In light of the pandemic, companies across the board are searching for ways to grow their ranks, increase revenue, and meet employee and customer satisfaction standards.
The crisis demands that most companies make adjustments for remote work due to employee health concerns. As a result, in-house management teams are experiencing increased frustration and productivity backlash while they tackle new challenges.
Where one company may express disturbances while trying to meet profit margins and lose clients from the change, a large-scale call center can make arrangements with careful planning.
What Makes a Call Center Prosper?
It can’t go without saying that call centers are extremely busy and complex work environments with information-exchange taking place all throughout the day. The supervisors are often jumping between stations to assist staff, creating schedules, speaking with clients, setting up goals and monitoring metrics for areas of improvement. If there are any hangups, employees may be unable to help customers or relay accurate information. In successful call centers, you’ll observe some of the following characteristics or qualities:
- Effective Leadership:Management and supervisors are familiar with every aspect of the business, able to take initiative and work within strict budgets.
- Excellent Customer Service: Employees demonstrate an enthusiastic attitude, effectively communicate, have an excellent memory and rock-solid listening skills.
- Compelling Staff Communication: Teams meet to discuss goals, go over issues, find problems within the business, set reasonable breaks to perform optimally and delegate responsibilities.
- Targeted Feedback and Incentives: Employees receive feedback from management, set up goals for improvement, get coaching from superiors and gain rewards for competitive performance.
- Monitor and Use Data Metrics: Staff retrieve data from calls to gain insight into company operations, improve decision-making strategies and set goals to reach performance metrics.
You might consider it wishful thinking to match each or any of these qualities spot-on, especially since there are so many different “bumps” that you can hit each day. Problems can often outweigh the solutions or vice-versa, so it’s always good to stay on your toes and expect each call to be an issue you wouldn’t naturally be able to provide an accurate answer. Nevertheless, there are a few key tactics you should always try to apply to improve your metrics.
Pinpoint Problem Areas
Don’t know where to start? Take a step back and closely observe the “small” things within your call center you would not normally notice while you’re busy. Perhaps an employee does an excellent job communicating with customers, but there’s a hangup in their ability to understand the customer’s problem. When reviewing your budget, you might notice a “spike” during some times of the year. Become familiar with these small quirks, which are probably specific to your company. Afterward, you’ll be able to brainstorm and implement more accurate ideas for improvement.
Highlight Areas of Opportunity
If you’ve been putting off equipment upgrades for a while or discover a key way to save time training employees, why not implement the change before you miss the chance? During calls, the customer may often give off “cues” that staff can use as an opportunity to market a product better. If they’re paying attention closely, staff might also pick up on personality traits that go well with specific products. You should always be hunting for excuses to improve your customer service and signify that you’ve been paying attention to their needs.
Maintain or Improve Customer Satisfaction
Many call centers’ customer service metrics become “stale” when they neglect employee coaching, staff information exchange or don’t develop new strategies. If your employees don’t have a reason to be excited and positive about a product, then why should your customers? We’re less prone to be polite or add that “selling-word” to our conversation with the customer if there is no incentive on our part. That’s why you should schedule regular brainstorming sessions with the team, and be insistent on employee morale so you can determine if you’re providing poor customer service.
Optimize and Automate Your Call Center’s Management Procedures
Regardless of whether you’re working remote, on-site, at home or anywhere else, investing in innovative technology can take your business to the next level of growth. Workforce optimization software can help you find opportunities to improve processes, grow and maintain customer satisfaction and accurately track metrics for employee success that keeps your business on a positive path of progress.
