Call center industries are one of the most powerful sectors in today’s business world. But as easy as it seems to be, handling customer’s queries and demands is a very tedious task. It requires extra effort from the agent’s side to understand the demand and fulfill those according to a customer’s satisfactory level. International call centers are urgent requirements in today’s fast pace developing businesses. These call center agents are assumed to be multi-talented, highly skilled and experienced. Despite the fact that they are undoubtedly skilled, these agents face some tough times striving to maintain the quality and satisfaction of customers. To make your business flourish you need to keep an eye on every minute opportunity heading toward you. In this post, we discuss five challenges faced by international call centers and their agents. Take a look.
1). Delivering Quality
Regardless of doing all hard work, jack doesn’t get to play at all and thus making his day all dull and gloomy. The international call centers may face a similar situation when working day and night, which makes their work too monotonous to provide quality. Unlike other businesses, call centers need to invest a little extra effort to make their work interesting and keep going. If an agent fails to provide quality, customers tend to withdraw their services eventually, thus, hampering the stability of a business. On the hand, customer’s expectation tends to increase day by day making it even difficult for agents to keep them engaged.
2). High Attrition Rate
Due to lower salaries and promotions, experienced people leave the firm, increasing the attrition rate. This needs to be balanced by handing the responsibility to others to continue the business at the same pace, which in turn creates a requirement for the hiring of more agents and employees. Moving out a large number of employees lower the number of people handling calls, thereby increasing pressure on the remaining employees. With monotonous work structure and unmanageable goals, agents become demoralized and lose interest in working anymore.
3). Communication Gap
The medium and approach of communication have changed in past several years. International call centers are struggling to keep up the satisfaction level of customers because of the communication gap. It is difficult to pull out a customer from its comfort zone and incorporate any other idea when they have already made up their mind for something else. You make one mistake in satisfying their interest, the next thing they do is announcing it to the common people because boasting on social media and making much ado about nothing is the new cool. Another aspect of communication mismatch could be the variant time zones. The difference in time zones makes agents work after hours or during night shifts which leads to unmanaged and poor quality services. Due to this gap customers start getting frustrated and shows lesser interest in continuing its business further.
4). Saturation Point
It should be kept in mind that after a certain period of time, every job becomes monotonous and saturated. However, in case of agile international call center services, this phase, unfortunately, comes a little early. Though this phase does not prevail permanently, people start panicking and start quitting their jobs. At this point instead of letting their employees go, international call centers should alter their models and technologies, introduce new strategies, and so on to prevent saturation.
5). Tight Budget and Cost Cutting
One of the biggest challenges faced by international call centers is mandatory cost cutting to maintain the stability of funds and budgets. Due to this cost-cutting, experienced agents are fired as they expect high salaries and position rage. To compensate that place new agents are hired and trained, who might not be able to perform up to a level of customer’s satisfaction. This, in turn, lets a major setback in the profit and reputation of the company.
Conclusion
There are several other challenges faced by the international call centers apart from the ones mentioned above. However, looking toward the brighter side, call centers are a major part of any business. Without the call centers, management of any business would only spread chaos. They are a rich source of information. All other business extracts information from the very source. With passing time these call center industries have grown and flourished tremendously. Today, they have become an unavoidable part of the business firms. Almost, all big companies today, avail the services of call centers, reducing unwanted burden and cost upon themselves.
