How to Improve Your Call Center Metrics
90 percent of American consumers indicate that customer service is an essential factor in their choice and loyalty to a company. Currently, if you want to differentiate your brand, you must know what your customers want and how to satisfy their needs directly and immediately.
One way to address the concerns of customers is by improving the efficiency of your call center. You need call center agents who know call center training what they’re doing, who can do it fast, and who can keep your customers satisfied.
To boost call center productivity, you need to keep consistently improving your call center metrics. In today’s comprehensive guide, we show you how to do so.
Read on to learn more.
Enhance Call Quality
It makes little sense to boost call center productivity if the call quality reduces as a result. In other words, you don’t want to handle more calls poorly. Instead, you want to improve both productivity and quality.
You can achieve this by implementing a scoring system that rates all customer interactions based on your goals. These goals may include accuracy, professionalism, customer satisfaction, empathy, and so on.
Conduct regular coaching and training to keep call productivity and quality high.
Keep Your Call Center Agents Actively Engaged
Each year, US businesses lose $450-$550 billion because the vast majority of their workers are actively disengaged at work. Engaging your call center agents helps make them feel like more valuable members of your team. In turn, their motivation levels increase, which results in higher productivity.
So, how do you engage your agents? One way is to make them participants in your decision-making processes. Encourage them to give you feedback and include them in your quality assurance process. Where possible, allow your agents to participate in every aspect of running your call center.
Allow Flexibility in the Working Set-Up
Flexible business set-ups have been shown to enhance productivity. One way to have a flexible call center is to offer opportunities for agents to work off-site. Most workers report higher productivity when they work outside the office.
You could also allow employees to work alone or at home.
The idea behind working flexibility is to offer agent autonomy. If your agents feel that they have the freedom and trust to deal with clients as they see fit, they’ll be more productive. You’ll be able to keep your call center workflow streamlined besides bolstering agent morale and engagement.
Utilize the Right Software
Technology has transformed the way businesses handle tasks. The more you deploy software in your company to track essential business performance metrics, the more you’ll be able to provide efficient customer solutions.
Currently, there’s a bevy of call center software that can offer your agents access to real-time metrics. With such information, your agents can see how they’re doing and make informed decisions that boost their productivity.
A good example is where agents can access customer wait time data and thus take appropriate action to improve on that.
Boost Customer Flow
There’s hardly a more detrimental thing to call center productivity than poor workflow. Go out of your way to make sure that all chats and calls that come to your call center are distributed appropriately.
The goal should be to send each customer to an agent and team that’s best suited to handle their issue. You want all interactions resolved on the first contact.
Keep Your Agents Connected
A company that connects its workers can boost productivity significantly. Environment plays a massive role in determining employee productivity. By making your call center agents feel like they’re part of a larger team and have access to ready support, you can help them become more productive.
Hire the Best Agents
Top talent is by multiple times more productive compared to average employees. That’s why top call centers have robust hiring and on-boarding processes.
The fact is hiring new employees is a lengthy process that will significantly impact your overall productivity as a call center. What you want is to employ the right workers and train them well. In doing so, you can reduce future training costs, enhance staff engagement, and create an effective team where everyone performs at their top level.
Consider an Incentive Program
Workers are happy when they receive rewards for work well done. Creating a recognition program to reward top-performing agents can motivate everyone to work at their top levels. Ultimately, you boost worker satisfaction while enhancing personal growth.
The vast majority of employees indicate that they’d work better if their companies recognized them. An incentive program is thus worth investing in.
Reduce Interruptions
Interruptions can impact productivity more than you imagine. Once a person is derailed from the task at hand, it takes almost half an hour to get back on track.
That is no to say that agents shouldn’t be allowed breaks. Regular short breaks can actually help decrease stress and positively impact agent productivity. What you need to do is discourage unnecessary breaks that only consume time without decreasing stress.
Measure Performance and Adjust
A key part of boosting productivity is setting apart time to conduct quality assurance and see what you need to do to improve your metrics. You can automate this process to ensure it doesn’t interfere with other tasks.
When you regularly monitor and improve your business, you enhance customer experience, improve customer loyalty, boost agent productivity, and consequently bolster your bottom line.
Enhance Your Call Center Metrics Today
Keeping your call center productive does not have to be an impossible affair. All it takes is regularly monitoring essential call center metrics and taking appropriate action to improve them. The tips we’ve shared in this guide can help get you started.
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