There are many factors that can lead to the success of your outbound call center. Most of these practices can turnaround your sales, helping you reach and attract prospective customers. Starting from lead generation, telemarketing, telesales, market research, and surveys, you can follow these outbound call center practices to yield the best results.
An outbound call center software allows the companies to increase their ROI while maximizing the conversion rate.
For starters, include these features in your outbound call center to quickly check if you are doing your business right:
Predictive Dialer
Tired of call drops and unanswered calls? Predictive dialer intelligently assigns the calls to agents based on historical data such as average call handling time and agents’ availability, thus reducing call wait time. If you didn’t know already, with predictive dialer software, agents can make more calls in the same span as compared to making calls manually. You can reduce the idle time between the calls to increase your agents’ productivity.
Click-to-Call
Did you know you could reduce dialing errors with click-to-call functionality? Agents can easily place a call to the customers with a single click on their desktop, CRM, and contact’s profile without missing on any number. Eliminate redundant tasks of manual dialing and boost an agent’s productivity will smart dialing strategies.
Call Recording & Monitoring
Good news for managers and supervisors! Measuring call quality and monitoring agent’s performance has become effortlessly smooth with real-time agent monitoring tools. This allows the managers to listen to live calls and provide better assistance to the agents while whispering, snooping, and barging-in between the calls, ensuring an increased first contact resolution.
Managers can also listen to the recorded calls to analyze agents’ performance and they can score them on the basis of call quality metrics such a language proficiency, adherence to the script, first call resolution, customer satisfaction, etc.
CRM Integration
Integrate your outbound call center software with in-house or third-party CRM and allow agents to access and store the data in one place while making calls. If agents are well informed about customer’s conversational insights from previous interactions, they will be able to surpass customer’s expectations.
If you have not yet implemented these technologies in your Outbound Call Center Software, now is the time to update your call center and improvise outbound call center services to see the results for yourself. A successful outbound strategy does not end with the call, it only starts with it.
To drive better results without fail, check out Ameyo’s One Solution for Outbound Call Center.
How well you handle the customer interactions across your contact center holds the key to business success. Customers have increasing expectations from the businesses when it comes to resolving their issues. Quick and effective customer service is the aim of all the business but upholding call center quality assurance every time a customer engages with your business is what makes the cut.
Before diving in understanding the basics of call center quality assurance, let’s first understand what is call center quality? In nutshell, call center quality is about how well your agents are delivering the customer service and ensuring the consistency over the period of time. Main aspect of this process is maintaining the call quality standards throughout a customer’s journey for each customer.
What is Call Center Quality Assurance?
Call center quality assurance is the process of observing an agent’s call and analyzing the quality of the call with respect to customer’s requirement and expectations. Call center quality monitoring is considered to be the most effective and efficient approach to improve the customer service provided by call centers. With effective call center quality monitoring call center, managers can easily spot and discover problems within their teams by proactively monitoring the interactions between the agents and customers with the help of a right call center software.
Why is Quality Assurance Important in a Call Center?
Assuring call center quality is important for many reasons, for instance retaining customers is one the most crucial reasons. Call center quality assurance helps businesses achieve the followings:
Maintain Call Quality Standards
Call quality monitoring practices soft-wire the skills in call center agents overtime in a manner that it becomes a part of their approach. Their approach towards solving important queries becomes more proactive and different areas like answering customer questions; handling irate customers; acknowledging customer feedback; being empathetic are handled in standardized manner across the team.
Adhering to Compliance
There are certain guidelines that call centers need to follow while handling customer interactions to ensure customer privacy and security. Quality monitoring calls for maintaining strict compliance standards and assuring that customer data is secured and call center agents are implementing all the requisite steps to adhere to the compliance.
Boost Customer Experience
When customer service is seamless and customers get quick and helpful assistance from the service agents, their overall experience with the brand is boosted. Quality assurance helps brands to maintain a consistent level of services over a period of time at each touchpoint throughout the customer journey.
Cost of Acquiring new customers is far higher than retaining the existing customer. Call center managers understand this fact, and ensures quality service is delivered to the customers to avoid them from switching to competitors. Quality assurance puts customers on the highest priority thereby ensuring retention.
Better Call Center Quality Assurance Metrics
When service agents are monitored closely, the call center quality metrics tend to improve automatically. This said, you can’t improve what you cannot measure. Hence measuring call quality metrics is a crucial aspect of call center quality assurance. Tracking these key metrics overtime surely improves service performance.
How Can you Improve Call Center Quality?
