A to Z of Creating a Profitable Call Center

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The primary aim of a call center is to enhance customer loyalty. While a well-managed call center can strategically act as a catalyst to achieve this goal, a poorly managed one can prove to be the opposite and turn into a major liability for the business. That is why it is not enough to just create a call center. In order to achieve competitive advantage for your business, your call center must act as a source of value creation. This requires you to establish equilibrium between maintaining operational efficiency and providing quality service through well-trained agents.
An effective strategy to create a profitable call center essentially involves recognizing the long-term value of customers and giving priority to customer service above everything else. We reveal to you the A to Z of creating a profitable call center.
Focus on resolving client issues effectively
Customers who contact a call center do so to get their issues resolved in a prompt manner. But often it is seen that call centers are more concerned about maintaining statistics such as average call duration, caller wait time, etc. than ensuring proper customer service. While it is important to maintain efficiency in a call center, it must not be at the cost of customer service quality. In the rush to attend to the expected number of cases, agents often feel pressurized and fail to resolve customer queries effectively. This invariably creates unsatisfied customers whose needs aren’t met. Such customers call again and this increases the call volume. Thus, the focus of an inbound call center must be on solving client’s issues efficiently rather than worrying about the call duration and other metrics. It will lead to increased customer satisfaction and reduced call volume.
Keep track of quality and speed
Maintaining a fine balance between quality and speed is one of the keys to creating a profitable call center. Every call center manager must monitor the activities of agents and collect data on their efficiency and service quality. It is essential to measure customer satisfaction in order to get a clear picture of the service quality meted out to customers by the agents. Once the data on efficiency and service quality is available, call center managers must evaluate agents on its basis and suggest steps to improve their performance. Agents must be provided with proper training and empowered with the information and knowledge needed to resolve customer issues with élan.
Provide proper coaching to agents
A call center is as good as its agents. In order to train agents and hone their skills, call center managers must adopt effective coaching strategies. One such strategy is to record and monitor every call made by the agents. By doing so, managers will be able to analyze the inbound calls and understand the strength and weakness of the agents while interacting with the customers. Based on this data, they can then coach their agents accordingly. Apart from coaching existing agents, the sample of calls can also be used to train new agents and introduce them to the various aspects of interacting with customers and resolving their queries.

Empower agents with customer data

An agent must have instant access to customer information and technology can play a great role in making this happen. When an agent needs to access different legacy systems to derive customer data, the customer’s call is put on hold while the agent retrieves the relevant data. This increases the call duration and hampers efficiency of the center. By investing in upgraded contact center technology, call centers can enable agents to access all relevant data in one go. Having access to information like previous call history and customer support transactions of the caller can help agents to serve customers in a better way. This, in turn, will translate into improved quality of customer service for the call center.
Implement efficient self-service technology
A well-designed IVR system can go a long way in providing relevant information to customers. While it definitely helps to reduce the burden on the agents, it can also be an effective way to give customers the information they require. Apart from saving time and effort on part of the customer, it can also help to streamline operations for the call center. But call centers must ensure to implement self-service technology that is easy to use from a customer’s point of view. For instance, customers must be able to easily contact a live agent if the self-service technology fails to resolve their issue.
By implementing the above-mentioned measures, any business can improve the efficiency and service quality of their call center and transform it into a profitable one.
 

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