Top 5 Call Centre Best Practices

Posted by Rahul Garg

In this day and age, for businesses, giving proper attention to noncore business functions is equally important, comparing with core competencies. Specifically, call centre operations should be handled with proper care because that’s how you can maintain your customer base for ages.

When a customer, who is upset and seeking reliable solutions to product-related issues, calls a company, only two things are expected — ‘Prompt response’ and ‘Satisfactory answers.’ Here, letting customers down isn’t an option for businesses because this would make a direct negative impact on the brand image and customer lifetime value.

Customarily, two options are left for business owners: ‘Contact a third-party company and enjoy the benefits of call centre outsourcing’ and ‘Run an in-house call centre.’

Multinationals usually go for call centre outsourcing to minimize the hassle related to customer service operations, while SMEs prefer to take matters into their own hands means they run an in-house call centre.

Today, we will disclose the top 5 call centre best practices, which will definitely help those businesses that don’t prefer to take help from external inbound call centre service providers, so let’s get started:

1. Evaluate potential call centre agents’ skills while hiring

To run a successful call centre, it is paramount to have nimble agents as that’s how customer service interactions could be handled in a proper manner. Therefore, employing the right agents is important. For the same, evaluating skills of interviewees during the hiring process seems very crucial.

However, companies running an in-house call centre often don’t take the importance of hiring seriously, which as a negative consequence, results in the employment of incompetent agents. It’s no brainer when you have unskilful agents in call centre operations, productivity levels are bound to dwindle.

Here are some tips to keep in mind while interviewing job candidates for call centre agent profile:

Ask only relevant questions.
Conduct a role-playing activity.
Check the past experience.

2. Converse with agents effectively and periodically

As we have already said, customer-facing agents are the one that helps to run call centre operations with flying colours, so it is vitally important to communicate with them regarding work environment, workload, or even casually. This is so because there is a high possibility agents get frustrated with tedious work or issues occurring during the work. Here, if you don’t talk to them, the problem of agent turnover is likely to arise.

Thus, if you are seeking call handling best practices, communicating with agents effectively and periodically is what you should take into account.

Here are the major benefits of conducting monthly meetings:

Agents are likely to share problems if they have any.
Suggestions will come to pave the way for improvement in call centre operations.
Call handling strategies can be improved.

3. Study and incorporate customer feedback

Agents are not the only one who can help in handling call centre operations but customer feedback can also give an insight into call centre training best practices. Businesses handling customer service queries with the help of in-house call centre agents generally do not study received feedbacks, which automatically, rules out the thought of any new implementation.

As revealed by NewVoiceMedia research, 57% of customers don’t shy about giving feedback regarding recently availed assistance. 37% airs their grievances (or compliments) via social media.

Thus, the best call centre practice says study customer feedback be it positive or negative and then incorporate necessary changes to ensure seamless call centre operations.

4. Focus on the best call centre metrics

Keeping a close eye on crucial metrics has always been one of the best call centre best practices because they provide you analytics on where you are doing well and where you aren’t. However, it is paramount to measure what is important, otherwise, you are likely to end up drowning in a mound of data.

Of course, there are numerous metrics that can be tracked, but you must focus on what really matters. Top 10 best call centre metrics are:

Customer Satisfaction.
First Call Resolution.
Service Level.
Customer Effort.
Net Promoter Score.
Forecast Accuracy.
Average Call Abandonment Rate.
Average Handle Time.
Occupancy rate.
Agent turnover.

Thinking tracking call centre metrics isn’t your cup of tea? Well, it’s time to avail call centre services from a reputed vendor.

5. Give top-notch training to your call centre agents

Giving top-notch training to agents is the best and most obvious call centre practice that must be followed. It is so because if your call centre agents are not properly trained, there is no point in expecting them to deliver during customer interactions.

Businesses handling call centre operations on their own often try to diminish the call centre agent training period, which, in turn, causes unnecessary problems to their reps during interactions with customers. At last, an inferior or average level of assistance gets delivered, which, in turn, makes a negative impact on both the business’s reputation and brand loyalty.

On the other hand, reputed call centres in UK always provide proper training to their agents, which consequently, paves the way for quality assistance. To leave nothing to chance, speech analytics software also gets used, which sheds light on the phraseology used during successful customer service interactions, and that intelligence helps to uplift the quality of call centre agent training programs. It goes without saying, this leads to a team of nimble call centre agents, which points to better operations.

Tags: Call centre best practices Call Centre Services Call Centre Outsourcing