We live in a day and age in which work is all about both quality and quantity, so businesses thrive on being productive while not sacrificing performance.
While that’s not always easy to achieve, it’s where the business world is heading. And if you hope to stay competitive, you need to go down that path as well. To help with this, below are five tips for improving your call center’s performance.
Never stop teaching your employees and provide feedback
This is invaluable and, for some reason, always goes under the radar. While you might not want to be a micromanager, you still need to constantly teach your employees best practices, especially if you incorporate new strategies or a new product/service.
However, you don’t want to simply point out when your employees aren’t doing things properly — you also want to give them positive feedback when they do a good job.
We sometimes incorporate bad habits, run shortcuts, and don’t double-check our work when we’ve been doing a task for an extended period of time, and this can lead to careless mistakes. It’s up to the manager to point out these mistakes as soon as they happen so they don’t become the norm.
Sharing best practices via real examples is a harder task, because you don’t always know when things are going to go perfectly in a call center setting. However, you can do this by showing a call that was recorded and monitored, or by having your best agent (perhaps yourself) perform a call with a customer while your employees listen.
This gives your employees an example of what best practices are while also giving them something to work off of. It might be important to point out when your customer service representatives are doing something wrong, but you also have to give them an all-star example to show them what you expect.
Take care of your employees
If you want to provide a quality product or service to your customers, then you have to take care of your employees. After all, these are your workers: the people who carry out your brilliant strategies and ideas.
Everyone has different managing styles, but some ways to take care of your employees are by being flexible (regarding their work, schedules, etc.), providing them with incentives for doing good work, and creating an environment that’s fun yet also prioritizes work. The list could go on and on.
By taking care of your employees, you increase retention rate and make their jobs more fulfilling, which leads to better work. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.
Build relationships with your customers
Businesses that tend to get the best reviews are ones that build relationships with their customers. Incorporating quality customer service makes the customer experience better and it leads to their questions and concerns being answered.
While some businesses like to cut corners, it’s never a good option to cut corners in the customer service department. Build relationships with your customers and have the best customer service center in your industry — those are the types of qualities that will help you stand out from the competition.
Incorporate call center software
If you want to improve your call center’s performance, then you need the right tools, equipment and contact center software. Call center software alone can make your agents more efficient and productive, as well as lead to higher quality in their work.
As an example: with predictive dialer software, agents won’t have to dial in numbers themselves and wait for someone on the other line to answer. This software dials numbers and connects live callers to agents automatically. This leads to agents making more calls in less time, which can lead to more sales, and of course, a huge boost in call center performance.
