Managing a contact center can be a very hectic and challenging process, as there are only a few other jobs that compare. Imagine your contact center as a battlefield with your contact center right bang on in the middle, with armies present along every side. As a contact center manager, you need to be able to put up a fight on multiple fronts. Your job revolves around fending off demands from multiple competing parties, such as the management you deal with, the technological changes, the customers you interact with and the employees that work with you.
In this blog, we will look at understanding the core contact center problems and how you can continue to meet the expectations of both yourself and your organisation. Let’s take a closer look at understanding the ten most common call center concerns with the most helpful fixes. Remember that hiring is incredibly important and hard, retention of employees can be much harder. Your employees can face a burnout rate if they work too hard and if they’re not careful enough, and the worst is when employees show up to work only when they feel like it.
Let us take a deeper look at the most common contact center challenges, which are:
When employees continue to take unscheduled absences, it can cost them a lot of money. It can end up costing the business a lot every single year for every employee, which can eat away at your customer service and general employee morale. To manage the leave of absence, we recommend that you look in the following ways:
Understanding patterns in absences
whether the holidays are seasonal or they need to correspond with holidays. It can help with identifying the root causes of absences and will also help you.
Setting a policy for absences
You need to encourage employees in giving notice or making arrangements in the event of a scheduled absence.
Hold all your employees accountable
Once your leave policy is established and the expectations are clear, then you need to enforce your absence policy.
When you lose an employee, you have lost all the time, training, resources and effort that has gone into that person. Employee turnover in an industry is at an all-time high and can also start to hurt your bottom line. Contact centers have seen very high attrition rates as it’s a high-pressure job that sees very few rewards. Here are a few ways that you can reduce your overall contact center turnover rate:
You need to give your employees the necessary tools that they need to excel at their job. There are other important tools that employees need to excel at their jobs such as call recording, call monitoring, interactive voice response (IVR), call analytics, multiple communication channels and computer telephony integration (CTI).
Maintaining employee enthusiasm in an industry is difficult, as more than half of the workforce is not engaging and is looking to leave their current jobs. In a contact center, the enthusiasm gap is even more significant, and the work is more monotonous and stressful which can lead to employees becoming more demoralised leading to absenteeism and turnover.
A large majority of customers prefer to solve problems all on their own, and they appreciate it whenever a company makes it easy to find the solutions without needing to engage with a customer service representative. It is important to increase overall customer satisfaction which leaves all of your employees free to handle complicated customer concerns.
The overall number of opportunities for callers to serve themselves on their own terms also significantly increases, which leaves your employees to handle more complicated customer concerns. Some of the various ways that it is possible to accomplish this, are due to the following:
Implementing simple, easy-to-navigate IVR menus
By setting up a few simple phone menus, it will include a section with answers to the most frequently asked questions.
Over various communication channels
When customers are not able to find what they are looking for, in their knowledge base or IVR menu, it allows them to engage with their customer service with the communication channels that they prefer the most such as social media, text, video, email and chat.
Building greater engagement
Route Mobile’s Click To Call is a fantastic way of offering real-time engagement between the agent, and customer in just a single click.
Maintaining a sense of anonymity
Route Mobile’s Call Masking can help maintain anonymity through the use of a virtual phone number.
People usually call a contact center whenever they encounter a certain problem that they can’t solve for themselves. Thus, you can assume that when people are on call, they are typically upset and in need of help. More than 20-30% of contact centers’ call volumes have callbacks from customers with unresolved concerns. As customer concerns become more complex than ever, it becomes more difficult to find a solution without multiple touchpoints. Here’s how you go ahead with providing a great resolution:
- Building a common knowledge base by recording common questions and populating them with approved responses.
- You can identify what are the main reasons why customers call the contact center through careful analysis in the first place. We can use the right information for populating our entire knowledge base.
- Use the right information for populating your entire knowledge base.
- Assessing the most important key performance indicators. These metrics that you gather can provide the necessary insights to improve your customer service.
RouteMobile’s Missed Call is a quick, simple, and reliable solution for connecting to your customers with the help of just a simple missed call.
Here are a few suggestions that you can employ to make the most out of the challenges that you are facing:
Empowering employees in helping out their customers
The vast majority of employees in a contact center feel that they do not have the resources or authority in dealing with customer needs.
Utilising the power of automation
You can free up your workload and increase your overall productivity with the power of automation. By using the power of automated menus you can allocate more of your resources and skilled people to answer simple, routine customer queries. It leaves your employees open to handling complex questions all on their own.
Rewarding performance
It is important to incentivise your performance with perks and other awards for meeting all your goals to keep them motivated to continue moving forward.
Deliver feedback in a timely manner
You need to let your employees know how they are doing on a regular basis.
RouteMobile’s Contact Center as a Service Solution is a cloud-based customer engagement solution with a rich and integrated dashboard which allows businesses to add contact center agents, by extending relevant functionalities and adapting to changing business needs.
