Call centres are an invaluable resource for any business today, a way to improve the experience that customers have and to ensure that they can always make contact when they need to. Whether you’re running an in-house call centre, your business is 100% call centre or you’re outsourcing this to a third party it’s important to be aware of the best practices for call centres in the UK today.
● Make sure you have the right people on the phones. Not everyone can do the job well in a call centre and your results will depend on how well you vet people. How able is this person to handle a customer interaction, a difficult conversation or a complex request? Understanding whether someone has the right skill set means interviewing them to determine what past experience they have and how they respond in relevant role play.
● Build a culture of communication within the call centre. Your agents are on the front line when it comes to call centre business and it’s vital to ensure that they feel able to communicate any issues or ideas they might have when they’re doing their job. There are a number of key purposes in this, including that you will always be aware of any trends in customer complaints and any issues that exist for all agents across the call centre. It’s also important to give agents the opportunity to vent any frustrations and explain any problems they want to get fixed.
● Delve deep into the customer feedback. This is a pot of gold in terms of getting a clear idea of how your call centre is performing and where you could do better. Feedback like this can be incorporated into ongoing training for your call centre agents so that it is specifically tailored to real life experiences. Plus, when you pay attention to feedback from customers you have an opportunity to improve any negative experiences they might have had - and stop that person from reporting it negatively elsewhere online.
● Create the right metrics to measure performance against. It’s going to be key to check in regularly with how the call centre is performing against essential metrics that affect the wider business. These could include customer satisfaction, first call resolution, average handling time, average call abandonment rate, agent turnover, occupancy rate and service level. Identifying your top metrics will mean you don’t feel overwhelmed by all the data being generated and you know where to look to understand results.
● Schedule plenty of ongoing training. Investing in training for a call centre has a lot of different benefits, including that it helps to keep agents engaged and makes them feel valued. It will also ensure that you’re delivering the best possible experience for customers, complying with any business, regulatory and legal requirements and creating a competitive edge when it comes to success.
Call centres are a real asset and these are some of the best practices that can ensure they deliver when it comes to ROI. Find out more by booking on to our Call Centre - Achieving Best Practice training course...