Re-Architecting Your Contact Center

Certifications-Improve-Contact-Center-Operations

Did you know that two-thirds of your customers have hung up during service calls before their particular issues could be addressed? And a whopping 71% were extremely annoyed at not being able to reach out to a real person on the phone, while 56% were infuriated because they had to go through multiple phone loops to get the right information. Do these figures ring a bell? If you want to be in business, you need to evolve your process and re-architect your internal and external systems. The company that offers a positive customer experience will survive, while the rest will fade into oblivion.

Ways to Boost the Value of your Contact Center

Here are some steps that you can take to ensure that your contact center adds value for your customers:

>Start with the Staff: Go by the long standing ideology of the contact center world – “happy employees equal happier customers.” Agents, on an average, attend 10,000 calls in a year from angry and upset customers, and the negativity is sure to affect them at some level unless the working environment is positive and cheerful. Begin by hiring the right set of people, who don’t not fit in with the needed educational qualifications but also do exceptionally well in the soft skills area. Then focus on their retention by providing them the right environment, comfortable working area and incentives that actually work.

>Incentivizing it Right: Money can’t buy love. So, plan your incentive right. Do not tie up the agent’s performance to the number of calls a day. Rather, choose a qualitative approach. Set a performance evaluation parameter, based on customer complaint resolution in the first call and the customer’s feedback. Reward agents for meeting or exceeding performance metrics and let their focus be on enhancing the customer experience.

>Catering to training needs: To provide cross-channel customer assistance, there is a need for cross-training on multichannel interactions. This training will allow managers to pull agents off from one area to assist in another, as and when needed. However, it is also important to cater to the training needs of supervisors. Supervisor training should focus on optimum utilization of agents, assessing their training requirements, and motivating and leading their team to success.

>Tackle the technology: A survey conducted by Velociti Partners points out that the average customer care executive in a financial services contact center uses seven or eight applications every day to resolve issues. Moreover, the applications and databases connected to them are siloed, which means that even the simplest processes takes extra time and effort. As a result, call handling times, customer satisfaction rates and even costs, suffer. Consequently, the first step to tackling technology issues is breaking down silos and integrating data across departments. However, you can ensure the following to enhance long-term customer and employee satisfaction:

  • Automate and synchronize customer data across multiple systems by logging all customer interactions (regardless of the channel) and automatically adding them to customer records.
  • Automate the delivery of cross-sell or up-sell offers to your customers. You can do so by allowing employees to access data stored in multiple applications, databases or servers from one application with a single user-interface, and providing a means that generates automatic alerts to agents when a high-value client is on the line.
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Shambhavi Sinha

Shambhavi Sinha is working as an SEO expert at Ameyo. She also likes to write tech-based stuff. Her aim is to provide knowledge to users by sharing the knowledge about the latest trends about contact centers.