Call centers have long been an important element of customer experience. They give your customers an efficient touchpoint to ask questions, get support and otherwise interact with your brand. However, calling into a call center is often an unpleasant experience. In many ways, centers aren’t achieving what businesses need. These are a few tips for how to get more from your business’ call center.
Your customers are calling you for a reason. They may have questions, feedback or need some kind of help. This is a great opportunity for your team to listen to your customers.
Incredibly, many business teams pay closer attention to analytics, third-party data and other abstracted sources more than what their customers are actually saying. This is partially the result of the data from call centers being convoluted and hard to use.
Data prep technologies can help solve this issue. By cleaning, structuring and enriching data, businesses can then use their customers’ own words as a valuable source of data. This is one of the best ways that a business can get a competitive advantage.
Customer satisfaction is important. Unfortunately, call centers often harm as much as they help. This is in large part because agents aren’t evaluated on their ability to help people but rather their timeliness. This emphasis on quantity leads to unhappy agents who make customers unhappy. The solution is simple: focus on positivity and helpfulness. Customer satisfaction starts with culture.
This effect is easy to observe in your own life. When something positive happens to you, such as someone helping you when you are struggling with your hands full, you are more likely to want to help others. Keeping your agents happy will empower them to keep your customers happy. At the end of the day, that is the main purpose of a call center.
Efficiency is the key to call center effectiveness. Customers want to get help quickly and the best way to ensure this is to remove as many obstacles as possible that may prevent your agents from being helpful.
For example, empowering your level-one representatives to make more decisions is a great way to improve efficiency. If they can provide a refund without getting manager approval, they can complete the issue quicker and the customer will be happier.
This doesn’t mean that you should press your agents to rush through calls. Instead, you should focus on making it as easy as possible for them to solve problems in a timely manner without having to rush customers off the phone.
In a similar vein, you should strive to minimize hold times. Data can help you achieve this. Understanding which types of calls take a long time can help you to route them more efficiently.
Of course, staffing is also an essential aspect of reducing hold times. Furthermore, trying to retain call center agents will help improve efficiency. While call center teams are often viewed as relatively replaceable, a skilled and experienced agent can field many more calls more effectively. This is one of the keys to ensuring customer satisfaction.
Another helpful option is to employ call back technology. This allows for longer wait times without requiring your customers to actually stay on hold.
Call center data offers you a lot of insight into how to improve. Capturing your call data in a customer experience management tool can help you monitor the impact of calls on customer satisfaction. At the end of the day, your goal with a call center is to keep your customers happy so that they stay customers for longer. Use the data you are already gathering to enable this.
With these tips and tools in mind, you can make a more effective call center. Doing so will help you to ensure that your customers are happier and provide greater lifetime value.
Publish Date: October 25, 2019 1:38 PM |
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