Call Center

Customer Service

At the heart of a call center's role is providing world-class customer service. Call centers serve as the primary point of contact for many customers and often are the fastest way to resolve issues. Top-notch customer service can lead to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty and word-of-mouth growth. What are your call center representatives doing well? What areas can be improved? We work with you to understand your quality, performance, and feedback data to identify potential opportunities and work with your team to implement positive change.

Trained and Motivated Team

A trained and motivated call center team can be an invaluable asset. A trained call center team has undergone extensive training to understand the products, services, systems, and communication techniques required to deliver top-notch customer service. Training is an ongoing process as products, services, or protocols evolve. A motivated call center team is an engaged, driven, and committed team. The team's role goes well beyond just answering calls; team members represent the organization's front line and help shape its public perception. This makes it critical to ensure that there is recognition and career progression for team members. We can help ensure that you are maximizing opportunities to boost morale and limit team member turnover.

Technology 

Having integrated and easy to use call center technology is essential to the success of a contact center.  Modern call center technology helps agents access and handle customer interactions, history, personal details and previous interactions via multiple channels (phone, email, chat, and social media).  This technology helps streamline process, reduce call wait times, and optimize routing.  This allows call center representatives to handle more activity in less time. Workforce management, call recording and monitoring, and knowledge management technology also need to be in place.  Workforce management software allows for call volume forecasting, shift planning, and management of staff.  Call recording and monitoring systems are essential for quality assurance and training purposes.  Knowledge management software supports training efforts and helps ensure that customers receive accurate, consistent and quick resolutions to inquiries, reducing agent errors and boosting customer satisfaction and loyalty.  Call centers generate a large amount of useful data.  Technology needs to be in place to capture and analyze this data to provide insights into customer behavior, preferences, and pain points.  This is invaluable for improving products, services, and overall business strategies.  Investments in technology can reduce the need for excessive manpower, reduce call handling times, optimize resource utilization, leading to significant cost savings.  Lastly, as your business experiences volume changes, your technology must allow for easy scaling up or down as needed without compromising service quality.  We can help you to evaluate existing or future technology.

Multichannel Support

Modern call centers have evolved to support more than just phone interactions.  This includes web forms, emails, live chat, and social media.  This provides customers with multiple avenues to get in touch and also allows companies to provide 24/7 support.  What are you currently doing to support multichannel inquiries?  Where are there opportunities to do more?  We can help you to implement or improve your multichannel support.

Standard Operating Procedures 

Not having standardized procedures can be devastating to call center customer experience.  Having clear, streamlined and standard processes is essential to both efficiently utilizing resources and to providing a world-class experience to your customers.  No, this does not mean scripting every single word said by agents.  It means having clear guides, flowcharts, process diagrams or written procedures for each step.  Most situations are predictable once you understand your customers and what they are inquiring about.  For those unpredictable situations, having clear escalation procedures, customer communications, and request tracking eliminates guesswork by agents.  We can help you to ensure that you have clear procedures for your representatives.

Feedback Loops

Capturing customer and agent feedback is a must to run a successful call center. It offers valuable insights into how business operations are perceived, both positive and negative. It points to areas where the team excels and to aspects where additional training or attention may be needed. It can guide strategic decisions and lead to product or service modifications. By addressing concerns and acting on feedback, businesses can reduce customer loss, increase customer loyalty, build team morale, and increase retention.

Metrics and Performance Indicators

Metrics and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are essential tools for managing and improving the performance of call centers. Metrics provide quantitative information on how well the call center is functioning.  Without them, call center managers are left to rely solely on observations which do not capture the full picture.  KPIs, such as average handle time (AHT), first call resolution (FCR) and customer satisfaction (CSAT), serve as performance targets. They can be set based on industry benchmarks, past performance, or strategic objectives. Metrics can indicate where resources, like staffing or training, may need to be increased or decreased. Metrics related to call handle time, schedule adherence, and average hold time can give insights into efficiency. Individual agent metrics can help both identify top performers and those who might need additional training or coaching. By monitoring various metrics, managers can quickly identify and raise areas of concern. This continuous monitoring builds a culture of continuous improvement and can lead to cost savings and better customer and agent experience.