How to Improve Customer Satisfaction And Call Center Performance

How to Improve Customer Satisfaction And Call Center Performance

How do you improve the quality of your call center and communicate the value of your business more effectively to employees, prospects and customers?

The first place to start to revamp your business is to have every manager on the same page. Managers need to understand that the primary benefit of your call center is to focus on improving a client’s business by increasing sales conversions and providing a high customer satisfaction rate.

However, before trying to improve how managers and agents perform at a call center, it’s essential to use cutting-edge cloud call center software because it’s pointless to make managers more efficient and train agents to more productive if they wrestle with inefficient systems. The use of software like Smart Dialers, Intelligent Routing, and On Screen Info will make it much easier for agents to perform well.

Some Typical Challenges

Before jumping into how you can improve your call center, let’s take a quick look at some of the challenges most call centers experience:

• ·  Agents often feel overwhelmed by unrealistic daily targets.
• ·  The work can become boring and monotonous.
• ·  The call center culture can quickly slip into cynicism because of the irritation agents feel after interacting with difficult customers.

All these factors result in a high attrition rate because agents feel discouraged by their work.

Improving Call Center Quality:

Here are simple but effective ways to quickly improve the quality of your call center:

1. Review your hiring process:

It’s essential that you hire reps with the right attitude and personality rather than hope they will change when they are on the job. While it’s not necessary for candidates to have the right skillsets since they will be trained, it’s important to hire people who like to build relationships. While some candidates may be personable enough, they are task-oriented rather than people-oriented. These people like to get complete projects but have little interest in developing their social skills.

2. Revamp the training process.

Notice what’s not working in your current training methods and find ways to make training more engaging. For instance, look into gamification techniques to make it easier to onboard new people and get them excited about working at a call center. People like challenges; they dread monotony.

3. Motivate your existing agents.

Motivation of your existing work force starts with re-energizing your managers. Find out what managers are doing wrong. Perhaps they are either too permissive, encouraging cynicism, or too authoritarian and unintentionally bullying employees. Whatever the issue, coach your managers to provide clearer instructions, show appreciation, and encourage agents to develop a positive attitude toward their work. In addition, provide agents with more incentives, rewards, recognition and competitions to keep the work interesting.

4. Reduce attrition rates.

There is no point in improving hiring practices, training, and re-energizing managers and current agents if the attrition rates remain high. When there is a high turnover, there is a drop in performance metrics because of the gap between when an experienced agent leaves and a new one is hired and trained for the job. If the attrition rate remains high, find out the primary cause of dissatisfaction by conducting exit interviews. Once you know what the problem might be, you can come up with creative solutions to resolve them.

5. Monitor call quality.

When agents handle a call badly it’s because they don’t know what they don’t know. By monitoring call quality, it’s possible to give them insights on how to handle difficult customers better. It’s also important to catch agents doing things right, rather than only talking to them when they make mistakes. All call quality coaching should be positive and encouraging rather than making the agent feel incompetent and unsuitable for the job.

6. Understand your key performance indicators (KPI).

How do you know if things are going well at your call center? You look at your KPIs and try to get some insights about your numbers. You need to know things like the call completion rate, the queue time, the number of calls that resolved a customer problem the first time, the cost per call, and that call abandonment rate.

7. Improve customer satisfaction rates.

There are 3 proven ways to improve customer satisfaction rates:

• 1. Provide a quick solution when customers first call. If you have a low first call resolution rate, then find out what is in the way of satisfactorily handling the problem. Did the agent fail to get to the root cause of the issue and provide the wrong solution? Did the agent do the best they could but did not have the resources, information, or permission to resolve the problem?
• 2. Show a sense of urgency. When customer’s call, they want to talk to someone interested in resolving their problem as quickly as possible. Agents should show empathy, provide reassurance, and fulfill their promises. If the agent can’t resolve the problem right away, the customer should hang up believing that things will be done as quickly as possible to set the situation right.
• 3. Practice the mirroring technique. People like people who are like them. Extroverts like extroverts, introverts like introverts, and good humored people like other congenial souls. This psychological technique is a powerful way of building almost instant customer rapport, and agents should be formally trained on how to practice the mirroring technique.