Top Call Centres Obstacles and how to overcome them?

Posted by Shashvat Vats

Call centres are considered as the front-liner for the customer service task of any business. Businesses avail these services from the top-notch call centres so as to enhance and optimize their entire operation. There is a straight correlation between customer service and productivity. Higher the customer experience is, more becomes the sales figure of the company. But, all is not so well in the world of call centres and outsourcing.

In fact, call centres are considered to hold one of the toughest working environments in the corporate world. The pressure of sales target and constant customer relation communication can lead to some serious issues. These aspects can lead to more number of agents getting absent from their work, higher agent turnover rate and lousy customer service. And all this can really hamper your business’s reputation in a big way. Call centre services provider has to face a lot more than this.

Since the customer expectations have increased, so, a necessity to keep the agents more proficient and efficient arises. Customers now expect the agents to go beyond the script so that if a complex issue comes up, there is no hindrance in offering the solution.

Let’s take a dive into the ocean of outsourcing and see what challenges call centre services vendor in UK are facing along with respective remedy:

1. Attrition rate

One of the biggest issue BPO sector faces is the high employee attrition rate. It becomes quite hard for the UK call centres to keep the agents cramped in a cubicle for 9 to 10 hours conversing with the confused, agitated, and irritated customers. Along with this, generally, the pay of these agents are unfairly low (that’s how businesses avail affordable solutions) with negligible or no benefit. This makes the professional to not see any future in the industry.

Remedy: There can be multiple solutions to this particular issue:

Employee recognition and benefits

It is a common habit of the call centre experts to reach their managers only at the time when something goes down. So, call centre services providers in UK should hire such managers that offer awards and incentives to the experts when a certain benchmark is attained. This empowers and encourages the agents to work much harder and enthusiastically.

Training

Proficient call centre agents not only maintain a smooth conversation but also attain the trust of the customers. This done by the experts who are well trained through stringent processes. So, ensure to offer such training to the customers that they offer value to your brand.

2. Reduced customer satisfaction

Did you know that around 20 to 30 percent of customers reach businesses with issues that remain unresolved or that come up again instead of them getting resolved previously?

The customers who have such worst sort of experience with your business are not going to even complain. They will straightaway leave your company. Also, it takes around 7 positive experience from the business side to make up for the one lousy experience customers had.

Remedy: Solutions to this issue are:

Offering IVR

A perfect solution to uplift the customer satisfaction level and increase the loyalty of customers is by rendering skill-based routing or Interactive Voice Response. What this tool does is that it provides a more personalized experience to the customers. It gathers information about the customer and ensures to transfer the call to the preferable agent accordingly. So, even if the inbound call centres expert is busy, there is no chance that a single business opportunity is missed.

Surveys

Take feedback and survey from the customers. This valuable insight from the customers will offer you a chance to enhance your overall product-line and service methods.

Re-track your KPIs

There is a slight possibility that the metrics on which your call centre assesses performance is lowering the level of customer service you are offering. So ensuring that the call centre agents are only working on the metrics that actually matter makes your customer more satisfied.

3. Putting everything first but employees

Low morale is often the reason for crumbling call centre performance out of many. Call centres that are majorly focused on meeting their targets at the lowest possible time completely look over the issues employees are facing. CSAT (customer satisfaction) is preferred higher than the ESAT (employee satisfaction). Metrics such as AHT (average handling time) and speed to answer makes the work of an agent more onerous and less interesting.

Remedy: This problem can be solved by:

Keep the focus on metrics that are non-traditional

Ensure to look out for the metrics such as balanced scorecards, net promoter score, and real-time customer feedback. This, in turn, ensures to raise the performance level much further at heights.

Tags: Call centre services