4 Ways to Take Advantage of the Slow Season
Just as most businesses that operate call centers experience seasonal spikes and busy seasons, almost all will experience slow seasons as well. However, the slow season is not always a bad thing. While it’s true that there may be a dip in sales or revenue during this period, the slow season can actually be an incredible opportunity for you to strengthen the performance of your call center and increase profitability in the long term. Here are four ways to take full advantage of the slow season. Schedule Trainings Taking the time to provide comprehensive training to new hires is [...]
Meet Our Partners! Part 2
At CallShaper, our goal is to give our customers the best possible experience with our call center platform. Whether they are agents, supervisors, or managers, we want everyone to have access to the tools they need to do their jobs efficiently and successfully. That’s why we’ve partnered with some businesses who help us do exactly that. Here, a brief introduction to a few of those awesome partners. The Blacklist Alliance The Blacklist Alliance protects every single one of our customers from scammers, predators and even federal and state regulators looking for ways to bring litigation against your call center. [...]
This is The Best Way to Handle Customer Complaints
Regardless of the industry you work in, the business you run, or the types of inquiries your call center typically handles, you are going to get complaints. It’s impossible to please every single customer 100% of the time. In fact, receiving customer complaints can actually be a good thing, as they alert you to issues that your customers are unhappy with and that you may have the power to improve or change. Since receiving customer complaints is inevitable, it’s critical that the agents in your call center know how to handle them in a way that will leave the customer [...]
How to Build a Customer Journey Map—And Why You Should
Here at CallShaper, we’ll never stop stressing the importance of collecting data on your customers and their interactions with your call center. Data is the key to determining what’s working and what’s not, why some customers remain with your brand for long periods of time and why others leave after short ones. Data is the key to making meaningful changes and to foreseeing possible problems before they arise. There are different ways that you can compile, aggregate, and represent data depending on how you intend to use it. You can also use the data you collect to create other valuable [...]
4 Businesses That Use Answering Services
Answering services, sometimes called virtual receptionists, are crucial to many businesses. They handle a much narrower scope of tasks than other types of call centers, but they also sometimes have a closer relationship with the business itself than an outsourced call center might. At its core, an answering service exists to be a presence for customers when the business itself is unavailable. Here are four businesses that use telephone answering services the most and the tasks they most commonly handle. Healthcare If you’ve only ever interacted with an answering service once, chances are it was the answering service [...]
3 Tips for Lowering Your Abandonment Rate
If you run an inbound call center, you are going to have abandoned calls. No matter how professional and skilled your agents are or how intuitive and easy-to-navigate your IVR is, you can never account for everything a caller is experiencing that may lead them to hang up before they connect with an agent. What you can do, however, is take steps on the call center end to reduce the percentage of customers who abandon their calls. Here are three such ways to lower your abandonment rate. Hire More Agents If it is feasible financially, sometimes the easiest way [...]
Creating Your Best Call Center Scorecard
Quality control in your call center is absolutely critical to maintaining customer satisfaction. Surveys have shown that huge numbers of customers will stop doing business with a company if they receive poor customer service over the phone. But the bigger your call center gets, the more difficult it is to keep tabs on all your agents and their performance. The easiest way to maintain a high level of customer service in your call center is to develop a call center scorecard that is used on a regular basis to evaluate agent performance. That said, almost as important as using a [...]
Meet Our Partners! Part 1
At CallShaper, we are proud to partner with some incredible businesses that have revolutionized the call center industry. The businesses we work with all have the same goal: to help call centers work more efficiently and with the peace of mind that they are doing what is best for their customers. Here, we’re highlighting a few of our partners and what they do to help strengthen your call center. ActiveProspect ActiveProspect is an SaaS platform designed around using consent-based marketing for customer acquisition. They offer products that help their customers take action on their leads, collect data, and save [...]
How to Implement Effective Call Center Quality Control Processes
To ensure that your call center is functioning optimally and efficiently, as a manager you need to be constantly engaged with what your agents are doing. If you wait for biannual or annual performance reviews to evaluate your agents’ performance and offer advice on how they can improve, you’ve let way too much time pass during which you could have been improving your customers’ experience. But if you have effective quality control processes in place, maintaining the quality of interactions between agents and customers will be effortless. Here’s how to get these processes set up and how to maintain [...]
4 Ways to Prepare for Seasonal Call Spikes
Whether they are tied to new product releases, holiday or seasonal promotions, unexpected global events or product glitches or mistakes, your call center is going to experience spikes in volume at various times throughout the year. The good news: It’s easy to prepare for these spikes and ensure that your agents have the resources and know-how to get through them while maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction. Here are four ways to prepare for seasonal call spikes. Consult the Data If you are using a call center platform like CallShaper, you are constantly collecting data on things like call [...]
3 Keys to Building a Successful Call Center
There’s a lot that goes into creating a call center that fulfills its role of improving customer experience and increasing satisfaction with your company, services and offerings. Whether you’re building a call center from the ground up for a startup, revamping a call center for an existing company, or just looking for ways to optimize the performance of your existing call center, these three keys should be at the core of your efforts to maximize the impact of your call center on your bottom line. A Well-Trained, Properly Sized Staff Your staff are the heart and soul of your [...]
4 Ways to Make Your Call Center More Efficient
In the inbound call center business, efficiency is the name of the game. It’s where speed meets effectiveness, where all customers’ calls are being answered in a timely manner and all their problems are being solved in a satisfactory way. While the skill of your agents plays a big role in how efficiently they are able to work, there are steps you can take to support their ability to work efficiently. Here are four such steps. Streamline Call Routing Customers hate waiting on the phone for their call to be answered. But the only thing they hate even more [...]
How the ABC Mentality Can Boost Revenue in Your Call Center
For any inbound call center, the number one goal should be customer satisfaction. But while there are metrics you can aim for and goals you can set, customer satisfaction can be difficult to quantify completely, which can leave your agents feeling a little unfocused and disengaged as a result. Enter the ABC mentality, which offers agents more quantifiable goals to work towards, plus takes advantage of existing opportunities to drive sales. Here, we’re breaking down how adopting an ABC mentality can go far toward boosting revenue for your business. First off, what does ABC stand for? In this context, [...]
Is An Offshore Call Center Right for You?
Offshore call centers can be an incredibly helpful tool for companies. They offer a significantly less expensive option than in-house, onshore or nearshore call centers, they are typically available during overnight hours in the US, the market is more competitive and the labor force is larger. But in addition to these considerations, if you’re deciding whether or not to use an offshore call center you also need to think about the tasks you need the call center to do. Indeed, some tasks and jobs are better suited to an offshore call center than others and a lot of it comes [...]
4 Ways to Improve Virtual Training
Now that more and more call centers are staffed by agents who are working from home either part time or full time, it is critical that the virtual training provided by call centers is just as comprehensive, engaging and helpful as in-person trainings were in the past. Not only does high-quality training guarantee that customers are getting the best possible service, but it also dramatically lowers agent attrition rates. Here are four strategies that will help you improve your virtual training. Offer Technology Training Before the Training It can be easy to forget that even with the highest [...]