Customer interaction management is crucial for all call centers. The customers decides whether to continue her association with a brand or switch to a competition based on how their issues are handled and interactions are managed. Therefore, it is important for businesses to put the right call center quality assurance guidelines and tools in place to focus on customer retention and manage effective interactions.
Call Center Quality Assurance Best Practices
-Focus on Complete Caller Experience – Call center managers must listen to the complete conversation between the agent and the customer in order to measure the agent’s performance properly and judge the call quality. The manager should assess if the call can be categorized as a quality interaction.
-Ensure Problem Resolution– The customers are calling for some purpose and need a solution to their problems. The agents should take complete ownership of the call and try their best to resolve the issues, even if it requires them to transfer the call to another department or escalate the call to a supervisor.
-Agent Engagement is Must Quality Evaluation Process – Agents should have a complete knowledge of the metrics and targets on which they will be evaluated. Whether it is adherence to scripts, average handling time or first call resolution, they must be aware of what a quality interaction constitutes of. They should be presented with live demos to gauge an in-depth understanding of a good, average and a bad call. The managers should ask the agents about their constraints and issues and ask for their feedback about the practices that are being followed in the team.
-Promote Self-Assessment for Agents – Agents must be allotted with a period of time each week to evaluate their own calls. They should listen to their calls and analyze their performance on the basis of quality of service and customer satisfaction. This will enable them to learn from their own mistakes and improve communication and service skills.
Call Center Quality Assurance Tips and Tools
–Voice Logger – This call recording tool is very helpful learning tool. Conversations are recorded and used for quality and training purposes, using real life examples of what to “do”or “not do” in different situations. Logs can be archived in different formats and agents and supervisors can use them to learn best practices. This helps businesses be compliant to processes and helps them identify the problem areas in case an issue arises from the customer’s or agent’s end. Voice logs prove to be very helpful in these situations as all the calls are documented with customer and agent information and what each person has said.
-Call Snooping – To monitor agents who are on call, without disturbing them, is called snooping. This tool allows supervisors to quietly listen to conversations. Supervisors can pick agents in a campaign at random, and see how they are performing on calls and whether all issues are being resolved.
-Call Whispering – A supervisor acts as an advisor and silent spectator in this tool. The customer does not know that the supervisor is talking to the agent while on call. In case an agent is not specifically skilled and needs guidance or advice. The supervisor listens to the call, offers the agent his/her advice, and the agent relays the same to the customer.
-Call Barging – In case an agent is not able to handle the customer efficiently, the supervisor can forcefully barge into the call. Supervisor now takes complete control of the situation and resolves the customer’s issue.
Managers must make call center quality assurance a priority as it affects the overall call center performance immensely. If done right, the business can thrive and lack of monitoring may have serious implications.
We’re living in the era when customer service is as important as the quality of products or services you sell. People expect immediate responses from businesses they contact, that’s why live chat software has been especially popular among businesses in recent years.
With businesses rising their customer service standards, more and more customers expect great service from all companies they’re dealing with. For example, the 2017 State of Global Customer Service Report, 54 percent of customers have higher expectations for customer services today than they had in 2016. Dig deeper and you’ll discover that this percentage increases to 66 percent for the 18-34 year-olds.
And you just can’t afford to fail to provide the quality of service your customers need because you’ll be losing big-time. A recent survey of customers by NewVoiceMedia found that businesses lost $75 billion in 2017 as the result of their customers abandoning them and leaving for competitors because of a poor customer service.
Ouch!!
If you feel like your own customer service has not been perfect lately, chances are that some of your customers are considering switching to other companies, too. To regain their trust, you need to provide quality customer service, and to do that, you have to find out what problems it may be experiencing.
Here are some of the most important things to consider.
1. Live Chat Option
Does your website have a live chat option so your customers can use it to reach you immediately? If it doesn’t, then you’ve got a problem. There’s tons of evidence showing that customers prefer live chat over other means of communicating with businesses because of it increases the speed of the service.
In fact, live chat has the highest satisfaction level than any other customer service channels, with 73 percent of customers reporting being satisfied with this feature, according to Econsultancy data. It even outperformed such popular options as email (61 percent), phone (44 percent), and social media (48 percent).
Moreover, many customers say they would prefer to buy from a business that has a live chat option because they perceive it as a quick way to reach customer support in case they have a problem. In fact, here are the most common reasons given by customers to why they prefer live chat, according to Econsultancy.
2. Number of Dissatisfied Customers
Let’s suppose that your customer service doesn’t receive a lot of complaints. In fact, let’s say it receives only a few complaints a week. Such a low number of dissatisfied customers means that your customer service is great, right?
Wrong!
