A business’s strength to acquire, retain, and satisfy its customers determines its long-term success. Call centers are a medium for customers to reach you and express their concerns. Solving these problems for customers creates an opportunity for you to be in direct contact with them and convey how much they matter. To make this interaction efficient for businesses and satisfy customers at the same time, it is important to incorporate the latest technology into call center operations.
In spite of most firms claiming to give customer satisfaction a top priority, only 26 percent of callers report a positive experience. Ineffective call center operations lead to unsatisfied customers, which ultimately causes a decline in sales and affects brand image to a great extent.
In today’s highly competitive environment, it takes a customer a second to switch to another service. This is why it is important that businesses not only differentiate themselves from competitors but also provide the highest quality of customer care and support. Here are the ways in which you can seamlessly communicate with your customers by utilizing your resources efficiently.
1. Manage Call Volumes Smartly
IVR allows you to assign numbers based on frequency of  the concerns raised by your customers. Identifying the frequently asked questions and creating automated responses for these can help your customers get solutions in a fraction of the time. This reduces contact with the agents and solves their problem faster. Your agents can now focus their time and energy on customers that have other problems that need human intervention.
2. Live-call Monitoring
Assessing an agent’s response to a customer’s questions in real-time will help identify specific areas of   improvement. You can now pinpoint instances in the conversation the agent could have performed better and guide them accordingly. This enable agents to enhance the quality of service and provide help to customers in a shorter period of time.
3. Intelligent Call Routing
Direct your calls strategically according to department-specific concerns. Through IVR technology you can assign key press that callers can click depending on the concerns they have. This reduces delays caused by the need to transfer the call to the right person. In an instance where the customers click on the wrong number, IVR flow allows them to get back and enter the right option, or agents can easily transfer the call and direct them to the right department.
4. Call Conferencing
Sometimes it takes a team to guide your customer in the right direction. Looping multiple experts on a single call can help get the most optimal solutions faster. If a specific concern raised by the customer needs assistance of a domain expert, the agent can smoothly add them to take over the call and resolve queries thereby increasing first call resolution.
5. Analyze Data
You can easily gather information regarding your call history and overall performance on calls. Key performance indicator is a business tool that is used to evaluate success of a firm. These include metrics like abandon rates, cost/call, number of resolutions, queue time, call completion rate and so on. Analysing these areas can help understand how much to improve in which area and also set future objectives for agents.
6. Automated Information through SMS
Certain information can now be shared with customers through Bulk SMS services. For example, information regarding where the package a customer ordered is. This reduces the need for customers to call and get the necessary information. SMSes also ensure that customers can access the information sent to them as and when required.
7. Improve Agents’ Performance
The real-time data and detailed analytics provides information on how the call center is performing along with the contribution of individual agents. Call recordings/live-call monitoring act as both training and feedback on how the agents can up their game and help them improve their weak areas significantly.
8. Set Business Hours and Enable Voicemail
You can control the date and time you receive calls. These settings allow you to get calls only during the set business hours thus, enabling a systematic approach to the handling of calls. You can see which customers have called during other times and call them back according to your convenience and provide quality assistance. You can also enable voicemail for your customers to leave behind voice messages in off-business hours.
9.Enable Missed Call
Through missed call widgets you can end the call as soon as it rings. In such a way you can get back to interested customers at a more suitable time and also ensure that customers do not have to incur personal costs to reach out to you.
10. Follow-up
Your service does not end with the call, it is important to go the next step and ensure that all the needs of your customers are met. Post the call you can email the customers feedback links, promotional offers, order details, etc. You can also send them this information right then, without needing to disconnect the call. In addition, you can check the acceptable time for you to get in touch with the customer to resolve queries. This ensures customers that they do not have to worry about getting in touch with customer care repeatedly and you can also call at a time convenient to them.
Incorporating these ten key factors into your call center operations will make interactions with your customers more efficient thus, improving customer satisfaction by a great margin. This is what will determine the difference between you and your competitors. By performing optimally on each call you receive, you can ensure that customers get full support post-purchases and increase the likelihood of re-purchases while benefiting from positive word-of-mouth for potential customers too.
(Disclaimer: This is a guest post submitted on Techstory by the mentioned author. All the contents and images in the article have been provided to Techstory by the author of the article. Techstory is not responsible or liable for any content in this article.)
Image Credit: Worldglobalpr.com
About the Author:Â
Aniketh Jain is the co-founder and CEO at Solutions Infini Technologies India Pvt. Ltd., one of Asia’s fastest growing Cloud Communications Company in India. Aniketh efficiently handles Business aspects of the organization.
He is responsible for building strategic partnerships, liaising with network operators, Finance and regulatory authorities, spearheading marketing initiatives, inventing new products & driving sales and he does it all with élan.
