Managing the daily operations of a contact center can prove to be extremely burdensome. But, centers are essential to the customer support that companies provide to their customers. Centers operate as a platform for customer complaints and inquiries. In this post, we take a look at several things SMEs can do to improve the efficiency of their inbound call center.
Table of Contents
1. Advanced tools
Regardless of how skilled your team members may be, they will be hindered by outdated tools. Many experts have highlighted that technologically advanced call center software is critical to managing call centers effectively.
This is because it gives supervisors and agents diverse functionalities to help them increase customer loyalty. Advanced contact software provides beneficial functions such as call recording, whispering, and call monitoring. While other features such as IVR, ring groups, and skills-based routine can help to direct customers to the right agent.
2. Strong interview process
Just because an individual has an abundance of customer service skills, it doesn’t mean that they would be the right fit for your company or your company’s current needs. For instance,
if your target audience is millennials, you may want to contact agents who have a more casual and hip manner of speaking that resonates with millennials. Developing a strong interview process is critical to ensuring that you hire the right people for the task. Essentially, you should focus on only hiring people who are capable of reflecting your brand. The trick with this is to not only rely on an individual’s technical skill sets, but rather their personality, coachability, intelligence, and willingness.
3. Scheduling software
Scheduling is a critical aspect of every business. Regardless of your business type, you can reduce expenses and increase employee motivation by using professional scheduling software. Just like regular people, agents get fatigued and experience the occasional burnout. As such, it’s natural for employees to work with anxiety and stress.
One of the ways businesses can increase anxiety and stress levels is to force employees to work overtime. Statistics gathered from the Aragon Institute of Health Science demonstrated that agents who work more than 40 hours per week were 7 times more likely to experience burnout than agents who worked for less than 36 hours per week.
The problem with burnout employees is that as they go to work each day, they gradually become less productive and often end up quitting. A contact center scheduling program can help establish a scheduling method that is beneficial for the team and effectively reduces unnecessary expenses associated with scheduling conflicts.
4. Establish a customer-centric and employee-friendly atmosphere
Many companies were able to achieve success because of how much they value their workers. When workers are comfortable, happy, and valued, they work at a higher efficiency than they would if they felt miserable at their jobs.
Small and Midsize business owners can procure an employee-friendly environment by providing things such as free coffee, vending machines, free healthcare as well as various places where employees can lounge or take a nap on their breaks. Or, think even bigger – the virtual call center model allows agents to work from anywhere. By doing this, employees will demonstrate how good the company is treating them, by providing excellent customer experiences.
5. Provide training that is linked to the company’s goals
As is the case with any industry, contact hubs consider trends as a critical factor in establishing goals and setting expectations. But, different centers have their own distinctive needs. Providing your agents with concrete scenarios and experiential data, it can help them to gain useful knowledge and skills that are ideal for real-life situations. Relevant training can also help employees to recognize what the goals of the company are.
6. Develop a script
A flexible call center script can serve as the blueprint to providing customers with the right solutions. It also enables agents to handle calls faster as well as to ensure that the right kind of information is given to the customer. But, it’s also worth noting that some customers may prefer to undergo calls that do not sound scripted. As such, in addition to developing a good script, agents should possess strong soft skills and empathy. When it comes to developing a good script, some of the things business owners can do, include:
- Hire knowledgeable agents who know how and when to use a good script
- Train agents on the best ways to use the script
- Make the scripts personal
- Adjust the script until it sounds more natural
7. Use an enterprise-grade call center and integration platform
One of the things SMEs can do to optimize how they handle customer interactions as well as to fine-tune their business processes is to utilize a call center and integration platform like babelforce. What makes this platform distinctive from its competitors is that it was developed by a group of veteran telecommunications and call center services experts. Platforms like babelforce give companies the opportunity to develop communications solutions as to which they can integrate into their current business processes.
The platform provides numerous features like the ability to create virtually any kind of communications solution such as outbound dialing solutions, cloud-based contact center, call routing system, and SIP softphone. By using babelforce, agents are able to execute customer interactions through different channels such as web, email, SMS and call.
About babelforce
babelforce is a global cloud communications platform focused on No-Code integration and automation. It allows non-technical people to build even the most complex integrated processes for customer-facing teams, particularly in the call center.
