Nowadays, Business Process Outsourcing or BPO is one of the fastest growing segments in the industry. Numerous factors like utilization improvement, superior competency, business risk mitigation, and economy of scale are responsible for the growth of BPO industry. The call center industry looks glamorous; however, administering a call center is an uphill task. A call center is a workspace, used to receive or transfer plenty of requests. There are two types of call centers – inbound and outbound. Inbound call centers customer executives cater to the customer’s request through incoming calls and outbound call centers agents cater to the needs of customers by making calls. To help a business achieve desired goals, a call center operational performance should be effective. In this blog post, we list eight ways that will improve the quality of a call center. Take a look.
- Effective Training
Before beginning an interaction with customers, the call center representatives should undergo extensive training. Each representative should have a thorough knowledge of the process, as this will help them to solve customer’s queries efficiently. If in case, a representative lacks process knowledge, he/she will not be able to address the concerns of the customers. And this can be frustrating for customers and will impact the image of the company.
- Excellent Customer Service
The strength of the call center highly depends on the quality of customer service, provided by the call center representatives. There are various important factors, including the interaction of the representatives, resolving customer queries, and service that determine the quality of a company, for which the representatives are working.
- Call Monitoring
Call monitoring is one of the most important ways which improve the call center quality. To track the performance of agents, the quality department should keep a continuous record of the service calls made regularly. As it is a prerequisite for exceptional customer service. By doing so, the QC or QA department will be able to identify the drawbacks. In addition, regular feedback and motivation are also required to upskill the customer service representatives.
- Reduce Attrition
In some call centers, the attrition rate is extremely high. The main reasons responsible for high attrition are tiredness, loads of work pressure, irritability, and targets failure. Besides these, the rotational shifts affect the health of employees. Therefore, this affects the call center quality. To avoid attrition, the company need to take some steps to counsel or motivate agents time to time. Reward and recognition are one of the best ways to encourage them. Also, perks, proper food facilities, and flexible/relaxed work environment will prevent representatives from leaving the company.
- Key Performer Indicator
Key Performance Indicator or KPI is a business metric which helps in evaluating parameters and crucial for the organization success. The list of important KPIs for a call center include monetary cost per call, queue time, call completion rate, abandon rates and a number of first call resolution. Analyzing the KPIs and working on the parameters are two activities that can increase the quality of a call center.
- Emphasis on Growth
The companies should also an emphasis on growth or do in-house promotions in order to achieve the desired goals. The customer service agents should be given an opportunity to manage some other areas of the department too. For instance, supervising new call agents, take process training, or linguistic/accent training when required. This will not only boost the confidence of customer representatives but will also enhance their skills.
- Re-Examine Key Performance Metrics
Another important factor in raising the quality of a call center is re-examined key performance metrics. It is used to judge the call center performance. For instance, average handling time. Some of the leading companies are measuring outcomes like new business sales, lifetime value of customers, customer satisfaction levels, and net promoter scores through Key Performance Metrics. This helps them to strike a perfect balance between the cost per interaction (efficiency) and business outcome (effectiveness).
- Form a Team Huddle
To form a team huddle, organize call center agents, team leaders, and team managers to come together daily, as it will set a good precedent for the team. This will encourage everyone, they will feel as a part of a united group. Organize every team member and make the team realize that you all have a common goal to optimize call center performance.
Way Forward
The above-mentioned ways clearly say one thing that customer representative’s proper training plays a vital role in improving the quality of a call center. Be it inbound or reliable outbound call centers, all have to follow the same practices to keep themselves in the race. So, make sure to include these practices in your call center and lead the market with great efficiency.
