5 Signs You Should be Investing More into your Customer Service Teams
If your company still views the contact center as an excess expenditure, it’s time to rethink your perspective on things. It takes dedication, training, and constant innovation to foster and build a team of successful customer service agents. Let’s look at ways in which you could be investing more into your customer team and how that could lead to improved profits.
- Tons of Complaints on Social Media
Before social media, the only way to complain was word of mouth and picking up the phone to complain directly. Now customers can go to the Internet and tell, potentially, millions of people what’s wrong. If your business is experiencing a lot of hate on social media, it’s time to step up the customer service team. The team should be reaching out to each individual complaint.
- Spike in Call Volumes
Some days are busier than others and if you notice that your call center is experiencing a spike in the volume of calls then you need to be prepared. One way to manage a spike in phone calls is using call-back technology. This allows for customers to leave their numbers and even a message regarding the call. When an agent is available then they call the customer back. This minimizes waiting time, which everyone hates anyway.
- Long Hold Times
Speaking of wait times… If you’ve been noticing a lot of complaints about long wait times then it might be time to hire a few more agents. Sometimes a bit of retraining can help speed up phone calls. Additionally, you can add call-back technology as previously mentioned. This helps to avoid, and sometimes, eliminate long wait times.
- Poor Customer Loyalty
Retaining customers and earning repeat ones isn’t exactly easy in today’s world. With tons of alternatives at all different price points, customers now have no problem walking away from one brand and walking on over to another. If you notice a spike in customers dropping from your brand, it might be time to reconsider what your center’s approach is as far as customer retention.
- No Web or Mobile Support
Not everyone likes talking on the phone. But the rise of the Internet, email, and online chat platforms doesn’t mean that the end of the call center agent’s job is near. No, in fact, there’s a whole new sector of what an agent can do. It’s essential to your customer service strategy to include a live chat or a call-back option online. Live chats allow agents and customers to discuss and solve problems in real time. Sometimes people have trouble making phone calls and live chat options helps to serve those customers who can’t call.
Finding ways to satisfy both your customers and your customer service teams can be a tricky feat. It’s important to have well trained and educated customer service reps in order to have happy customers. Investing in the team that speaks and interacts directly with your customers is crucial to the success of your business.
Call Center Agents Needs
No matter what job anyone takes they want to feel respected and like they’re going somewhere. No one likes the feeling of a dead-end job or a job where they feel like they’re just a cog in the machine. Employee retention is crucial as training new employees can be very time consuming and expensive. Here are a few reasons why your call center agents might be leaving sooner than you’d like.
- No Career Path
One of the main reasons people quit their call center job is because of the lack of upward career path. Your call center agents know the customers better than anyone else. Better than the CEO, the marketing team, even the people in the stores. They know what they like and what they don’t like. This means that these agents are a highly valuable resource. Encouraging agents to build their skillset can result in positive career moves for the agent and the business.
- Lack of Agent Empowerment
It’s such a great feeling when you feel like you’re making a difference at work for the people around you. If agents don’t feel empowered they don’t feel valued. Empowering agents beyond support calls and allowing them to make critical decisions can help to create strong, knowledgeable, and loyal employees.
- Toxic Environment
As much employee screening as you might do before hiring a new hire, some bad apples still slip through the cracks. Unpleasant co-workers or an unpleasant environment can cause you to lose quality agents for seemingly no reason. That’s why it’s important to weed out bad agents so they don’t force out the good ones.
- Not Enough Money
For many people working at a call center is their main source of income. Everyone is working to make ends meet and no one wants to work a job that only ends up making their life harder for little money. Offering promotions and raises to deserving agents can help to improve employee morale. Not only that, but promotions and raises show that you recognize the effort and work ethic the agent has.
- Lacking the Right Tools
Sometimes customer service agents get customers frustrated because they themselves don’t have access to the right technology needed to keep customers happy. This could be anything from call-back technology to live chat. By providing agents with the best technology available to customer service agents, you are ensuring that agents can do their job to the best of their ability.
There’s a multitude of factors as to why someone stays or leaves a job they seemed to enjoy. However, the ones listed here are the top 5 that many agents who leave a workplace they initially enjoyed. By ensuring the happiness and satisfaction of your customer service agents, you are ultimately ensuring the happiness and satisfaction of your customers. These agents have direct and intimate access to your customers. So why wouldn’t you want them to be as happy and satisfied at work as possible?
