How to improve your inbound call centre’s service in UK?

Posted by Polash Borah

As you might be aware of, a call centre can be categorized into two segments based on whether it is dealing with incoming or outgoing calls. The call centres or in broader term, BPOs that resolve problems related to IT and computers, provide customer support, tech-support etc. are generally associated with the term inbound. While on the other hand, outbound calling is related to mostly sales, telemarketing and promotion of products and services.

Let’s take a look at a few ways on how one can improve their inbound call centre service.

1. Keep up with technology

Call centres are a product of advancements made in the field of telecom and technology, therefore they must keep up with the latest innovations to provide the best experience to the clients. Also, if you are lethargic towards new technology, there is a good chance that your business might be replaced by a better competition. Chatbots are a new tech in this field. These are computer programs that can interact and converse with a human via auditory or textual inputs. Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana are a few examples of how chatbots or virtual assistants help with customer interaction. New and efficient technologies are and will always keep on surfacing. Artificial Intelligence is a new concept that might have a great impact on how we will see customer service in the near future.

2. A friendly human touch goes a long way

Though it is important to keep up with technology but equally important is a friendly interactive conversation. A call centre rep should let the customer speak first and then use positive simple language to explain any request or query. This builds a trust among the customers about the brand and it is this trust that will prevent them from switching from your company to your competitor’s.

3. Keep your reps fresh with on-going training

Training is the foremost session that an employee goes through after joining a call centre. Many well-established inbound call centre service companies make sure that their executives are frequently trained on the changing dynamics of the BPO world. This system of on-going training provides an opportunity to make necessary changes to the script, tone, and vocabulary of the reps according to the processes.

4. Establish a graded feed-back loop

A feedback loop is an important indicator of the performances of the call centre executives. A graded feedback is something that has at least 3 grades for instance, Good, Average and Bad. A customer review of a particular call can give us various important insights. A feed-back loop is a key metrics in determining the impression of the inbound call centre service among its customers.

5. Improve your call quality monitoring team

The in-house call monitoring team is the one that makes sure that the quality of the calls is as per industry standards or the ones set by the management. Good quality calls should be rewarded and bad ones should be closely monitored and if necessary the executive responsible should be re-trained for the process. This way we can improve the overall quality of the calls which would ensure that the consumers are kept satisfied with the product or the service. Remember, there is always scope for improvement.

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6. Increase the first contact resolution percentile

For those unaware, first contact resolution is the ability to provide solutions or resolve any issue of the customer on the first call itself. This is important because it relieves the customer from following up the problem a second or third time. It gives the impression of efficiency and is a key performance metric. And therefore it is obvious that more the first contact resolutions, merrier are the customers.

7. Reduce agent attrition rate

The attrition rate of an outsource call centre is the amount of trained agent leaving the contact centre at any given period of time. The management should take appropriate measures to reduce this rate because once a trained agent leaves the job the whole hiring and training process has to be repeated once again. Above all, there is also the concern of the waiting time between the exit and the entry of a new recruit. This attrition rate directly influences the KPI of the call centre.

Businesses prefer to outsource call centre services to a BPO that can meet their required standards. And every business has their own individual requirements. For instance, the volume of calls of a particular business might be too high for a certain BPO. Therefore, there are certain key performance indices such as call abandon rate, monetary cost per call, queue rate etc. that businesses look for before outsourcing their non-core processes Improvement in these KPIs will automatically improve the overall performance of the call centre.

Tags: Inbound Bpo Customer support