Contact center’s managers and executives face a real challenge when it comes to reducing the cost-per-call and that too without compromising on the levels of service quality and customer experience. To make the most of every call and to operate the call center at a reasonable cost requires a balance between efficiency and effectiveness in their day-to-day operations, resources, staffing and customer service quality.
Here are 8 ways to reduce cost-per-call in a contact center without missing out on opportunities to foster customer relationships and drive incremental revenue.
Enhance the process of hiring, training and coaching of agents
It is not only important to hire the right set of employees but also to train and motivate them to improve their productivity levels. Ensure that your call center agents have the right set of traits and skills to serve your customer right. They must have a complete knowledge of the product/service and are able to convey the same to the customers properly. They should be able to adapt themselves with different moods of the calls and handle them with patience. Handling the customer properly and resolving their issues quickly will reduce the cost-per-call for sure.
Tap Call Monitoring
The supervisors must monitor the calls on a regular basis as it provides invaluable insights into how your agents are performing and what the customers are really experiencing. One can definitely single out the improvement areas and accordingly coach and support the agents. It will ensure a positive customer experience and reduction in cost-per-call.
Utilize Callback from Queue
With a Queued Callback feature in place, customers can opt out to be called back, thereby reducing their waiting time. It reduces call abandonment and improves customer experience. Also, allowing your callers with an option to hang up and request callback will reduce your cost of them waiting in a lengthy queue.
Take Advantage of Intelligent Dialers
Using Predictive dialers ensure lowest abandoned calls and eliminate unproductive calls. Based on inbuilt dialing algorithms bases on call history and other data, it dials the calls when an agent is available, hence reaching out to the customer at the best possible time. This leads to better connect rates and reduced number of dialing nuisance calls to customers.
Resort to Skill-based Routing
Skill-based routing reduces call transfers considerably as the call gets routed to the agents with preferred skill-sets. This minimizes the cost of operation and handling time and improves customer satisfaction.
Optimize First Call Resolution
First Call Resolution is a critical measure of customer satisfaction and loyalty. Agents should be trained in a way that they resolve majority of the customer issues at one go. It reduces the operational costs as it reduces the number of repeat calls and the overall call volume. According to a report, a 15% increase in FCR results in a 57% reduction in repeat calls.
Employ CRM integration with Screen Pop ups
As soon as a call gets connected, Screen Pop up tool displays the customer’s information on the agent’s desktop. By enabling the agent to have a preview of the customer details leads to a meaningful conversation and the agent is able to handle the calls faster.
Optimize Self-Service IVR
A self-service IVR system offers services round the clock and saves time and resources. It enables the customers to handle their own simple operations such as making reservations, paying bills and so on, thereby allowing the agents to have more time to handle complex and other important calls.
All the above feature is in Ameyo Call Center Software that can ease the calling process and other related activities. Thus, a majore help in reducing the Cost-per-Call in a Contact Center