Only 4 percent of unhappy customers complain. Moreover, 91 percent of those who choose not to complain simply leave and never buy anything from that business,
claims Colin Shaw, a customer experience thought leader.
So, the fact that your customer service receives just a few complaints per week or even month may not mean that you should be proud of your progress and stop seeking ways to improve it.
3. Working Environment
If you feel like your customer service team is unengaged, unmotivated, and lacks skills to provide an excellent service, this could be the main reason why your customers are unhappy with it. To improve the quality of customer service, it’s your responsibility as a leader to create an environment that allows an exceptional service.
For example, you can:
Invest in training of customer service members and ensure they have all the skills they need to provide professional service even in the most complicated situations
Involve customer service in decision making. Ask the member of the team about significant factors related to customer service improvement to demonstrate that you appreciate their opinion and feedback.
Measure progress. Collect customer service performance metrics and use a tool like Knowledge Management System to ensure that you have maximum data and information on how to improve customer support.
4. Customer Transfer to Other Departments
Another major reason why your customer service sucks may be the inability to support agents to solve customers’ problems without transferring them to somebody else. For example, a customer who contacts your customer care team expects an immediate attempt to resolve their issue but instead he or she gets thrown like a hot potato among different departments.
Of course, this adds a lot of stress and discourages that customer from contacting your customer service ever again. To avoid that, you should ensure that your customer support agents have the tools and authority they need to try to resolve customers’ problems right away.
The Bottom Line is that it’s clear that customer service is an important marketing channel because its poor quality may persuade customers to leave for competitors. If you’ve been struggling with your own customer service, feel free to apply the tips described above and remember: never stop improving! Even a few complaints per month may not mean that you’re doing everything perfectly.
A better way to assess the quality of your customer service is to ask customers directly via an online survey on your website and ask them for improvement suggestions.
Audrey is a visual content and digital marketing specialist who finds her passion in expressing her own thoughts as a blogger and currently works at https://www.assignmenthelper.com.au/ She is a tech-savvy person and likes to write on different topics like social media, web design, mobile apps, online marketing and much more.
Customizing help desk software gives your customer support portal the look and feel of your brand and defines tailor-made workflows to extend the ease of operations. Different aspects of your helpdesk ticketing system can be personalized to ensure better user interface and support functionality. But the important question that arises here is how easily and quickly can you customize your help desk. An effective ticketing system is the one where creating rules, managing workflows and roles comes handy for the customer support manager with a few clicks instead of going to the solution provider every time for each customization. Ease of help desk customization is an important parameter that businesses should consider during help desk ticketing system comparison before the final implementation. Customized helpdesk with integrated knowledge management system and self-service portal that looks like an extension of your brand adds to the overall customer service experience. Secondly, easy operational configurations make it convenient for service agents to address customer queries in a timely and efficient manner along with enhancing agent productivity. Let’s explore how can you customize your ticketing system to achieve the dual goal of improving customer service experience and increasing agent productivity–
Reinforce Brand Identity Across Chat Support
Ensure a smooth transitional experience for your customers when they move to chat support on your website by keeping the look and feel of your brand intact across chat forms. Help desk software that offers easily customizable elements like text styles and backdrop theme for chat forms can let customer support managers ensure a personalized experience in sync with their brand guidelines.
Track Every Query or Feedback via Social Media
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are increasingly becoming the preferred medium for customers to report their grievances for instant redressal from the brands. Businesses can address this situation with the help of a ticketing system that tracks customer queries and reviews by recording customer comments and replies to Facebook or Twitter posts as new tickets.
Personalize Email Support Communications
Businesses should never forget that there is always a human at the other end and should always strive to keep support communication as personalized as possible. One such step to ensure personalization is giving a human face to your brand by giving the service agent an option to configure individual email address and sender name to be used in email conversations. This would also help the customer to identify the point of contact thus preventing a broken service experience.
Manage SLA Better with Office Hours Configuration
Meeting the Service Level Agreement (SLA) is highly crucial for customer support and ensuring that SLA is not breached by the agents, is a necessary requirement for a ticketing system. A dynamic help desk software lets the customer support manager configure calendar hours as well as office hours within the customer support portal. This enables you to set the ticket resolution times based on the correct duration as per your operational hours for better customer escalation management.
