The call center is the face of the business for many businesses, companies, and organizations. For this reason, businesses must ensure that their call center, and especially their call center software, can support customer interactions smoothly and efficiently. Here are some of the mistakes call centers make and how to fix them.
Focusing on First Call Resolution
In many businesses, a substantial amount of a call center’s call volumes are callbacks from customers with unresolved concerns. In the United States, between 20% to 30% of a call center’s call volumes consist of callbacks related to unresolved issues. First call resolution is an important metric, since improving first call resolution directly correlates to improving customer satisfaction, reducing operating costs, and improving other key metrics in the contact center. For every 1% of improvement in first call resolution, call centers reduce operating costs by 1%.
Not focusing on metrics like first call resolution can mean missed opportunities to improve the customer experience as well as make your contact center more efficient. To improve first call resolution, ensure that your call center software is dynamic enough to support specific use cases as well as flexible enough to scale to demand. Another way to improve first call resolution is through building a strong knowledge base that records common questions and allows agents to access quick answers to questions that they may not recognize. Finally, managers can also analyze the top reasons why customers call into the contact center and ensure that there are resources to guide agents on what to do when these certain types of calls and interactions come in.
Overcomplicated Bolted-On Tools
Many call centers utilize outdated call center software tools and utilize multiple outdated software systems to help them with their day-to-day customer interactions. This overcomplicates the CX process. Since many of these outdated tools are also bolted-on and multi-channel, it creates a disjointed experience for both the agent and customer. Agents can be wasting a ton of time opening and closing multiple different programs to resolve a single issue and spend huge amounts of time on administrative tasks in the background while not talking to customers. This gets in the way of delivering a seamless customer experience because creating a disjointed experience for the agent will also affect the customer experience.
To solve this problem, make sure that the call center software you’re using can integrate all the tools you need into their platform. Tools like CRM integrations, quality management tools, AI integration, communication on all channels, and internal business communication tools should all be accessible to agents within the contact center platform to ensure a smooth experience for agents, meaning a better experience for customers as well as more efficient contact center operations.
Lack of Agent Flexibility
Agent flexibility is crucial, especially in today’s digital world. During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments imposed lockdown restrictions, meaning contact centers had to move to a remote working environment. Despite many businesses and locations opening back up to the public, many contact centers continue to employ many remote workers and recruit agents from across the globe to deliver customer service internationally. Lacking flexibility for agents can hurt contact center operations by lowering agent productivity, lowering agent morale, and increasing agent attrition rates. This, in turn, will lead to less efficient contact center operations and decreased customer satisfaction.
To support agent flexibility as well as improve the workplace environment for agents, your contact center should adopt the call center software to support agents’ flexibility. This means a cloud-based platform that can be accessed anywhere through a simple internet connection. Being based on the cloud also means your contact center can scale up or down depending on seasonal demand, allowing your contact center to add more agents during peak seasons, such as holidays. Finally, some contact center software vendors provide mobile app capabilities, allowing agents to turn their phones into a fully-fledged contact center to help customers.
Bright Pattern’s Call Center Software
Bright Pattern’s cloud-based call center software provides all the advanced tools your call center needs, like CRM integrations, omnichannel quality management, self-service options, AI integrations, and more, while being based on the cloud. Ensure smooth and efficient contact center operations with high customer satisfaction on every interaction, while improving the agent experience.
To see the full list of features that you can get access to with Bright Pattern’s call center software
