7 Expert Tips to Optimize your Call Center Team

Call center optimization helps call centers to improve their performance in a number of ways. It works to bring together it’s technologies and digital channels (web, mobile, social media) under a singular point of management. This further brings more transparency and visibility in important areas such as customer interactions, employee performance, etc.

Call center optimization involves the call centers analysing every single customer interaction. This analysis gives away important insights which can be used by call centers to develop strategies. Such strategies spell out the ways to coach the employees and improve workflow, and thus enhance the overall quality of customer service provided by the call center.

Call center workforce management has helped call center to only improve their customer support service, but also diversify further in providing sales support services.

 Tips To Implement Call Center Optimization

. Let us now look at the various ways to bring about call center optimization in the points below:

1. Ensuring Accurate Customer Service Data

It is essential to collect and carefully analyse customer service data in order to ensure call center optimization. This data will help call centers in formulating strategies that can assist them in attaining their desired customer service and sales goals. By compiling data from the different departments, a sound business strategy can be formed.

2. Using Smart Strategies to Handle Calls

Call centers looking to optimize their operations can adopt the following strategies to deal with a high volume of calls:

1. Hold Queues: All call centers face a scenario where all their agents are busy, thus forcing them to either to put their customers on a prolonged hold, or redirecting them to the main menu. However, there should be an option, which enables the customers leave a message, and get a call back from an agent.
2. Routing Calls: Routing calls to the agents based on their skill with help call centers to enable the customers to talk to the right agent in their very first attempt. Needless to say, this will reduce the wastage of agent’s time.

3. Evaluating The Performance of Agent Regularly

Call center workforce optimization improves the chances of success of a call center and its ability to generate revenue. Call center agents must be put through carefully planned tests. These tests would establish if their performance is good enough to achieve the desired goals. Investing time and money in agent optimization and educating them about important techniques like up-selling and cross-selling is vital to bring about that desired conversion of leads to sales.

4. Correctly Assessing the Number of Agents Needed In The Project

Accurate forecasting of the demand for the employees is a crucial factor in ensuring contact center optimization. Understaffing, on one hand would lead to excess work pressure on employees. Over-staffing, on the other, would increase costs.

 By predicting the number of agents required at any point of time, call centers can optimize workforce and running costs.

5. Keep Providing Training Opportunities to The Agents

A study named Emergency Workforce, revealed that about 41% of employees plan to leave organizations which have inadequate training score. However, for organizations whose training scores were good this number was just 12%.

Here are few training activities that would result in call center workforce optimization:

1. Conducting training sessions through workshops, e-learning, virtual assistance and scripting tools.
2. Putting the spotlight on the top-performing agents. These agents can provide first-hand tips to other agents to improve their performance.
3. Constantly updating the agent’s knowledge on best practices, industry standards, technology.

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6. Ensuring That the Latest Tech Is Used

Let’s imagine two scenarios. In the first one you contact a call center and are asked for your contact number, following which you’re put on hold for another minute while the agent looks up your number against a spreadsheet. 

In the second one the call centre’s software automatically identifies your number and presents the agent with your details, so that you could jump straight into your enquiry.

If you chose the latter option, you should understand that customer service departments are capable of generating better revenues when they are equipped with the right technology. For instance, it is essential to have a CRM system in place that captures relevant information across all communication channels. In order to ensure that leads generated are by a real-time referral strategy, there has to be an integration between the call center system and the sales management system.

7. Leveraging AI 

Artificial Intelligence algorithms are challenging human intelligence. With their inherent pattern recognition, self-learning and cognitive capabilities, AI powered algorithms are better at performing complex jobs with amazing speed and accuracy. Businesses are getting better day by day with the help of predictive analytics, using artificial intelligence (AI) applications to help streamline call center experiences for customers and agents.

How Do We Ensure Optimization in Our Call Center Services

Our call center operations are optimized to the fullest extent, using a mix of smart analytical and operational technologies, and time tested employee training programs.

As a rule, we only hire candidates who are fluent in English. Furthermore, they are put through speech training programs as a part of the hiring process. This works to eliminate traces of their mother tongue in their accents. Thus, we have only those agents who passed the training interacting with your customers.

There is very little space for unproductivity in our operations. To this end, we continually monitor our agent performance using our cutting-edge data analytics tool. These tools give us strategic insights, which further help us to increase agent efficiency. 

Another key strategy we employ to ensure optimal functioning of our call center is to keep a close watch on the key determinants of the agent’s productivity. The number of calls per agent, the average time an agent takes to interact with the customer, etc, are some examples of such determinants. 

Technology is our strongest suit. We leverage top of the line technologies such as IVR, predictive diallers, to ensure a smooth interaction between our agents and your customers. As a means to ensure, that all of our agents achieve their targets for the day, we have in place an automatic dialler system. Additionally, this system helps us to address the issue of agent idle time. To keep up with the constant advancements in technology, we update our tech regularly.