4 Tips to Improve your Call Center’s Effect on your Business
If you have a business, utilizing a call center is a critical move to ensure success for your business. It’s one of the few strategic ways to engage with your customers, get feedback, know what is working and what isn’t, and ultimately use this information to improve on your business practices. On a surprising note, many business owners fail to measure their call center’s practice and success through a range of important metrics. These metrics include first call resolution, adherence to a schedule, self-service accessibility, contact quality, and customer satisfaction. Let’s look at how you can improve the business process of the call center you use and attain outstanding results for your company.
- Streamline your Marketing Effort
You don’t need to break the bank in marketing campaign efforts. You can utilize online and offline methods at cost-effective rates. Call centers can help you monitor your social bookmarking, manage your social media platforms chat features, and ultimately answer any questions regarding any confusion surrounding any present or past marketing efforts.
- Assemble the Right Team
No matter how well trained your team may be, every position isn’t for everybody. This means that some people will excel at customer service, while others, no matter how hard they try, may just suck. Many company owners find themselves complaining that their call center agents are inexperienced. This leads to poor results.
- Invest in Your Employees
Whether it’s your call center agents or your employees in-store or in-office, investing in your employees is a wise business decision. The call center is your company’s focal point. If it fails, it’ll not only affect your company’s performance, but also the business process. To correct this, you need to constantly come up with innovative ideas and strategies that will keep you ahead of your competitors. Innovation sure drives outstanding results for every company. With innovative ideas, for instance, you can come up with toll free lines for a particular period of the day, redefine the way your employees respond to queries by customers, and the response they give after each enquiry. This will make your company unique, and improve your business process too.
- Deliver Value
Value, Value, Value. It’s a word that’s thrown around a lot in business across all industries. There’s a reason for this. Without value there is no purpose in creating or buying a product or service. Employees should be adding value to the customer experience every single time they interact with a customer. Whether this is at the call center, in-store, or in-office.
Whether your call center is providing inbound, outbound, or a help desk service business owners need to help manage these centers so that they do not have to bear losses. By investing their time and money into employees of both ends of the customer service segment, business owners are guaranteeing success. If you want to learn more about how your business could benefit from utilizing a call center, find out more online today.
Call Centers And Chat
There are several call centers that deal with different call center processes and so they have different types of customers. Some will have visitors who actively engage with the website while others are more quiet about their activity level while visiting a site. Therefore it is so important to find ways to increase use engagement with your website. Even though call centers are masters in their domain of knowing different techniques with which to satisfy customers, the Internet has created a whole new world of interaction. Building trust is an essential part of business and call center job to retain customers. Let’s look at five ways in which you can bring more customers by being proactive with chat.
- Customize the Chat Invitation
Websites which have a live chat option, they are more likely to get visited by the customers as they pay double attention to the same. Customizing the chat option is one of the best ways to attract most customers towards your website and the services you offer. By using the live chat support in an outbound calling services, you can trigger the site visitors, manage the customer relations, and contact potential customers and so on.
- Customer Data Protection
With chat options, some customers may be leery about discussing sensitive information over a relatively informal platform like an instant chat box. There should be clear policies and provisions regarding services and efforts. Make sure that customers know all the rules and regulations about the data that they share. Building trust between customers and agents and business is so important. There are too many options out there for customers to run to.
- Optimize Chat Button Placement
Next most important things you need to know about the outbound calling pro-active chats is that you need to optimize the chat buttons placements. It is because it is the most visible option in your entire website. Make sure the chat button is not only limited to the website’s homepage, it should be available on each page of the website. This way people do not have to get back on the home page if they want chat assistance. Of any sort with the call center agents.
- Option to Quit
There are many customers who like to be notified about new products, services or any discounts available to any products of their choices. Chat is a great way to let them know as soon as they enter the site about these new happenings. However, if you give them a choice of quitting at any moment while making a purchase, you could win their trust. For instance, brand emails must always have an unsubscribed option so that the customers can get rid of unwanted emails or if they’re not interested in your services. Make sure you always ask for permission before sending notifications on mobile devices
In order to build a business reputation and brand recognition it’s important to optimize business practices to fit the needs and lifestyle of customers from all walks of life. Find out how call centers, of both inbound and outbound, can help your business grow.
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