A call center can be the heart of an organization. It is the conduit for ongoing, on-demand communication with people who buy from you and people who work for you.
Managing a call center isn’t what it used to be. With new technology available, it’s easier than ever to get a handle on what happens, when it happens, how it happens, and how to proactively implement best practices for efficient call center management.
Efficiency is truly the name of the game, because the effectiveness of a call center largely relies on your team’s ability to take a high volume of calls while achieving a high level of resolution. Technology is the key.
The call center tech experts at Evolve IP have some ideas for how tech can make running a call center easier. Small, strategic changes and implementing the right tools are a winning combination to getting the results you want. Read on to learn all about it.
Call Center Management Best Practices
The only way to effectively manage a modern call center is to use call center management software, which nowadays means CCaaS solutions. Contact Center as a Service (CCaS) includes streamlined integrations and automation to support center management best practices.
Here are some of the best practices enabled by CCaaS:
- Better customer experiences, made possible by real-time monitoring, reporting, and analytics.
- Major cost savings for companies due to the cloud-based nature of this SaaS product and its flexibility.
- Fast, flawless growth. CCaaS is highly scalable, in part because it is a cloud-based technology and in part because it is designed to scale.
- Reliable and available, without needing extensive tech support or outside assistance to implement, adjust, monitor, and more.
- Better agent training and experiences, which we’ll talk about next.
Related reading: check out the Guide to Contact Center as a Service.
Reduce Call Center Attrition Through Agent Empowerment
Delighting customers is a chief goal of a call center, and it is an important one. However, empowering agents is a noteworthy trend in contact center management. This has gained more attention because call centers feature human-to-human interaction. People are not robots, and call centers that staff people are appealing to customers of all kinds.
Training, Buy-In, and Clarity
There are three initial areas where call center software makes agents feel secure and empowered:
Training — Systems can be used to identify areas in which most agents need to be trained, all the way down to areas where individual agents need to be trained. This training can be digitally delivered to reach remote or in-person call center employees.
Buy In — Reducing attrition is tricky, and the rate of turnover in call centers can be very high. This adversely impacts morale, cooperation, culture, and more. Helping agents succeed is made possible with technology, spotting the aforementioned need for training to resolve problematic patterns before they develop too much.
Clarity — Good tools track agent growth, which brings clarity about an individual’s performance potential and improvement, as well as trends throughout an entire team.
Agent Performance
Call tracking, call recording, voice AI, and similar technologies in a solid CCaaS suite can give management sweeping insights into agent performance.
Call center workforce management software enables you to then reward high-performing agents, setting a gold standard of job performance and incentivizing other agents to follow suit. This is a powerful leadership tool and can have overarching, net benefits that boost employee productivity and satisfaction.
Increase Efficiencies With Call Center Management Software
Choosing the best CCaaS provider is mission-critical. The right call center management software is going to upgrade efficiencies. This is achieved in a variety of ways:
- Systems and processes provide default actions, reducing the time to action (and cognitive load on you as a manager and your team).
- Call center workflow optimization smooths out all of the bumps in the road, making the path to success far easier and ensuring a standard, repeatable process for every call.
- Call center productivity can be accurately measured (total output/total input and other metrics), then that data can be aggregated to give a full picture of operational performance.
- Develop omnichannel strategies, using live calls, live chats, chatbots, automation, routing strategies, and more to simplify and streamline the customer experience.
- Precise monitoring unmasks core issues or inefficiencies. Leadership gains a whole new level of visibility and understanding, arming them with data to make strategic decisions.
With the right tools in place, you can evaluate the effectiveness of customer interactions, which is the ultimate goal of a call center. When customers have great experiences, it mitigates churn risk and can improve revenues through up-selling and cross-selling opportunities.
Empowered agents and delighted customers are the outcomes of employing best practices for efficient call center management.
Active Best Practices for Your Call Center… Today
Call center management best practices don’t happen because you wish them to, and no change happens overnight. However, any call center leadership team has the ability to start making meaningful adjustments… today.
The competition in any market is stiff, and the world is facing constant disruption. Creating a predictably high-performing organization has everything to do with how you treat people: those that call into your call center and those who work there.
Whether it’s agent retention, speech analytics, reporting, or resolving calls more quickly, Evolve IP’s contact center services and solutions can streamline all of these items and more — making your life easier. Get in touch today.
