In today’s rapidly advancing era, it is hard for every company to establish in-house services to take care of customer satisfaction. This is the reason call center services have become the basic need. Ensuring customer satisfaction is significant to make sure that the business is moving on in the correct direction. After all customer satisfaction is supreme!
It’s no secret that businesses depend on customers. One of the aspects of this business-customer relationship is communication, specifically one-on-one, direct communication. It is easy for small businesses to communicate with their customers. However, for the others, communicating with a wide base of customers, especially when they are spread over several cities, states or countries, is monumental and a nearly impossible task.
The solution is, “Adopt a call center software!
What is Call Center Software?
A call center or contact center is how a business can directly contact customers. Having a traditional 24*7 call center is not a viable option for businesses any more. They need to be modernized and equipped with the latest technologies to improve the efficiency of the call centers. Customer Relationship Management or CRM software is a solution that improves the performance of a live call center at a fraction of the cost but is very beneficial to the growth of the business.
Read More: Involvement of Communication Channels in Customer Satisfaction
How Does it Work?
This direct contact with customers is possible over the phone with the help of an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, SMSs, in-app chat, or social media platform. With the help of CRM software, you can also gather information about your customers to improve customer satisfaction for the advancement of your business.
Call center software made on APIs is easy to use and offers a wide range of features and analytical tools to check, measure, and iterate. The Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are unique to each business,
Most importantly, a cloud-based CRM center is able to iterate frequently in order to provide ongoing customer satisfaction, collect feedback, check the metrics of your company, roll back the items that did not work, and keep the items that did work. The test and measure of the components of your contact center should be done regularly like that of your website or application.
Some of the most important analytics to gauge customer satisfaction with the help of CRM software analytics are included here.
Customer Effort
The first analytics that you should focus on is customer effort. The KPI is the experience of the customers with the call center. Is it easy or difficult to reach an agent? Does it take long? Are the calls abandoned before reaching an agent?
Customers want to exert as little effort as possible. Checking these analytics will help you to make changes in the contact center to reduce customer effort. This, in turn, can improve customer satisfaction.
First Contact Resolution
When a problem is solved during the first call placed by the customer regarding the issue, it is known as First Contact Resolution.
You can calculate it by dividing the number of inquiries solved by your agents during the first contact, by the total numbers of first contacts received.
Low First Contact Resolution means that the agents need additional training and support. It helps in decreasing call volume by eliminating the same purpose calls.
Indian call center looks after improving their first contact resolution so that customers trun up to them and do not leave their services in search of other providers.
Automation Rate
When a customer’s needs are simple and can be met without an agent’s assignment, such as knowing the account balance, the IVR system is more than effective. It is also known as self-service displacement or automation.
CRM software calculates this rate by dividing the number of consumers with fully resolved issues with the help of a self-service channel. A low rate implies that you perhaps need to update your IVR options.
Read More: Digital transformation: Redefining Call Centre Services and Customer Satisfaction in UK
Holds and Callbacks
Once a customer calls, how long do they have to wait before their needs are addressed?
To calculate this, the call center software tracks the callbacks, transfers, and hold time the customers have to go through. These rates should be minimized as much as possible.
- Transfer: Number of agents handling each call.
- Hold: The average time a customer is placed on hold as well as the average number of holds per call.
- Callback: Times customers request a callback.
Call Time
One of the most important KPI is to know how long do the agents spend on a call? It simply is the length of a conversation between an agent and the customer.
It should be remembered that often the customers hung out on the interaction before they get connected to an agent.
A related KPI is the experience time. This is measured from the customer’s perspective. It includes the ring time, time spent with IVR, being on hold, as well as talking with the agent. This measurement is also related to customer effort. It signifies how quickly customer’s needs are resolved.
From an agent’s perspective, call time is termed as handling time. This measures the talk time, hold time, as well as wrap-up time of each agent within a set period. Wrap-up time refers to the time taken by an agent to finish up, enter notes or any other task before moving on to another call.
The number of handled calls per hour might be an efficient indicator of which agent takes the most number of calls and the way they’re handling it.
Abandonment Rate
As mentioned earlier, several customers hang up before reaching an agent. This is known as abandonment.
It is important to know the abandonment rate that is nothing but the total number of callers who abandoned the call, divided by the total number of calls received.
The abandonment rate helps in the determination of the reason that the customers leave rather than waiting. It may be because of an understaffed call center or wait times being too long or if the calls were placed outside business hours. They also act as a warning for problems previously not recognized.
Read More: Want to give Exhilarating Customer Service Experience? Follow these tips!!
Call Quality
Quality score is used to evaluate the quality at which each individual conversation with a customer is handled. Usually, customers are called back or are requested to take part in a quick survey after talking to the agent where they are asked to rate the quality of the call, whether their problem had been solved, etc.
On the basis of these surveys, overall quality scores of the call center, each agent or department, within a period, or for any set parameter can be calculated. Quality scores also help in uncovering areas or agents who require additional training.
Conclusion
These analytics, along with the others that didn’t make into this list, act as a determiner of the overall experience of the customers calling the call center. A better experience would result in a good business-customer relationship and would benefit the business in the long run.