Overcoming 2021 Contact Centre Challenges in 7 Steps

Josh O’Farrell at Spearline discusses overcoming contact centre challenges.

The new year has arrived, but with it comes new challenges. With the current climate, many businesses have been forced to remote work, taking a step back and re-evaluating what should be prioritized in order to survive and stay ahead of the competition.

Setting goals early for your contact centre is essential to help produce better results on every level, from management to customer.

The road ahead may be difficult, and the fear of the unknown can be daunting for some, but it is vital to proactively set clear goals and objectives to start the new year fresh.

Identifying and resolving issues quickly will greatly benefit your business from every angle, by ensuring excellent customer experience, positive staff morale, and brand protection.

In this article, we take a look at these seven different steps your contact centre could implement to help boost work performance and results.

Step 1 – Make Your Customers Feel Secure Through Empathy

Every customer wants to be treated as important by call centre agents whenever they call customer care. It is the agents to make every customer feel special with timely service, first call issue resolution, and cordial conduct.

Your agents are the main point of contact for the customer. They want to feel safe and reassured that their problem is their number one priority. Being empathetic with the customer can help keep the frustration towards an agent to a minimum, helping resolve the problem faster.

Step 2 – Minimize On-Hold Times

Customers have busy lives and do not want to be kept waiting around on a call. Shorter waiting times keep customers happy and, ultimately, make them much more comfortable and satisfied with the services you are providing.

The last thing a frustrated customer wants is to be told to wait for a long period. They will start to feel like their agent is not taking their issue seriously, no matter how polite they are.

Although it is impossible to completely eliminate the waiting time, there are many techniques that companies can use in the new year to reduce the on-hold time and minimize frustrated customers.

Fully trained agents, an online presence on different social media platforms, chatbots and FAQs are all beneficial solutions to help minimize on-hold times.

Step 3 – Remote Team Fitness and Wellbeing Classes

With a majority of businesses now fully ingrained to the remote working lifestyle due to the current global pandemic, the need to stay connected has never been more essential.

Group activities and taking the time to ensure all your staff has a healthy lifestyle can increase productivity and mental wellbeing. A positive workforce becomes a more productive workforce.

Organizing remote fitness classes, daily team catch-ups, wellbeing sessions, coffee mornings and others are all positive and useful ideas that your company should continue to implement in the new year.

Staying connected with one another, no matter how far apart.

Step 4 – Staff Acknowledgment

Recognizing your staff and their accomplishments, regardless of the scale, is something every good manager should do. Proven to be more than effective in boosting morale and confidence in the workplace, it also helps your agents be more productive when dealing with their customers.

Not only does it increase engagement and satisfaction in their jobs by presenting agents with a clear route of growth, but public acknowledgment can also spark that healthy competitive edge that some may need.

Continuing from the previous point, simple ideas such as surveys, weekly meetings or simply just asking for their input on how to develop the workplace and taking the suggestions into consideration can be extremely beneficial in the long run.

It’s an excellent sign of leadership to show your staff that you care about their wellbeing while also keeping things fun.

Step 5 – Reduce Costs

Entering the new year means a new budget and deciding on reducing costs in different areas. With most businesses working remotely, budget cuts have had to be made.

Now is the perfect time to take a step back and analyze what costs need to be cut, what resources and suppliers need to be used more or less, and what investments (if any) need to be taken into consideration.

Not everything has to be cut, but it’s best to look at the bigger picture and fix what may have been less than economical for the previous year.

Step 6 – Workforce Optimization

Having a weak inaccurate forecast for the year ahead can negatively impact your business. It’s always best to be prepared and plan. 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.

Dedicating time early on with managers, HR, and recruitment to plan out and forecast your workforce will be time and cost-effective. Managers can identify call peaks and troughs by analyzing 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.

Step 7 -Ensure Call Quality Is Optimal

Terrible audio quality is one of the most frustrating things a customer and agent can face during a call. Not only will the customers become more irritated with your services and potentially move to a competitor, but your staff motivation will decrease at a rapid pace.

Your agents deserve the best quality in everything, whether it be the correct tools, the style of leadership, or call quality.

By enabling proactive monitoring and testing to your phone lines, your business will be alerted and given the time to fix any issues your agents could be facing before your customers are affected.

Josh O’Farrell

If you haven’t been proactive in solving problems previously, let the new year be the best time to start fresh and proactively fix any problems that may arise. It’s a smarter way of working.

To help your contact centres start 2021 on the right foot, follow these steps if you want to ensure excellent customer experience, positive staff morale, and brand protection.

For the new year, be proactive in solving your problems, from a managerial position all the way to the customer, and you will see better results.

Author: Guest Author