Among the most common problems call centers face are long wait times, long onboarding periods, high personnel turnover rate, and unsatisfactory performance, resulting in customer churn. Moreover, according to a recent Salesforce survey, 59% of service teams shared that the pandemic had exposed their technology gaps.
For most call centers, there’s plenty of space for improvement. What can be done to solve common problems and boost productivity? This article shares a few tips on that.
Improve quality assurance
The ongoing monitoring and advancing the quality of brand communications, including outreach campaigns and customer support, is key to a successful contact center. To evaluate the performance of your employees, use specialized call center KPIs such as First Call Resolution (FCR) or Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). Regular employee training and randomized call records assessment have also proved effectiveness.
Adopting conversational AI technology can help eliminate common human-related quality problems, such as incompetence, inconsistency, or even the wrong tone of voice. With AI systems, you can be sure that your scripts are followed 100%, and every interaction follows the correct tone of voice, which helps achieve and maintain the highest quality of communication.
Ensure omnichannel experience
Customers today prefer to have access to various communication channels apart from the phone, so businesses need to keep up with the trend and ensure their brand communications are available across multiple channels. These might include email, SMS, phone calls, messenger apps such as WhatsApp or Telegram.
While handling all those channels manually can be a pain in the neck, conversational AI is very well-suited for establishing omnichannel interactions with customers. Apart from answering clients’ requests, you can send special offers and news updates, cross-sell, collect feedback, and support customers on their platform of choice.
Minimize wait times
There’s daunting statistics indicating that 44% of customers are not ready to spend more than 2 minutes waiting on the phone, while 13% will not wait at all. That’s why minimizing wait times should be a number one priority for businesses when improving their contact center performance.
One of the solutions is to hire more personnel to be able to handle more phone calls simultaneously. However, this can be costly and requires additional training. An alternative solution is to implement conversational AI technology. Since virtual agents can handle many tasks simultaneously, your clients will no longer have to wait in queues to have their issues addressed.
Use process automation
According to the Quality Assurance and Training Connection (QATC), the average employee turnover rates for the call center industry are between 30-45%, which is the highest rate compared to any other industry. This is mostly due to routine, monotonous work tasks, stressful environment, and high KPIs.
Luckily, many processes can now be easily automated, which is especially helpful considering rising labor costs and increasing customer expectations. Besides, your employees can now be liberated from dull, repetitive tasks and engage in something more creative and meaningful. For example, the contact center AI solution by Neuro.net is capable of handling up to 80% of customer requests without forwarding them to human operators.
Collect feedback from customers
Establishing good relationships with your customers is crucial. 68% of customers turn to another brand because they think a company is indifferent to their needs and opinions. For example, you can make sure that you consistently follow up with clients after each interaction to assess customer satisfaction. Customer feedback is an indispensable source of insights and ideas on how to improve your service or product.
To collect feedback, you can use plenty of tools, from long survey forms and in-depth interviews to short in-app surveys, phone calls, or suggestions to rate recent purchasing experience. Conversational AI solutions can help you speed up this process and ensure up to seven times higher completion rates.
Final thoughts
The contact center is one of the crucial touchpoints that define customers’ perception of your business. The more positive customer experience you’re able to provide, the more satisfied and loyal your customers will be. Often, that’s a matter of timely and polite responses as well as accessibility via different channels.
This is why more and more businesses embrace conversational AI as an optimal solution for customer service, sales, and brand communications. Along with the multichannel, highly personalized, and easily scalable approach, it enables you to make the most of your contact center while letting your employees turn to more interesting and challenging tasks.
