover the root causes of the problems and address them effectively.
