7 Excellent Ways to Improve Call Center Performance
Although customer support can be provided online, phone conversations are still considered the fastest way for customers to ask questions related to services or products and/or communicate their complaints. Call centers play an important role in determining how satisfied customers are with the service they receive. Therefore, it is important for businesses to be able to optimize their call center performance. Check out the following seven tips!
1. Agent Training
Customer service agents have to deal with customers via telephone, email, or live chat on a daily basis. They’re required to be able to provide solutions to various issues that your customers experience. Therefore, they should be properly trained so they can always deliver excellent customer service. Teach them how to properly answer calls, handle customer complaints, manage tickets, and so on. Also, make sure they can adapt to the technology used by your company and make the best of it.
2. Customer Categorization
Your customers certainly have different characters, requirements, inquiries, and issues. Mixing all your customers together and randomly distributing them to your agents will just create new problems. To avoid that situation, you should ask your agents to categorize every customer so that it makes it easier for them to find the data or tickets of the customer.
3. The Right Persons
After the customer tickets are saved based on the category, they must be assigned to the right ticket agents. The agents must really understand the issues faced by the customers and be able to provide the right solutions to solve them. If a ticket is given to an agent who doesn’t have the capacity to solve the issue, then this can slow down the completion of the ticket and may result in poor customer experience.
4. Service-Level Agreements
Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) need to be created so that all activities in the call center can run well. They should determine how agents should respond to customer inquiries, the right time to make calls or send messages to customers, when the tickets must be completed, which tickets should be prioritized, and so on. Make sure that all your agents comply with the SLAs.
5. Conversation Records
To optimize their customer support, most companies intentionally record conversations between their agents and customers. Call logging is required to ensure that the conversations have actually taken place, to enable agents to listen to their past conversations with customers while handling tickets, and to let management monitor the conversations carried out by each agent. This way, improving call center performance will be a lot easier.
6. Ticket Prioritization
Even though customers should all receive the same level of service, they should be treated differently as they have different issues. Each issue must be fully recorded in each ticket (this is why call logging is very helpful). Customers who have the most complex issues with ‘urgent’ status must be prioritized.
7. Cloud-Based Solution
There is no better way to improve call center performance than by automating your call center management. A Cloud-based call center management system stores all customer data, call logs, tickets, and other relevant information in one system. That means, your agents can collaborate with each other using the same system. The software helps accelerate their work so that this would have a major effect on customer satisfaction. Since all the tasks can be completed faster, more tickets can be handled each day.