5 Ways to Improve Efficiency of Your Call Center Operations

You may wonder who resorts to a call center for grievance redressal when you can contact companies via email, texting, social media, and web chats. But, the reality is different. Studies indicated that more than 50% of the customers with queries still prefer phone calls to reach out to customer care agents as they feel that they are heard patiently and given solutions quickly.

This is the perfect time to win the heart of your customers by offering them reliable and instant service on their preferred platform or channel, which indicates your call center operational efficiency needs to be at its top. Otherwise, you end up adding a dissatisfied customer (which, of course, you don’t want). Let’s understand the meaning of the call center operational efficiency.

Let’s Define “Efficiency” for Call Centers?

Efficiency or Operational efficiency are the key metrics that define what output you get out of what you invest.  Whatever output you gain from your business in terms of profit, revenue, or cash, satisfaction by investing resources like people, time, hardware, software and other capital and operational costs.

Your process becomes more efficient when you get the same output metric while lowering cost and via reduced effort. More process efficiency would mean more profitability. Your focus should be on creating operational efficiencies and driving revenue growth. If you are able to make processes run swiftly, it will translate into improving customer experiences and bringing positive business results.

Quick Tips to Improve Efficiency of Your Call Center

We’ve compiled the top 5 ways to improve efficiency of your call center that will help you gain customer satisfaction and reap profits.

To Gain Efficiency You Need a Framework

If you have developed a QA framework for your call center, then congratulations! You are on the right path towards enhancing customer experience and building a good brand image. A call center’s success and its productivity depend on how accurately you examine agent performance and use that information to boost customer experience.

With the help of a QA framework, you can collaborate effectively with your team, evaluate their performance and training, better understand the customer experience, and ultimately enhance operational efficiency. What’s important here is that you must collect data using the advanced technology and relevant systems to see desired results.

If you are aiming to see good efficiency in your call center operations, there are certain questions you need to find answers for:

1. Who determines quality? Your customers, leadership, regulators, etc.?
2. Which outcomes are you eyeing? Performance, innovation, compliance?
3. What inputs are you referring to? Evaluations, analytics, surveys, or self-scoring?
4. What drives quality? Systems, processes, self-managed, and needs?
5. What are the metrics to measure success? Behaviors, NPS, Metrics, Feedback?
6. How is quality improved?

Chances are that you will have a matrix of metrics. For example, if you’re eyeing quality from the eyes of a customer, then you must provide satisfaction, which must include no wait time. This goal may be in direct conflict with another metric when eyed from the leadership team on reducing costs.

Keep Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a Key Evaluation Indicator

As mentioned above – Offering positive customer experiences is the primary goal of call center operations. And to reach your goal, you need to find out if you are moving in the right direction to satisfy your customers. Here’s where Net Promoter Score comes into the picture. It is the benchmark to measure customer loyalty and experience, which helps you to manage your call center operations strategically and tactically. You should ideally focus on getting a good score and converting maximum customers into your brand advocates. If you are able to achieve this, you will easily be able to surpass your competition and boost revenue. Here are some steps that you can take to improve NPS.

• Listen to conversations carefully and examine each customer call to find out if things are at the right place.
• Keep an eye on your customers and take their feedback to know if they are Promoters, Passives, or Detractors.
• Provide training to poor performers and make them outperformers.
• Set attainable goals that are measurable and make sure to deliver consistent service.
• Last and most important, don’t forget to add the quality assurance framework that we mentioned above.

Give Your Agents Tools and Information To Succeed

Call center agents mostly have to deal with outdated technologies and lack of accessibility to real-time data.Therefore, it’s crucial to optimize the workflow of call center agents to hit your goals. Here’s how you can optimize call center workflow.

• Make an organizational chart to keep track of who is handling what, available tools, and most importantly, how enquiries are assigned.
• Decide how you are going to entertain support tickets whether on the basis of first-come and first-serve basis or channel, and customer customer basis.
• Segment customer service requests based on type: marketing, sales, etc.
• Try implementing unique approaches to improve workflow efficiencies, like entertaining responses from your customers, management, and agents.

Work on Average Handle Time (ATH) and other Important Metrics

Average Handle Time is a predominant KPI to measure call center efficiency. It measures the average time customers spend on a call, inclusive of hold time and talk time. A low AHT indicates good agent performance, but you should also consider other vital metrics to measure call center efficiency.

Many call center agents find it difficult to reduce AHT as sometimes resolving queries quickly can negatively impact first call resolution, and you end up increasing repeated calls. Instead, start focusing on improving other metrics like critical business metrics, customer critical metrics, and process critical metrics. Adhering to these metrics will certainly improve call center performance.

Use Self-Evaluating Performance Tools for Feedback Loops

It has been seen that empowered employees perform better and derive better job satisfaction from their jobs. They have incredible zeal to reach their goals and provide unmatched customer service. You can further help them enhance their efficiency by implementing call center agent feedback loops. Here are a few ways you can help boost your call center efficiency by creating feedback loops.

• Use call center agent scorecards and link their performance metrics to your business goals. The scores will encourage them to work harder towards their goals.
• Discuss about their soft skills, compliance and outcomes. And motivate them to keep working on their lacunas.
• Who doesn’t like kind words? We, humans, love to hear good things about ourselves. Apply the same trick of verbally acknowledging your employees and rewarding them with timely positive feedback or gifts. When you reward top performers, fellow call center employees will get motivated and work hard to surpass those records.

You need to dive deep into the performance metrics of your call center agents and identify areas of improvement. Outfit your call center agents with the right technology and solutions that help them streamline QA processes and improve agent productivity. The quick and easy way to improve efficiency of your call center operations is to switch to cloud based call center solutions. Trust us, you will thank us later! 

By following the tips mentioned above and taking advantage of the best call center solutions, your call center will run efficiently while ensuring maximum customer satisfaction.