Throw Out the Lifeline: How to Save the Contact Centre
Give your contact centre a sterling reputation with these 5 tips.
Whether your contact centre has personally contributed to it or not, there’s simply no getting around it — contact centres have a bad rep. We’re the people who interrupt your family dinner trying to get you to upgrade your auto insurance, the people who drop your call accidentally, the ones who transfer you to a thousand different departments and ask you to repeat your name and reason for calling each time.
If your contact centre doesn’t do any of the above, you’re on the right track! But sadly, it may not be enough to compensate for the customer service centres that do let down their clients repeatedly. So throw the contact centre a lifeline using these five ways to save the contact centre’s reputation.
1. Don’t Be a Nuisance
This should really go without saying, but a surprising number of contact centres continually are a nuisance to their contacts and customers. If your contact centre makes outbound calls, call during acceptable hours. Don’t phone during standard dinnertime hours, or too late in the evening. Finally, be sure to keep your customer information updated. This includes notes on when specific customers prefer to be contacted. Follow your customer’s preferences to a ‘T’. Even if they don’t notice the thought right away, simply not being a nuisance will help keep you on their good side.
2. Staff Up
Make sure you staff up properly. In a 2013 study by dialogtech, average customer hold time across businesses of all sizes was found to be 56 seconds. Hold time was the longest among small companies, possibly due to a lack of adequate resources. Since long hold times are one of the things that infuriate clients most, making sure you have enough agents on staff at any given time is essential to saving your contact centre’s reputation.
3. Ask the Pros
Customer service can be a tricky department to manage. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by call volume, or simply want to improve your first-contact resolution and customer engagement, consider outsourcing to a third-party provider. Third-party customer service providers are experts in their field, with extensive training on how to handle customer complaints and inquiries. This can also be a great way to offer around-the-clock customer assistance in both official languages.
4. Switch to Customer-Centric
Today, customer-centric is the way to go. In fact, more and more businesses are shifting their views of customer service into more progressive and proactive ideas of customer care. To ensure that your contact centre is customer-centric enough, don’t get bogged down by surface level metrics. Metrics like Average Handle Time may seem important for keeping costs to a minimum, but when examining the bigger picture, it’s more important that your agents are trained to prioritize customer care over getting them off the phone. Here are some valuable customer-centric metrics to keep an eye on:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): This metric ranks the effectiveness of your service based on the likelihood that your customers will recommend your business to others.
- First Contact Resolution (FCR): First contact resolution tracks the frequency with which your agents are able to solve customers’ issues on first contact. FCR means there is no need for transfers, repeat contacts or follow-ups, making this a win-win for your contact centre and customers.
- Hold Time: This is one surface-level metric you don’t want to ignore. Again, staffing up or outsourcing your overflow can help you get a handle on average hold time to make for happier customers.
5. Stay Up-to-Date
One of the biggest contact centre frustrations among callers is being transferred to different departments or different channels, having to repeat their basic information and reason for calling each time. Staying up-to-date in the contact centre means enabling the right technology that can provide seamless integration between channels. Focusing on a multi-channel customer experience in which your agents can efficiently and effectively mine recorded data on each customer is a major step in the right direction toward improving your contact centre’s reputation.
By using these five tips, you can pull your contact centre out of the sea of bad reputations and into safer territory. Modern advancements in customer service means that if your business can’t rise to the challenge of providing customer satisfaction in an increasingly demanding industry, you’ll get left in the dust of bad reviews.
For more information on how to throw your contact centre a much-needed lifeline, download our free whitepaper.
