Top 6 Keys to Operational Excellence in your Cloud Contact Center

Cloud Contact Center

These days the main focus of Contact Centers is to ensure that every customer call should end on a positive note without spending unnecessarily. Therefore, Answering promptly and solving issues efficiently is an important standard of a contact center.

To achieve this goal, everything depends on the effort of the contact center regarding the area of operational efficiency. Therefore, it is always seen that contact centers with good operational efficiency are inclined to be more profitable.

As per a recent survey conducted by the company executives across the globe, it is found that according to three-quarters polled claim that their main goal remains professional efficiency.

They are aware that when operational processes are adequately streamlined, it can enhance customer experiences besides boosting their bottom line.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Cloud Contact Center’s main goal is to provide a positive customer experience in a short period to maintain low costs besides ensuring success. 

• Operational efficiency is the key to running a profitable and well-set cloud contact center.

• Numerous strategies should be opted by management to enhance and maintain operational excellence, besides implementing high-end software tools.

Significance of Key Operational Excellence in Cloud Contact Center

In today’s world, the business landscape is moving at a breakneck pace. Due to the increase in competition and changing customer needs, it has become much more challenging to grow and sustain a business.

Thus, an organization must have an effective and efficient operation to sustain the competitive market. Hence, organizations need to make operational excellence their key deliverable besides aligning it to their strategic goals to sustain in the competitive world.

Prior, you start looking at top steps to operational excellence. It is imperative to conduct an in-depth evaluation of your existing call center operations to understand what’s working and what is not working and what should be your plan of action for operational excellence.

Unfortunately, there is no one size fit approach to evaluate the current scenario of your contact center. However, a few basic questions will help you evaluate your existing Contact center.

  • Usually your agents take how many calls to resolve the customer’s issue?
  • What is the customers’ waiting period before connecting to an agent?
  • How consistently do we follow after every interaction to measure customer satisfaction?
  • With existing technology, are our agents able to support customers fully?
  • Are we currently offering customers self-service options?
  • Are the customers satisfied with our contact center?
  • Are our agents satisfied with the workplace?

This list of questions will help you understand your Contact Center‘s existing scenario. In addition, this will help you to understand what would be the best solution to achieve operational excellence in Cloud Contact Center.

Six Key Steps to Operational Excellence in Cloud Contact Centers

So, now the question is what contact centers can do to improve operational efficiency?

Cloud Contact Center

1. Be Dedicated on Providing a Good Customer Experience

The main aim of a contact center is to make sure that the customer leaves satisfied with the service. Therefore, no matter why the customer approached the contact center, contact centers cater to customer queries and resolve the issues.

To cater the customers well, you should closely monitor how efficient the agents are in helping the customers. Cloud contact centers can evaluate it by measuring quality assurance daily, requesting each caller for feedback, identifying the areas of weakness among agents, and ensuring ongoing training of agents to keep them updated. 

Thus, continuous evaluation and implementation of new strategies can lead to operational excellence.

2. Improvement of Agents Workflow

It’s quite common for agents to experience hurdles while trying to do their work. For example, they may face trouble in assisting customers while searching for information required for a good customer experience. They may also face issues with the technology they need to use while taking calls.

These issues can hamper an agent’s workflow, which means a waste of time and money for the contact center. Not only this, but it can also lead to agent burnout, which can also make a high turnover rate for contact centers, thus leading to unnecessary costs that can negatively impact the profitability of any business.

Therefore, it is crucial to optimize agent workflow to ensure that customer support is handled appropriately while minimizing costs. Contact centers can enhance workflow by prioritizing customer support properly, making proper assigning calls, and implementing self-service options for customers; thus, they can use this self-service option whenever possible.

3. Optimize Call Handling Time

Usually, call time should be as short as possible to save time. However, the focus must not only be on reducing average call time, but it could negatively impact customer experience. Well, call timing should be reduced while maintaining the quality of customer service.

The process of quality assurance should incorporate average call time metrics besides assessing whether the agent was able to address the customer’s issue and provide a solution to it. Analyzing these metrics can help to reduce call time without compromising customer experience.

4. Make a Good Script

For every contact center, the staple is a comprehensive script that agents follow. Usually, such comprehensive scripts cover the most common question that users may ask and the issues that they may face. It also helps agents handle calls efficiently, which saves time besides ensuring that the information is appropriately related to the customer.

Read More: Uplifting Contact Center Operations (2022 Edition)

It is also necessary to keep in mind that agents should not completely rely on scripts to solve any issues or answer any specific question. Customers can usually detect whether an agent is reading through a script or not and often don’t like to sit and listen to a speech.

Thus, agents should have the proficiency to personalize their scripts and use their skills while communicating with the customers and answering their queries.

While using the scripts, agents should efficiently personalize them to make them sound natural when reading them. Furthermore, agents should handle scripts in a conversational tone besides including numerous scenarios covering multiple questions and issues.

5. Self-evaluating Tools should be Included for Agents

Managers should have metrics to evaluate the agents’ performance in the contact center. Besides this, it is also beneficial for the agents to self-evaluate their performance.

Incorporating these tools makes agents feel more empowered and valued in the workplace. Self-evaluating also encourages agents to be more committed, and thus, they perform better.

One of the best ways for the agents to self-evaluate is by including a scorecard. It not only helps to measure customer satisfaction instead, but it is also beneficial for agents to review their performance and make enhancements where required.

6. Implementing Innovative Cloud-based Technology

Contact centers should implement some form of digital technology to make the task of agents more proficient besides enhancing the overall experience of the customers. For example, most Cloud-based technologies are designed to make video conferencing, telephone communications, and team messaging more accessible and flexible.

Conclusion

Operational excellence acts as a framework to help businesses focus on their growth and execute strategies far better than their competitors. However, the drive to keep enhancing and have the limit to pursue innovation and growth depends on two primary factors: the excellent management of operations and the commitment to a good culture focusing on customers’ needs and empowering staff. 

If your staff is well empowered, they have a clear picture of goals and plans; they feel secure in taking the initiative and also come up with solutions to fix an issue. Thus, operational excellence plays a crucial role in the growth of Cloud Contact Center.

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.