A call centre is a dynamic workplace, where every call brings in a new challenge. As with most customer service roles, a call centre professional has to be tenacious and patient in handling demanding customers. The stress that a call centre professional experiences on a daily basis can bring down morale.
To keep spirits high, it’s important for customer service managers to properly handle the customer service team and get the best out of them without overwhelming them with work.
To manage the customer service team efficiently, different measures can be employed. These range from steps that need to be taken by employees to changes that a company has to incorporate in its processes.
Additionally, a company can use a call centre solution to increase the productivity and efficiency of call agents. Call centre solution help employees create incoming tasks quickly, track them with ease and escalate as required.
To make things simpler, here are a few tips that managers can follow to improve the performance of their customer service team.
Customer service vision is defined as the type of customer service employees are expected to provide. This allows an organisation to set measurable expectations for the customer service team.
If the expectations from a customer service team is pre-defined, it’s easy to devise strategies and achieve desired results. Clearly defined customer service visions can also help service reps prioritize tasks based on first come first serve or any other acceptable service model.
Once you have a customer service vision in place, it’s time to find a way to align it with the overall business goals. Business goals often include maximising revenue, reducing costs, brand strengthening and improving customer experience.
To align goals, corporate leaders need to participate in discussions with employees, train them for customer service skills, ensure their individual development while fulfilling company goals, and establish policies for better customer service.
By finding ways to align customer service vision with business goals, companies can come up with a concrete plan of action. This in turn will give the customer service team a better understanding of its goals and how to pursue them.
Corporate leaders should make time to talk to their subordinates and listen to their opinions and feedback. Since a team stays in the trenches together, it can come up with practical ways to improve work efficiency. Further, when corporate leaders express interest in learning about challenges faced by a customer service team, employees are likely to feel valued and perform dedicatedly.
Another reason for initiating one-on-one conversation with team members is to identify the hurdles in their performance. Also, there are employees who are being harassed or bullied at work. Such unfavourable work conditions impact their performance. Having a private conversation with supervisors would help those employees vent their frustration.
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Agent scheduling plays an important role in determining a call centre’s performance. Too few agents scheduled and customers have to wait for long. Too many agents on the floor and company resources are spent unnecessarily.
As a corporate leader, your responsibility is to identify peak calling hours, and efficiently schedule call agents. Use a call centre solution to track the hours of higher call volumes in a day and schedule agents accordingly. Call centre solution can also help in routing every customer call to the one who is ready to attend the call and provide apt solutions.
By evaluating the performance of customer reps via call centre solutions, managers can be aware of productivity gap and areas that need improvement. Employee performance can be further used to deploy training and workshops accordingly.
Additionally, remember to share the feedback with service agents and let them know of key areas where they are performing well and where they can do better. When your agents are aware of their improvement areas and they receive the support to do better, their confidence shoots up.
Customer feedback is another good way to understand the problems faced by them and how to improve their experience. Train your employees to collect feedback from customers without pushing them for it and have a mechanism to record their feedback. A call centre solution comes with CRM tools to record customer calls.
The pain-points extracted from the feedback can also be used to set team goals. For example, if customers are dissatisfied with call waiting time, then the organizational goal should be to reduce the time spent on each call. Accordingly, agents can be trained to resolve problems faster in order to spend less time on each call.
Aside from their feedback, also have calls analysed to identify customer FAQs. If there is a common problem that customers are reporting, work on it to reduce the need for customers to reach out. This saves time for both customers and the call agents, and the latter can focus on handling more complex issues.
Get the best out of your customer service team using the pointers above. Remember, listening to your employees goes a long way in understanding their needs and effectively managing them.
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