If you think that a call center is just a necessity that every successful brand needs, you’re wrong. We’ve seen how even the biggest brands in the world get burned on YouTube for a caller’s experience with dealing with subpar customer support and product purchase.
Call experience quality right now is seen as one of the key differentiators. This means your agents – not even the service or product – can determine whether someone will buy from you or not.
The good news, you can get help to access technologies to help you achieve success. Providers like Freeje FR are creating customized solutions to help businesses, offices, and call centers design a technology system fitting their needs.
The ultimate objective: enhanced customer experience
This is an unending task. As the industry evolves, so do the customer’s expectations of call centers.
Forrester published that more than 70 percent of enterprises see their customers’ experience as their top priority. But a smaller percentage is actually willing to invest in technologies to aid with that goal.
So expectedly, this is where call centers and businesses start to fail. In the absence of the right technological infrastructure to help them, continuously enhancing customer experience may be impossible.
The ingredients to success
You can have all the most advanced technologies available today. But if they’re not able to respond to the demands of your customers and the work requisites of agents, consider them a waste of money.
Therefore, the technologies should be able to supply these ingredients:
Efficiency: As with any organization, efficiency is very important. But with agencies, this means maximizing the effectiveness of an agent each shift. For example, this can mean the percentage of issues resolved per day and the number of calls received.
But at the same time, efficiency applies on the customer end. How long does the average customer spend on a call? How long do they wait before getting assigned to an agent? How many of them are satisfied with the service?
These, and more, are all questions of efficiency. And without low efficiency can potentially damage your brand.
Streamlining: How easy is it to get a hold of information that can help agents assist their customers? How easy is it for leaders to detect potential rooms for improvement?
When talking about streamlining, it’s normally about the process. Red tapes have no place in a service-based industry as they would slow down processes. And between those waiting times are lost opportunities to impress customers and turn them into loyal followers.
Automation: Automation is a call center’s best friend. The goal of automation is to let your agents focus on nurturing their relationship with the clientele and improve their experience.
The important thing here is maintaining the human touch to the communication, so it doesn’t sound robotic and impersonal. It may have become a buzzword that you hear in almost all industries, but it’s still a very important ingredient to success.
The technologies to help you get there
SMS apps: Texting may have lost people to social media messengers, but it’s gaining traction again as a tool in this industry. If you want to connect without wasting your agent’s or the customer’s time on the phone, this is the way to go.
Business Intelligence: People forget that even on its own, this is an extremely service-oriented business. So to ensure the longevity of a business, you need to maintain a certain quality of client support.
With this solution, you’ll be able to track results and determine potential rooms for improvement. Business Intelligence or BI can help set standards for your agents, based on certain metrics like hold times and client satisfaction rating.
Predictive dialers: You can’t expect that the people at the other end of the line would answer a call, especially from an unknown number.
What a predictive dialer does is dial multiple numbers at the same time. For example, the response rate is at 20 percent. Then, the dialer can be set to dial four or five numbers to maximize the agent’s time spent on calls.
And now, these have more features designed to help improve the response rate from your list of numbers.
Automatic call distributor: You can think of it as a funnel that distributes water to three glasses. Instead of directing all traffic to just one of these glasses, it’s distributed so they don’t get overflowed so quickly.
This is the logic behind this technology – it assigns the calls so customers are responded to more quickly while distributing the same amount of work to all agents.
Depending on the particular needs as assessed by leaders, this list may change. But the most crucial thing is whatever technologies are used must help with propelling you to success.