Worried about your call center efficiency? That’s a normal concern. Call centers make a really important job: keeping your customers happy.
Therefore, it’s totally understandable that you want to optimize the functioning of your call center. If you don’t spend the time and money to maintain your customers happy, you won’t be in business for long.
Call centers are a critical customer support tool. Your employees talk to your customers on a daily basis and with each conversation, you are either gaining or losing customers.
Did you know that customers would leave a business just after one bad experience?
That’s why a prerequisite for great customer service includes a call center that functions at its best.
There are three categories that you need to focus on when measuring the efficiency of your call center.
- Operational efficiency
- Cost efficiency
- Resource efficiency
Operational efficiency points to the processes that you have set up in your call center. Are you aware of your call center metrics, and can you track them on a regular basis? Are your operations smooth on a day-to-day basis, or do you face multiple problems?
Cost is, of course, a metric that you cannot ignore. Is your call center burning cash? Are there avenues for you to cut costs? There are certain decisions that you can make to reduce your costs and improve your bottom line.
At the heart of your call center are your agents. If they don’t work efficiently, there is no point in tightening your purse strings or improving your processes. If you want your agents to delight your customers, they need to have the right tools and the kind of moral support that brings out the best in them.
Now, check these 4 tips that will help you optimize the efficiency of your call center.
1. Move to the cloud
This step will improve your operational efficiency by leaps and bounds. Here’s why:
- Features
Traditional on-premise PBX systems often lack many modern features that are required in today’s call centers. However, while you may have some basic features, additional capabilities like integration with your helpdesk/CRM, call monitoring and Artificial Intelligence will prove to be a challenge with an on-premise system.
- Scalability
Cloud call centers can be deployed within hours, whereas on-premise systems might take weeks and in some cases even months. Further, for every agent that you’d like to provision, you’d have to procure a hard phone and layout telephone lines. A process that might take weeks! Certainly, in this fast-paced world, that’s just too much time.
- Dependence on your tech team
With an on-premise phone system, for every update or change that you need to make to your call flow or IVR you would require help from your IT team. Most cloud phone systems are user-friendly, allowing you to make changes by yourself.
2. Invest in a great call distribution software
A call distribution software or often called an automatic call distribution system is the backbone of your call center.
You can greatly optimize your operational efficiency if you get your customer calls to the right agents in the shortest possible time. An automatic call distribution system can help do that for you.
73% of consumers say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do when providing customer service.
If your customers reach your agents in a short period of time, then you’ll naturally have fewer escalations to handle, this way you will spend more time focusing on your call center operations and less time dealing with angry customers.
Also, a call distribution system also helps you to apply call monitoring and provides you with all your data.
3. Give your employees the proper tools
Your employees may use a set of tools on a daily basis to get their work done. As a result, these tools have a big impact on their performance. However, tools that don’t work or those that only work half the time are a waste of time and effort. This can be frustrating for your agents and would reflect in conversations they have with your customers.
On the other hand, many agents have multiple tabs open and end up juggling between various tools. Certainly, this can lead to more mistakes and greater handling times. Unifying many tools into one single platform will come as a boon for your agents, they would spend less time juggling and more time delighting your customers.
Above all, by optimizing your call center efficiency, you should be able to keep your agents happier, improve your response times, and reduce your overall costs.
A call center that functions well translates to great customer service. One of the best ways to improve your call center efficiency is by moving to the cloud; choosing a phone system with the best set of features that’ll let you run your call center without any worries.
Most importantly, the single most essential thing to look for in a phone system is routing capabilities. Nothing is worse than missing your customer’s calls.
As a result, you have to be prepared for all kinds of scenarios such as receiving calls outside business hours, during holidays, or simply when all your agents are busy.
A phone system with strong call routing features ensures that you don’t miss any calls and your customers are always served.
4. Don’t forget the metrics
Nothing can be improved without data, as a result, without insight into your phone team’s performance, you would not be able to improve.
For example, you may want to drill down and analyze individual metrics like hold time, your average handle time, etc. These metrics would offer critical insights into the conversations your agents are having with customers.
In conclusion, with call center software that gives you insights into your phone operations, you can analyze and identify improvement opportunities with pinpoint data.
If you need help with this topic, do not hesitate to contact us for free advice.
