1. Monitor and manage in real time
Knowing what’s happening in your customer service centre in real time is critical to making the right decisions when things change – whether it’s a huge spike in incoming calls, or identifying and responding to issues as they arise.
The recent pandemic is an excellent case in point. A health advisory service or insurer might be experiencing a higher rate of calls, but how do they maintain their standards of service while also protecting their own agents? And what about just maintaining business as usual – the “Keep Calm and Carry On” ethos?
Having up-to-the-minute information at your fingertips means you can prepare, respond and adapt effectively during focused campaigns, in response to crises, and your day-to-day operations. With well-designed systems to support you, you and your customer service staff can build resilience while you grow.
2. Match staffing to service needs
Whether your team operates 24/7 or for a fixed number of hours a week, balancing all the variables for delivering good CX – contact volumes, the availability of skilled staff, KPIs, budgets – can be a tricky job.
There are different ways to approach the problem, depending on your needs and goals. But at Premier Contact Point, we’re of the belief that a good workforce management (WFM) system can be one of your strongest performing “team members”. A WFM system can ease your scheduling headaches, and help you maintain service and staffing levels that boost agents’ morale, and customer satisfaction by:
- giving your staff a say in their scheduling, so they’re more engaged and productive
- helping your staff and managers monitor call quality and identify coaching opportunities and process improvements
- getting customer feedback straight away, helping you target other areas for improvement
- giving your staff and managers clear, real-time feedback on their performance, so they respond quickly
- helping you forecast busy and quiet times, to make the best use of your resources
3. Introduce scalability
Scalability is about more than just getting staffing levels right to respond to forecast highs and lows. It’s about having flexibility built right in to your existing systems to support staff through the peaks and troughs they can encounter during their shifts.
Tools like:
- automatic call distribution and skills-based routing can channel incoming calls directly to the staff member who is best qualified to help your customers
- overflow queuing can help manage spikes by redirecting calls to different queues
- IVR can help triage calls, giving callers options to use self-service or request a return call, which staff can attend to when call loads are lighter.
Scalability is about responsiveness, and it’s important that your staff have quick access to the right information. Integration with other apps such as CRMs, knowledge bases, or ERP systems, means your staff can handle customer contact efficiently, whether it’s by phone, email or chat. Your staff will sound more professional and better organised, and be able to focus entirely on the customer, not on technical inefficiencies.
4. Manage and reduce costs
Budgets loom large over any department in an organisation, and in the sales and customer service areas, it seems that targets and progress against KPIs are on dashboards and monitors nearly everywhere you look.
It’s important to keep your team focused on customers, while supervisors track productivity, processes and progress towards departmental and organisational goals. In-depth reporting lets you gather powerful data that helps you refine processes, and build your staff’s capabilities. All of this combines to give you a clear picture of how your team is performing, and what areas you can improve on further, boosting overall cost efficiency without compromising your customer experience goals – all of which translates to a better bottom line for your business.
Delivering the ultimate customer experience
Premier Contact Point helps you identify which of these areas you need work on to get the right balance for your business. (Be sure to read Part I of this post for the first four). Together, we can build a strategy and action plan that will get you on track to delivering the ultimate customer experience. Take the first steps toward your success and get in touch with us today.
