How Can I Improve My Call Center Performance?
The modern business world is fast-paced. Customers want to get things done as quickly as possible, even when on a call with a call center agent. There’s a high chance that customers may lose interest in a brand or product due to a negative call experience. One sure way to avoid losing customers while making the best first impression is through your contact center. Voice can help you with an automotive call center, but you also need to put in the effort to deliver an amazing experience to customers.
This article offers tips on improving call center performance while boosting customer satisfaction and retention.
Defining Performance Standards
Many call centers fail because they do not have strict guidelines clearly defining their performance standards. Without a defined performance benchmark, it is easy to fall below the line and deliver sub-par services to customers. However, call center supervisors and agents can begin improving performance by setting clear quality and communication standards.
In setting the right standards for your call center, you should consider the following;
- How do we define coaching and quality monitoring excellence?
- Are our team leaders and coaches constantly meeting expectations?
- Do advisors have a standard for monitoring performance and customer satisfaction?
Clearly, answering these questions and some more helps you understand where you are and what you need to do to improve call center performance.
Focus on Intrinsic Motivation
Motivating your contact center team can be challenging. This is because performance can be difficult to scale, and assessment may sometimes be biased. However, setting a standard scale for periodic assessment and monitoring may be a better approach.
These assessments can come with motivations and incentives that drive the entire team into a healthy competition. You can choose to recognize the best-performing agents or team members, pushing them to become better and pushing others to want to do better.
Educate on Best Practices
Think of it this way, ignorant call center agents do not know what they are doing wrong, and this may cost you a lot of money. However, you can call their attention to these bad habits by sharing the best practices of a call center agent with them.
With best practices, each agent reevaluates themselves, understands where they are dropping the ball, and re-adjusts to meet the latest quality standards. Combining best practices with incentives and intrinsic motivation can drive your call center team to compliance.
Introduce Team Meetings (on-site or off-site)
One tree does not make a forest. A good way to build a strong and healthy relationship within your team is to encourage socialization. What better way to encourage this than to introduce team huddles which can be done virtually or physically?
It is important to get a feel of what your call center agents want and how to work with them to achieve it. With these team meetings, agents get to share their challenges and the solutions that have worked for them. It can fast become an in-house casual training session where team members discuss newer ways to achieve set goals while bringing the team up to the same quality standard.
Focus on Employee Empowerment
As business owners, employee empowerment should not just be another buzzword that appears in papers without real meaning. Employees are likely to stay in their job when they learn more and improve themselves.
This means that you should focus on education and training. Providing the right avenue for your employees to become better at what they do can help them feel fulfilled. However, you should also acknowledge that employees have significant control over what they do, how they do it, and when they do it.
Introduce Workplace Flexibility
Call center advisors are a key part of your call center success. Being humans, they need a little bit of motivation every now and then to improve their performance and conduct. Flexibility in the workplace may be all that is needed to achieve this goal.
You can begin by creating a chance for advisors to move from one department to another in the call center. This gives them a chance to learn more and function in the capacity where they are best at. You can also create more roles wherein advisors who have become subject matter experts can apply their specific expertise to improve the call center and its performance.
While these are great, they also need some form of monetary gain. This can be done by improving their bonuses or introducing flexible plans like annual leave hours instead of in days. Measuring the annual leave in hours gives them a better opportunity to split their leave into more sectors.
You can also offer advisors a chance to build their schedule around the times that work best for them or introduce a work-from-home option but with strict performance requirements.
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How Can I Improve My Call Center Performance?
