Meta Description: Contact centre efficiency is one way of improving customer experience and enhancing productivity. Learn how to boost this area of your business on our blog.
Contact centre agents are often regarded as the face of your business, and rightly so. These are the people who are always in direct contact with the clients or suppliers. Making their work environment as efficient as possible goes a long way in improving their service.
Remember, as a business, you only have one opportunity of leaving a good first impression. As such, boosting contact centre efficiency will help you attract and retain as many customers as possible.
But how are you going to achieve that? First, it’s worth noting that operational efficiency is the ratio of the output gained as a function of whatever investment you’ve put in place. Therefore, it’s all about the resources you provide your employees to work with and how you integrate new tools into the system.
Here are a few ideas you can consider in your contact centre amelioration process:
- Embrace modern technology
There have been a lot of advancements in the world of technology, especially in the 21st century. Following these innovations, every business today is employing modern systems to meet the ever-changing consumer demands.
Therefore, for you to remain competitive, you’ll also need to integrate new tools into your contact centre’s operation system. Perhaps one feature you might want to invest your money in is Contact Centre as a Service. (CCaaS)
So, what is it, and how do you benefit from CCaaS in the UK or anywhere you’re based? Well, this is a cloud-based solution that allows you to purchase only those services you need to make your team productive and improve customer experience.
In the long run, this reduces your overall operational costs while enhancing scalability. It also reduces the need to hire an internal IT team.
- Utilise skill-based routing
Every agent has a specific area where they’re regarded as the experts. If you don’t have this diversity in your team, you might want to consider this aspect in your recruitment.
First, make a list of all essential skills needed for your contact centre to run smoothly and find an ‘expert’ agent for each. Once you have this information, you’ll need to feed it into your database so that callers can be routed to specific agents depending on the issue at hand.
Skill-based routing ensures that a customer’s issue is resolved by the first agent with whom they share their details. It can be quite frustrating when a client is transferred from agent to agent, and each time, they have to explain their problem.
That’s why many companies are currently using First Contact Resolution (FCR) as one of the metrics to measure performance in their contact centres. Utilising any available skill-based routing tools will help you avoid the aforementioned frustrations and improve the overall efficiency.
- Implement short-hour shifts
As mentioned earlier, operational efficiency at any workplace refers to the quality of the output vis-a-vis the investments. However, regardless of how much you spend on computers and the workplace environment, the agents might not be as productive as you’d like if they don’t receive enough emotional support. Remember, these people are subjected to various forms of pressure and mental stress because they deal with different types of customers on a day-to-day basis.
To ensure that you get the best out of your employees, it would be prudent to give them enough time to rest. Of course, this might be somewhat tricky for smaller companies, but investing in more agents will do the trick.
This way, you will be able to split the team into various shifts. With enough time to relieve the daily pressure and relax, agents will be able to provide quality service to the callers. This will improve not only the customer experience but also the productivity of this department.
- Offer continuous team training
Another technique you can employ to boost the efficiency of your contact centre agents is team training. Of course, it’s always recommended that you hire competent employees who understand what’s required of them. However, with the rapid technological advancements, it’s easy to get lost along the way. Therefore, it’s imperative that you offer continuous training to all team members, even the most experienced ones.
Every successful company has regular refresher courses that every contact centre agent must attend. These training sessions are meant to keep the employees informed on any significant changes within the industry. To implement this policy effectively in your business, you will need to come up with a proper schedule to ensure that every agent attends the session at least once per month, quarterly, or annually.
Conclusion
Boosting your contact centre’s efficiency won’t happen overnight. It takes good planning, training, and identifying areas that need improvement. If you evaluate your current systems, processes, and agent skills, you’ll identify where you need to invest more to improve service delivery. Fortunately, technology also provides improved ways to make contact centres more efficient.
