As an essential customer service channel, voice is capable of establishing the most intimate communication with your customers. With every single call, your company can either gain or lose potential customers.
Having a well-functioning outsourced call center is paramount for excellent customer service and high client retention. However, emerging digital trends and technology takeover made it harder for companies to nail down their call center performance. Optimizing your call center might feel like an uphill climb, but satisfied consumers are worth the effort.
In this article, we’re going to examine the five crucial steps for call centers to excel at customer service in the digital market. Make sure you follow each step carefully to delight your customers and keep the score high.
The Fundamentals of Call Center Efficiency
Making the call center work in the most efficient way is about leveraging several elements at a time: human resources, cutting-edge technology, costs, and tech-savvy customers’ needs.
For this reason, call center efficiency is defined by many different factors, among which the most important are:
- Operational efficiency: The processes established in the call center, the metrics, quality of the service, and problem-solving procedures.
- Cost efficiency: The profitability of the call center and the strategies to reduce costs and retain the quality of the service provided.
- Resource efficiency: The support agents who are the backbone of the entire call center and the proper equipment that agents require.
Each of these elements of call center efficiency is part and parcel of high-standard customer service. Let’s see what companies can do and what steps they should take to step up their game in a new digital reality.
Step 1: Cloud Migration
Moving your call center to the cloud ensures fast and effective progress and increased operational performance. Cloud call centers can accelerate their performance due to advanced features and, thus, benefit in many different ways:
- Integration with helpdesk or CRM;
- Call monitoring;
- Reduced time to deploy the call center;
- Scalability;
- Technical support backup.
Step 2: Service Automation
Call centers cannot neglect the fact that technology plays a pivotal role in achieving customer service success. Therefore, bringing in technological solutions is your golden ticket to call center optimization.
Your team can consider adding automatic call distribution systems or automate all the manual processes in the call center. For example, you can implement smart voice- and chatbots based on artificial intelligence to correctly distribute the work between human agents and self-service technology.
Step 3: Cost Optimization
The bottom line of your call center performance is the ability to run smooth customer service in the most cost-effective manner. Reducing costs should never undermine your customer experience.
Digital technology can come in handy when companies want to cut down the expenses of their call centers. These are the crucial cost optimization options for call centers to deploy to reap the benefits of technology:
- Self-service technology;
- The right balance between agents and technology to increase FCR;
- Collecting customer data to better equip your agents.
Step 4: Artificial Intelligence
Customer support agents handle massive volumes of customer requests daily, and AI is here to alleviate their work. With AI technology, human input in customer service is significantly augmented to the extent that both agents and clients benefit from faster and better quality service.
Leveraging AI technology is a great solution to boost agents’ performance and human resource efficiency in general. In addition to the service automation step, AI can be particularly helpful with these novel trends:
- AI-powered client assistants;
- Voice-based AI;
- Predictive call routing;
- Mindful segregation of duties between human agents and AI technology;
But keep in mind that the human touch is far more appreciated than ever in the digital era. AI (for now) can’t provide the same level of emotional connection as human agents when talking to your customers.
Step 5: Going Virtual
We can’t stress enough the role of technology in customer service. In particular, cloud solutions are valuable assets that can transform your call center from scratch and make it all set for the technology-driven future. One of such technologies is a virtual call center.
Setting up a virtual call center is an alternative option yet a good remote strategy with many promising benefits that can cover all the previous steps, like reducing costs, adding flexibility, fostering agent productivity, and harnessing the use of technology. Most importantly, you get to expand the geographical scope of your call center with this one step.
Concluding Thoughts
Having a call center accomplishing all the established organizational objectives in the constantly changing marketplace is a tricky business. The demand for a high-quality, customer-centric service aligned with the most recent technological trends is rapidly soaring.
These five steps towards a better call center performance can not only help your business grow but also get it ready for any technological upheaval that might soon disrupt the entire industry.
