The frequent ask of customers is an effective after-sales service or query handling or great customer support. Running a call center efficiently is not a walk in the park for businesses. It requires robust call management software in place along with a strategic vision, exceptional people skills, and the ability to manage and motivate your workforce. Out of all the day-to-day challenges in operating a contact center, the one that needs attention and strategic changes, is the unexpected surge in call traffic.
Unfortunately, unanswered calls bring down customer experience as in the long run it can result in the loss of a potential customer. Contact centers, therefore, have to ensure that all calls are answered. But how can they achieve a balance between an unrestricted number of calls and a restricted number of agents? Should they hire more agents? How will this additional cost affect the business?
How to Maximize Efficiency in Contact Centers?
Here we will talk about the factors that help in effective peak call traffic handling. We will also talk about how to stay prepared for the difficult scenarios to ensure that you’re never taken off guard when it comes to effective customer service.
Have a Flexible Call Center Software in Place
The first thing a contact center needs to ensure in full-time operation is a robust software solution that makes the whole operation seamless and easy to control. Inbound call center software solutions with tools like ACD, Queuing and CTI helps the agents to serve customers better.
- ACD helps ensure that all calls are routed to the available agents in time resulting in fewer call drops. Call routing algorithms help in mapping the calls to the best available agent to ensure a seamless experience.
- Call Backs – Contact centers can customize the solution in such a way that even if an agent is not available to take the call and the customer is waiting on the IVR the solution should be able to schedule an automatic callback
- Virtual queuing feature notifies the customer of waiting time and they can simply opt for a call back at the earliest convenience of your staff. This helps to ensure customers won’t have to wait in long virtual lines for a connection with a live agent.
- CTI gives the agent access to important information on their unified agent desktops and they can resolve issues through quick searches, simple clicks, and multichannel communication. The brief preview of customer information helps agents serve better and faster resulting in reduced average handling time.
Adopt Systematic Forecasting
Taking a look at the call center dashboards at various times of the day helps in easy analysis of the call traffic. Centralized control of the contact center with real-time monitoring makes the business more flexible and accommodative of change which helps improve your customer service satisfaction index.
During the day, there can be peak times and low times in contact centers. Mornings and evenings tend to be among the busiest times for contact centers. Afternoons see a lull and the number of calls decreases significantly. The peak times are also impacted by the regions in which contact centers serve, time zones, and business segments.
Each contact center needs to identify the peak times of the day, keeping in mind their customers. Investing in a contact center software that gives details on call volume trends helps to plan the day ahead and make strategic improvements.
Maintain Optimum Staffing
Employing and allocating the right number of staff members on the clock at any given time at your contact center is an important factor in managing your incoming call traffic. During normal operations, it seems a simple task to keep the right number of agents to handle typical call numbers, but what happens when you have high volume calls? Close monitoring of dashboards and effective real-time queue management can come in handy in such scenarios. Supervisors or floor managers can quickly move agents from one queue to another to balance out the call traffic. This would be a cost-effective quick fix without the need to invest in extra resources and using the existing resources to their maximum potentials.
Render Self Service Options
Give your customers the choices for how to get the help they’re looking for. Extend self serve options for your customers like a customized self-service IVR or a Voicebot to free up your agents to handle more complex queries that need human intervention. These options allow customers to get the answers and the help they need without unnecessary waiting times.
In the Nutshell
Taking everything into account, if you’re looking to set up a call center software solution to handle high call influx, it’s imperative to evaluate and consider different parameters that we discussed above. Choose a call center software that meets the needs of the organization and is in the best interest of the customer’s experience.
Ameyo’s call center software, with its proven expertise, makes for the best solution for all your call spikes handling needs, ensuring that you have reduced call drops and average handling time with an improved CSAT.