Organize Ticket Visibility for Faster Resolution
With never-ending customer tickets, the usual workday of a customer support agent can be overwhelming. The key agent productivity lies in cutting the clutter and getting the agent dashboard organized with only tickets that are relevant to each individual agent. Intelligent helpdesk software allows the support admin to configure the tickets visibility to control which tickets are to be shown on an agent dashboard depending upon the queue, campaign or assigned owner. This leads to more organized ticket management and faster resolution. Help desk customization is essential to improve operational efficiency of your ticketing system while personalizing it in tandem with your brand to ensure consistent customer service experience. Ameyo FusionCX is a help desk software that provides easy and quick configurations to make your help desk your very own.
If you were to make 10 calls in an hour with no break, how would you feel?
Agents work round the clock and get frustrated with the same mundane task over the period of time, but industries forget to acknowledge that without them, it will be impossible to run a business.
How do you equip your agents with high-quality customer experience skills that also align with their KPIs and eliminate redundant tasks? Agent’s productivity would affect the customer experience, so you need to place your focus on their efficiency and flexibility to drive better results for your call center.
Let’s check the key areas that your agents would benefit with and would help them manage their time effectively.
Agent Self Monitoring Toolbar
The truth of the hour is that everyone is striving for a higher success rate in lesser time. Agents feel bottlenecked when they fail to hit the KPIs despite working relentlessly. Equip your agents with Agent Self Monitoring Toolbar to give them an informatory insight of Agent Login time Duration, Calls handled that were connected or attempted, break duration and break bifurcation.
Do you need Auto-Call functionality?
Ask your agents if they need a control over the auto-call button! Agents receive call restlessly that are auto-answered and they lose the grasp over their productivity after a few calls. A pop-up with “Accept-Reject” option on the screen for all inbound and outbound calls reflects on agent’s screen which allows them to take a call when they are ready for it.
Quick Telephony Actions
Do you want your agents to do multitasking? Agents can now quickly take the call and manage other operations like solving customer’s query while browsing through other pages on their screen without any hassle. They do not need to toggle off between the tabs, a telephony panel could be accessed on the screen simultaneously thus eliminating the redundant task of operations.
Voice Media Status Update
How would you measure your agent’s productivity if the WebRTC fails or if its state is inactive for any reason but the agent’s dashboard says that they are available?
Get warning alerts and notifications whenever there is a break in the WebRTC connectivity. Both agents and supervisors are notified once the WebRTC fails to connect or reconnects so that the agents could be spared of struggle to connect with customers.
Enhance Call Transfer and Conference
Allow your agents to deliver a customer experience that your customers won’t forget. Agents can have filtered view of available agents in any queue or campaign and transfer the calls to them while having a conversation with the customers.
Supervisor Monitoring just became easy with the call transfer and conference functionalities. They can easily track the name of the agents available to take the calls and take an informed decision while transferring the calls to best-skilled agents.
Agents are the building stones of any business. How you do business may involve a strategic decision but how you delight your customers is what makes the stance of your contact center. Your agents will deliver a customer-centric experience if you consider building an environment that would also delight your agents.
In this technologically driven world, customers still want to connect with human agents personally. Delight your agents to delight your customers with Ameyo Voice.
In a call center, auto dialer is no less than a lifesaver from the redundant manual process of dialing. But, its benefits range beyond just saving time. An automated dialer software is the base of contact strategy which not just automates the call center dialing process but rather brings logic to your contact strategy. In addition to saving time, it results in more calls, higher agent productivity, better service quality and ultimately more revenue.
Automatic dialer has largely impacted the way agents call customers and the time they take for their interactions. An intelligent dialer software functions on algorithms that predicts, and constantly dials contacts based on different contact parameters. The software determines which agent is free and routes calls to based on a chosen dialing algorithm.
Businesses have to ensure that the dialing solution they choose not only provides them with a high call connect rates, but should also have an easy-to-use interface and access to detailed dialing reports. After all, the analysis from the software will help modify business goals to achieve the best results in both long- and short-term.
So let’s see why an auto dialer software is one of the ideal features of a consolidated call center software and how it makes call center contact strategies smarter.
Reduced Call Drops
An automatic dialer software improves contact strategies because the specific call strategy adopted would be based on predefined parameters rather than random calls from a call list. Automated dialer software brings intelligence to the call center dialing process by connecting the agents only to the answered calls.
Improved Agent Productivity
The auto dialer software solution would ensure that the agent is talking to a prospective customer first instead of wasting time in manually dialing out numbers from the never ending database. When agents spend more time talking to the customers they are bound to achieve better results than going through the monotonous process of dialing numbers.
Maximize Customer Connects
A proactive autodialer should help reduce telecom costs and thus, enable overall increase in end productivity. The smarter the algorithm, the more number of connects, and more number of potential sales. Smart dialing solution ensures your agents reach out to the maximum number of prospective customers from the list without wasting any time of their work hours.
