A call center is a valuable part of every business and each company has this department. Companies use call centers to communicate with their customers, not only to help them and answer all their questions, but also to hear people’s opinions about their products. Most call centers operate for telemarketing, market research, and technical support. If you are a manager of a call center, here are some things you can do to improve the efficiency of your employees as well as the efficiency of the whole department.
The first thing you should do is to listen to your customers. If you work in technical support, people usually call you because they have some problem and they need help to solve it. People want quick and concise answers to their question so they can start using your products immediately.
Solution to this problem takes us to a second suggestion – train your staff. Clearly, the training process is mandatory when hiring new people, but you should also organize frequent training seasons for all your employees. This is important because people tend to forget something they had previously learned. Also, you should hold training season every time the company changes something or adds some new product in their offer. This way you’ll help the new representatives catch up and learn different techniques they can use when answering the call. Another great thing you should do is ask more experienced workers to share their knowledge with their new colleagues. This way, you will be building great interpersonal relationships. Furthermore, ask the representatives for feedback. You shouldn’t be scared to hear criticism. If you talk regularly with your employees, not only will they feel more included in the whole process but also you will discover some problems you otherwise wouldn’t.
Img source: blog.zingtree.com
Implement state-of-the-art technology. Firstly, improve call routing. Make sure that your system is working perfectly and most of all that it is understandable i.e. that the caller knows which number to dial. If the call routing is confusing, and the customers press the work number and ask for a wrong department, your workers will lose precious minutes while transferring the call to the right representative. Furthermore, you should automate the whole process and make the representative’s job easier. No representative in the whole world can learn by heart every solution to every question that the customer asks. That’s why you provide your workers with custom-made scripts which help them do their job. However, you should take full advantage of technology. Using Real-Time Voice Analytics will improve the efficiency of your employee. This technology monitors and what’s more, understands each conversation and provides the representative with the best solutions. Other systems will illustrate all the mistakes a representative has made after the conversation is finished. However, Real-Time Speech Analytics will guide him through the entire conversation, point out things he should say or correct during the call. Moreover, you should automate all scripts and advice on how to solve different problems, so the workers can find them easily, by simply typing a keyword into the program.
Since working at a call center can be extremely boring and monotonous, you, as a manager, have to find different ways to motivate your employees and increase their performance. In addition, if you improve the technology you use as well as conversation techniques, you will decrease the number of dissatisfied and agitated consumers.
