This Should Be the Focus of Every Customer Call
When a customer calls into an inbound call center, whether to seek help with a problem, inquire about a sale or promotion, schedule service, or some other reason, the call center agent they reach undoubtedly has a goal for the call in mind before they even answer the phone. The goal might be to resolve the problem and end the call as quickly as possible, or it may be to make a sale or renew a contract at any cost. While these are valuable in the short term, and may very well be what the customer and/or the company are [...]
3 Call Center Staffing Problems and How to Solve Them
Having the right people answering phones in your inbound call center is a crucial element of sustaining a successful business. That said, this is hard to achieve in the first place, let along maintain over the long term. There are countless roadblocks and problems call center staffers run into when trying to build a call center that adequately supports their customers while also supporting the ultimate goal of creating a profitable business. Here, three of the most common problems and advice on how to solve them. Problem: Too much agent turnover. Solution: Adequate training and support. Agent turnover is [...]
Call Center Closeup: Higher Education Call Centers
Institutions of higher education like colleges and universities may not be the first places you think of when it comes to organizations that utilize call centers, but they have to field a huge volume of inquiries from prospective and current students and their families. In fact, many large institutions may need to use an outsourced call center to keep up with demand at certain times of year so that everyone is able to get the information they need. Here, learn about some of the most common tasks that are handled in higher education call centers. Financial Aid Support [...]
3 Questions that Can Transform Your Customer Experience
There are many metrics and statistics you can collect behind the scenes at your inbound call center, metrics like average call wait time, average length of call, and frequency of first call resolution. And while these are helpful and can drive needed adjustments in your processes, they don’t tell you much about the customer’s experience. Indeed, there comes a time when you just have to ask the customer for their thoughts—and one of the easiest ways to do this is via a single question survey that’s administered immediately after the conclusion of their interaction with your brand. Here, three [...]
Why You Should Establish SMART Goals
We’ve discussed many times on this blog why it’s so important to set goals for your inbound call center: without them, agents can feel unmotivated and adrift, making them less focused and less efficient. But perhaps even more important than the act of setting goals is choosing the correct goals to set and one way to ensure you are setting the correct goals is to use the SMART framework. Here, we’re breaking it down. Specific The S in SMART stands for specific, and it’s the first step for a reason. If goals are not specific enough, then they [...]
The Power of Expectations
A lot of the success of your customer service-centric inbound call center has to do with expectations. But not just one person’s expectations: there are three unique sets of expectations that must be met in order for your team to provide a satisfactory and first-rate customer service experience. Those are the company’s expectations of the quality of service provided, the customer’s expectations of the quality and type of customer service provided, and the expectations the customer has of your brand that they expect you to meet. Here, discover why all three are critical to providing exceptional customer service. Company [...]
A New Survey Reveals What People Consider ‘Good Customer Service’
Before setting goals for your inbound call center, it’s important to determine what benchmarks and characteristics are important to you as a company—but you should also consider what characteristics and benchmarks are important to your customers. The best way to find out what these are? Ask them! Customer support company Intercom did just that in a recent survey, polling over 1,000 U.S. customers in a variety of age groups to determine what is most important to them when it comes to good customer service. Here are some of the biggest takeaways. Feeling Valued is Most Important In the survey, [...]
Balancing a Human Approach with an Automated One
Businesses are nothing without their customers. And as much as you would love the opportunity to connect individually with each and every one of them, unfortunately that isn’t possible (especially if you’re successful and growing). For this reason, it’s important to create a balanced approach to client communication that delineates between situations in which a human touch is needed and those in which automated support will do. Establishing this line and sticking to it will prevent your agents from becoming overloaded and your customers from becoming frustrated with long wait times and inefficient processes. Here, learn when an automated approach [...]
Top 10 Customer Service Skills Every Agent Should Have
The agents you have answering the phones in your inbound call center must be well-trained and well-equipped to address any and every inquiry a customer might present to them. Here are 10 of the most important skills they need to cultivate to excel at customer service. Patience When customers call with a problem, quite often part of the reason they are experiencing a problem is that there is something about the product or service that they don’t understand. For this reason, it may take them a minute to explain the reason for their call and what exactly they need from [...]
3 Ways to Optimize Call Center Wait Times
If you’re running a thriving and successful business, it is going to be nearly impossible to avoid having customers experience wait times when they call your inbound call center. That said, the fact that customers expect to wait to connect with an agent doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be looking for ways to trim wait times to reasonable lengths. Here, three simple strategies you can use to optimize wait times and increase customer satisfaction. Maximize Call Quality Call quality is purposely a bit vague—the first step is determining what constitutes a successful and quality call. These could be things [...]
4 Processes to Integrate into Your Agents’ Script
Even though every call and interaction with a customer is going to be different, providing the agents in your call center with a script from which to work creates a rough structure that will move calls along toward a satisfactory conclusion. In addition to making sure the agent proceeds with empathy and listens intently to the customer, making sure that the apps they use most often are easily accessible from within the script will streamline calls and help eliminate lags that frustrate customers. Here are four processes that you should integrate into your agents’ script for your inbound call [...]
Outsourcing Your Call Center: Offshore vs. Onshore vs. Nearshore
You’ve made the decision to outsource your call center and use a separate company to handle your incoming customer service inquiries and the like. Once you’ve determined your budget for your outsourced call center, the next step will be to choose whether you want to use an offshore, onshore or nearshore call center. Here, what you will get with each option and how to determine which is best for you. Offshore An offshore call center refers to one that is in a faraway foreign country in comparison to the country where your headquarters are located. For a company [...]
Call Center Closeup: Telecommunications Call Centers
Telecom companies like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and T-Mobile do billions of dollars of business every year. Given how massive these companies are, they need to maintain robust call centers to help troubleshoot customer problems, field inquiries, and process sales. Even the call centers at smaller telecom companies will need to deal with many of these same things. Whether your telecom company maintains an internal call center staffed by full-time employees or uses an outsourced call center, there are a few primary tasks for which all telecom call centers are responsible. Here, some of the most common tasks that are handled [...]
How to Build Lasting Customer Relationships
Every successful company goes through a growth period in which they can barely keep up with demand and the flow of new customers coming in. During these times, your main focus is on optimizing the product and getting it out to customers. But these periods are typically followed by slower ones in which sales to new customers lag—and it is during these phases that it is critical to take steps to nurture your relationships with existing customers. Ensuring that you hold onto the customers you already have is super important to maintaining steady revenue streams and keeping your business [...]
4 Ways to Boost Call Center Agent Performance in 2023
As we near the end of the year, call centers everywhere are looking back on 2022, evaluating the performance of their agents and business as a whole and figuring out things that need to be improved for the coming year. Even if the agents working in your call center did excellent work in 2022, providing top-notch support to customers and increasing customer retention rates, not taking steps to support them in the new year would be a mistake. Constantly working to help your agents do their jobs better will not only encourage and inspire them to do so, but [...]