We have the top call center best practices you should be following to drive excellence and remain competitive.
The call center industry in the United States is alive and well. With its anticipated growth, it’s imperative for call centers to drive operational performance excellence in order to remain competitive. Failure to do this can result in losing out on valuable customers and top call center talent. We offer a glimpse into the 8 call center best practices that you need right now to retain your best employees and improve the customer experience.
1. Rate Potential Employees
The agents making the calls are very important in serving your customers. Your employees are the first ones to interact with customers, so it’s important to hire talent that will represent the company in a positive manner, motivate other employees, and drive high levels of performance. Consider adding an assessment of your candidates to ensure you are picking the best candidates for your call center.
2. Use Call Scoring and Monitoring
To help drive growth at your call center, it is crucial that you know how your agents are supporting your customers. This will assist in the determination if they require additional training to help them do their jobs more effectively. Plus for the customers, this can help with quality assurance within the call center.
3. Start Coaching Sessions
The advantages of coaching sessions are two-fold: managers can share idea to help boost agent performance and agents get to communicate their impressions on how to improve customer satisfaction. A collaborated meeting between the two can be beneficial because it allows the agent and supervisor to share their unique observations.
4. Determine and Measure Important Metrics
Ensuring a high level of performance for any process is to determine the key performance indicators (KPIs) and then measure them. When measuring how your call center is doing you might be tempted to measure anything and everything. But we forewarned, you should never measure so much that you are overwhelmed with data and performance metrics. Some things to consider tracking include call resolution, average handle time, agent schedule adherence, call abandonment, average hold time, and call abandonment.
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5. Don’t Be So Negative
A typical call center script is upbeat and uses certain key phrases. But it is worth your time to find those negative words that your agents might be tempted to use, or already find themselves using. For example, instead of saying, “I can’t help you. I need to put you on hold.” say something like, “I’m not the best person to assist you. Let me transfer you to an expert that can answer your question. Thank you.”
6. Provide Career Progression Paths
All employees, even call center agents, want to feel that their career has the chance to potentially grow. Another great call center best practice is to outline and then share with your agents a clear path for progression throughout your company. This will help your top agents to be made aware of the opportunities that await them with strong job performance.
7. Make Positive Work Environment
Find new and creative ways to make the physical space in with your agents and managers work as comfortable and pleasant as possible. Consider ergonomic furniture and other desk options to make your employees more pleasing. Posters and artwork that inspires and common area to rest and relax has also been found to increase the performance of your staff.
8. Always Improve
Now that you have followed our other call center best practices, here is one last one. Now that you have introduced a culture of positivity for your employees, always be willing to find new ways to improve. Ask your agents and managers for their ideas and thoughts on a regular basis. This will help them to not only feel valued and appreciated, but positive about the direction of the company. Determine what’s working well and what’s now, and put fixes in place to solve the issues the right way.
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Here’s one last thought. Increasing call center performance takes time. These call center best practices are just a few of the many ways to improve customer interaction and employee satisfaction. Are there any we missed?
What some of the top call center best practices that you have discovered? Share your thoughts in the comments below!