How to Optimize Your Call Center for Peak Performance

Call centers are one of the traditional means for providing customer service as phone calls are the medium that has existed in common public use for quite a long time now. Customer service through call centers is actually an opportunity to keep your customers in business. But how? The answer is to provide them with a solution for their queries that came into existence while doing business with you.

To make it sound simpler, if a customer stumbles upon a problem with your product or service, you can regain their trust in your brand with good customer support. And if you wonder what would happen if you don't cater to their query, 78% of customers change their decision to make a purchase due to such a negative experience.

In totality, call centers play a critical role in retaining customers and thus, their management matters, too. If you don't manage your call center’s performance well, then you may fail to save customers who fall out of your business. But you don't have to worry about it, as we have created a guide for you to make your call center perform better.

Seven Strategies to Make Your Call Centre Perform Better

Here are the seven strategies to use for your better call center management and performance.

Add Self Service Options

As per the reports, about 62% of the millennials and over 75% of Gen-Zs have shown a preference for customer support via self-service portals. So this stat tells you about the importance of a shift from the traditional customer service options. Now, it is not about scrapping your call center, but it shows how you may be overusing your call center by keeping it as the only option for your customers.

Instead, you can add other options like live chats to cater to customers who are not actually fans of talking to customer care agents. What it will do is filter the uncontrollable customer service requests and save only those requests for the agents that require human intervention.

Create a Self-Service Knowledge Base

Now, introducing self-service portals doesn't only mean adding tech like chatbots, but you can also go with more economical and traditional options like having a self-service knowledge base. Sometimes, what a customer needs is minor guidance or knowledge of what to do next, for which connecting to an agent might not be the best option. So, you can create a knowledge base where the customers can learn about the issues that they frequently face.

It will not only make the customers happy as they get their solution very easily but also help make your CC perform better by shedding the unnecessary load off the agents’ shoulders.

Implement Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)

Now, let's talk about a strategy that directly increases the CC performance, which is to have a well-guided path. See, you can't leave everything on the agents to find out how to take care of the customer’s issue, as it will create room for a lot of errors. The better approach is to keep everything structured so that the agent doesn't have to find out what to do next. 

What you have to do is to create standard operating procedures for your agents for commonly occurring issues. It will help them to respond in a certain way to every query. Moreover, it will also allow them to pass the query to other agents on time rather than trying to solve it on their own, even if it's not possible to do so.

Be on Open Lines with Your Agents

Employee mental health is of great importance today. It has become common for call centers to let go of their employees as they face burnout. However, the reduction in an agent’s output is mainly due to overworking and stress. Try not to follow the path of letting go of your employees. Instead, the better option would be to open a communication channel for your workers.

This way, they can share their thoughts about what’s stressing them. It will also let them share the scope of improvements that can be done in various aspects of your call center. Not only will it improve their performance, but also create a positive environment for all the agents. As a result, you will see that they start handling customer calls in a better manner and improve the overall engagement and satisfaction of your customers.

Mystery Shop your Call Centers

One of the best practices to get an unbiased review of your call centers is through mystery shopping. You should use it as a metric to assess your customer experience and how well agents are engaging with the customers. But what exactly is mystery shopping? Mystery shopping is a process in which you hire trained individuals to act like customers. It helps you get a more realistic knowledge of your employee’s performance.

Most importantly, when you hire a mystery shopper, make sure that he/she has proper knowledge about your consumer base and what they actually want. It will help you get a more accurate analysis of your call center’s performance. 

Reduce Customer Wait Times with Tech

No one likes to be put on hold, especially when calling us timer service. This is the reason for the huge dissatisfaction among customers. Hence, you must make it a point to reduce hold times. The best way to avoid such a long wait is by providing a callback option. Another alternative is to use more than one customer service channel, such as email and social media. This way, you will also be able to reduce the number of calls that your agents have to deal with. It will result in better engagement by the agents as well as instant services to your customers through various channels.

Do Frequent Call Centre Audit for Quality Assurance

A call center audit refers to a comprehensive check of various things to benchmark its performance for comparison and to point out the pros and cons.

See, when it comes to call center management, you must ensure its quality assurance. While you can opt for Call Center Audit Services for periodic audits, you need something that can help you keep an eye on quality assurance all the time. 

Here comes the role of QDegrees’ call center audit service. At QDegrees, our call center audits are powered with QAViews, a call center monitoring tool, which is a one-stop solution for contact center QA. It has features like real-time dashboards and analytics, random call sampling, and many more. With this tool, our company provides you with detailed audit reports that you can use to make improvements and structural changes in your call center. Since we use QAViews, our auditing is done faster and you can get real-time reports. 

Wrapping Up

To sum up, a call center’s performance depends on various factors like the load it is handling, the SOPs, and many more. Hence, you should strategize your call center operations to make it perform better. However, some improvements can only be made when the related problems are highlighted. Thus, a call center audit helps a lot as it uncovers a lot of details about your call center audits. So get your call center audited today with QDegrees.