Every business needs perpetual up-gradation. So, the maxim that necessity is the mother of the invention becomes truer in case of business processes as well. Particularly, call center innovation ideas to play an important role in determining the fate of leads and prospects in the contact centers industry.
On the other hand, if you want to make an impact in the industry, you must realign with the market trends as soon as possible because a stitch on time saves nine. In fact, transforming practices are widely observed in businesses.
Here we suggest some call center innovation ideas that will make your business processes smoother. Also, this will help to boost lead generations, customer satisfaction rates, and goals achievements.
Manage Your Channels Wisely
Yes, this is the most important factor that most managers ignore when managing processes. In the old days, there was only one channel: phone calls. However, with time, numerous other channels of communication emerged. They include SMS, Chatbots, Emails, and Agent chat, etc.
Nevertheless, live voice has dominated as the prominent channel of customer interaction. Mostly, customers and prospects like to talk to a live person who can listen and respond to their concerns realistically.
Though a successful contact center creates a mix of channels, yet you must have to evaluate the channel that customers use more. So, prioritize that channel accordingly. Invest more resources and workforce on that channel. This would be a clever move.
Behavior and Skills Assessment
The second most important keystroke is to evaluate the hiring process and skills of the new employees. Employees are the lifeline of a call center. So, managers must evaluate first.
You must check the customer service insight, aptitude, problem-solving, pressure handling, and team working capabilities of candidates. A pre-employment analysis is necessary.
However, once you have decided to hire an agent, further assessment is essential. Now, evaluate typing and navigational skills.
Moreover, provide your staff with consistent career coaching, management opportunities, and privileges. Employees would foresee their future.
Software Integration for Personalized Experience
When customers were a few in numbers, it was easier to remember them by name. However, with the expansion of businesses, the customer database has become limitless. Now, it is impossible to keep your clients remembered by name.
So, customer relationship management (CRM) software integration is used to keep the agents updated about the customer. When a customer makes a call, all his information (Name, History, and previous issues) pops up on the desktop. This will reduce the call handling time, increase interactive sessions, and enhance personalized experiences.
Use IVR To Engage Your Customers
The best way to keep your customers engaged is to use IVR technology. This is the lovely voice guiding your customers: press 1 to renew your subscription, press 2 to choose another plan, and press 3 to talk with our representative.
So, IVR keeps your caller busy meanwhile the agent completes his talks with other on-call customers. Moreover, it gathers valuable information about the customer before an agent starts talking.
Additionally, IVR can handle transactions, call back the customers, and even prioritize the calls from customers. Due to its bountiful benefits, I have included this factor in the checklist.
Disaster Preparedness: A Key to Success
If you have only one call center, which due to any weather disaster shuts down, then what would you have as a backup? Certainly, your customers will stop getting answers to their queries, if you wouldn’t have disaster preparedness.
I would like to suggest to you, if practicable, set-up two call centers in regions of opposite weather conditions. Also, you can have a home-based call center system as a backup.
Setup A Multi-Language Agent Pool
Mostly, agents have to deal with a multilingual group of people. For example, in the USA call centers prefer the agents with multi-language skills.
So, if you want to stand out among the competitors, you should go for any distinctive feature. You can opt for a distinct feature of a multi-language pool of agents. This will not only make you prominent in the market but, also it will broaden your customer option.
Manage Immediate Feedback and Training
Providing immediate feedback and training is the ultimate key to success. You can use an innovative method for this purpose. The method includes sending the recordings of their calls with customers.
Ask them to evaluate their calls, rate them, and then point out faults. This should be done on the agent’s workstation rather than conducting on the manager’s end. Usually, they would be harder on them. So, in this way, they would evaluate themselves, rate them, and even train them.
Hire Multiskilled Agents Pool
Traditionally, a blended call agent can handle both kinds of calls: inbound as well as outbound. You can also make your call center prominent by having cross-trained agents in the office. For example, if you are dealing with a campaign that requires subscription renewal as well as customer queries. Then, you have to ask the agents to deal with them simultaneously.
However, if you have cross-trained agents, they will handle the campaign easily. Moreover, cross-training improves productivity and prevent burning out among your employees.
Consider Streamlining Your Business
Most managers consider streamlining the business not that necessary, and others don’t try to invest in this process. However, this aspect holds great value.
Streamlining the processes will cause ultimate ease for your agents. Moreover, they would be happier when they are asked to use simple and streamlined processes. So, by simplifying the things everyone’s job will become simpler and convenient.
Micromanagement
Though businesses do not like to implement the concept of micromanagement, yet It can play an important role in a call center. Micromanagement in a call center refers to the feature of dealing with a certain customer by a specific agent every time.
This will let the agent deal with the customer in a more customized manner and personalized services. In this case, we can deliver the best services again and again. So, overall it would not be micromanaging the calls, but also micro-managing the whole business process.
Don’t Just Analyze Your Customers but Answer Them as Well
Merely analyzing the surveys from customers wouldn’t be enough. Yes, you have to contact customers based on their opinions. You can integrate the customer feedback with the CRM database that will suggest in future that how a particular customer would like to be dealt with.
On the other hand, customers who have responded negatively should also be contacted through another channel asking them how would they like to be treated.
Agents Should Have Real-Time Customers Information
Nowadays, customers expect more personalized experiences when they talk with agents. The customers who receive sales promotions that are based on their interests then they must expect to have a personalized talk with agents.
So, providing real-time data to agents would be a good idea. In this way, the agents would deal with the customers more interactively. On the other hand, customers will also be happier to have such good and personalized services.
Every Agent Has the Answer
Agents spend almost 33% time in selling, and they consume the rest of their time resolving issues about the information and the after-call workings.
However, by making processes automatic, managers can reduce the burden of after-call working. This will make the agents concentrate on selling. Moreover, by making your agents efficient enough, you will make the whole process productive.
In summary
In a nutshell, managers can seek diverse and innovative ways that will lead to the ultimate boost in the over performance and particularly increase in sales. Also, customer satisfaction rates would be higher. So, overall innovation in a call center will make a difference immediately. Happy Calling!
13 Call Center Innovation Ideas That Will Make Immediate Difference
