5 Common Contact Centre Challenges – With Solutions

Josh O’Farrell of Spearline puts forward five common contact centre challenges, while also sharing his proposed solutions.

As one of the most difficult environments to work in, contact centres can be more than challenging for managers and agents.

Between trying to maintain positive support to frustrated customers, budget cuts, technical issues and more, it can sometimes be testing.

However, identifying these issues now is actually a good thing.

Spotting the problem at the start of the new year can be extremely beneficial, especially if you want to start fresh for the year ahead.

Listed below are five challenges your contact centre could potentially be facing, and the solution to each.

1. Maintaining Excellent Staff Motivation

Returning to the ‘daily grind’ can be a challenge for people after spending the holidays relaxing.

Your agents may experience a lack of motivation when returning to the work routine and immediately dealing with frustrated callers.

Your agents also deserve the best services; it can be extremely unmotivating for them if their technology and tools are not of the highest standard.

The Solution

A good manager should always ensure their agents are always looked after and satisfied.

Spreading positivity, public acknowledgment, encouraging feedback, ensuring all technology is optimal and group activities are just a number of methods you can implement in your business if you want to see success.

Your agents look to you for strong leadership and a clear direction. If they feel comfortable in their workplace, they will be more motivated to do their jobs well and make sure your customers have the best possible experience.

2. Poor Audio Quality

A major obstacle for both your agents and your customers is having terrible audio quality during the call.

Not only will it increase customer churn and cause them to move to better services, i.e. your competitors, but it will also greatly annoy your agents and decrease their motivation.

The Solution

Implement proactive monitoring and testing for your phone lines.

While it is impossible to completely remove poor audio quality, you can be proactive in avoiding it.

Knowing your problems before they become a major issue and resolving them quickly can greatly benefit your business. It’s a smarter way of working.

3. Lack of Communication

Communication is a pillar of employee engagement to ensure agents understand the goals and keep up to date on new updates and business changes.

Agents want to understand the business, and they should be updated as regularly as possible. It establishes a sense of trust between staff.

The Solution

Make sure it’s a two-way street: your agents are a valuable source of insight; enable them to share what they learn about the desires and needs of their customers.

Having bi-weekly or monthly meetings with them, with surveys and encouraging feedback, will be extremely beneficial.

If scheduling meetings can be a little time consuming then up-to-date messaging tools can be used to view and evaluate performance data and more.

4. Weak Social Media Presence

We live in a digital age. Everyone on the planet is connected in some shape or form and having a strong social media presence is vital for a business to survive.

Not only can you reach a wider audience or an untapped market, but you can see how your competitors are performing and what kind of engagement they are having with potential customers.

A company with a weak social media presence can fall out of touch with trends and become not only irrelevant, but also invisible, to consumers.

The Solution

Make use of your marketing team to come up with digital campaigns to reach customers on multiple platforms.

You will start to see more and more engagement and interaction with customers across useful sites like LinkedIn and a steady increase in revenue.

Not only that, but you will also see an increase in cross-departmental collaboration between agents and marketing, building a stronger, more united workforce and fuelling an increase in productivity.

Having a strong social media presence is also extremely useful if you are expanding your workforce with recruitment.

5. Workforce Optimization

Having a weak inaccurate forecast can negatively impact your business.

It’s always best to be prepared and plan ahead, and if your forecast is not thought out and planned correctly, you could easily face problems such as over- or understaffing, untrained agents and high turnover.

The Solution

Dedicating time early on with managers, HR, and recruitment to plan out and forecast your workforce will be time and cost-effective.

Josh O’Farrell

Managers can identify call peaks and troughs by analysing records of call patterns and thus increase agents’ productivity.

Managers should ensure that there are sufficient agents available to handle customer calls during peaks. An optimized workforce is a stronger, more successful workforce.

For more information about Spearline, visit: www.spearline.com

Author: Robyn Coppell