Ease of Operations
An auto dialer system not only automates the dialing process but helps the call centers to track the daily calling activity and analyze the agent performance with easy to understand reports and call recordings. These add-on features of a dialer will ensure there is no missed opportunity.
Dialing Strategy
There has been continuous innovations when it comes to dialing strategies for an auto dialer. One of them is predictive dialing where the Dialer software uses parameters based on customer profiles and combines it with past calling data to come out withe best dialing process. This way, contact centers not only connect better to their customers but also achieve significant reduction in nuisance calls to important customers.
Thus the requirements from a call center dialer software therefore, are enormous. And call centers should rightly expect them to outperform each time so that the business breaks even and succeeds. A proactive dialer would help define, configure, and automate business-specific processes. The solution can help management configure smarter contact strategies based on various parameters including customer segment and interaction history.
The evolution of digital marketing has laid the grounds for industries to move towards consumer behavior and prioritize customer engagement through different media. Pharmaceuticals firms are on a strive to engage more effectively and proactively with their customers to drive more insightful decisions.
Doctors search for an online medium to collect information on medicinal products. Why would Pharma not step-up and digitize the operations, as is the demand of the hour? Digitization has made it easy for Pharmaceutical firms to connect with the hospitals and manage the operations without any hassle, hence resulting in an increased amount of funds. Social media is a preferred platform for consumers globally, which enhances the interaction rate on online media and helps to maintain a consumer-friendly environment. Analyzing the behavior of physicians and patients becomes easy with the stored data thus enabling the firms to experiment with their products in real-time.
The need to opt for digital media is not limited to multichannel, with the increased demand for security of data and ease of placing orders, industries are looking forward to bring a change in the history of pharmaceutical practices with following measures:
Omnichannel Interaction
Interaction through multiple channels drives customer’s loyalty and reliability on your products. What our customers are running short of is time, you can provide them with ease of placing orders via online portals and help them save time with virtual engagement.
Deliver a personalized experience through live chat and make your customers feel valued. Customers feel delighted when they are provided 24×7 support on social media.
Data security is important and if you cannot assure your customers of their data security, you will lose on a large number of customers. Click-to-dial enables the firm to prevent data leaks and ensures the encryption of data at rest and data in motion depending upon the requirement.
Reduce Wait Time
Doctors and customers would contact any pharmacy to avail immediate solution to their problem. Routing your customers to the right agent at the right time turns out to be the delighting stone for them. Stay in touch with your customers right from the beginning and help them through their journey with you.
Real-Time Data Analytics
Customers feel valued when they are timely informed of their orders and they are able to track the status of delivery. Easy refund policies, 100% assurance of timely delivery helps them place their loyalty in the product. Send notification alerts via different mediums ensuring that they are being cared for. If the delivery is delayed due to unavoidable circumstances, they could be notified prior to the date of delivery and the instance of no-show could be avoided.
Listen to your Customers
Live-chat with a specialist to communicate medical information gives an assurance to the customers that they are being led in the right direction. Critical situations may arise when the customers are looking for a second opinion, listening to their problems and delivering prompt responses will boost their confidence in the product.
With a leading approach to the digital solution, pharmaceutical companies are moving towards a holistic customer-centric system which can help the industry to engage with customers better. Digital presence is sure to dominate the pharmacies and its prominence is realized largely in the market.
To make your pharmacy an engaging platform for your customers, go digital with Ameyo Fusion CX technologies and see the change for yourself.
It goes by many names – The Holy Grail of Customer Success, The Next Big Thing, and The New Competitive Battleground. It’s probably what differentiates you from your competition in the eyes of consumers. Your customers are expecting more – and it’s up to your brand to fulfill their needs. And, most importantly – if you’re an industry pro who’s nailed the Not-so-Secret CX formula in the digital era – you’re pretty much destined for success. Continue reading “Setting up a Customer Experience System for Designing Better Experiences”
Good brands understand their customers, but ideal brands understand the sentiments of their customers. They take care of customers’ needs by identifying how they feel about their products and services. To meet the rising customer expectations, real-time insights about customer sentiments can come handy for service agents to engage with them in a highly personalized manner and deliver empathetic service. Continue reading “Sentiment Analysis : Key To Empathetic Customer Service”
Taking a loan has definitely become easier in the last decade or so. But, what about debt collection? How are these agents supposed to remember all the details and deadlines of every customer. It is a daunting task which will significantly reduce the productivity of the agents and slow down the operations. Leading to a domino effect, which will create some additional problems of its own.
Let us discuss some ways to make the debt collection a seamless experience:
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